Davos, 2023: preserving an unfair world

This Monday the World Economic Forum convened in Davos. This is the 53rd meeting of the global economic and political elite, or what Fidel more appropriately called the "imperial bourgeoisie." Unlike the vast majority of the world population, exploited and oppressed by capitalism, which fails to achieve the creation of a Davos-like structure to coordinate the great struggles of our time, the right knows and appreciates very well the virtues of a worldwide organization and the devise of global intervention strategies. This powerful global conglomerate exalts individualism but knows very well that the only effective way to maintain its privileges is by improving the collective action of the capitalist classes around the globe. This means acting in concert on the world geoeconomic and geopolitical chessboard to confront, as a unit, the multitude of critics and opponents of capitalism who still insist on fighting locally against an actor who has a global and unified strategy. To illustrate what we have been saying: you cannot fight against Bayer's pesticides and transgenics, whose production and application in agriculture obeys a global strategy, with isolated and unconnected protests, with little local or regional impact, at the best scenario.

The Davos meeting has had, from the beginning, precisely that mission. Strengthen coordination efforts between the dominant actors of contemporary capitalism, refine their strategies and tactics of struggle, and agree on the diagnosis of the situation and the possible ways to face the challenges it poses. Also to make a show of force, summon heads of state and governments from the five continents, hundreds of politicians, economists, experts, and a host of social communicators who will amplify and disseminate urbi et orbi the agreements sealed in that Swiss town. Some 2,700 leaders of global capitalism are expected to attend Davos this year.

The meeting will call for international cooperation in a fragmented world, which is a recognition that the old liberal globalization was fractured, that there are actually “two globalizations” or international economic subsystems. One, in the North Atlantic world with its tributary extensions in Japan, South Korea, and Australia; and another, more economically powerful, with its epicenter in China and which radiates throughout Asia and, via the “Belt and Road Initiative” reaches a number that oscillates between 128 and 144 countries (depending on the year) of the planet. Within this framework, the Davos experts and strategists will try to reach a consensus on how to face the simultaneous challenges posed by the slow economic growth, inflation, the energy and food crises and, mutedly said, the very serious situation on the geopolitical level worldwide and which is expressed with unusual strength in the war in Ukraine. Aware that the legitimacy of global capitalism is increasingly being questioned, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab proposes to strengthen "the ties of cooperation between governments and the private sector." Yet, at the height of the pandemic, Schwab raised the need for "a reloaded capitalism", in which states' role in the recovery of the economic cycle was considerably accentuated. What's more, he came to speak of a “state-led capitalism”. Now it seems to have softened its approach and revalued the role of markets, hidden under the euphemism of "private sector." But in no case, neither before nor now, did Schwab and his fellows hint at the slightest intention to democratize the capitalist states or make any effort to redistribute, even to a minimal degree, the wealth that has been scandalously concentrated in recent years, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic and, later, the war in Ukraine. The data supplied by the Oxfam 2023 reports is horrifying. Just consider that the “billionaires got richer in the last 2 years than it had taken them 23 years before; food and energy billionaires are $453 billion richer than two years ago while 263 million people fell into ‘extreme poverty’ in 2022”. To have another concrete image, Oxfam sums it up like this: "It would take a person belonging to the poorest half of the world's population 112 years to earn what someone from the richest 1% would earn in one year." Finally, “the richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population” reveals a new Oxfam report. During the past decade, the richest 1 percent had captured around half of all new wealth; now they catch two-thirds of it. This very unfair world is the one that Davos wants to stabilize.