The unsustainable, Great Reset model, or “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” lacks free markets, free will and individual liberty and is the governmentalization of private industry. It's 'stakeholder capitalism' is actually a two-tiered economy, with corporate-government-socialist monopolies and the state on top, and “actually existing socialism” for the majority below. The Great Reset combines resets in all conceivable domains of human life: economic, environmental, geopolitical, governmental, industrial, technological, social, and individual.

by Michael Rectenwald,

I’ll begin by addressing the elephant in the room. Isn’t the Great Reset simply a “conspiracy theory” concocted and circulated by “rightwing extremists?” The so-called conspiracy theories run something like this: the Great Reset is a plot hatched by a technocratic global elite to establish a socialist-communist New World Order. The Great Reset will abolish the property rights of the majority, as well as individual and national sovereignty, and wipe out the last vestiges of personal freedom. It uses covid-19 and climate change as pretexts to enslave what will remain of humanity, using never-ending lockdowns, experimental vaccines, and pervasive and inescapable surveillance. According to the New York Times[1] and the Anti-Defamation League,[2] the Great Reset has no basis in fact. Or, as the BBC claims,[3] the Great Reset is a benign effort on the part of “leading thinkers”[4] to bring about “a fairer, greener future,”[5] based on a reset of capitalism. Meanwhile, Time devoted an issue to the Great Reset, effectively hailing it as the solution to all our problems post-covid.[6]

Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), suggests that the Great Reset is merely an attempt to address the weaknesses of capitalism exposed by the covid crisis, as well as the looming catastrophes posed by unmitigated climate change and environmental degradation. This is what Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret suggest in their book, Covid-19: The Great Reset.

I don’t mean to suggest that the truth lies somewhere between denial and conspiracy. Rather, I want to make clear just what the Great Reset entails, according to its architects and subscribers.

the Great Reset can be traced to the inception of the World Economic Forum, founded as the European Management Forum in 1971. In the same year, Klaus Schwab, an engineer and economist by training, published his first book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering, written in his native German.[7] Here, Schwab first introduced what he would later call “stakeholder capitalism,” arguing, as the WEF website notes, “that the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.”[8] Schwab and the WEF have promoted the multistakeholder concept ever since.

The exact phrase, “the Great Reset,” came into circulation in 2010 with the publication of the book, The Great Reset, by the American Urban Studies theorist Richard Florida[9]—although others claim that they used the phrase before him.

Schwab apparently appropriated the phrase and adapted it to represent his stakeholder vision for a new kind of capitalism and world system. At the WEF annual meeting in 2014, Schwab declared: “What we want to do in Davos this year … is to push the reset button.”[10] By this he referred to an imaginary reset button on the world economic system of “neoliberal” capitalism.

Next, the WEF organized two events that eerily anticipated covid-19, which became the primary inspiration for the Great Reset project. In May 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct the CLADE X Exercise, a “tabletop” simulation of a national response to a pandemic.[12] The exercise simulated the outbreak of CLADE X, a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus...

A little over a year later, in October 2019, the WEF’s uncanny prescience was again on display, only this time with greater precision. Along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF teamed up with Johns Hopkins University to stage another pandemic exercise, called Event 201. Event 201 simulated the international response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus—two months before the covid-19 outbreak became international news and five months before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic.

The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation,” the flooding of social and legacy media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.[15] These premonitory exercises and other covid curiosities have contributed to the “plandemic” narrative—speculation that the covid-19 crisis may have been staged by global elites centered around the WEF as an alibi for initiating the Great Reset.

On June 13, 2019, the WEF signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UN to form a partnership centered on advancing the UN “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” The Great Reset, then, may be understood, in part, as the WEF’s contribution to Agenda 2030.

One of the WEF’s many “strategic partners,”[29] BlackRock, Inc., the world's largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model of the Great Reset program.

Stakeholder capitalism is thus opposed to the free enterprise system. It means not only corporate cooperation with the state and NGOs but also vastly increased government intervention in the economy. Schwab and Malleret promote “the return of ‘big’ government... Governments, banks, and asset managers use the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) index to squeeze non-woke players out of the market. The ESG index is essentially a social credit score for rating corporations. The collectivist planners drive ownership and control of production away from the non-compliant.

Unsurprisingly, stakeholder capitalism has been seen as a new approach to achieving socialism, even by socialists.

The corporate-socialist tendency is toward a two-tiered economy, with monopolies and the state on top, and “actually existing socialism” for the majority below. “Actually existing socialism” is socialism as it really is, as opposed to how Marx and his epigones claimed it would be. “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” is a play on the Chinese Communist Party's description of its economic system. Several decades ago, as China's growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the CCP, its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe its economic system. According to the party, the growing privatization of the Chinese economy was to be a temporary phase—lasting a hundred years if necessary(!)—on the way to a classless society of full socialism-communism.

The difference between the former Soviet Union and contemporary China is that when it became obvious that a socialist economy had failed, the former gave up its socialist economic pretenses, while the latter has not.

Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, socialism with Chinese characteristics, or the Chinese system itself, amounts to a socialist or communist state increasingly funded by “capitalist” economic development. [It is the 19th Century] robber baron schema [of John D. Rockefeller]...who said the only sure road to the acquisition of massive wealth was monopoly, and [legalized monopoly] is also … the socialist plan. This Chinese-style system includes vastly increased state intervention in the economy on the one hand, and the kind of authoritarian measures that the Chinese government uses to control the population, on the other.

This Chinese-style system includes vastly increased state intervention in the economy on the one hand, and the kind of authoritarian measures that the Chinese government uses to control the population, on the other.

...the WEF model also represents the governmentalization of private industry. Under Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism and the multi-stakeholder governance model, governance is not only increasingly privatized, but also and more importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions to governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous corporate assets. These include funding directed at “sustainable development” to the exclusion of the non-compliant, as well as the use of Big Data, AI, and 5G to monitor and control citizens.

The Great Reset, then, is not a conspiracy theory; it is an open, avowed, and planned project, and it is well underway. But because capitalism with Chinese characteristics or corporate-socialist statism lacks free markets and depends on the absence of free will and individual liberty, it is, ironically, “unsustainable.” The vast majority will not accept the Great Reset’s attempts to lock them away in an economic, governmental, and technological prison. Like earlier attempts at totalitarianism, the Great Reset is doomed to fail.

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