One of the most striking aspects of the blanket media coverage of the eurozone crisis is the way in which financial markets are routinely spoken of as entities with a life of their own.
They are conceived of as capable of adhering to ethical codes, from which they have of late drifted away. Ostensibly they can experience such human emotions as tension, and even desperation, fear, panic and the jitters.
In addition, they can demand obedience, on pain of the exaction of serious consequences. George Soros tells us that financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression. No wonder that governments have little choice but to do their bidding.
So it is a worthwhile corrective to point out that, in the ordinary sense of the word, financial markets do not exist. No one has ever seen one, or taken a photograph of one, for instance.
They are not an expression of the laws of physics, or of some divine will. They are simply a conceptualisation of the social relationship that exists between the people that make them up, and the rest of the population.
Somehow a set of human properties is depicted as having broken free of its basis in the real world of men and women, and is projected instead as an independent power over them, capable of issuing diktats that impinge on just about everybody on the planet.
I’m not an unqualified admirer of the late György Lukács, but anyone looking for an instantiation of the great Hegelian Marxist thinker’s notion of reification could hardly come up with a more clear-cut example.
Next time you hear that ‘the markets’ are pushing for this, that or the other, substitute the words ‘the bankers’ into the sentence. It will take you rather closer to the reality of the situation.
