Already in the 18th century, British economists of the nascent capitalism were questioning the sustainability of this system around David Ricardo. What was initially very profitable would eventually become commonplace and no longer enrich its owner. Consumption could not eternally justify mass production. Later on, socialists, around Karl Marx, predicted the inevitable end of the capitalist system.
This system should have died in 1929, but to everyone’s surprise, it survived. We are approaching a similar moment: production no longer makes money, only finance does. All over the West, we see the standard of living of the mass of people falling, while the wealth of a few individuals is soaring. The system is once again threatening to collapse and never rise again. Can the super-capitalists still save their assets or will there be a random redistribution of wealth following a generalized clash?
The 1929 crisis and the survival of capitalism
When the 1929 crisis hit the United States, the entire Western elite was convinced that the goose that laid the golden eggs was dead; that a new system had to be found immediately, or else humanity would perish from hunger. It is particularly instructive to read the US and European press of the time to understand the anguish that gripped the West. Huge fortunes had disappeared in a day. Millions of workers were out of work and experiencing not only misery, but often starvation. The people revolted. The police fired live ammunition at the angry crowds. No one thought that capitalism could be amended and reborn. Two new models were proposed: Stalinism and fascism.
Contrary to the image we have a century later, at that time everyone was aware of the flaws in these ideologies, but the most important, vital problem was who would best be able to feed their population. There was no longer any right or left, just a general “sauve-qui-peut”. Benito Mussolini, who had been the editor of Italy’s leading socialist newspaper before the First World War and then an agent of British MI5 during the war, became the leader of Fascism, then seen as the ideology that would give bread to the workers. Joseph Stalin, who had been a Bolshevik during the Russian revolution, liquidated almost all of his party’s delegates and renewed them to build the USSR, which was then seen as the embodiment of modernity.
Neither leader was able to bring his model to fruition: in the end, economists must always give way to the military. Arms always have the last word. So it was the Second World War, the victory of the USSR and the Anglo-Saxons on the one hand, the fall of fascism on the other. It so happened that only the United States was not devastated by the war and that President Franklin Roosevelt, by organising the banking sector, gave capitalism a second chance. The US rebuilt Europe without crushing the working class for fear that it would turn to the USSR.
The crisis after the disappearance of the USSR
However, when the USSR disappeared at the end of 1991, capitalism, deprived of a rival, found its old demons. Within a few years, the same causes caused the same effects, production began to decline in the US and jobs were relocated to China. The middle class began its slow decline. US capital owners felt threatened. They tried several approaches to save their country and maintain the system.
The first was to transform the US economy into an arms exporter and to use the US armed forces to control the raw materials and energy sources of the non-globalised part of the planet used by the rest of the world. It was this project, the adaptation to ’financial capitalism’ (if this oxymoron makes sense), the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, that led the US Deep State to organise the 9/11 attacks and the endless war in the wider Middle East. This episode gave capitalism a twenty-year respite, but the domestic consequences were disastrous for the middle classes.
The second attempt was Donald Trump’s curbing of international trade and return to US production. But he had declared war on the men of 9/11 and no one would let him try to save the US.
A third development was considered. It would have involved ditching the Western populations and moving the few multi-billionaires to a robotic state from where they could fearlessly direct their investments. This is the Neom project that Prince Mohamed bin Salmane began building in the Saudi desert with the blessing of Nato. After a period of intense activity, the work has now stalled.
Donald Rumsfeld’s former team (including Dr Richard Hatchett and Dr Anthony Fauci) decided to launch a fourth option during the Covid-19 pandemic. The idea is to continue and generalise in the developed states what was initiated in 2001. The massive containment of healthy populations has pushed states into debt. The use of teleworking has prepared the relocation of tens of millions of jobs. The health pass has legalised a society of mass surveillance.
Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset
It is in this context that the president of the Davos Forum, Klaus Schwab, published Covid-19: The Great Reset. It is not a programme, but an analysis of the situation and a forecast of possible developments. This book was written for the members of the Forum and gives an idea of their lamentable intellectual level. The author uses clichés, quoting great authors and the abracadabratic figures of Neil Ferguson (Imperial College).
In the 1970s and 1980s, Klaus Schwab was one of the directors of Escher-Wyss (absorbed by Sulzer AG), which played an important role in apartheid South Africa’s atomic research programme, a contribution that took place in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 418. So he has no morals and is afraid of nothing. Later he created a circle of business leaders which became the World Economic Forum. This name change was done with the help of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE); the business arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED/CIA). This is why he was registered in 2016 with the Bilderberg Group (Nato’s influence body) as an international civil servant, which he was never officially.
In his book, Klaus Schwab prepares his audience for an Orwellian society. He envisages anything and everything up to the death of 40% of the world’s population by Covid-19. He proposes nothing concrete and does not seem to prefer any option. We just understand that he and his audience will not decide anything, but they are willing to accept anything to keep their privileges.
Conclusion
We are clearly on the threshold of a huge upheaval that will sweep away all Western institutions. This cataclysm could be avoided in a simple way, by changing the balance of remuneration between labour and capital. This solution is unlikely, however, because it would mean the end of super fortunes.
With these facts in mind, the West-East rivalry is only superficial. Not only because Asians do not think in terms of competition, but mainly because they see the West dying.
This is why Russia and China are slowly building their world, with no hope of integrating the West, which they see as a wounded predator. They do not want to confront it, but to reassure it, to give it palliative care and to accompany it without forcing it to commit suicide.
