The Great Rehash – Part 1
The
World Economic Forum (WEP) January – May
2021
Each meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is preceded
by a massive media campaign that it is historically significant. The January-May 2021 meetings are touted as a “great reset” of the global capitalist economy following
the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of a “Fourth
Industrial Revolution”
The WEF 2021 meetings could more accurately be described as a
great rehash of 21st century state monopoly capitalism (imperialism) [i] which, since 1971, when the WEF was
formed, has been in a perpetual state
of recurring regime change wars and depressions.
For 50 years the WEF
has been meeting to sustain and ostensibly reform global capitalism and
devise theories and mechanisms to perpetuate its dominance over all forms of
evolving economies and in particular socialism.
A dense web of WEF global corporations, capitalist
politicians, intellectual and scientific forum participants, meet in secret and
at stage managed public forums are devoted to maintaining a frontierless global
playing field for cosmopolitan finance capital to engage in ruthless
competition for economic and political supremacy.
Consideration of the consequences for billions who live in
poverty or respect for the sovereignty and economic, political and territorial independence
of states is token.
The WEF has degenerated from the days of the Canadian idealist
Maurice
Strong into a 21st century glitterati of jaded acolytes
of global capitalism including royalty and bankers such as Mark Carney the
former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
By Invitation Only - Labour Reformism
The “by invitation only” WEF meetings exclude the
revolutionary movements of peace and socialism, anti-monopoly resistance,
Marxist class struggle unions such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)
representing the aspirations of millions of working class, urban and rural wage
labour.
Tolerated non-Marxist international labour organizations, the
ILO-ITUC and its leaders who carry the theories of the 1919 US founder of the
ILO, labour faker Samuel Gompers, faithfully and enthusiastically into the 21st
century, will be accorded second row seats and allowed as panelists to present
their reforms.
The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Labour Organization
(ILO) call for a “new social contract ” (ITUC), “A Century
Declaration for the Future of Work” (ILO)
that harmonizes
nicely with the “great reset”.
The ILO declares in its June 2019
Document Declaration for the Future of Work that “labour is not a
commodity” avoiding the essence of Marx’s explanation that “labour
power is a commodity”.
Labour power is defined by Marx, Chapter VI paragraph 2, Das
Capital.
“By labour-power or capacity
for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities
existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value
of any description.” (our italics)
It is labour power that is purchased by the owner of capital
in exchange for wages and put to work for a defined period of time where it
creates a value greater than the wages paid which is then realized in the
market and privately appropriated by the capitalist as surplus
value, profit.
Whether by deceit or ignorance the leaders of the ILO and the ITUC
ignore Marx’s scientific discovery of the source of profit in capitalism
because to do away with “labour power as a commodity” requires the
overthrow of capitalism and the system of the private ownership of the means of
production, the system of the social production of wealth and its private
appropriation. The WEF is where the
“friends of labour” attend to plead with capitalists to be less capitalist and to
“please” share a little more with the working class.
The ILO support for capitalism is clearly stated in its
Declaration for the Future of Work described in section II A (ix);
“…supporting the role of the
private sector as a principal source of economic growth and job creation by
promoting an enabling environment for entrepreneurship and sustainable
enterprises, in particular micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, as well
as cooperatives and the social and solidarity economy, in order to generate
decent work, productive employment and improved living standards for all;”
Concealing Truth for Maximum Profit
The WEF exists to conceal the objective truth, that
capitalism at its imperialist stage has long since ceased to have any
contribution to make to progressive human development. The WEF postulates the impossible, that
capitalism can be managed and reconfigured to serve humanity while the
operation of its fundamental law, the pursuit of maximum profit prevails.
The agenda of the WEF treats the social breakdown everywhere
evident in all developed and developing capitalist states as a baffling
surprise attributable to an apparent random destructiveness of advances in
science and technology, dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The task according to the WEF is to control
this randomness and manage it more equitably and leave the system of capitalism
intact.
That contradiction is a recurring theme in all WEF meetings.
Examples abound.
Consider the cynically artful speech of former French
President Nicholas Sarkozy and the cringe worthy speech of Prime
Minister Harper at the 2010 WEF to the unctuous speeches of PM Justin
Trudeau at the 2016 and 2018 WEF
forums and the delusional utterances of President
Donald Trump at the 2018 WEF Forum.
Setting aside the narrow opportunist and self serving
domestic political motivations for the speeches, they are barren and cowardly
for what they do not say.
50 Years of Regime Change and War
The WEF has been convened for 50 years in the midst of US-NATO
imperialist wars of regime change. It has met in the midst of recurring capitalist
cyclical recessions and depressions that have shattered the lives of hundreds
of millions, caused massive migrations of the poor and desperate to escape war,
famine and misery. The WEF has convened
in the midst of the wanton waste and abuse by imperialist investor classes of the
resources of the planet. The WEF has met
as the sovereignty and economic independence of entire countries was destroyed
by US-NATO regime change wars and the heritage, treasures and social
achievements of their people was plundered.
Meeting in the midst of the crimes of imperialism all the
WEF has ever achieved is to lament such devaluing of humanity by adjusting the
language of its musings as a sop to its victims.
Such adjustments include defining regime change war to overthrow
sovereign states and appropriate resources as “the duty to protect”. Canada’s Lloyd
Axworthy a former Liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs is the
innovator of the fiction and the term Duty to Protect(D2P).
Lester B. Pearson, a Liberal Prime Minister is credited with
providing NATO, the Anglo-US-Canada gendarme accompanying finance capital
exports, with a “social” mission, in an attempt to portray NATO as a benign
force for peace and for the gullible to believe, an alternative UN. No Canadian government Liberal or Conservative
or any opposition Parliamentary party including the NDP has ever contradicted
Pearson’s thesis or opposed NATO’s aggressive doctrines including its most
sinister doctrine, the first
strike use of nuclear weapons.
The WEF convened and deliberated during the US-NATO
initiated Gulf Wars, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the NATO
bombing of Belgrade using depleted uranium bombs during which Canadian
pilots dropped 10% of the ordnance. The WEF met during the “New American Century”
Bush-Kissinger “coalition of the willing” war on Iraq and the ongoing US war in
Afghanistan where the US-NATO
coalition has been waging war for 20 years. The
WEF met during the US-NATO overthrow of the Gaddafi Libyan government, the
drone wars of President Obama and Vice President Biden and Donald Trump who
authorized countless CIA
intrigues and assassinations of heads of state and ministers. The perpetrators of such crimes were applauded
as they took to the podiums of the WEF to engage in discussions about “social
problems” detached from their responsibility
of risking
nuclear war.
WEF and the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis
The WEF met during the US sub-prime crisis that ruined tens
of millions of US home owners. The resulting global carnage led to G7-IMF bank
bailouts, imposing on the working class neo-liberal austerity wage freeze doctrines
to prop up “too big to fail” banks and a tottering stock market.
The Harper Government allowed US sub prime giants to enter
Canada to rob Canadians and did nothing to curb home grown sub prime
crooks even as their greed threatened the mortgage system. Only
after CIBC and Harper’s more-savvy Finance Minister Jim Flaherty raised the
alarm was anything done. The five Canadian banks seized the opportunity and received
a multi-billion-dollar bailout whether they needed it or not and put $74CDN
billion on their books by shifting bank
mortgage risk indebtedness to the Canada Mortgage and Housing
Corporation (CMHC).
Canadians desperate for decent low-cost housing today must demand
the Trudeau Freeland Liberals return CMHC to its original purpose as supplier
of low interest mortgage loans for working class families, cooperative and
public housing initiatives.
What happened in Canada also happened in all G7-NATO states
and was greeted with equanimity by the WEF as another inexplicable
free market “happening” necessitating saving big banks that were
deemed too big to fail. The WEF at its
2008-2009 deliberations in
which the University of Toronto Rotman School of Business played a role with
elegant language and artful tables in the final analysis offering nothing of
substance except to advise capitalists to be “more competitive.” Being “more competitive” in worker’s language means
to impose austerity, lower wages and intensify labour at the point of
production and for government to spend less on social needs. And that is what was done.
Military Spending and Ignoring the Threat of Nuclear War
The WEF has been vocal in elevating awareness of the threat
of global warming, solvable given global peace, while ignoring the threat of
nuclear war that assures human extinction. Not a single G7-NATO-EU head of state
appearing at the WEF has ever dared address capitalism’s responsibility for the
development and use of
atomic weapons on civilian populations.
The Trudeau-Freeland Liberal Government’s refusal to join
the 50 signatory states of the UN Treaty On the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons is indefensible.
Nor has a single notable at a WEF meeting dared to address
the need for massive reduction in arms spending if any of the social inequities
the WEF laments are ever to be solved. Today
as Canadians descend into joblessness and lower standards of living the media
is full of reports of unconscionable
corruption and waste
at the highest levels of Department
of National Defense procurement spending on jet aircraft and naval
vessels.
Applying Sanctions and Blockades in the Name of Human Rights
The WEF has convened and filled volumes of advice to overcome
regional underdevelopment while remaining silent about the illegal use by the
US and its allies of military and financial power to impose and enforce sanctions
against Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China, Palestine, Iran and Syria.
While PM Justin Trudeau and then Minister of Foreign Affairs
and now Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland extoled the rights of women at the
2018 WEF forum the Liberal Government in collaboration with the Trump
administration of the USA concocted the Lima Group and imposed brutal sanctions
on Venezuela falling most heavily on women and children and the
health and medical needs of their people.
As the Trudeau-Freeland Liberal Government organizes
sanctions against socialist states it sells armaments to Saudi Arabia that has
been given a respectable leading role by the WEF even as the feudal regime conducts
a genocidal
war against Yemen and jails its human
rights activists.
The only departure from Canadian Government lock step collaboration
with US financial and military support for Israel was the Trudeau Government’s belated
support for UN resolutions condemning Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. It came after years of upholding the
obsequious Harper Conservative Government
pandering to Israel and as part of the failed effort of the Trudeau
Liberals to win a seat on the Security Council of the UN.
The WEF has an archive of good intentions about the justice
of the Palestinian cause but in practice has limited its discussions to
behind-the-scenes schemes that leave the Israeli occupation and its genocidal
policies towards Gaza intact. The General
Secretary of the UN speaking before Jordanian Royalty at a WEF forum in 2019
briefly mentioned the plight of Palestinian refugees while hastening to the
feel-good issue of global warming.
COVID-19 – Profiting at the Expense of the People
The WEF Forums in January and May will overflow with concern
about the global COVID-19 pandemic. The
WEF presenters will attempt to take credit for its eradication. That is why it is a mistake, and not a small
one, to become obsessed with the notion that the present COVID-19 virus
global health emergency is a unique conspiracy of a special type
concocted by a sinister cabal to subvert all of ‘civil society’. Such
an analysis is diversionary and ahistorical. Since when has capitalism ever been civil
or lacked conspiracies to mask its essential predation? That is what capitalism is and what
capitalists do. It is important to
pay attention to the trusted statements of Cuban
leaders who in spite of US blockades and sanctions know something
about universal public health care.
WEF is Not About the Working Class
The WEF agenda of the virtual meeting from January 25th
to January 29th is a continuation of the long record of deceit and failure
of the WEF, each meeting claiming to confront some global emergency. The agenda of the January 2021 virtual meeting
of the WEF is about how capitalism can survive another “emergency” causing
massive social and economic breakdown of its own making.
The agenda is not intended to be read by the unemployed, the
impoverished and the sick because it is not about them.
It is not enough for class
conscious working class and peace activists to expose and denounce the
motivations of finance capital and the organizations they dominate. It is our duty to also identify the resistance
to it and provide answers to the path of struggle that will lead to its defeat
and moreover to carry that struggle into the forums of the United Nations, the
World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum.
Next: The Great Rehash – Part 2, The Working
Class has Its Own Answers
[i] Tax in Kind and Rungs in the Ladder of
Capitalism
In his work, Tax In Kind, obligatory reading for any worker
that who wants to know about the difficulties of consolidating the victory of
worker’s power in Russian after WW1, Lenin made reference to another of his
famous works, “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” 1917. Lenin was
arguing passionately and patiently for the workers and peasants to understand
the importance of a revival of state capitalism to bring about a revival of
large-scale industry and to transform Russia from a peasant economy to an
industrialized socialist economy. The quote that follows is from Volume 32
Collected Works page 336.
We provide Lenin’s quote in full so as not to lose the
significance of the idea that Lenin presented to the Bolsheviks and the workers
and peasants of Russia in April 21, 1921 and that continues to have profound
significance for our struggles today. Lenin counseled;
“In order to convince the
reader that this is not the first time I have given this “high” appreciation of
state capitalism and that I gave it before the Bolsheviks seized power, I take
the liberty of quoting the following passage from my pamphlet, The Impending
Catastrophe and How To Combat It, written in September 1917.
“Try to substitute the
Junker-capitalist state for the landowner-capitalist state, a
revolutionary-democratic state. ie., a state which in a revolutionary way
abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy
in a revolutionary way. You will find that, given a really
revolutionary-democratic state, state monopoly capitalism inevitably and
unavoidably implies a step…towards socialism…
“For socialism is merely the next
step forward from state- monopoly capitalist monopoly…
“State-monopoly
capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of
socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called
socialism there are no intermediate rungs.”
Pages 27 and 28. (our emphasis and italics DC)
Is what Lenin said in 1917 not an accurate statement of the
stage at which the Canadian economy has evolved to in 2021? We live in a state
monopoly capitalist state which is the complete preparation for socialism. It
is this historical truth that the WEF and all of its participants seek by all
means to avoid.
