We Are All Socialists

“Echoing this notion from on high, in 2016 the [World Economic Forum] announced the imminence of a post-historical future in the Marxist sense: ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.'”

The book that came out in 2020 titled COVID-19: The Great Reset—by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret of World Economic Forum (WEF) fame—is a fascinating, perhaps even world-historical, document. To be sure, the book does not, in itself, make for a particularly engrossing read. Rather, what is fascinating about it is the self-evidence and utter matter-of-factness with which it lays out the spirit of our times. The Great Reset offers what could be described as an engineer’s perspective on the global trajectory. Confronted with the inefficiency of the world’s response to the breakout of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the book asks a simple question: How do we fix this broken thing called neoliberalism?

The answers it provides are neither compelling nor sufficiently detailed to be truly actionable, but the overall purport is unmistakable. Schwab and Malleret call on everyone to work together toward a more globalized, more centralized, more digitized planetary state to put us on a path “to a better world: more inclusive, more equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature.” The alternative: “a world that resembles the one we just left behind—but worse and constantly dogged by nasty surprises.”

The way the choice is framed should immediately remind us of a retrograde Marxism. To be clear, I am not referring to Marxism here to invoke a “Red Scare.” Before it became a moniker for everything supposedly un-American, Marxism was an authentic philosophy. Schwab’s framing of the alternatives has Marxist overtones not because it is un-American but, rather, because it frames the choice in terms of a “reset” or revolution as opposed to a continuation or evolution. As such, Schwab has done his best to keep in vogue a supremely German sentiment: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch. (“Where, however, is danger, there also lies in wait the saving power.”) Or in Schwab’s own words: “The looming challenges could be more consequential than we have until now chosen to imagine, but our capacity to reset could also be greater than we had previously dared to hope.”