a.2 Sistema financiero y la forma del crecimiento 54

The need to pass to the free market economy, a form of economic organization, the only one capable of releasing mankind from the actual stalemate has become a banal truth. But by following international economic information from economically advanced countries one can observe that their specialists think and moreover issue different opinions. Quoting from L’Expansion nr. 422 of 199083 from the article “The state tomorrow – fewer interventions, more arbitration”:

“In Eastern Europe, communist successors wish to make the State “tabula rasa”. Actually,

ultra-liberalism has become out of fashion. 84 The weakening of political power in the 80s revealed its limits: fewer social cohesion, financial abuse fever, increased corruption (…) today, a consensus was reached on the necessity of the State. To do what? (…) The death of the State … the resurrection of the old State…Neither one, nor the other: the birth of a new state. Its main legitimacy source is the arbitrage between opposite interests which only it may do ensure impartially (…) it is a cultural revolution”.

Edith Cresson explains:

“The state should not be a passive agent!” (…) Nobody cares for all the close operations for which the private sector is theater (…) but we would have wished that the State did nothing, and not to react. This is not my conception (…) It is the duty of the state to have a long term vision (…)”

Lionel Stoleru states in the same number:

“…Europe does not have an organized hinterland. The USA has constructed an integrated economic area with Canada and Mexico (…) Japan (…) annexed a dollar area by the “four dragons” Thailand and other South East Asian countries.” On the other hand Europe could have done the same with Eastern Europe and North Africa. These two areas should have allowed it to gain upon production costs and other comparative advantages in the profits of the entire area…”

Regarding “advices” for the East, enthusiastic opinions, we meet more and more often nowadays, at politicians or western economists the political and economic realism.

“The relentless repetition of slogans ‘the inevitable change’ and the ‘necessary restructuring’ have spearheaded and accompanied the rapid supervised opening of national economies and cultures towards foreign exploitation everywhere, without barriers against commerce or investments’. But there is an amazing gap between the dominant ‘ideology’ of the ‘free and self-sufficient global market’ and the reality of tens of thousands of commercial regulations which are imposed all over the world in the process of secret and rapid expansion which institutes the absolute right of private demands made by multinational corporations which submit the selected legislatives anywhere in the world” – says professor John McMurtry, of the Philosophy Department of Guelph University, Ontario, Canada.

83 We are in 2003, but the way of thinking that the state must quit the economy as a whole has not changed here, for most politicians, in spite of 14 years of opposite examples

84 our underlining

The truth is that the opposite of “free markets” stands in labor. The free market exploits, takes advantage of an unstable equilibrium to accumulate, whereas labor produces, creates. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, financial interests and the media have unleashed together an overwhelming agenda of global corporate rules on governments worldwide. The rules are political, but silent (classified). Whether governments execute this agenda as it is given, or floating capitals and special funds will go somewhere else and resistant leaders will be either ignored or defiled by the corporate press. The public is assured that a “substantial growth of development will solve everything”. The requirement is that global competition may be free of taxes and regulatory barriers instituted by the government. But the harsh reality is exactly the opposite of the growth of standards of living and of new freedoms for the peoples of the world. One might say that the propaganda is a bluff, which, at least so far, is working.

There are theories which claim that nations become so interdependent from an economical point of view that the tendency towards fighting decreases. Commerce, not military power, is now the path towards global power, said Bill Clinton in his campaign for election as U.S. president.

By the élan of transport means – now when time and space compress, according to David Harvey’s formula – some objects move quicker than the others. Economic capital – meaning money and al the other resources needed to create money and again, resources – are moving fast. Fast enough to always be one step ahead of any form of State organization (no doubt, territorial) which may attempt to include it and hijack its routes.

As a paradox, it is not the triumph, but the death of State sovereignty that made the idea of the State so popular. As Eric Hobsbawm noticed, as the Seychelles Islands have the same quota when voting in the U.N. as Japan “it is expected that most U.N members will soon consist of 20th century replicas (and republican) lands as Saxony-Coburg-Gotha and Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen”

The function to which the orthodox state renounced – or which was taken from it – is maintaining that dynamic equilibrium, as an approximate equality between growth and productivity increasing rhythms – meaning that what determined sovereign states to ban certain imports or exports for periods of time, to close borders or to stimulate the internal demand formulated by Keynes. According to the verdict of Latin American politicians, due to the “porosity” of all national economies and due to their lack of perennial perspective, imprecision and non-territoriality of their operating space, global financial markets impose their effects on the planet. States do not have sufficient resources or freedom of movement to support such pressure.

Commander Marcos, leader of guerillas in a Central American state, said: “In the cabaret of globalization, the State strips, and at the end of the show, it is left with no pants: repression force”. The new masters of the world must not govern it directly. They entrust national governments to foresee their businesses.

Due to the extent of free trade laws, of free capital and finances movement, “the economy” is gradually exiting public control. The first signification of the term “economy” is “the non- political area”. What’s left of politics will be coordinated by the state, but all aspects of economic life will remain unavailable to the state: any attempt to modify this will clash with a swift and prompt riposte of world markets.

We concede with a doubt: is the State dead? Is it transformed? And into what? 2.5 Global technocracy

Once the separation between owner and propriety, a new element appears in the great corporations: technocracy. An entire literature was dedicated to it. There is little talk however about the graduates of the French Institute of Sciences, which, even troughs their graduation photo, at the beginning of the century, have managed to set the basis for a real technocracy. Strong bonds between them, mutual support, a certain coordination of goals for various in-groups has lead to the acknowledgement of a guild spirit at a time when economics became a strong and money-creating instrument in the hands of the State, precisely their field of operations.

There was much more talking regarding the American technocracy. The golden rule, obtaining a greater dividend than banking interests. At this time, stockowners, ergo most of the owners were no longer important; rather only important as they were “significant” stockholders, which with one could negotiate. Management was changing.

Mass economy lead to a pyramid type system of technocracy, which was limited to the superior levels of the hierarchy. One production was no longer a mass issue, with the appearance of information industry, the pulverizing of the markets, “particle marketing”, the disappearance of differences between the time and place of work and with the whole leisure concept, technocracy receives new dimensions: it becomes democratized. The number of those who give up the hierarchy increases as incomes obtained due to globalization increase as well, thanks to unknown places and people. At the same time, while some are becoming poorer and are “tied to the ground”, others become mobile and rich. Executives of great transnational corporations realize that the wealth of the company increased or decreased without knowing the causes. It is not economical, as costs are to high when compared to recovered values. They had to specialize on “the big picture” – “the global image”, the general strategy that only steers the ship onto the trend. The effective work is carried out by other white collars of the company, those who know only a piece of the business and consumers, from where continuous profits are coming. And they get their share. And this world has come to know itself, if not individually, then by belonging to a class, a typical lifestyle of a technocrat. And fear of poverty.

For the inhabitants of this world, the cosmopolitan world, extraterritorial to businessmen, culture or globally oriented universities, state borders are vanishing, undermined by planetary goods, capital and finances. They travel where they wish; they’re enjoying themselves especially if they fly first class or with personal planes, are invited and lured to travel. Seen as a metaphor of the new world order, it unveils the fact that “the access to global mobility” has become the most important stratifying factor. For the world of those globally mobile, space lost its constraints and may be traversed easily, both in its “real” and “virtual” meanings. The shrinking of space abolishes the time flow. Inhabitants of this world live in a continuous future, in a succession of isolated episodes, isolated from both past, but also future.

This summer, I’ve known two middle-aged who were employees of an international commercial firm, which spoke five languages and had three apartments in three countries…they are moving constantly, the type of culture to which they participate is not the culture of a certain space: it is time culture, a culture of the absolute present. They travel regularly from Singapore to Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, Tokyo, Prague, and so on. They always reside at the Marriott. They know for sure where the light switch is…foreign universities are not foreign to them. After each class, they are being asked the same question, whether in Manchester, Singapore, Paris, and Tokyo. This is the new world of technocracy, with its layers. They are the first to find out where the world will go, what must be done even before others suspect it. You see them in all super- hotels in the world, on luxury cruises, in exclusive restaurants, in sport parks closed to the crowds. Immense prices protect them from intruders. If not, they hide beyond clubs or “members only” buttons, on the internet. You do not see them in regular holiday spots. They have no holiday, their job is holiday. These are special destinations for them. The meet with each other, they pass by knowing what they are as if they sense some kind of smell, they salute with an uncanny politeness and pass on. They do not “socialize”85, they communicate for their business.

I have never come across Romanians in such places. That is why, perhaps, information reaches us from newspapers, when it is already past.