What is the World Economic Forum and zero-sum growth?

3.6K

To understand what the World Economic Forum is, it is not enough to learn a few notions, refer to some particularly charismatic leader (do you have any name in mind? Write us to contribute) and cross these elements at dates. In this article, therefore, without wishing to exhaust the topic, we try to return to the political links between various organizations and particularly active think-tanks, placing the lens of observation where the paradigms and watchwords of this system were most decisive.

What is the main theme of the World Economic Forum?

The central theme of the World Economic Forum is the restructuring of capitalism, not only in reference to the economy, but to society and to human life itself, as a function of a new society, oriented towards the end of “growth”. To understand this fundamental node we must go back to the history of environmentalism, in particular the drift that the environmental movement and environmentalist thought have known in the passage from the seventies to the end of the twenty-first century.

We can speak frankly of drift since this movement, born as a contestation of the system, then became (Overton’s window) an integral and founding part of the system itself initially targeted.

A fundamental part in this process was played by the Club of Rome, which in fact was its partner and main sponsor, from the very beginning of the Davos man’s enterprise. So much so that the critique of growth, the critique of GDP as a false indicator of well-being, which seemed to be the heritage of an ecological challenge to the capitalist economic system and to the consumer society as well as to advanced industrial society, were fully assumed by Klaus Schwab himself. It is therefore crucial to ask why this criticism, this contestation, which seemed disruptive to the system, was instead accepted by the dominant oligarchies; this took place not in a purely instrumental way, as a tinsel to good intentions and noble principles, aimed at neutralizing the critical significance of this environmental movement. This could have been thought up until a few years ago, following a simple trace of the domestication of dissent. Instead, we find ourselves in the presence of something else. This environmental criticism becomes an integral part of the design of these oligarchies. This aspect must therefore be analyzed seriously.

What is the World Economic Forum? The drift of the environmental movement

The ecological protest arose as a counterpart from the 1950s and especially from the beginning of the 1960s, precisely during the so-called miracle, or economic boom. Pollution, wild urbanization and overbuilding are rightly represented as the primary causes of a less authentic, less healthy life, more exposed to harmful agents. Hence the departure of the ecological criticism; the literary trumpet blast is by Rachel Carson (1962) immediately translated into Italy by Feltrinelli, entitled Silent Spring. Carson wrote

«If we continue to use pesticides, the pollution will be such that these harmful substances will spread in the earth, in the waters, will be assimilated by animals, ending up in food and in the mother’s milk itself, until the birds die and our springs become silent»

Rachel Carson in Silent SPRING (1962)

In that same period in Germany a much deeper philosophical critique of the consumer society developed, that of the Frankfurt School. In France, another book, a milestone of this environmentalism, is that of a political scientist Bertrand De Jouvenel, who also founded the movement called The Futuribles. The author criticizes GDP as a false indicator of well-being as early as 1968. In Italy this movement was taken up by a brilliant entrepreneur, Pietro Ferraro who followed up on the integration and distribution of the magazine (called “I futuribili”) in the territory of Peninsula. Not surprisingly, still in Italy, we could mention Pier Paolo Pasolini a few years later.

The illustrious writer, on the eve of the administrative offices of June 1975, speaking during a meeting of the PCI, makes a speech that the party itself was probably not prepared to accept. In fact, it posed the difference between development and progress, referring precisely to the critique of GDP, to the critique of quantitative growth, of a development that cannot be assimilated to true progress. Some time earlier, in February of the same year, Pasolini wrote the famous article remembered as the article of the fireflies, even if the title was different; this article expressed more than just an ecological critique. The disappearance of the fireflies ten years earlier was a historical caesura, alluding to the advent of a consumer society, of a neo-capitalism that was creating a new type of authoritarianism, much more pervasive and totalitarian than the old regimes. A new authoritarianism capable of realizing a real anthropological mutation of the Italians.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) of those years could not understand this criticism, since its opposition to the system was an internal opposition to the model of an advanced industrial society, founded on growth.

Still on the subject of ecological protest, it must be said that this will also be able to permeate the pontifical encyclicals, we recall in particular two: Pacem in terris by Pope John XXIII of 1963 and Populorum progressio of 1967 by Pope Paul VI. The explosion of this ecologism took place on April 22, 1970 with the so-called Earth Day. We were in the midst of the student youth protest of 68; and this earth day, celebrated all over the world, departed significantly from California, the center since the early 1960s of the protest movement. The ecological criticism was linked to all the other aspects and all the other movements of the protest, therefore to the denunciation of racial segregation, to the movement against the war in Vietnam and so on… If we made a comparison with this Earth Day of 1970 and the days of the Earth and the current Fridays for Greta’s future, it would be rather embarrassing.

The Club of Rome takes over

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968, among the founders we can include Aurelio Peccei, an Italian physicist. According to an official reading, this club was founded at the Accademia dei Lincei at the Villa Farnesina, in order to carry out a project of good governance of the world. But there is also a conspiracy theorist reading that at least has emerged for some years now, according to which this club was founded and financed by the Rockefeller family, was not born in Villa Farnesina but in a villa owned by the Rockefellers in Bellagio and it would have pursued since its foundation a Malthusian project of depopulation and eugenics. Now, whatever the truth is, one thing is certain: the Club of Rome has nothing to do with the contestation from below we are talking about, eg. with the Earth Day movement. In fact, the idea from which this club was born is that of a technocratic élite that takes on a project for governance, for the good governance of the world, and it is essentially the same idea that it then pursues Klaus Schwab at the same time, or at least a few years later, through the founding of the World Economic Forum, an idea that is prevalent today. However, this aspect does not appear at all clear to the environmental movement of the seventies, which instead is partially enthusiastic about the work of the Club of Rome.

What mission did the Club of Rome carry out?

The Club of Rome in 1972 commissioned a research from some scholars of MIT of Boston, which was then published in the spring of the same year with the original title “The limits to growth” (original first edition scan of the book linked). This book will sell something like 12 million copies and will be quickly translated into thirty languages, always enclosing the theme between growth and development so dear to Pasolini. What strikes us a lot today, except for the content, is that this book is a first application of Artificial Intelligence, heralding a Fourth Industrial Revolution, even though the third had not even begun at the time. This study is based on a structured, global calculation model, which aims to predict the environmental and economic consequences of uncontrolled population and production growth. That is, being focused on the trend lines of some factors on which the fate of the planet earth would then depend: population, production, consumption, food resources, energy resources. There are a number of graphs that explain this model, and the typical comment of the authors is roughly always this: if we keep doing this then this other one will happen. If population, production and consumption continue to increase, catastrophic scenarios will arise in the short term. It is true that in reality there are no precise chronological forecasts in the book, but overall the tone remains the catastrophic one, which today sounds rather familiar to us.

In the text there is above all the criticism of the idea of ​​unlimited growth. At the time it was clearly a disruptive critique, inserted at the very end of thirty glorious years, which saw the passing of a model of transversal development, based on growth. In fact, on the one hand we had the capitalist West guided by the Keynesian Fordist model and on the other hand we found a communist world that believed in that idea (which Karl Marx had simply hinted at and did not consider a scientific prediction) according to which society without classes, therefore the end of capitalism, would have entailed such a huge liberation of the productive forces, capable of making the communist dream possible in the end, that is, that of such an accumulation of wealth that it would have been possible to give to each according to their needs. We therefore find ourselves well within a growth model, or rather exactly within its utopian apotheosis. However, both blocks did not concern themselves with the environment at all; the countries of the East, of real socialism, were in fact the ones to perpetrate the most serious environmental damage.

It was therefore an absolutely heretical idea that Klaus Schwab’s fledgling World Economic Forum found very interesting. Looking at the chronology of the Davos Forum, we often see the Club of Rome well represented at its center. Or maybe it was mutual. Against this background, just the following year, it was 1973, something that we could even define a coincidental prophecy unfolds: the Yom Kippur War breaks out and consequently there is the oil embargo, with the relative increase in the price of fuel. on levels unimaginable until a few months before.

In this study, the authors anticipated and even prevented the strongest criticism that would be advanced to them, that according to which technology, technological progress, would allow the limit of growth to be pushed higher and higher, and that therefore one could escape from those problems indicated by the authors. The model of the study commissioned by the Club of Rome instead responds negatively to this objection, in the sense that the deployment of all the technology possible in every sector of human activity would not have been sufficient to avoid collapse and that at most it could have delayed it, to delay. This limit could have been moved by a maximum of a few decades but the limits of growth would not have been removed in any case.

What did the authors of “The Limits to Growth” propose at the time?

The state of equilibrium: development without growth, what would later become “sustainable development”. That is, some variables had to remain constant to ensure the maintenance of this balance. These variables were population, production and capital.

All human activities that did not involve the waste of non-renewable resources, which did not involve environmental degradation, could continue to grow even indefinitely. Technological development, provided that the increase in productivity did not translate into an increase in production, had to remain constant. Therefore, technological progress could be translated, in a very suggestive way, also for the movements of the time, in a reduction of work, that is, in a greater availability of free time. In reality, things went very differently, already with the Third Industrial Revolution.

The aspect of capital: how can capital remain constant in a society with a capitalist economy? How can we think of a state of equilibrium in which capital remains constant, remaining in the context of capitalism? How could the authors argue this in a study commissioned by what was basically none other than a capitalist elite? Attention, the study reports that this aspect was not at all understood at the time: capital increases that translate into increases in production are not sustainable. It does not say that any increase in capital is not sustainable.

Which capital is therefore tolerable?

The growth of capital was tolerable only in the form of finance capital, that is, capital growing on itself. At the time no one understood it, or only a few did … among these probably was Klaus Schwab.

The criticisms paradoxically came above all from the capitalist world; this is not surprising since this system has always had innovative and other conservative currents within it. Ford’s example is quite instructive in this regard, considered a half insane by his fellow entrepreneurs.

Instead, the study is welcomed with deep interest and enthusiasm precisely by the world of youth, student and in particular environmentalist protest. In essence, the great exponents of industry and finance who are part of the Club of Rome are considered as traitors, traitors to their own class: in a positive sense by the environmentalists, in a negative sense of course by the ruling classes, who do not yet understand the problem. growth and by no means intend to abandon the dominant economic model. But the study of the Club of Rome actually also marked the principle of the drift of environmentalism, it would be understood only several years later. The process of taking the environmental issue into the ideology of the elites and the policies of NGOs and governments began.

During all these years and even today a certain radical ecologism has certainly remained alive, of full opposition to the system. We remember for example. John Zerzan, Murray Bookchin, and in general in the well-known theories of degrowth by Serge Latouche. This type of environmental radicalism has been completely marginal, liquefied in the green parties and within an irrelevant associationism.

The main stages of the drift

Let’s see some stages of this drift process. A milestone was in 1987 with the Brundtland Commission (former Norwegian prime minister), with the launch of the idea of ​​sustainable development. For this Commission, development must respond to the needs of the present without compromising the possibility for future generations to satisfy these needs in an at least equivalent manner. Gro Harlem Brundtland is currently president of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an offshoot of the World Health Organization and the World Bank Group, which built the first of the pandemic simulations of the future, the forerunner of Event 101.

Another stop is the United Nations Conference in 1992, a first agenda of the United Nations, which at the time was called Agenda 21 and was concerned with linking the problem of the environment, peace, inequality and hunger in the world.

Then we have the Kyoto Protocol starting from 1997, for the limitation of CO2 emissions.

And finally we find the Paris Conference in 2015 and the topic of global warming, which then dominated the current environmental movement.

Thus we arrive at the United Nations Agenda 2030 which we could somewhat define as the theological summa of the ideologies of the globalist élites, corresponding to the agenda of the World Economic Forum.

In the meantime, what was the Club of Rome doing in recent years? We pointed out a book from 1991, because this text greatly strengthens the conspiracy readings. This book, The First Global Revolution, however, shows that for at least thirty years there has been a very clear plan, pursued by the globalist élites; a public, published and advertised plan. What did the Club of Rome write in this 1991 text? It was argued that the policies indicated in previous reports (the limits of growth and beyond the limits of growth), had to win popular support. To gain this support, the masses had to be able to be connected to a life and death struggle against a common enemy. The end of the mentioned book contains a passage very significantly titled: humanity’s common enemy is humanity itself.

«In the search for a common enemy against which to unite we came up with the idea that pollution, global warming, water scarcity, famine and the like would be suitable (to constitute this common enemy). However, by designating these dangers as enemies we fall into the trap we have already warned our readers about, which is to mistake the symptoms for the causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through different attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy is therefore humanity itself»

The First Global Revolution

Here is therefore packaged the common enemy in a catastrophic key: the human being.

This approach is therefore further refined in the future through the ecological footprint theory. This theory would like to quantify the portion of the planet necessary to compensate for the resources that each of us consumes and to dispose of the waste that each of us produces. Each of us would leave an ecological footprint, consuming resources and producing waste; but if this is the case then the footprint of an individual is the less harmful the less resources he consumes the less waste he produces. So we arrive at the paradox that the most virtuous human being on the planet, or rather the only one that is more properly virtuous, is the one who does not consume any resources and does not produce any waste, that is the one that does not exist. Hence the ideal state of the planet would be the extinction of mankind.

A good conspiracy theorist would now say: from here to the depopulation plans there is only a small step. What is highlighted by this environmentalist ideology or pseudo-such, is that these theories can easily be used for a totalitarian design, translating everything into a series of prescriptions not only addressed to governments and legislators, but to all citizens who are called to change their behavior, their habits and their lifestyles under the looming threat of planetary catastrophe. Individuals are blamed for contributing to the catastrophe. Through these dialectical mechanisms this catastrophic environmentalism has been structured into a kind of secular religion, founded on articles of faith, on dogmas that it is blasphemous to question.

World Economic Forum: a religious system of penance?

The World Economic Forum, seen from this perspective, looks very much like a religious system of penance.

The first way in which the dominant system has appropriated environmental criticism is the instrumental use of environmentalism, reduced almost to an apocalyptic and penitential religion, in order to build emergencies, to call the population to a totalitarian mobilization, dividing it into two classes. opposed: the good part and the evil part, the responsible and the irresponsible, thus avoiding other and more real conflicts, compacting the population in support of global political policies. What happened, however, was that green religion was not incisive enough, totalitarian enough; then the recent health emergency has been an excellent lever, used apparently with the same modalities and for the same purposes. This allowed a general speeding up of the dynamics useful for the transition: the sudden intubation was the immediate risk, the fear of the invisible enemy.

It should be concluded that having found such a powerful alternative tool, the dominant oligarchies would no longer need the green ideology. And instead this is further relaunched; it is relaunched because there is the real adhesion of the elites to a society without growth. That is, it is not just about cosmetics, the mere use of environmentalism for profit, eco-business (which is also very real) or to govern through the permanent emergency… It is instead the fact that the end of growth is taken very seriously. The diagnosis is not so strange; this obviously does not mean that you have to accept the therapy. Sharing the diagnosis is important because otherwise one cannot understand the current era, placing oneself on a point of view that is not up to the challenge that these powers are launching.

A short (sad) story about the end of growth

The decisive factors at the end of economic globalization are basically two:

1. Post-Maoist China’s entry into the global market.
2. The fall of the Soviet bloc, apparently more striking, and therefore the enthusiasm for rapid market integration

Moreover, as we saw in the introduction, these two factors were baptized precisely in Davos. The idea of many is that the West has favored and ridden globalization without realizing all its consequences and without being able to govern them (cit. Luca Ricolfi in The Growth Enigma). However, we believe this is not the case: there is someone who has thought about how to govern globalization and its consequences, and we find it above all in the World Economic Forum. What are these consequences

The first fundamental is the irruption on the world scene of intermediate countries, between advanced and poor ones. The so-called Asian tigers. If we consider GDP growth and the degree of inequality between the various world economies, comparing on this basis the advanced countries (West) and the rest of the world, recent history can be divided into three great epochs.

• 1945> 1975 – With a growth rate higher than that of other countries in the world, with a clear increase in the relative gap. Western countries seem to grow at the expense of other countries. (Wolderstein)
• 1975> 1995 – The speed of growth of advanced countries still remains significantly higher than that of the rest of the world, but is starting to decline. Just as the degree of inequality begins to reduce. At the beginning of the 1990s the effects of globalization began to be seen. From this moment on, the escalation continues; the West therefore loses the baton of “growth”. Contrary to the dominant narrative, the inequalities between the West and the rest of the world have not grown at all but on the contrary have collapsed.
• 1995 > 2007 and beyond – The crisis of the West became clear and evident only after the collapse of 2007, even if in reality it had begun at least fifteen years ago.

On this crisis only apparently diverge a Keynesian or neo-Keynesian interpretation according to which the crisis would be the result of neoliberal policies, spending cuts, austerity, privatizations etc. and a liberal interpretation according to which instead it was the Keynesian policies, never interrupted, that constituted the origins of the crisis, while liberalism would not be the origin but the solution to the various problems. And gradually the various cascading theories: deficit or budgetary control? Reduce taxes or safeguard welfare? Is it better to redistribute wealth or better to facilitate the companies that have to produce this wealth? In reality these two apparently opposing currents agree on a fundamental question: to resolve the crisis it is necessary to return to growth. Neo-Keynesians and neo-liberals are unable to think except within the framework of growth. Instead, a disturbing question arises: if the problem weren’t “when and how will growth return?” but was it “can growth ever return?“.

The zero-sum society: facing the end of growth

There is a very well founded suspicion according to which growth represents nothing more than a brief parenthesis in the history of humanity; on the other hand, for millennia men have lived in a society without growth, defined as a cold society. But one thing must be noted: today’s companies could not however be cold companies since they continue to be founded on a previously absent element, namely competition through the market and the accumulation of financial capital. What is happening? There is a shift to a company that remains competitive but has no growth. This type of society is precisely a zero-sum society, a society which, as in game theories, does not allow everyone to win; a winner must necessarily correspond to a loser. If someone wins more, there must be someone else who loses more. This is at the level of competition between individuals but above all in competition between the various sectors and between the various economies. This is essentially the fundamental problem of the zero-sum society, a problem with a socially explosive significance.

The defeated, the excluded, those who are left behind, are not only individuals, but are entire categories, entire productive sectors, entire professional groups, entire portions of territory, entire regions of the world, countries… which are inexorably cut off outside. Moreover, this was the humus upon which populist, sovereign, etc. movements grew up because the insecurity of a zero-sum society generates a request for protection, and populist movements play a particular role in this kind of request. The growth of these movements leads to a crisis of hegemony of the dominant groups: the design of the World Economic Forum can be considered a lucid response to this crisis, first of all in exploiting the pandemic as a window of opportunity but, on a broader level, in imagining a profound restructuring of capitalism in order to adapt it to this society without growth.

This change is bluntly revolutionary, truly a Great Reset, tending to construct a new dystopian model of economy and society, a different political paradigm, obviously under the guise of a philanthropic ideology. Our readers should know that philanthropic masquerade is in fact an old habit of the classes that exercise the most brutal rule. These dominant oligarchies essentially function as an “intellectual organism” towards economic and political powers, with respect to multinationals, governments, the media, providing these players with a conscience, a line, a program: Klaus Schwab composes this organism by disseminating its so called global leaders.

The disappearance of fireflies

Coming back to our introduction, this Pasolini’s vision, rather than the effects of pollution, the advent of a new extreme form of authoritarianism was denounced, together with a very sad anthropological mutation of the Italians. Responding to Franco Fortini (the author’s answer written at the time, in this link, please use google translate, without misleading us 😅) who believed that the Christian Democratic party (DC) regime was nothing more than the continuation of Fascism under a false mask, Pasolini affirmed that instead there had been a clear break, approximately in the mid-1960s, emblematically marked by the disappearance of the fireflies . According to this author, a completely new authoritarianism was born; the values ​​of peasant, paleo-industrial civilization that had remained dominant until then had been destroyed, and a totally different civilization was affirming itself, that of consumption. This new civilization had permeated the souls of the Italians in a purely totalitarian way, as previous regimes had not been able to do; an anthropological mutation ensued.

«As everyone now knows, we are no longer faced with new times but with a new era in human history, it was impossible for Italians to react worse than that to this historical trauma. They have become in a few years, especially in the center-south, a degenerate, ridiculous, monstrous, criminal people: it is enough just to go out into the street to understand it. But of course to understand people’s changes you have to love them, unfortunately I had loved these Italian people, both outside the schemes of power, indeed in desperate opposition to them, and from populist and humanitarian schemes. It was a real love, rooted in my way of being. I therefore saw with my senses the forced behavior of the power of consumption, recreating, deforming the conscience of the Italian people, up to an irreversible degradation. This had not happened during the Twenty Years, a period in which behavior was completely dissociated from consciousness. In vain the “totalitarian” power iterated and reiterated its behavioral impositions, the conscience was not involved. The fascist “models” were nothing but masks to put on and off»

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Corriere della sera, February 1975

It seems that today the masks, imposed by a techno-sanitary system, which is preparing to become a pure techno-ecological regime, imposed by its rules, by its hypnotic dictates injected by the monopolized media, have instead been introjected, as had not happened in the context of the Italian twenty-year period, as had happened in a different way in the authoritarian consumerist. With the difference that this new authoritarianism will soon promise us the reappearance of the fireflies, perhaps imposing us first, as usual as a moral duty and then with a more persuasive blackmail of so called Green Pass (or whatever PASS), perhaps an energetic and ecological curfew will be imposed on us, in order to better admire them, to these fireflies.

Having concluded this brief journey, we can then outline an initial answer to the question “What is the World Economic Forum”. This project of a green and social economy is effectively an attempt at a violent and anti-democratic restructuring of the economic, political and social model of human life itself. An attempt that carries with it a serious danger of great social turmoil. A social danger that Klaus Schwab does not hide at all and to which, however, our dominant oligarchies already have the answer ready. So, get ready for it ’cause in the future, we will have to deal with this aspect above all.