this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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I guess I'm not entirely following what specifically you're referring to that we've abstracted. We've created all these sophisticated financial mechanism, but these are just arbitrary rules we create that are entirely decoupled from the material reality. When you cut through all that crap, it all comes down to supply and demand of physical goods. People want food, TVs, phones, stoves, and so on.
These have to be produced somewhere, then shipped and distributed to people who want them. No amount of financial games changes the fundamentals of the situation. The west having shipped out much of its industry to other countries, and having lost its educated workforce necessary to produce the goods it consumes has no choice but to continue importing these things from places like China. It's not a problem that can be solved by abstractions.
What I'm pointing at is financial abstractions, for sure, but inclusive of things like currency (an abstraction for material goods), ending the gold standard (an abstraction for currency), fractional reserve lending (an abstraction for money supply), securities (an abstraction for property), derivatives (stacked abstractions for securities), etc. The logic of postmodernism is that symbols can represent symbols ad infinitum, which would indicate that the hegemon should have an additional layer of abstraction available that accounts for the contradictions emerging and obviates it, but it seems like there isn't one readily available at this time and the contradictions are punching through the layers of abstraction.
It all comes down to material reality in the end though. The standard of living in the west didn't result from all these financial abstractions. It was built on colonialism and exploitation of the Global South. What the financial abstractions did was mediate how these resources were distributed, ensuring that the oligarchs got the lion's share of the plunder. However, the plundering itself is what the whole system is ultimately built on. Now that the empire is starting to lose control over the colonies, and it's becoming challenged economically, and militarily, all of a sudden the house of cards is starting to crumble.