The Great Rehash – Part 2

The Working Class Can Answer Each WEF Agenda Item in Its Own Interests

Below is the January 2021 WEF agenda couched in classless liberal language. Each agenda item deserves a ringing militant working-class reply which should be sent to the Canadian participants.

Monday 25 January: Designing cohesive, sustainable and resilient economic systems

The agenda item speaks of economic “systems”. There are only two economic systems today. One capitalist and other socialist. Neither are static. Capitalism is in historic decline and socialism in historical ascendency. Only the latter has the ability to design the economy in the interests of the vast majority, those who labour and create all wealth. The WEF agenda item is an admission that capitalism is not cohesive sustainable and resilient otherwise why discuss such deficiencies.

If the organizers of the WEF forum had the courage they would state the agenda item as a question; “can capitalism be redesigned to be cohesive sustainable and resilient and in whose interest?” Capitalism has been redesigned, reformed, reworked, reconfigured and always in the interest of its oligarchs and monopoly power. In all of its configurations from state monopoly capitalism and its most extreme form, fascism, to all variants of bourgeois democratic economies, it remains the same system of exploitation of wage labour for profit. To be redesigned, concessions must be wrung from monopoly and its governments and to do that the working class must have its own program that leads to socialism.

Tuesday 26 January: Driving responsible industry transformation and growth

The struggle to transform industry responsibly to ensure its growth cries out for definition.

Industry in capitalism is privately owned and merged with banking and private investor capital. Each capitalist state such as Canada that has arrived at the imperialist stage of its development upholds as a sacred right and freedom the buying and selling of industry on the international market as any other commodity distorting national economic development as it suits oligarchic investor interests. The sacrifice of entire economic regions and Canadian communities is the result. There is no responsibility to the people of Canada that any capitalist investor, domestic or foreign recognizes. Their “nation” is the global market and their loyalty is to maximum profit.

Industry to be transformed must be in the hands of the people who created it and then it can be planned to grow to serve the needs of society. That is when society can be said to be civil.

Wednesday 27 January: Enhancing stewardship of our global commons

The stewardship of the global commons is an invitation to a discussion of why people’s sovereignty and the principle of the right of nations to self determination and choosing its own path of economic development including the control of the development or non-development of its own natural resources is considered by finance capital to be barrier to profiteering from the exploitation of the planet, the oceans and outer space. The WEF absolves the representatives of capital of any such accountability.

Canada is a G7 NATO member state of the United Nations and its finance capitalist class has never voluntarily respected much less acknowledged any limitations on its exploitation of Canada’s resources or the resources of the planet. The history of successive Canadian governments from its colonial beginnings to the present time is a history of reorganizing the commons, by force, into private property and where that was not done to consider the commons, known in Canada as Crown Lands, to be open to the penetration of private capital as a right.

The WEP agenda item demands a discussion of the restraints and limitations to be placed on investor capital and above all its use of military threats and interventions that accompany its goals to seize and exploit natural resources of sovereign states, the oceans and outer space. The agenda item also must include a discussion of international agreements regarding the Artic and Antarctic and the 1963 UN Declaration banning the stationing of nuclear weapons in outer space. The appearance of arrogant nouveau riche billionaires such as Elon Musk who declare private capital is not bound by international treaties has resulted in an international discussion of the need to reinforce the provisions of the 1963 UN Treaty. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as well as implementing the Paris Agreements on global warming cry out for a discussion as to which states and private investors routinely violate and ignore the welfare and sustainability of the “commons” and to insist they be held accountable.

Thursday 28 January: Harnessing the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The transformative effect of new technologies and science integrated with production can lift up all of impoverished humanity and quickly. The WEF speaks eloquently about this but has no answer as to why it isn’t happening.

Science and technology are categories of human activity present in all class societies that profoundly effect the growth of the productive forces. The WEF defining the effects of the discoveries of the digital era as a Fourth Industrial Revolution is specious. Science and technology under the system of capitalism regularly outpaces the ability of capitalist governments to control its anti-social effects because the “geniuses of high finance” appropriate such developments and subvert it to the service of maximum profit.

To harness the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution means to “Put Monopoly Under Control” [i] Politically it means to reject passivity and to organize mass intervention by the working class and its organizations by advancing demands for public ownership and control of domestic and foreign corporate power and subordinating it to a defined national democratic plan that serves the people’s interest and accords with the principle that the people will not be the victims of science and technology but its rightful beneficiaries.

Friday 29 January: Advancing global and regional cooperation

Global and regional cooperation is relevant to the extent that it is based on the principle and practice of peace, respect for sovereignty and political independence of states and their right to choose their own path of political and economic development as the only firm basis for friendly relations between nations.

There are historical precedents and ample experience for such a vision of human relations. In the modern era it was carried to its highest point in the anti-fascist alliance of states, led by the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain and which after great sacrifice defeated Hitlerism and laid the basis for the most advanced expression of the will of humanity for global peace and security, the founding of the United Nations, the adoption of its Charter and all of the provisions and agencies that were devised to uphold it.

The cold war competition during the post WW2 period between the US-NATO alliance and the alliance of the Soviet Union and European Socialist states was defined at various stages as peaceful coexistence, détente, and relaxation of tensions. It described the actions of diametrically opposed social systems interacting without world nuclear war and deciding all economic relations by competition, and all political differences by negotiations.

A discussion of regional and global cooperation today is in the context of rising and declining economic powers, the imperialist USA in decline and socialist China in ascendancy. Global realignment is the reality of our time arising from the centrifugal political developments compelling all lesser developed states to be attracted or repelled by either pole.

Global and regional cooperation is not recognized by contending finance capitalist investor classes. Such interests do not subscribe to any form of global or regional cooperation that is based on any consideration other than the supremacy of financial and military power to impose its will. What is recognized and practiced is the formation of competitive trading blocs, military alliances, competition for global and regional economic and political supremacy and to consider all opposition to such power as manifestations of unacceptable restraint on the export of capital.

The supremacy of international finance capital over all economic development in the modern era is an anachronism and the struggle to oppose it and overcome it has risen to the top of all agendas of any international forum, capitalist or working class.

It is the purpose of the organizers of the WEF to evade the essence of that struggle and to divest it of any sense of historical materialist reality.

It is the task of Marxism and all of its consistent adherents to engage in that struggle and to uphold its vision of a new and better world, socialism.

[i] “Put Monopoly Under Control” was a publication of the Communist Party in 1964 authored by its Chairman Tim Buck that addressed the advent of computer-controlled automation and its impact on workers in Canada. It is a prototype of what a proletarian response to the effects of science and technology should be today.

Where Buck refers to the advent of computer-controlled automation, the reader can substitute the 21^st century definitions for the current stage of the scientific technological advances that the WEF has dubbed a fourth industrial revolution. Note: (when Buck wrote the pamphlet in 1964 there was a total of 700 computers installed in Canada)

With foresight what Buck wrote 57 years ago resonates today. Here are some excerpts.

“Revolutionary changes are taking place in industry. The ultimate expression of this change is automation, which is going to have revolutionary effects in the years immediately ahead.

“The fundamental thing about automation is that the techniques becoming available will mean completely different production facilities and processes from those we know. It is not simply a super-imposition of automation on a process now done by people. It will be a completely different manufacturing, etc. process.

“To grasp the social implications of this new industrial revolution we must keep in mind that it combines all the accumulated knowledge of the mechanics of automatic machinery, along with entirely new possibilities created by the application of science in industry. It includes harnessing of electronics to production – electronic operations with continuous, unwinking inspection of products.

“It includes the dramatic revolution in chemistry with its new synthetic materials which can be made, literally to order, many of them coming into being as finished products with no need for machining or fabricating.

“When all of the possibilities opened up by all this are brought together under the direction of computers, the result is modern magic. In a sense it justifies the claim of the designers of automated production lines that they do not simple “use” the modern computer to control the machines, they “teach” it to run the machines and keep them adjusted.”

The reader may say: “So what, many at the time were saying what Buck said.”

The response must be as always, what are the conclusions that are presented by those who share the same observations of science and technological advances?

Here is what Tim Buck concluded from the incontrovertible facts of the “industrial revolution” extending from the 1960’s to 2021.

“The manufacturing industry has become the biggest users of computers. This confronts the working class with the question “What can be done right now?” The measures that must be fought for now to protect even the most elementary interests of the workers affected by automation and the communities in which they live, go beyond purely economic demands such as shorter hours, higher wages and such, indispensable though they are.

“Working people should put forward a demand for democratic public control of the introduction of automation and public responsibility for its effects upon those who are displaced by it. The exact form in which democratic public control will be exercised depends upon a number of factors., but it must include as a major participant representatives of the organized labour movement…

“The speed at which automation is being introduced makes its public control a matter of urgency. People must not permit the monopolies to turn this wonderful application of science into a curse. We must act to ensure that its great potentialities are utilized to enrich society as a whole…

“In conditions prevailing today (1964 Ed.) the battle to establish democratic public control of the introduction of automation is an indispensable part of the process through which, in struggles to defend the hard-won gains of previous years, the working people will train themselves to be masters of public affairs, capable not only of intervening in but of managing the affairs of country and so become its new and really democratic leaders.”