From Lapham's Quarterly:
I would set you free if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom but the least free of all.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s RainbowThere is no alternative.
—Margaret Thatcher
i. who is klaus schwab, and why are people saying such terrible things about him?
Klaus Schwab is the founder and current chairman of the World Economic Forum and author, with economist Thierry Malleret, of 2020’s enormously controversial book Covid-19: The Great Reset. The World Economic Forum sponsors an annual conference in Switzerland, popularly known as Davos, an invitation-only event attended by industrial and governmental leaders from around the world. In the words of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the attendees of this forum are “Davos Men,” a wealthy global elite who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”
Now, Huntington was a Harvard Man and no right-wing conspiracy theorist, but this description is not far removed from the conclusions of a popular conspiracy fantasy that asserts—among many, many things—that the world is being taken over by global elites toiling against our interests under the banner of Schwab’s Great Reset. The claims get woollier from there: the Great Reset has also let loose Covid-19 in order to create conditions that would allow them to take control of world politics and economics, replace national currencies with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, instate a communist dictatorship (aka the New World Order), and mandate a Covid vaccine containing a GPS tracker designed to provide universal police surveillance. In some versions of this theory, Donald Trump is the only leader keeping all this from happening.
I say this is a conspiracy fantasy because there is nothing theoretical or even hypothetical about it. It is not waiting for the right arrangement of material reality to confirm its conjectures. But then again, much of what we normally take for reality is largely a screen of clichés—ideological fantasies—that have no basis in fact but that we live through more or less willingly anyway. Evangelical salvation, American exceptionalism, personal wealth as a measure of virtue, patriotism, nationalism—all are dependent upon fantasies. These quotidian delusions provide a context in which right-wing conspiracy fantasies can seem plausible to some. For instance, if we can believe that the “founding fathers” convened with pure intent to provide “American freedom,” why can’t we imagine that people of impure intent conspire to take that freedom away? Even though none of this makes any sense at all, we are forbidden to say what’s true: there is not now, nor has there ever been, pure or impure, something a sober person might choose to call “American freedom.” To paraphrase Greg Palast, American freedom is the best freedom money can buy and always has been.
Schwab is not the first business theorist to describe our cybereconomy and its likely future. In 1990 inventor Ray Kurzweil published The Age of Intelligent Machines, and in 2001 there was former Lycos CEO Bob Davis’ book Speed Is Life. “We live in a world,” wrote Davis, “where a company is measured by its ability to accelerate everything from manufacturing to marketing, from hiring to distributing.” More recently, Richard Florida published The Great Reset in 2010 (a debt that Schwab does not acknowledge in his book), and in 2013 libertarian economist Tyler Cowen published Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. Cowen’s book provides an account of the worker of the future, the “freestyler,” the human working in tandem with Kurzweil’s “intelligent machine.” Cowen writes, “If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor-market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch.”
The idea that the global cognoscenti are convinced that technology is the future of all global and regional economies comes as no surprise. What is perhaps surprising is an assumption that underlies their conviction: speed. Velocity. The idea that the future is coming at full speed has been common parlance among market savants for some time. They have argued that whether we like it or not, the cybereconomy of the future is “inevitable.” How do they know it is inevitable? Because it is happening fast. Worse yet, not only is it coming fast, but like the cosmos itself, it is accelerating. It is a force out of anyone’s control.
National Gallery of Art, transferred from the Library of Congress.
On just two pages of Schwab’s The Great Reset, he uses words like fast, speed, accelerate, catalyze, turbocharge, change, and quick seventeen times. The use of these words is more than descriptive. Their repetition also has a subliminal function: anxiety. Something is coming! We’re told the following story by all of these technogurus: the age of the intelligent machine is near; it is inevitable; if you don’t prepare yourself for it, you will be left behind, you and your BA in European history. So if you’re lucky enough to go to college, be sure to study something in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). If you don’t, you may find yourself un- or underemployed. So get on it!
Schwab’s and Cowen’s bottom line is that whether or not you study computer science at university, you will end up working with intelligent machines. There’s no escaping that. It’s only a matter of whether the work will be with computers in a shiny Google programming warehouse in California or with robots in a shiny Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Alabama. That’s the shape that the “prisoner’s dilemma” takes in the global economy of the present: shiny outside, unhappy inside, and millions of workers, isolated from one another by the very machines that are supposed to be their tools and unable to make common cause.
This is the situation, for real. Whatever the conspiracy-minded might like to add to it, this is bad enough
ii. how is the great reset different from earlier theories about technocapitalism?
There is no new global order, just a chaotic transition to uncertainty.
—Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Schwab differs from Tyler Cowen and his ilk in his insistence that global capital will soon have no choice except to reform itself if it wishes to avoid “doom.” Schwab proposes that a global commitment to “environmental, social, and governance” crises is necessary if capitalism is to avoid systemic failure. He claims we will soon see “a new social conscience among large segments of the general population that life can be different.” Schwab concludes that the neoliberal era is finished, its grand assumption that all problems can be fixed by markets has come to an end. In particular, Covid-19 has shown that “just in time” global supply chains are too fragile to work dependably and that the neoliberal model must be replaced by structures that respect the importance of regions, states, and cities. “The model of globalization developed at the end of the last century,” he writes, “conceived and constructed by global manufacturing companies that were on the prowl for cheap labor, products, and components, has found its limits.” As a consequence, much more manufacturing will have to be done locally as a “hedge against disruption.”
Schwab also contends that business will be “subject to much greater government interference than in the past” in the form of “conditional bailouts, public procurement, and labor-market regulations.” As with the New Deal in the 1930s, Schwab proposes that corporations working for “stakeholders” rather than “shareholders” will save capitalism from itself and make possible another great compromise between business, government, and people. “The pandemic struck at a time when many different issues,” he writes, “ranging from climate-change activism and rising inequalities to gender diversity and #MeToo scandals, had already begun to raise awareness and heighten the criticality of stakeholder capitalism and environmental, social, and governance considerations in today’s interdependent world.” The claim that global capital is going to discover its inner FDR just in time to avoid calamity is based upon the assumption that there is sensitivity and unsuspected virtue within Davos Men, who say, with Shakespeare’s Shylock, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” They, too, are people of feeling. Of course, this is just more mealymouthed special pleading by the ruling elite and is not so much a project for reform as it is another fantasy—the Davos Conspiracy Fantasy.
According to Schwab, the global elite is indeed conspiring at Davos, but it is conspiring in the name of justice, equality, and environmental health. In short, he argues that people like himself and the wealthy organizations that flock to his Davos confab each year should be trusted to right not only their own ships but all ships, in the name of a social conscience they have always possessed even if they haven’t always succeeded in showing it. Most surprisingly, given that we’re talking about Davos, Schwab suggests that “the ostentatious display of wealth will no longer be acceptable.” So no surprise if more Honda Civics and fewer Mercedes pull up to the curb at Davos.
Slack-jawed incredulity is required here, but it is probably strongest not among capitalism’s critics, people like me, but among the elite. The business elite enjoy Davos not for the preaching they hear from Schwab or from celebrities like Bono, Elton John, and Sharon Stone, but for the unique opportunity it provides for networking and deal making. The idea that they should give authority back to governments, reform labor relations, and put the needs of the environment before the need for profit will happen…in a pig’s eye.
After all, why should they change in the ways that Schwab says stakeholder capitalism requires? And why should anyone think capitalism needs to be saved from itself? This is not the Great Depression. There was no Black Tuesday and no execs dropped from the fifteenth floor, worthless stock certificates fluttering behind....
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