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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 35 the value ofthe world’s GNP. From now on, the ability of the economy to generate income depends much less on the effectivity of production than on financial speculation, the fluctuations in exchange rates and the conditions of credit (and let there be no more talk of quality or utility) — all things which cannot be influenced by the local producers and consumers. ‘The production and use of goods and services has become an indispensable but subordinate aspect of the operation of the system. The real decisions (the purchase of corporate empires, the establishment of interest rates, the influencing of conjectural fluctuations, the granting of loans, etc.) are made far from the real economy, in the negotiations of global finance and the superpowers. A strange change of place occurred in the meantime. "Ihe traditional institutions of power, the states, at least those which followed the recipe of the IMF in privatising, liberalising and deregulating, lost their monitoring influence on the basis of their power: the local resources. ‘They were no longer able to look after the wellbeing of their subjects or other public goals with social, cultural or environmental measures. Yet the result of liberalisation was not the prevailing of spontaneous market processes. Quite the contrary, economic competition lost its spontaneous — i.e., market — aspect as decisions increasingly came to be made by prior political deals (planning, blackmail, compromise) between the leading actors of the global market and states. The novelty is merely that the majority of the negotiating parties do not represent countries or peoples even on paper, but rather sources of money and economic corporations, the size and power of which sometimes easily surpass those of a state. ‘These corporations operating on purely business principles already exercise multiple functions of the state: they provide work and a living to millions of people, conduct scientific research, hold trainings and possess a secret service, media, private army and social politics. The decisive difference between the old and the new political actors is merely that while the conduct of nation states is legitimated and sanctioned by public law, that of businessmen and business states is legitimated and sanctioned by private law, primarily commercial law. The problem of the new international regime is therefore not that the states have surrendered a significant part of their sovereignty to various supranational organisations. Rather, it is that among these, the purely political organisations, the UN, NATO, the European Union and the like barely hold any real power, because they are not able to enforce the implementation of their decisions. Meanwhile, the true power over the world’s resources has fallen into the hands of organisations and networks
