>
>
> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Philp Pilkington wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Interesting dilemma... but what if people are trying to apply an
>> entirely
>> > inadequate framework to the problem? Is it material conditions
>> generating
>> > economic chaos; or is it psychological factors causing the downturn? But
>> > here's a question: what if its absolute ideational and economic
>> confusion?
>> > What if we weren't to attribute the "cause" to either psychological OR
>> > material factors and were to put it down to pure... as Sartre called
>> it...
>> > "nausea"?
>>
>> Suppose someone with an irresistable (even pathological) tendency to
>> bounce a rubber ball on every brick surface he walked on. Put him in a
>> village in an area where there are no bricks. What do you know, even
>> that pathology doesn't result in rubber balls bouncing on brick
>> pavements.
>>
>> Carrol
>>
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>
>
>
> Urr... that's kind of what I was getting at. Its not really a question of
> whether these things come down to economic (i.e. brick pavement) or
> psychological (i.e. wierd-ball-bouncing pathologies) phenomena, it seems to
> me to be something in between. It seems to me to be somewhere which at once
> generates "psychopathology" and at the very time arises out of "material
> reality". Sartre puts it as such:
>
> *"Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put
> them back in place, you live among them. They are useful nothing more. But
> they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them
> as though they were living beasts."*
>
> As Sartre tends to blur the boundaries between psychopathology and
> objective reality - resulting in "the Nausea" - I think to understand the
> current situation we need to blur the boundaries between the "homo economus"
> and the objects he "economises" - resulting in crisis".
>
> I think de Soto has a very interesting point when he highlights property
> rights... Where else but law would we find such an overlapping of objective
> and subjective???
>
One more point: I think that Marx realised this - at least in the beginning. His entire project, at least in my interpretation, begins from his critique of Hegel's "Philsophy of Right" and the glaring, unresolved ambiguity he points out within this philosophy.
Hegel seems to indicate a point at which the bourgeios conception of "right" doesn't add up. Specifically the point at which "Civil Society" begins to generate massive accumulation at one pole and the relative immiseration of those at the other. In Hegel's otherwise very thorough conception of bourgeios rights this produces a massive imbalance in the entire field, which in turn, if given enough oppurtunity, may generate extreme confusion over the actual nature of property rights and thus, because we live in a society dominated by property rights, a crisis.
Perhaps all of those Marxist attempts at positing a crisis theory should begin from this point rather than starting from Marx's own catagories (i.e. use-values, surplus-value, LTV etc.).
This is why I thought de Soto's argument, which was, and this is important, conceived of outside of the "Westo-sphere", so fascinating. In its very "pre-modern" conceptions of political economy it may very well allow us a window through which to observe the manner in which our civilisation attempts to function...
Specifically, the manner in which we allow property rights to "float". Just think of the sub-prime crash recently. What the hell was the real issue? I would say "floating", one may almost say "spectral" or "fetishistic" conceptions of property rights...
Over and over again, this seems to be *the* problem that Marx tries to deal with in "Das Kapital"... we as moderns just try to cast it in post 17th/18th/19th century language... We try and cast it in the language of science... and not rights...