By Michael Rectenwald | Hillsdale College
The
following is an excerpt of an article that was adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on November 7,
2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “The Great
Reset.”
Another way of
describing the goal of the Great Reset is “capitalism with Chinese
characteristics”—a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies and the state
on top and socialism for the majority below.
Is the Great Reset a conspiracy theory imagining a vast
left-wing plot to establish a totalitarian one-world government? No. Despite
the fact that some people may have spun conspiracy theories based on it—with
some reason, as we will see—the Great Reset is real.
Indeed, just last year, Klaus Schwab, founder and
executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF)—a famous organization made
up of the world’s political, economic, and cultural elites that meets annually
in Davos, Switzerland—and Thierry Malleret, co-founder and main author of
the Monthly Barometer, published a book called COVID-19:
The Great Reset. In the book, they define the Great Reset as a means of
addressing the “weaknesses of capitalism” that were purportedly exposed by the
COVID pandemic.
But the idea of the Great Reset goes back much further.
It can be traced at least as far back as the inception of the WEF, originally
founded as the European Management Forum, in 1971. In that same year, Schwab,
an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern
Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering. It was in this book that
Schwab first introduced the concept he would later call “stakeholder
capitalism,” arguing “that the management of a modern enterprise must serve not
only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and
prosperity.” Schwab and the WEF have promoted the idea of stakeholder
capitalism ever since. They can take credit for the stakeholder and
public-private partnership rhetoric and policies embraced by governments, corporations,
non-governmental organizations, and international governance bodies worldwide.
The specific phrase “Great Reset” came into general
circulation over a decade ago, with the publication of a 2010 book, The
Great Reset, by American urban studies scholar Richard Florida. Written in
the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Florida’s book argued that the 2008
economic crash was the latest in a series of Great Resets—including the Long
Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s—which he defined
as periods of paradigm-shifting systemic innovation.
…
In June 2020, at its 50th annual meeting, the WEF
announced the Great Reset’s official launch, and a month later Schwab and
Malleret published their book on COVID and the Great Reset. The book declared
that COVID represents an “opportunity [that] can be seized”; that “we should
take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world”; that
“the moment must be seized to take advantage of this unique window of
opportunity”; and that “[f]or those fortunate enough to find themselves in
industries ‘naturally’ resilient to the pandemic”—think here of Big Tech
companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon—“the crisis was not only
more bearable, but even a source of profitable opportunities at a time of
distress for the majority.”
The Great Reset aims to usher in a bewildering economic
amalgam—Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism—which I have called “corporate
socialism” and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called “communist
capitalism.”
…
Proponents of the Great Reset hold “neoliberalism”
responsible for our economic woes. But in truth, the governmental favoring of
industries and players within industries—what used to be known as corporatism
or economic fascism—has been the real source of what Schwab and his allies at
the WEF decry.
…
Another way of describing the goal of the Great Reset is “capitalism
with Chinese characteristics”—a two-tiered economy, with profitable monopolies
and the state on top and socialism for the majority below.
...
The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese
system in the West, but in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political class began
with a socialist political system and then introduced privately held for-profit
production, the West began with capitalism and is now implementing a
Chinese-style political system. This Chinese-style system includes vastly
increased state intervention in the economy, on the one hand, and on the other,
the kind of authoritarian measures that the Chinese government uses to control
its population.
Schwab and Malleret write that if “the past five
centuries in Europe and America” have taught us anything, it is that “acute
crises contribute to boosting the power of the state. It’s always been the case
and there is no reason it should be different with the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The draconian lockdown measures employed by Western
governments managed to accomplish goals of which corporate socialists in the
WEF could only dream—above all, the destruction of small businesses,
eliminating competitors for corporate monopolists favored by the state. In the
U.S. alone, according to the Foundation for Economic Education, millions of
small businesses closed their doors due to the lockdowns. Yelp data indicates
that 60 percent of those closures are now permanent. Meanwhile companies like
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google enjoyed record gains.
Other developments that advance the Great Reset agenda
have included unfettered immigration, travel restrictions for otherwise legal border
crossing, the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money and the
subsequent inflation, increased taxation, increased dependence on the state,
broken supply chains, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates,
and the prospect of personal carbon allowances.
Such policies reflect the “fairness” aspect of the Great
Reset—fairness requires lowering the economic status of people in wealthier
nations like the U.S. relative to that of people in poorer regions of the
world. One of the functions of woke ideology is to make the majority in
developed countries feel guilty about their wealth, which the elites aim to
reset downwards—except, one notices, for the elites themselves, who need to be
rich in order to fly in their private jets to Davos each year.
…
In terms of the social order, the Great Reset promises
inclusion in a shared destiny. But the subordination of so-called “netizens”
implies economic and political disenfranchisement, a hyper-vigilance over self
and others, and social isolation—or what Hannah Arendt called “organized
loneliness”—on a global scale. This organized loneliness is already manifest in
lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and the social exclusion of the
unvaccinated. The title of the Ad Council’s March 2020 public service
announcement—“Alone Together”—perfectly captures this sense of organized
loneliness.
In my recent book, Google Archipelago, I
argued that leftist authoritarianism is the political ideology and modus
operandi of what I call Big Digital, which is on the leading edge of a
nascent world system. Big Digital is the communications, ideological, and
technological arm of an emerging corporate-socialist totalitarianism. The Great
Reset is the name that has since been given to the project of establishing this
world system.
Just as Schwab and the WEF predicted, the COVID crisis
has accelerated the Great Reset. Monopolistic corporations have consolidated
their grip on the economy from above, while socialism continues to advance for
the rest of us below. In partnership with Big Digital, Big Pharma, the
mainstream media, national and international health agencies, and compliant
populations, hitherto democratic Western states—think especially of Australia,
New Zealand, and Austria—are being transformed into totalitarian regimes
modeled after China.
But let me end on a note of hope. Because the goals of
the Great Reset depend on the obliteration not only of free markets, but of
individual liberty and free will, it is, perhaps ironically, unsustainable.
Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to ultimate
failure. That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t, again like those earlier
attempts, leave a lot of destruction in its wake—which is all the more reason
to oppose it now and with all our might.
