The Great Reset-Part II: Stakeholder Capitalism or Neo-Marxism?

As a guest blogger, Kamiel Gabriel continues to summarize the World Economic Forum at Davos Switzerland in this second part of his series.One of the most promoted ideas at the 2021 Davos meeting by its founder, Professor. Klaus Schwab, is what he coined “Stakeholder Capitalism”. In his newly released book carrying the same title, he explains his concept as:“Stakeholder capitalism is a form of capitalism in which companies seek long-term value creation by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large. We are facing a whole set of social, economic, and health crises, and the best response to these challenges, would be for all actors in society to consider more than their narrow and short-term self-interest.”He adds :“To ensure that both people and the planet prosper, four key stakeholders play a crucial role. They are: governments; civil society; companies; and the international community (e.g., the United Nations).”While much of what has been promoted might be seen at the surface as laudable efforts to “level the playing field”, the initiative goes much deeper than that. At its roots, what is proposed is in fact a neo-Marxism. Marxism is a political and economic way of organizing society, where the workers own the means of production. Socialism is a way of organizing a society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the proletariat.According to Investopedia, Marxism posits that the struggle between social classes, specifically between the bourgeoisie (capitalists), and the proletariat (workers) defines economic relations in a capitalist economy and will inevitably lead to revolutionary communism. Marx proposed that this was the next necessary step in the progress of history. He argued for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism.Marx’s class theory portrays capitalism as one step in the historical progression of economic systems that follow one another in a natural sequence. They are driven, he posited, by vast impersonal forces of history that play out through the behavior and conflict among social classes. According to Marx, every society is divided among a number of social classes, whose members have more in common with one another than with members of other social classes.The difference between Marxism and what Professor Schwab promotes is that in the new Stakeholder Capitalism, the economic and social driving forces will be handed out to a small number of elites. Such elites are expected to unite in thought and actions to set up the new world order in which economic, social and environmental progress is realized according to new rules, policies and regulations. Such new rules allow the orchestrators of the new system full control while the majority of people will be expected to simply follow.In all western democracies, the last few generations have seen a shift in decision-making away from legislature, which are more responsive to ordinary voters, and toward institutions like the executive branch, the judiciary and the Supreme Court. Therefore, there is a shift of power away from the most accountable parts of government. As Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, so eloquently wrote :“The spirit of remaking nature-including human nature-greatly emboldens both human beings and governments. Imbued with that spirit, and employing the tools of modern science, totalitarianism is a form of government that reaches farther than tyranny and attempts to control the totality of things.”There is a strange anomaly here. Working class people “tend to be somewhat to the left on economics. They favor more welfare spending, higher minimum wage, more social security, more health care spending. [but] They are a bit more conservative…on social and sexual issues.” This cultural conservatism is not a racial issue. “A lot of morally conservative people- many of whom are non-white…feel that their viewpoint as traditionalist or as religious people is not represented in the commercial mass media.”In his recently published book , American political scientist Michael Lind asserts that “the top 10% or so of the population, particularly those with advanced graduate and professional degrees, dominate the public, private and non-profit sectors in the US and other Western democracies.” So the big divide is not between the left and the right but between the elites and the working class majority. “Many of the policies that are preferred by the managerial elite…are very unpopular with the voters.”