credit crisis pt.2: market meltdown

"What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision." -Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books, Oct 9, 2008.

Žižek, as always, makes some provocative analyses in this recent essay about the market collapse, really highlighting both the political nature of the problem and the class issues involved. Check it out!