Majfud Lincoln University

From the hysteria of Wall Street in September 2008 the price of oil collapsed to less than $40. The prices of homes in the United States had done before. What It happened on the side of the material reality? A tsunami devastated the twenty per cent of the houses and killed the five percent of the world’s population? Do not. Even the terrible tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 had the slightest effect on the world economy. Some earthquake moved the foundations of Chinese industry? Any plague devastated the crops in the Midwest? No any drought around the world arrested the machinery of food production? No. did any philosopher infested the world with an anticonsumista ideology that contracted demand products useless to thirty percent? Less.

So, what is new but a rupture in the relationship that often keep (1) the material world with (2) the Kingdom of the tyrannical abstraction of capital linked? The current global crisis is a crisis of credit symbols and the investment capital that ended by dragging to the material world to a real crisis. It is the closest thing to the situation where the old European conqueror, that He went behind the gold in America or diamond in Africa, not only needed for brute force to get the object of your desire, but also the ideological force to impose on the rest of the world recognition of the value of those minerals first and the recognition of their abstract representations in the form of money paper, interests and unpayable debts later. But both money and a debt is not worth anything if between debtor and creditor does not mean an implicit recognition and explicit on that value. This relationship that unites the beneficiary with injured by mutual agreement, usually implicit and unquestionable way, but ultimately the relationship is guaranteed by the State which not only legalizes the relationship but that has the authority to validate the beneficiary in cases in which the injured person question the recognition of such symbolic relationship. In the current crisis that implicit agreement between the material world and the symbolic world is maintained despite a rupture between the two categories, between the abstract and the concrete, between the understood according to the classic model Marxist where the infrastructure (the material world) determines or radically affects the superstructure (the symbolic world) but is increasingly more the symbolic world, through an ideological tyranny seated in the financial centers of power, the sphere that does orbit the material world according to their interests and needs. A systematic, ideological and monetary tyranny. Or is not tyranny that the workers of the world, suffer absolutely at the mercy of the mood of investors, i.e., the revered masters of the world? It is not a tyranny with a personal, bitter and dark face.

It is a tyranny that is expressed with smiles in the media of incommunicado detention. An ideological tyranny that requires the recognition that the world operates and exists thanks to her. A tyranny of the torn symbolic world of the material world and the human world. A tyranny of consumerism and psychological instability.