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Friday, August 17, 2007 12:00 AM

Panic on Wall Street

You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you know your derivatives from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to understanding the current market freakout.

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  • Friday, August 17, 2007 12:13 AM

    real vs. unreal

    OK, Andrew, here's my problem about your write-up: you're setting up this opposition between the "real" economy with "real men" and the speculative, derivative economy of finance capital. This opposition between real and unreal is in essence, uncritically Heideggerian. That is, it ascribes a moral valence/superiority to "real" - real work, real life, real men - vs. the derivative, speculative, unreal world of global finance. As long as you use these binaries to try to critically explain the movement of capital, you are in fact disarmed. That is, you are postulating that somehow, somewhere, there is a "good" and "real" economic (i.e. capitalist) ethos - the hard-working, manly one. And that those hedge fund speculators just fuck it up with their greed and their credit swaps. In short, by creating those binaries - which in and of themselves have a dubious history (hint: it starts with Sorel and Mussolini) - you are misrecognizing and misrepresenting what is in fact a unified social form - capitalism. In that sense, you are reiterating the strategic misunderstanding of the reformist left, who still believes that there is a good form of capitalism. Capitalism has become nature - it is neither good or bad. It is the Hegelian totality, and therefore knows no outside and - as a corollary - cannot be the object of moral judgement. Just like nature, it subjects us to random catastrophic events.

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