“No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

– The Holy Bible (Luke 16:13)

“Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.”

– Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1 – Bourgeois & Proletarians

Klaus Schwab most certainly has based his career on the maxim “The height of originality is skill in concealing origins”. For indeed, Marxian sociology and poststructuralist, post-fascist derivatives have been established by the World Economic Forum, and the prestigious academic institutions, as the foundational methodology in the execution of their long-term plans. Generally this involves the study of the relationship between the evolution of technology and its changes upon law, social organization, culture, and the power relations between socioeconomic classes.

In the last chapter we looked at the post-fascist derivatives from critical theory and poststructuralism, that combined Marxian structuralism with reconstituted technologies from fascism, and from Heidegger. In this chapter we look at the tremendous influence of Marx upon Schwab who conceals his sources on multiple fronts. This will be once again demonstrated in the following chapter on the bifurcated neo-fascism of the burgeoning technocracy, settings aside critical theory and poststructuralism, and instead looking at this same question through the development of ‘stakeholder’ business management and administration as a partial refutation of Milton Friedman’s ‘shareholder theory’ ethos, the so-called Friedman Doctrine.

In Marx’s work we discern that the age of industrial revolutions, unlike previous ages, brings about a new kind of social order which overwhelmingly subsumes the consciousness of its various and incidental actors. It possesses them, like a demonic being from the netherworld in the image of Mammon himself, the logic of the machinations of capital.

It lays the framework for understanding AI, and how that system could become effectively self-conscious, or at least from observations, indistinguishable from a conscious living being. It shows how, with the rise and implementation of new technologies, the logic of that techno-industrial system is far more complex than in prior historical stages, such that its processes mimic or even evidence a consciousness of its own.

A Sorcerer with the Powers of the Netherworld

From Marx we find that modernity’s ruling class, arising formally into power as the financiers of the 1^st Industrial Revolution, had summoned up from the netherworld through its complexity, that the logic of its process constitutes an artificial consciousness beyond the control of industrial society itself.

Thus, the beginning of the 4^th Industrial Revolution stands at the precipice of late modernity and post modernity, bearing the birthmarks of the old society, at the great divide before a new paradigm which situates beyond the control, comprehension, and class interests of the ruling class of modernity.

The aim of Klaus Schwab is to be the sorcerer who can control, comprehend, and manage the spirits of the netherworld into the next paradigm while delimiting the havoc and contradictions which such undertakings had in prior historical epochs brought forth.

Klaus Schwab attempts to serve two masters. First, the netherworld spirit of Mammon, conjured by the ritualized capital accumulation of the plutocracy, which in turn possesses them. Second, God: through certain discoveries, technological and otherwise, that benefit the whole of humanity such as 3D printing. But Schwab, with his sorcerer’s robe, cannot serve two masters.

Schwab donning faculty regalia, which partly originates with the magi and alchemists

In Klaus Schwab’s 2016 primer “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, we are introduced to immediately in Chapter 1.1 (pg. 6) to a direct paraphrasing of Marxian historical materialism, without attribution:

“Revolutions have occurred throughout history when new technologies and novel ways of perceiving the world trigger a profound change in economic systems and social-structures. Given that history is used as a frame of reference, the abruptness of these changes may take years to unfold […] the transition from foraging to farming – happened around 10,000 years ago and was made possible by the domestication of animals […] The agrarian revolution was followed by a series of industrial revolutions that began in the second-half of the 18^th century…”

The chapter goes on to express Schwab’s greatest concern, that there is a problem in elected leadership who do not understand what is required for this revolution to be realized smoothly and effectively. Part of his immediate solution is global cultural hegemony and the use of a class of political commissars (a diversity trained set of individuals) to enforce it. He believes that if done correctly, they can mitigate the class struggle, by dividing the disenfranchised and displaced working class along ‘community’ lines (race, gender/orientation) such that populations will not revolt along the lines of class:

“Second, the world lacks a consistent, positive and common narrative that outlines the opportunities and challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, a narrative that is essential if we are to empower a diverse set of individuals and communities and avoid a popular backlash against the fundamental changes underway.”

But why would there be a popular backlash, if such changes are universally positive?

Because such changes aren’t. There is an overarching inability to tackle the problem of planned obsolescence, and also takes the position of the plutocracy as an immovable given. This is connected to a slow-down of innovation and future technologies in the sense understood in modernity, because the return on investment would, on the whole, tend to decline in inverse proportion to the rise in production technique.

Planned obsolescence has long been tied in our paradigm to innovation, that innovation of features was so great that the use of higher quality construction goods was unnecessary. This forced consumers into newer models that had novel features and functions, even if the core technology or utility of the commodity was not significantly improved compared to the waste created. This allowed for a return on investment for very minor innovations of questionable utility, and relied instead on advertising and conspicuous consumption as integral to the distribution process.

While the World Economic Forum’s discourse dances adjacent to a future paradigm, the logic of the industrial mode of production is an unchangeable variable. This, even though the planned obsolescence of the era of the 3^rd Industrial Revolution was tied to extracting surplus value from human labor, from monopolistic pricing, from usurious lending, and employment as a form of social control (idle hands do the devil’s work), all of which are exceptionally redundant in an age of total automation.

In pieces like Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity we develop a foundation for understanding that the real aims of the Great Reset are towards further slavery, despite that the technological possibilities presented by 3D printing and the internet of things (IoT) organically tend towards localism and decentralization (away from globalization). It is evident that planned obsolescence is greatly wasteful and is responsible for perhaps most of the waste that damages the environment (whether or not we accept the anthropogenic global warming thesis).

Whatever other cause of carbon emissions, pollution, or unsustainable environmental harm we can imagine, we can almost always tie that outcome to some part of the cycle of production and distribution of goods which are being unnecessarily replicated (from energy production to product delivery), thousands of times a day, because of planned obsolescence.

And yet the solutions of the IMF are not to significantly increase product lifetime, against planned obsolescence, but to reduce human consumption of still poorly-made items through making them expensive in terms of price-point or taxes, and by reducing the number of humans because human beings, within the rubric of modernity, only have value as producers and consumers-for-profit. With robots producing, consumption becomes ‘useless eating by useless eaters’.

As human beings who are among these numbers scheduled for redundancy, we must meditate on the profoundly genocidal and evil premise of this equation.

In the piece The Great Reset Morality: Euthanization of the Inessentials , we explain how it is the moribund thinking of the paradigm we are leaving, which is bearing its mark up the one we are entering. Corporate culture of Friedman’s doctrine, (externalizing costs, the bottom line) leads to genocide when human labor itself is no longer required.

Because there is a difference between using social technologies (Marxian, etc.) in the revolutionary process involving new technologies to eliminate the possibility of a rotation of elites on the one hand, and the broader problem of ‘solutions originating from within paradigm’, on the other. These are two different problems, and the WEF does not concern itself with the later, because they are of the paradigm of the 2^nd and 3^rd Industrial Revolutions, of employee downsizing, of the use of war and disease as methods of population control, of the destruction of free trade and market functions, of permanent austerity as a way to show a strange version of ‘economic growth’ on a ledger.

What is the Purpose of the WEF?

There are two real possibilities of a 4IR. The one pursued by the WEF/IMF is centralized and in the interests of the ancien regime, the massive corporations, is part of a mass depopulation campaign, (a population no longer required in light of automation) as well as a push to revolutionize methods of social control.

The other, coming through medium-to-larger businesses, is decentralized and establishes new lines of production and local distribution through 3D printing, which upend and relegate the members of the plutocracy to the dustbin of history.

This is why we see the push to destroy small and medium and larger enterprises, through the cutting off of supply-lines at the ports and restricted access to capital.

Photo: Mario Tama/AFP/Ritzau Scanpix

And so the next immediate aim of the plutocracy, is to eliminate medium enterprises before these can create decentralized 3D printing and usher in a 4IR which follows the model of upending the old power structure.

Combining Marxian ideas of historical materialism and technological determinism, with fascist-futurist ideas of technocracy and bureaucratic managerial scientism, the World Economic Forum pursues a path of ‘inclusivity’ for the shareholders (the managerial class elite). This increases their function in setting policy more than the present financialist stock-holders (the plutocracy) have so far required, given that the cycle of production and distribution formed the largest control mechanism on the activities of regular people as workers and consumers.

This managerial elite can guarantee that the hereditary practice of the aristocratic plutocracy is undisturbed by what would otherwise be a contest between decentralized vs. centralized production methods, a likely rotation of elites, and undesirable political outcomes.

Conclusion

Marxism and fascism-integrated poststructuralism and critical theory has greatly informed the scope of the designs of the WEF, both broadly but also in the micro-engineering of the manufactured pandemic and the social credit system arising from it, as we explained in “Deplorable Until Proven Compliant: Kafka, Social Credit, & Critical Theory”. In describing it as a ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’ an expectation is created and reinforced that, just as with the first through third, the same dynastic plutocratic families can remain in power.

In our piece “The Globalist Dilemma: How to Implement a 4th Industrial Revolution Without Losing Power”, we explained that historically, revolutions in the productive & technological forces led to great social turmoil as these new productive forces created new social classes based on those forces, with their own political project to reflect their newfound social power.

These came into conflict with the old order, and generally led to what Pareto describes as a rotation (circulation) of elites. Marx also informs these sociological points, and goes on to claim that through his science, society may for the first time be self-aware of the science of history development as a series of revolutions in the productive forces, and those in control of society may also control these processes as a sorcerer who has truly tamed the powers of the netherworld.

What members of the elite may well understand, which explains the inter-elite conflict underway, is that the same technologies used to reduce the population and enslave the remaining sum of humanity, are not based in a scientific or technological necessity. Instead, despite the use of techno-industrial and rationalistic language, stemming from scientific traditions of modernity, the real impulses and aims are ‘evil’. The fact that Mammon as a high-ranking entity in the pantheon of evil gods may now be rotated out for the first time in known history, what we have in place is a new system of a greater incarnation of evil from the netherworld, the adversary and accuser himself, signaling to religious communities a process described in Revelation.

These can and will be used until there is a maximum of only one human being left on the planet, as explained in ‘Have the Great Reset Technocrats Really Thought This Through? Evil: Between Depopulation & Neuralink’ , because there is no end to the appetite being summoned. Managing the transition of the plutocracy into a technocracy without hiccup is only part of the requirement for this bill of goods to be as advertised. The new technologies are being implemented with a new expressed evil, the logic of which will not be manageable, and creates a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” disaster.

‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’, 1940

This fact must be better understood by further layers of the elite, that their own doom is also spelled out in this process despite being called the ‘stakeholders’ of Schwab’s 4IR ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’. In our next chapter we will focus on the ‘Fascism of Klaus Schwab’, looking at how business administration and management theory, in preparing for their hoped-for next-wave in social metamorphosis post Milton Friedman, re-constructed the essence of fascism.

The author can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

Marx’s claim was that he made socialism scientific by which he meant that he believed he had discovered the mechanism that had driven society through history: he concluded that socialism was the inevitable next stage of evolution. He and his collaborator Engels laid out the theory in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Marx spent the rest of his life working out the details. Class struggle – the means of production – the triumph of the bourgeoisie in modern times – labour theory of value – surplus value – the more the bourgeoisie succeeds, the more it creates its destruction: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” It’s a complete theory of history and society. The driving force of the coming socialist period is the immiseration of the proletariat – as the owners of the means of production squeeze more surplus value out of the workers, they become more powerful and richer while the condition of the workers becomes worse:

The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.

By the same process, more and more formerly rich capitalists are ruined and pushed into the ranks of the miserable workers (“One capitalist always kills many“) until – and the details are never really described – there are so few rich and so many poor that:

Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The final stage doesn’t need to be especially violent: at the end point, there are so few super rich that whether they’re hanged from lampposts or pensioned off like the last emperor of China doesn’t make much difference in the great scheme of things.

Marx believed that he had discovered the laws, the processes, the machinery, that drove history and society: the way things are and will be, that must be: scientific. After Marx, socialism is no longer something to be wished for, something some rich benevolent owner might create if we asked him politely, an appeal to Christian conscience, but something that is the very mechanism of the way things are and the way they must develop. Socialism is hard-wired into history.

But, right away, there’s a contradiction: if it’s scientific, nothing you or I can do will make it come faster or slower so there’s no point in joining socialist parties: Newton’s laws of motion don’t care whether you or I create a society to proselytise for them. But if it’s important to work towards socialism – and Marx himself was closely involved in at least one effort to do so – then it’s not inevitable and, therefore, not scientific. This created two threads in Marxism – spontaneity (it is going to happen in its own time) and voluntarism (it has to be made to happen).

The scientific expectation that A leads to B and B to C came to a crisis in the late 1800s. Eduard Bernstein argued that things were not following the path that Marx had foreseen half a century before – ownership of capital was not concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, the conditions of the workers was not growing worse. In a word, political developments – the working class’s political power – were changing Marx’s laws. From this conflict of theory and observation was born the idea of what we now call social democracy. Socialists should work within the system to reduce working hours, break up monopolies, eliminate child labour, force up wages, support labour unions and so on: in Marxist terms, use political power to compel the owners to give up a significant portion of the surplus value. Social democracy could be harmonised with the idea of free enterprise by describing it as levelling the playing field. If the essence of the free market is competition, then who can disagree with the idea that labour’s demands should freely compete with capital’s in conditions where each is level; if competition in output is desirable then it is desirable in inputs as well. The mixed economy: the dynamism of the free market prevents the stagnation and bureaucracy of socialism and the power of labour prevented the crushing of the weak and the government is the enforcer of the balance.

Lenin hated Bernstein’s conclusions (“revisionism“) and in What is To Be Done? took a different course: an informed and disciplined few should drive development. And that led to the USSR and, at its flaccid end, the “developed socialism” of Brezhnev. (Parenthetical aside: Brezhnev is what Plato’s Philosopher King looks like when actual humans try it out in real time). Interesting to observe, however, that both Bernsteinism and Leninism were voluntaristic approaches: the future will be created by acts of will today. So much for scientific socialism.

The mixed economy worked pretty well for a long time and social democracies in Europe delivered high standards of living and social justice across the board. Even the USA, with its hatred of “socialism”, delivered a fine standard of living to its “proletariat” thanks to the power of labour unions and majority voting. Rather than wretchedly existing at the edge of the commodity cost of labour like the protagonists of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a worker in the West could buy a house and support a family. Altogether, the generality could agree that a good balance had been struck and Marx’s predictions had been disproven. The collapse of the USSR and its satellites fired a nail gun into his coffin. Marxists turned into whiskery crazies shouting on street corners that it can’t have failed because it was never really tried!!!

* * *

But that was then and this is now. What started me off on these thoughts was this headline: “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country, Study Finds“. That’s pretty astonishing: 3 people could buy out 160 million Americans: pay off their rents and mortgages, clear out their savings accounts, pocket their health plans, empty out their pension plans, throw their clothing into the Salvation Army box, pile their knick-knacks at the curb and cash out their tooth fillings. As to buying the other half, the only question is how many more billionaires would it take: a hundred, two hundred? How long before the three could buy up two-thirds of the population? (Last week, we’re told, one of the three added six billion to his kitty – that’s twelve of the latest Princess cruise ships or half a U.S. aircraft carrier.) Before I heard about the big three I’d known of this study from 2014: “Researchers then concluded that U.S. policies are formed more by special interest groups than by politicians properly representing the will of the general people, including the lower-income class.” The two headlines are not, to put it mildly, unconnected.

Moving down to mere millions we learn that the “Ousted Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg left the company with stock options and other assets worth about $80 million, but did not receive severance as part of his departure from the embattled company, Boeing disclosed late Friday.” A gold-standard company, probably destroyed on his watch, and he pockets more moolah that you, I or all the readers of this piece will ever see. Meanwhile average wages haven’t changed much for 40 years in the USA. Rich getting richer, poor getting poorer.

What happened? Well, simply put, the rich grabbed hold of political power, took over the government and started to unlevel the playing field. Wherever they can exercise their power they do: executive salaries rise, university fees grow, parliamentarians grow richer, bureaucracies expand, government bailouts bail. None of this is new or unusual, of course: greed+power=more greed is an equation for all times and all places. But somewhere the West lost the countervailing forces that balanced the greed of the bosses with the greed of the unions. We see this throughout the West: super rich, enormous executive salaries, endless perqs for some; austerity for the rest. More dramatically in the USA, of course, because it is the West’s leader and its “early adopter”. Socialists and the institutions they encouraged provided a counterforce and brute power created a balance in which everybody got something. That counterforce disappeared somewhere.

* * *

So, in a way, what Marx foresaw 170 years ago has come to happen. Much later than he expected and much differently than he expected. His theory held that the owners of the means of production – Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers – would rule the world. But of the three Americans who, we are told, can buy half the population, one is an investor, another a software developer and the third the inventor of a mail order store. Where are the means of production? Well – another irony – they were sold to China.

So the super rich in the West own intangibles;

The communists in the East own the means of production:

Not exactly what Marx expected.

And yet: three people as rich as half a country? Legislatures that do what they’re told by their paymasters? That is rather like the late stage capitalism that Marx was talking about – a few, very few, super rich and a large number of emmiserated people.

As Marx might say today, opioids are the opium of the people.

So what happens next? COVID-19 is brutally exposing the fact that these Western societies aren’t actually very efficient. Is it significant that three quarters of the COVID-19 cases are in NATO countries? Only six months ago, they were supposed to be the best prepared. Endless wars go on endlessly, debt piles up, wealth gaps grow, austerity policies grind on. The propaganda of Western exceptionalism is still strong but weaker and less convincing with every failure.

The world is changing and Karl Marx doesn’t look as out of date as he did 50 years ago.