The article is devoted to changes that have taken place in the world economy and in the econo- mics, starting with the Great Depression of the 1930s to the contemporary Global Crisis. The author pays special attention to the phenomenon of free movement of capital across borders, which lead to weakening of the importance and role of the state. Introduction To open up a discussion on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Professors Witold Bień and Henryk Chołaj, I will start from the time in which they used to live and create. It was a very interesting time, unfortunately, in part, its atmosphere was closer to the Chinese curse – “may you live in interesting times”. So, what was the time they knew? Hitlerism, Stalinism, command and control system of different forms, the emergence of the Solidarity movement, perestroika and the “Round Table”, neoliberalism, and in the end an explosion of populism and struggle with political correctness. They happened to work in different systems and eras. During their scientific lives, there has been a transition from the era of continuity to the Drucker’s era of discontinuity, so from evolutionary, incremental, predictable changes to the changes that were violent and unpredictable. Consequently, there was also a better understanding of the historical school (Max Weber, Gustav Schmoller), which already at the end of the 19th century criticized the ahistorical approach to economic principles. The proponents of this school questioned the universality of many regularities, which according to them have a historical character, imposed by the specific conditions that change. Currently, the arguments for historicity of the regularities are incomparably stronger. An outstanding biologist Ludwig Hirszfeld wrote that the truths revolutionizing science by one generation often become dogmas, which must be combated by the next generations. In social conditions, this truth is more common than in other sciences. We come to the truth by logical drawing conclusions using adopted assumptions. In economics and social sciences, unlike in mathematics and logic, the assumptions must be consistent with reality. When reality changes rapidly, the assumptions change and many truths must be verified again. Although in his times, these changes were much slower and not as qualitative as today, J. M. Keynes frequently emphasized: when the facts change, I change my mind. A major concern of the economics today is lagging behind with verification of many truths and often explaining the world, which no longer exists. From the Great Depression to the Global Crisis The lives of Professors stretch between the two phenomena fundamental to the reality and economic sciences, between the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Global Crisis of the last decade. A much older, but familiar to them, Michał Kalecki, was the first in the world to understand the Great Depression, its causes and the essence of economy, transforming from the local to national, and became one of the pioneers that createdmacroeconomics of the national economy. Today, we are still facing the difficulties in understanding the Global Crisis, as an expression of the effects of failure to cope with the transformation of the national economy to the global economy. We are facing the requirement to create megaeconomics of the global economy, as written many times by Professor Henryk Chołaj. Today, the phenomenon and the causes of the Global Crisis are very often simplified. It turned out that the shock caused by the crisis was too small in relation to the conservatism and heaviness of the world bureaucratic, political, and scientific machine. It is easier to focus on the symptoms, effects and causes of derivatives rather than on the real systemic reasons of the economy transforming from the national to global. The world order based on the pillar of the nation state disintegrates, and we are not able to create a new, coherent form of functioning of the world system of the globalisation era. We have globalisation, but we do not have institutional architecture that would enable identification of global goals and subjecting many activities to rationality from the global point of view. If treatment of the crisis phenomena focuses on the symptoms and not on the actual sources of difficulties, we may only expect that the problems will be postponed and will accumulate. A common simplification, or even a mistake, is reducing the causes of the crisis to the neo-liberal doctrine of economics and economic policy of the last decades. The neo-liberal doctrine, so the doctrine of the minimal state, actually predominated from the times, when Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were awarded the Nobel Prize, and Margaret Thatcher controlled the economic policy in the United Kingdom, and Ronald Regan in the United States. Why is this not only a simplification, but a mistake? Because it ignores the second,more important reason for the minimal state, which was and is the process of releasing the movement of capital (foreign and domestic) beyond the borders. Freedom of movement, giving capital the freedom of choice of the place for investments, gave also the power that was taken away from the state. This is a major transformation of the modern world – the change of power. You have power when you can choose, and capital has a choice, while the state seriously lost the ability to choose, because in the name of ad hoc requirements, it is forced to adapt to the interests of capital. In this way, the state wants to avoid the outflow of capital. In the past, the state had politics and power. Now, the state still has politics, and the power has flown away to capital and financial markets. Still, we can choose the parliament and the government, but it does not mean that we can choose social and economic policies to a significant extent as in the past. The state largely lost the ability to autonomously determine the compromise in the interests of the country, as it is forced to subjugate to the capital interests, to a greater or lesser extent, and it is at the expense of the interests of the employees, the environment or the long-term interests of the country. The weaker the state in terms of economy, the more it must subjugate the interests of capital. These transformations explain the systemic cause of the minimal state in the process of globalisation. Awareness of this is important, as it explains how wrong it is to think that departure from the neoliberal doctrine itself will fundamentally change politics. It is much easier to change the economic doctrine than the economic situation resulting from the freedom of movement of capital. To do this, we need to move away from the situation in which countries compete for capital, adapting their regulations to its interests. It activates the globalisation principle of the race to the bottom in the scope of taxes, regulations, and social liabilities. Hence, the conclusion is that it is not enough to move away from the neo-liberal doctrine, but it is necessary to change the nature of globalisation. And it is much more difficult. I believe that the departure from the freedom of movement of capital (in fact, withdrawal of globalization), would be extremely difficult and unfair. It would be difficult to start the process of transformation of transnational corporations into national corporations. It would be similar to the desire to make eggs from the already made scrambled eggs. At the same time, it would be unfair, as we are in a different world, where the problems of global nature escalate [Szymański, 2015, pp. 24- 32]. To control capital and limit its power, a progress must be made in the creation of unified transnational regulations, and so the progress in terms of political globalisation. The power of capital results from the choice of the countries with favourable regulations for capital. The process of subordination of the state to the interests of capital, so the transfer of significant part of power from the state to capital, from the macroeconomic entity to microeconomic entities, who are profit-oriented, consequently leads to a situation, in which the entire globalisation process is of microeconomic nature. The economy is dominated by entities that are guided by microeconomic interest, that is profit, and the entities guided by macroeconomic and macrosocial interests gradually become weaker. Macroeconomic and macrosocial requirements are superseded by the interest of a short-term profit. Microeconomic does not mean small entities; suffice it to say that the 200 largest transnational corporations are responsible for 28% of the global GDP [Kotler, Kotler, 2015]. Discussions concerning globalisation usually omit its microeconomic nature, which hinders the understanding of many contemporary issues [Szymański, 2004]. For example, it is a cause of confusion as to one of the most important transformations in the world of the last decades, which is the accelerated process of moving of the centre of production and competition from West to East, from the United States and Europe to Asia and China. During the last three decades, in the countries of the North Atlantic, the GDP increased on average at the rate of 2.7% per year, and in the countries over the South Pacific (among others China, India, Pakistan, Australia), at the rate of 5.9%. [Orłowski, 2011]. Many authors, including among others Francis Fukuyama [2012], analysing the causes of this process, condemn the West for losing its competitiveness and predominance in the last decades, as it gave China and other Asian countries its most precious national treasures for free, meaning the technical progress and business culture which have been developed for decades. In this situation, China and other Asian countries could quickly add the technical progress together with organisational and business skills taken over from the West to their low costs of labour. Fukuyama consider
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