"We can clearly observe the close interaction between a class and the scientific method that arises from the attempt to conceptualize the social character of that class together with its laws and needs. It has often been pointed out — in these pages and elsewhere — that the problem that forms the ultimate barrier to the economic thought of the bourgeoisie is the crisis. If we now — in full awareness of our own one-sidedness — consider this question from a purely methodological point of view, we see that it is the very success with which the economy is totally rationalized and transformed into an abstract and mathematically oriented system of formal ‘laws’ that creates the methodological barrier to understanding the phenomenon of crisis. In moments of crisis the qualitative existence of the ‘things’ that lead their lives beyond the purview of economics as misunderstood and neglected things-in-themselves, as use-values, suddenly become the decisive factor. (Suddenly, that is, for reified, rational thought.) Or rather: these ‘laws’ fail to function and the reified mind is unable to perceive a pattern in this ‘chaos’"