ABSTRACT

SUBSTRUCTAL CRISES AND THE “WORLD” WITH NO FUTURE.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF CRISES

This paper is dedicated to the relationship between economy and the state of the postmodern world. The general idea of this article is that economy has lost its guiding role it was assigned at the beginning of the modern era. Whether it is the guiding function of money or the teaching role of production and the market alike, the economy, we are told by the great theoreticians and scholars of the modern age, plays a determining role in society's development. The economics approach to what we call substructal destruction makes us sensitive to those processes in the economy which, instead of leading mankind towards prosperity, bring ruinous destruction, i.e. damage the foundations of the world and therefore of its order. Substructal destructions are those types of destructive processes that contribute to the fundamental ruin of a system (even society with its established order). The currency often lies, the market is downright sick, the flows are shaken by turbulence attested by uncontrollable volatility, the banks are breathing heavily, suffering from a kind of financial-banking asthma, the stock exchanges are hit by uncontrollable turbulence, by storms that herald crash after crash, the debt spiral is dizzying etc. All this describes the economic landscape of an alarming substructal destruction, and the present paper is dedicated to a focused analysis on how the substructal crises penetrate the society and heralds the end of what we may call a „historical world”.

Keyword: substructal destruction, peripheral economies, great crisis, world system, „helicopter money” cultural economics.

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