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of a film, a natural disaster, a new scientific discovery or a military loss,
they all have worth and matter to the extent that they can be expressed
in money, profit or loss that can be compared with others. It is to this
extent and to this extent only that it can be justified to begin the overview
of the global processes of our time within the system’s own frame of
reference — i.e., with the critique of the functioning of the economy, even
if we attribute greater explanatory significance to cultural, ecological,
demographic or technological changes.
The superpowers victorious in two (or, if one prefers, three) world
wars, relying on the seemingly unsurmountable advantage they had
achieved in the technological race, reversed their previous strictly
protectionist behaviour and established principles of economic
association contrary to the previous ones: they enforced the removal of
all obstacles standing in the way of the movement of capital. The
equality of freedoms of course created an inordinately unequal situation.
On the one hand, it ensured unlimited power for the owners of the
information and money that can be moved with the speed of thought
over the difficult factors of the real economy. On the other hand, it
triggered the migration of the labour force between poor and rich
countries on a previously unimaginable scale. There is no need to detail
these oft-described processes here: the competition of national
economies for the inclination of investors and creditors commenced,
this being the only way to become competitive on the global market and
to preserve their populations (or to attract new arrivals in the place of
the emigrants).
But why did they not instead aim to stay out of it? The answer is
common knowledge: in previous centuries, the “opening” of the local
markets took place by armed force, followed by the collapse of the local
culture and the reproductive systems. In economic terms this means
that the peoples of the world “realised” that they can no longer live
without the products and services that they themselves were incapable
of producing. To acquire these, they had to trade and to have something
to trade with, they needed to develop. To develop, they needed credit
and to be able to repay their loans, they have to submit for sale whatever
they have on the world market, competing with each other, at whatever
cost and in as large a quantity as possible.
‘The result became the devaluation of labour, raw materials and
physical infrastructure on the one hand and, on the other, the previously
unimaginable growth of the share of the monetary sphere, which takes
the form of the amassing of a fictitious quantity of money forty times