For billions of people, the Groucho Marx rule applies when talking about Davos. This is the exclusive club, which meets in the luxury Swiss resort each year to discuss the global business environment.
Groucho, of course, has been immortalized along with the rest of the Marx Brothers in the zany Hollywood movies of the 1930s, such as A Night a the Opera, A Day at the Races and Animal Crackers.
In one quick-fire response, he joked: “I sent the club a wire stating, ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’.”
Well, to start off with those billions of people would not get past the bouncers, because the self-defined World Economic Forum is about exclusion. Yet even if, by divine design, they were handed free passes, what would be the point?
The austerity mantra holds sway over large swathes of Europe. The US remains mired in the fiscal cliff maelstrom and the Japanese are about to unleash an economic tsunami – devaluation of the yen at all costs.
On the other hand, growth does apply to parts of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of emerging nations and selected members of Next 11.
Certainly, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey, South Korea and Vietnam fall into this category in N-11, a BRICS-like organization.
So, what is the point of spending the GDP of a sub-Saharan country trekking to the Alps to Davos for a mere blabber fest, when basic membership plus access to private sessions at the summit cost a whopping US$245,000?
For instance, the slopes of Jackson Hole, where the annual central bank symposium is held in Wyoming, are way cooler.
In comparison, Davos is essentially double-dip land. On one side, we have ‘Bad for Labor’, with millions in the West thrown into an unemployment hell or suffering from a wages freeze. On the other side, we have ‘Good for Capital’, with companies flush with cash.
Yet the result is uncertainty, all over again. Quite simply, more “robust” companies are just not investing. Why? Because there is no demand. That is the “price” of the austerity mantra, and there is no evidence that the business, financial and government suits in Davos will address the drama.
After all, since the 1990s, the summit has always been about hardcore globalization and its prime spin-off – the absolute marketization of everything in life.
To get to the bottom of it, CEOs, bankers and techno-bureaucrats would have to engage in an in-depth discussion of hardcore neoliberalism.
To do that, they would have to bring in David Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has been teaching Karl Marx’s “Capital: Critique of Political Economy” for more than 40 years.
They would have to hold global banking to account. They would also have to consign austerity to the dustbin of history, and level the playing field between capital and labor. Of course, that will not happen.
Still, this year’s Davos theme is “Resilient Dynamism.” As a definition of the current woes of turbo-capitalism, a five-year-old in a favela, or slum, in Rio could come up with something more meaningful.
But then, Davos is a one-trick pony. “Resilience” remains a euphemism for the ever-expanding markets and low pay for workers syndrome. In a nutshell, globalization driven by huge multinational corporations.
We should scrap “Resilience” as the name of their game is “Inequality.” Davos, of course, does not do “inequality.”
In a study released by UC Berkeley, the wealth of the top 1% of Americans accrued by 11.6% in 2010, while for the other 99% it was a mere 0.2%. This is what is at the heart of hardcore neoliberalism and capitalist.
Davos should be discussing how a key segment of elites concocted the Wall Street-provoked financial crash. That was only ‘virtual’ business, but it was not ‘virtual’ national governments that had to intervene afterward to pick up the bill and bail out the banks.
No, I am afraid “Resilient Dynamism” will not do for Davos. But it is a good definition of China. While European and American elites accrue their capital to contain Beijing’s advance in Africa and Asia, China’s interventionism is of the business kind. It is a case of building roads, not wars.
Still, the question Davos refuses to ask remains: Why is it easier to imagine the total destruction of mankind, from nuclear war to a climate catastrophe, than to work on changing the system of relations spawned by capitalism?
Stay tuned for that one.
Yes Pepe, well said; I only wonder why those Swiss people demonstrating against Trump’s expected arrival in Davos didn’t think about demonstrating against the very nature of the Forum itself…. Maybe Groucho would have an answer
As usual———-Pepe on point!
Another "Escobarazo", which in Spanish means "sweeping with a broom". Mr. Pepe Escobar always goes to the root of questions, and particularly on the Davos’ elite, he contributes to the analysis of neoliberal capitalism’s "masters of the universe" narrative. While some economists keep crying "let’s save capitalism from it’s destructive tendencies" or dream of a "capitalism with a social conscience", Mr. Escobar, by referring to David Harvey’s radical analysis, implies that "capitalism cannot be saved from its suicidal tendencies", unless it stop privileging profits for the few, which is the essence of capitalism. And the ending about the absence of creative imagination at Davos for a social order of peace, equality, social and ecological sustainability, and economic solidarity, reveals the "absent or excluded from Davos" urgent agenda of the 99%, or the world without the "masters of the universe" controlling life in planet Earth. Pepe, you need to be translated in Spanish for Latin American and Spanish readers!
Thank you for so many years of great writing and great journalism. Before saying, "See you sometime at Café de Flore," let me first say, as a once English Professor who couldn’t find much political agency in the post-modernist project, probably because of my nun-inspired Picasso-Jesus Communism, you have managed some successes there as well. In the end, a couple decades of clear social political insights fashioned by you are hard to ever thank you for. Thanks.
Pepe Escobar,
Absolutely delightful! All the satire and the puns and the cynical ridicule of the charade of Western capitalism. I would like to ask you to but not sure whether you could have enlightened us more about China’s socialist capitalism as against democratic socialism in such a brief article,
About time some economic professorial dude comes up with a theory on socialist capitalism v democratic capitalism.
Particularly how it might solve this scourge or bane of inequity of exploitation of democratic capitalism such that international trade or global trade is not just free per se in terms of trading and development opportunity but truly ‘fair and equitable’ – not ‘beggar thy neighbour’ mantra but mutual enrichment with some sort of a ‘handicap’ system.
Which leads on to the issue as to an open global inquisition as to the whether Western democracy is an insidious conspiracy and a lie because the government is not by the people but by the economic oligarchs or cartel, the small % that owns almost the entire wealth of the nation. It is not and can never be real democracy unless the majority of the people own the majority of the entire wealth of the nation.
All is not well on the Western Front, if you will permit the pun.
Gracias!
China’s representative Liu He speaks at Davos. Must see.
https://eblnews.com/video/live-liu-he-explains-chinas-economic-policyliu-he-chu-xi-da-wo-si-shi-jie-jing-ji-lun-tan-2018nian-nian-hui-311883
As I see it, capitalism and it’s true alter ego socialism, do a dance in perpetuity. When unfettered capitalism shuts its doors to the masses and only rewards the financial wunderkinds and old guard barons, the natives get restless. That use to be the breeding grounds for trade unions to come in and organize the labor force. Why has it changed? In America at least, if unions organize the labor force and negotiate better wages , then there is a line a mile deep of immigrants that are willing to do the jobs for less. Effectively, organized labor has been vanquished by immigrants desperate for work, willing to work for lower wage. Enter Socialism and communism, the other end of the spectrum. After union organization fails, there is another strategy, which is the population “demands” something that cannot be given, because no government has the power to grant it….equality. If they pass laws to create equality, they might as well be passing laws that every woman be 5’10” and every man be 5’6” to make up for years of height advantage men have enjoyed. The equality purposed laws are about as effective. Financial acumen can be taught. But how much is LEARNED is up to the individual. There are a million different reasons that people don’t become financially literate. Hence, the reason we aren’t all millionaires and billionaires. Some people have that drive and some don’t. Some don’t feel it important to amass untold wealth, some do.
I find it fascinating that both socialism and communism attempt to say “we’re all equal” despite what human nature says. When populations, who were cajoled into thinking that the answers to inequality is forcing those who spent their life pursuing financial intelligence to sacrifice even more for the common good, find out that laws that go against human nature cannot be made without an ability to enforce them. The enforcement can start with public shaming, then confiscation, then perhaps some public executions to “motivate” the population to do as they’re told. Then your society starts to resemble every society that has tried this in the past 125 years. Like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba and finally Hugo Chavez’s destruction of Venezuela in the name of “equality”. One would think we had learned our lesson by now.
Capitalism without conscience is just as bad mind you. It demands the government not allow people to go bankrupt and have debt erased, while the companies themselves do it all the time(my GM stock from 2009 simply disappeared). They formerly had “debtors prisons” to punish “degenerates” or people down on their luck who couldn’t afford to pay back those they owe due to unforeseen circumstances. We all become the citizens of Bedford Falls and Potter has us all by the balls.
The answer in my opinion is to continue dancing the dance of capitalism/socialism equilibrium. To put the focus on financial education from K-12, also in college where more can be absorbed and a more mature mind can weigh life options. We must encourage capitalism with a social conscience. OUR bottom line can’t be THE bottom line, everything else be damned. Organic balance is a lofty goal. But that goal is never reached by drawing dividing lines in our population and assigning blame to one group or the other. The successful should be imitated not demonized, then all of our societies are built up together and not simply divided.
Any society with property rights, the rule of law, and economic freedom will create market capitalism. The problems which the author attributes to market capitalism are mainly problems caused by unstable money. For example, the problem in Europe right now is not "austerity" (governments refusing to spend money that they don’t have), but monetary deflation produced by the ECB. If you look at the CRB Index translated into euros over the past 17 years, you will see the problem.
The ECB is a huge coropration, an intergral part of Europe’s "market capitalism."
"Any society with property rights, the rule of law, and economic freedom will create market capitalism." Actually, contrary to your dictum, some polities, both large and small. have chosen otherwise; in the end, all societies place some constraints, operating perimeters, around free for all capitalism. Thank God.