The Billionaires Find No Answers in Davos. Their "Burning Man" in the Alps.

Richard Mellor

Afcme Local 444, retired.

1-24-20

Video: Trump in Davos boasting about how the US has the cleanest drinking water, and how we are the cleanest people in the world. Has he ever been to Flint Michigan I wonder, or some of the rural and Native American communities?

The top representatives of global capitalism met at the Swiss resort of Davos this week to discuss the state of the world economy.  These billionaires were joined by the Climate activist Greta Thunburg and other activists including the co-founder of the Occupy Movement, Micah White who explained his reasons for going as, “It is here that the argument can be made that elites must stop suppressing protest and instead harness the creative energy of social movements to achieve great changes.”

Poor Micah, appealing to billionaires and the global elite to stop the nasty exploitative stuff they’re doing (stop being capitalists) and “harness” social movements to make the world a better place. It sounds like a Monty Python sketch. With a worldview like that it’s no wonder the Occupy Movement is in the history books with precious little to show for it.

The global capitalist elites in Davos are in a bit of a quandary being faced with assaults on all sides. Throughout the world, on every continent bar Antarctica, workers and youth are fighting back against the market and its inherent violence. French workers just won a huge albeit temporary victory against Macron’s attack on pensions. India was hit with a general strike of some 200 million workers. In Latin America there have been major battles and we will see more as US imperialism intensifies its reach in to the region destabilizing it further.

The Island nations of the Caribbean will not escape these developments and neither will Brazil where right wing, racist Christian fundamentalism, another arm of US imperialism and one of its favorite exports, has a huge influence. Russian imperialism is facing growing opposition at home as is the Chinese bureaucracy. Both these two examples have recent history of revolutionary struggles and are home to a very large and potentially powerful working class. China in particular will be facing increased battles in the future as both the growing Chinese bourgeois and the working class come in to more open conflict with the bureaucracy and each other.

Capitalism abhors obstacles, anything that disrupts the god given right to profit. Full Spectrum Dominance is what it aims to achieve, the right of capital to go where it wants, when it wants and without regulation, government interference or unions. The folks at Davos are internationalists, they understand that capitalism is an international system. They grasp that, like or not, we live in a world economy; the laws of the market demand it.

They are aware of the dangers of protectionism but when necessity calls, they will as a last resort hide behind the barriers of the nation state, capitalism’s own creation.  This too is a disaster in the making and the rise of nationalism, given greater impetus by the US president Donald Trump, is of a major concern to them. They are being battered on all sides and are hoping to find a way out but capitalism offers only a future of further inequality, misery and forever wars. Ultimately, if the working class fails to take up the task history has set for it, capitalism will destroy life on earth as we know it. 

In Davos, the world’s billionaires along with our friend from the Occupy Movement apparently, peddle the tale that capitalism can solve the problem and offer a friendlier face to the world, a new capitalism, a “stakeholder capitalism” that will raise all boats. “In effect, then capitalism as a system of production for profit must be transformed into a system that involves other sectors of society being part of a corporate-led system of ‘shared goals’.”, wites Marxist economist Michael Roberts. (see the previous FFWP post on Davos from Michael Roberts).

And here we are in Davos where a one-bedroom apartment at this time can cost $5000 a night. Walter Russell Mead, a prominent US academic and one of their experts in US foreign policy doesn’t have too much faith that these folks at Davos can accompany much. The title of his recent Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal All Aboard the Crazy Train, says it all and does offer some humor for his class colleagues. He writes,  “This year an earnest young aide at registration told me that, to reduce the event’s carbon footprint, no paper maps of the town were being distributed; one could almost feel the waves of relief from the nearby Alpine glaciers at this sign of green progress”

Humor aside, Mead’s concern is the rise of nationalism, or what they call populism today and the dangers this presents in a global economic system. The problem is that capitalism cannot overcome the barrier of the nation state, its own unique creation. Once a progressive step as capitalism arose from the womb of feudalism, the nation state is now a major obstacle to the powerful market forces that reach in to every corner of the globe.

The world economy is more integrated than ever before. As I write, the US Commerce Department’s attempts to, “tighten the noose on Huawei Technologies Co.” has been blocked by the Pentagon, joined by the US Treasury Department as it could hurt US tech companies. “The Pentagon is concerned that if U.S. firms can’t continue to ship to Huawei, they will lose a key source of revenue—depriving them of money for research and development needed to maintain a technological edge, the people said.”

WSJ 1-24-120. There is no escaping global market forces. The more sober US bourgeois understand this, but things are slipping out of control.

Young Greta Thunberg has her finger on the pulse and slams the billionaires for talking to much and taking no action as she usually does. She demanded “….an immediate end to subsidies for fossil fuels and complete divestment from the energy source". She continued,  "Of course those demands have been completely ignored, but we expected nothing less," adding that, “As long as the situation is not being treated as a crisis, then world and business leaders can of course continue to ignore the situation."

We can forgive Greta’s naiveté and her lack of any real alternative other than pleading to the wolves (that surround her) to spare the sheep, after all, she is a young teenager from an upper middle class background. It’s hard for her to envision the working class as the only force that can offer a future for humanity. Micah White’s problem has no such excuse, it’s simply his bourgeois world view. He learned nothing from the Occupy movement apparently.

The global crisis of capitalism is intensifying and has many of them worried. Impeachment chair Adam Schiff is not wrong to say that Trump poses a "clear and present danger" to US Democracy. As I pointed out in a previous commentary, this is the real fear for the more class conscious US bourgeois, not Trump the sexual predator, the racist, the con man, the liar. But this political crisis has been brewing for a long time. Each election cycle in the US the numbers that opt out grow as US workers’ living standards have declined under both parties.

The trade union leaders, the dogs that never bark, are willing participants in the slide backwards, for them, mobilizing their 14 million members in an offensive of our own is a terrifying prospect and can only lead to chaos as they see no alternative to the market. Capitalism is their only alternative, a friendlier, warmer, “capitalism with rules.”

This blog has pointed out how US capitalism was dragged from the abyss through socialist measures in what was a public rescue of the system during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. The two great imperialist world wars taught them a lesson. Fascism scarred them for life and half the world was lost to Stalinism. The system had to be saved from itself, the consequences were too dire

In 1938 in the midst of the Great Depression, shortly before his assassination by one of Stalin’s agents, the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in his Transitional Program of how the global capitalist class (the bourgeoisie using the French term) “…..toboggans with closed eyes toward an economic and military catastrophe.”, a fairly reasonable prediction given the war that followed a year or so later cost some 50 million lives and changed the world.

In an unusual twist, it has been the existence of nuclear weapons that has deterred such wars today. But they don’t make all those nuclear weapons never to use them. And the only country to use these horrific weapons on urban centers is the US, under the guise of saving lives no less.

The title of Mead’s Op-Ed piece is revealing but it ends with another warning, “What if, with all of their competence, experience, cosmopolitan vision and, yes, goodwill, the Davoisie are merely passengers, comfortably ensconced in first-class seats, on a train whose route they do not know and cannot control?”

Not a rosy picture from one of US capitalism’s top foreign policy experts.