All posts by : Enrique Lescure

Introduction

Recently in my country of Sweden, a conservative news columnist has come under fire for suggesting that media reports about a record hot summer were alarmist in nature, and thus she is accused of being a climate change denier, and calls have been raised on the platform previously known as Twitter to de-platform her.

Her defenders on the other hand claim that she is not denying climate change, but offering a critique against the habit of connecting future potential heatwaves as well as weather phenomena with climate change.

What this public spat points out is that the messaging about climate change is prone to misunderstandings, and to a contentious public debate which sows confusion and depolarization.

We live in a time of ecological crisis, in terms of climate change, soil erosion, freshwater depletion and ecosystems deterioration. Each of these crises represents an existential crisis against not only industrial civilization but also for higher lifeforms on our planet. This is not the first global ecological crisis which our species have faced – but it is unique in two regards. This time we are 1) aware of the looming crisis and 2) are largely the cause of the crisis, due to our collective over-exploitation of our biosphere.

In the same time, for various reasons, it is a culturally, economically and politically difficult, nearly insurmountable task for our species to muster a comprehensive and effective strategy to stop damaging the ecosystems which we depend on for our sustenance.

It could be argued that one of the factors which prevent the effective dissemination of the gravity of the situation is information overload. A typical citizen today is bombarded with information, news, outrage, enticement, distractions and fear for all their free time. Attention is divided, and the ability to discern relevant information from trash is diminishing among the generations who are growing up with social media.

Ideally, there would need to be a cultural revolution to reduce the amount of information stasis constantly bombarding a stressed out, anxiety-ridden populace, but in the mean-time, maybe the strategy to disseminate information about climate change could be revised?

Clearing the table – instituting severity levels

Man-made climate change – i.e. how the emissions of fossil-based greenhouse gasses reduce the amount of heat evaporating from the Earth by thickening the Earth’s atmosphere – is a complex issue which affects everything on the planet. It is an elaborate, complex puzzle with tens of thousands of pieces, and scientific institutions do not yet fully grasp its implications.

I would argue that if the media would be sincerely interested in helping to provide the public with a clearer understanding of climate change, its effects would need to be divided into several levels.

These levels would be roughly constituted along the line of the potential severity of the short-, medium- and long-term effects. I will provide one example here below.

1. Level One (Yellow): Effects which are localized, disturb local economies, increases the likelihood for extreme weather, forest fires, reduce tourism income or lead to higher demand for cooling.
2. Level Two (Orange): Slow-moving long-term changes which will demand social intervention on a centralized, large scale, for example sea level rise and changes in agricultural productivity.
3. Level Three (Red): Very severe effects which will not only disrupt human civilization but also permanently affect the living conditions regionally or globally, and threaten to cause civilizational collapse. Examples are the melting glaciers of the Himalayas, the weakening of the AMOC (of which the Gulf Stream is a part) and the greening of the equatorial seas, which threatens plankton reproduction and thence the global reproduction of Oxygen (arguably the greatest threat of climate change).

Ideally, I would argue that the third severity level needs to be emphasized in the public messaging about climate change.

As it looks now, it seems like most of the public associates climate change with two factors – the first one being that the temperatures generally will become warmer and the second that the seas will rise due to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. It would not be surprising if most of the public primarily associated climate change with the risk of increased flooding. This causes several problems with communication, as it opens up the opportunity for climate change denialists to (correctly) point out that the raising of the sea levels is a slow process, that it is expected to take millennia for the Greenland ice sheet to collapse, that rising GDP levels (since they ignore all other factors) will make it possible for countries to invest in sea walls, and that even a poor country like Bangladesh is investing heavily in sea walls and have even regained some land during the last two decades.

The focus on sea level rise is understandable – the public interest is awoken both by the fact that most of our species are living on lowlands and at coasts, and by the Flood myths inherited from ancient civilizations. But it is not a good thing when the public cares for climate change on behalf of an issue which is understood in a flawed and dare I say alarmist manner.

That 75% of the Himalayan glaciers may be gone by the year 2100 (ICIMOD, 2023) is a much more serious threat against the well-being of the peoples of Bangladesh (and India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, China…) as it would represent a collapse of food production, ecosystems, soil and fresh-water reservoirs, and threaten the stability of the entire Eurasian landmass.

Likewise, the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) due to the warming of the arctic seas could very well cool northern Europe to temperatures which move towards Siberian and Alaskan levels – which would probably be great for winter sports but disastrous for agriculture and heating. This would also represent a permanent and unalterable facet of climate change, which is more difficult to adapt against than building sea walls on the Danish islands.

This is another reason for being cautious on reporting about for example the end of winter mountain sports in Scandinavia, as climate change as a phenomenon is so complex that it affects other systems – like sea currents – which in their turn can affect the outcome in a different but even more undesirable outcome.

When newspapers, governments and green organisations speak about climate change, we should do it in terms of focusing on the threats which are existential in nature. Plankton and seaweed produces around 50% of the Oxygen on the planet. If the phytoplankton living near the arctic waters are threatened by extinction, it can cause a reduction of oxygen regeneration which can threaten animal life globally. This could herald a mass extinction event which will affect us.

Summary

Of course, the certainty of these cataclysms could be put into question – but what we need to act upon is not the chance that they won’t occur or that the trends would be reversed, but that these events may occur. If we would have reasoned around aerosols as the climate denialists or minimizers are doing with the climate, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina would probably have enormous amounts of skin cancer occurrences today, and would have had to adapting into becoming the first ever nocturnal human societies.

Even without climate change, there is a need to transition to a zero-fossil society before the lack of economically accessible oil does that for us, and builds us into an economic high energy trap. The economic forces which want to keep the perception of the viability of fossil energy are reactionary beyond the level of self-destructiveness, and the economic sustainability of oil must be more vigorously questioned. Not the least, there must be a demand for and a public debate about the banning of the prospecting of new oil fields.

But before that, we need a better debate about climate change.

And the debate we need may need to be more concise and focus on the most serious implications of climate change – especially regarding its effects on glaciers, ocean currents and long-term habitability. There are other severe issues which I probably for brevity’s sake have disregarded in this article, but the point is not what severe problems we are discussing, but that we must primarily highlight them, rather than bringing in everything from the problem of urban heatwaves to the increasing insurance costs of coastal habitation to the end of winter resorts in Scandinavia.

Though all of these issues may be true, the problem of including too many issues in the question of the seriousness of climate change are manifold.

• The public will be cognitively flooded with climate change to the point of nausea.
• Pointing out severe and mundane effects in the same setting will blunt the emotional and psychological impacts of understanding the severe effects.
• The more points will be taken up in the same articles, videos and information briefs, the greater the likelihood that misconceptions could arise and that our opponents could utilize these misconceptions to win tactical victories.

In short, what we need to do is to design the messaging with climate change in a manner which can focus the attention of the public on the need for radical reform, and to achieve that we need to focus on a few core issues (ideally fewer than five) and then repeat them constantly. These issues must be scientifically validated, and must be focused on what constitutes an existential threat with climate change.

The opposition to climate change reform is consisting of probably the most confused political forces in human history, who actively are working to create a political situation which will bring forth the opposite they claim to support (which generally is a free-market capitalist society, while opposition to climate change reforms must bring forth ever more statist and regulatory economics in the future to help correct the course).

What the Earth Organization for Sustainability is doing

Right now, we are in the early process of developing a single player computer game which would simultaneously serve as a simulator showcasing the effects of climate change, and as a strategy game where the player themselves can interact with and initiate policies intended to mend climate change through reforms, technological innovations, cultural changes or other means.

The name of the game is Climatopia, and we hope it will help increase the understanding of this topic.

If you want to help, you can contact us on enrique.lescure@eosprojects.com or support us through our Patreon (or Swish number if you live in Sweden).

Introduction

“Build Back Better”.

The term has recently been in vogue, and used by governments in the English-speaking world and Continental Europe to define a progressive reform approach following the Pandemic. What the term vaguely means is that the recovery offers opportunities to create a new and superior type of system.

That a disparate cluster of Western governments have chosen the same term is associated with the term “the Great Reset” which is being championed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which holds an annual summit in Davos, Switzerland, and is sponsoring a “Young Global Leader programme” which includes political leaders at different levels from various countries – from heads of state like Sanna Marin, to legislators like Ida Auken – the latter infamous for an article she wrote for the WEF website, which was called “Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never been better”.

For the Anti-Globalization/Nationalist Right, this new trend of Post-Covid material produced by the WEF was declared as evidence for a sinister “globalist plot” of sorts, which either would utilize the pandemic for its own end, or outright had manufactured the virus and the pandemic/pandemic responses in order to transition Western society away from capitalism and towards some form of totalitarianism.

As a representative of an organisation which actually envisions a post-monetary/post-capitalistic future, I took a passing interest in these claims – though the only sources about the Great Reset and the term “Build Back Better” either were short articles were the terms were mentioned in passing (i.e – “The temporary pandemic subsidies could be utilized as a template for our governments Build Back Better programme”, or “The Vaccine Passports together with Digitalization can become a model for how identification of citizens is conducted in the future.”), articles about WEF itself which were of medium-length and descriptive of the trends of the future, or – in the majority of the cases – more or less hysterical texts which drew maximalist conclusions about tech-dystopias run by “psychopathic communist mega-corporations”.

Comparing the writings of the proponents of “the Great Reset” with those of their detractors, a casual reader becomes none the wiser – since the descriptions vary so much in scope. While the proponents talk in optimistic terms about turning the page and installing new and more robust healthcare systems, the detractors talk about RFID chips and mass sterilizations.

The question is where one could find serious and balanced critique. In the old days, back in the early days of this century, proponents and detractors of various concepts would vehemently disagree about the desirability of political and economic goals, but their view on what those goals were would usually converge. During the heydays of ATTAC, the World Social Forum of Sao Paolo and the leftist Alt-Globalization movement, progressive critics’ generally offered critiques of the WEF programmes based upon their textual content, while the current generation of critics (who mostly are rightists of the nationalist variety) focus on single statements or articles, like that of the aforementioned one by Auken.

This is not conductive for a debate, and it is not inviting for the public to partake in these discussions.

Therefore, because I simply wanted to know better, I purchased and read Mr. Schwab’s book – Covid 19: The Great Reset.

Now I have read it, and this article is an attempt not primarily at critiquing the book, but to describe its contents, and hopefully be of some help to those who wish to better know what it is about.

Summary by points 

• The book is divided into two segments, focusing on a macro reset for the international community, supranational institutions and nation-states, and a micro reset for corporations and individuals. For this article, I opted to focus on the macro reset.
• Rather than offering prescriptions for a brave new world of tomorrow, the book offers broad descriptions of the society that the author(s) believe is emerging and of which the onset of the pandemic has spread.
• The political preferences of the authors could be vaguely discerned from the focus of the analyses, as well as the probably unintentional usage of hyperboles – especially at the beginning of the text. Also, in one particular case, the lack of a counter-narrative could discern a certain – guilty or reluctant – advocacy of a political position that deserves more critique and illumination.
• However, the descriptive nature of the text makes it difficult to ascertain what descriptive analyses are in reality prescriptive recommendations.
• The book cannot be seen as a definite statement about the political preferences of the WEF – for a deeper understanding it would probably necessitate further studies of WEF materials, for example choices of lecturers, themes and workshops during their broadcasted seminars (of which they generously have provided a plentitude of on Youtube).
• While the claim that the WEF controls the Western World cannot conceivably be called a serious analysis, there is a serious critique to be made against a society which allows well-connected think tanks to have an outsized influence over the democratic processes.

Covid-19: The Great Reset

The book starts with a hyperbole – namely that the recent Pandemic has “plunged the world into a challenge we have not experienced in generations”, that it means an unprecedented challenge for governments, businesses and individuals to adapt – that many will fall but “a few will thrive”.

A quick remark about this postulate is that even the West – which arguably has had the best conditions for the Post-1945 era – has undergone many crises during the preceding decades (the 1973 and 1979 oil embargos, stagflation, the 2008-2010 financial crisis). What made the Covid Pandemic unique was the actions undertaken to combat it – namely lockdowns, vaccine passports and measures of control which in some countries made the economy contract by 20-30%.

It should also be noted that Sweden, which went against the current and instituted were minimal restrictions, during the course of the pandemic did neither do worse or better than the general mortality projection of countries.

The outline of the argument proposed by the book is “to never let a good crisis go to waste” and that governments and other decision-making entities should take the opportunity to for example institute badly needed ecological, financial and political reforms. These are of course well overdue, though it can be argued that the current configuration of global resource usage cannot be solved within the current incarnation of the market system.

However, the book then outlines as its mission to describe trends which we can see emerge.

The Green New Deal

The book outlines that the Pandemic has strengthened trends towards the automation of the service industry, and is mentioning basic income and strengthened focus on healthcare and a comprehensive welfare system at the expense of a focus on economic growth. It does also state that Japan’s model – often derided as stagnant and inefficient – has seen a growth in wealth if we account for the population decline.

These statements are outlined as a description of the trends we will see in the future, and they represent trends which are desirable – at least if you have a low to medium income, is disabled, have small children or other issues which may increase the stress levels on your life.

Schwab and Malleret do not see or describe any trends in the opposite direction. For example, it could be postulated that the rise of crypto-currencies would sap the state coffers from needed tax revenue, and it can also be drawn from experience of the stagflation of the 1970’s and the financial crisis of 2008 that economic hardships which threaten the viability of the monetary stability and financial systems are often counter-measured with infusions of capital into banks and other financial institutions. These measures would often lead to the growth of deficits – and traditionally these have been paid by cuts to the welfare systems – so called austerity policies.

While the EOS agrees with the WEF that there needs to be greater focus on accessibility to resources for all human beings (see the third criterion), there is yet to be seen whether the current monetary and financial system is capable of reintroducing the social democratic model. Canada, which has a government with many Young Leaders, have recently made strides in that direction.

The question is what intent can be derived from the book. The description of what policies states may indulge in seems to line up well with what the WEF prescribes. However, this could well cause confusion when the WEF describes other trends – which are far more controversial. It remains unclear whether or not the book is endorsing or describing these policies – and if the answer is the latter it is unclear why the book has not described trends in the opposite direction.

Supranational institutions

One of the chief characteristics of international development since the 1980’s has been the gradual increase in the number of supranational institutions, as well as their growing clout and power at the expense of national governments. To a large degree, this transition has coincided with the advent of Neoliberalism and the growth of Information technology, which to a large degree has affected the policies of these structures.

The EU is the most far-reaching example – to a large but unclear degree, it has deprived the states which are members of the Eurozone of their ability to conduct monetary policies, and also of a large amount of their ability to conduct financial policy. While this can provide scope benefits for trade and growth within the current system, it also deprives the citizenry of a large degree of economic and social political power. In an article written back in 2016, I theorised that this deprivation of political power towards treaties like NAFTA or institutions like the EU is one of the main reasons for the growth of right-wing populism.

The WEF has since its increasing visibility been associated with this trend of moving political authority from democratically mandated nation-states to goal-mandated supranational bodies.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Covid-19: The Great Reset is focusing a lot on health, and especially how the WHO and other international bodies and private institutions have helped countries dealing with the supply crisis at the beginning of the Pandemic, and that the authors state that a lot could be learned from this in terms of health coordination and the introduction of health as a focus point for international travel.

There are undoubtedly a few benefits of that kind of standardization, but it is a precarious trend to transfer health policies from the state – not because the state necessarily is a superior provider (which isn’t the case with a lot of developing nations), but because the state, despite everything, has a mandate which can be affected by the decision of its constituents, whereas international institutions only have responsibilities towards their mission statements (which may be affected by numerous nation-states, where the conflicting wills of numerous peoples are diluted down to compromises which will leave most citizens with a feeling of alienation and may not even be ideal to the varying situations on the ground).

Yet again, it is unclear whether the book endorses this development or merely describes it. It should also be noted (and it is actually mentioned by the text in passing) that the crisis caused by the Pandemic also saw countries becoming more protectionist in terms of guaranteeing access to medical equipment and vaccines, at the expense of poorer countries. While the WEF are correct in their assessment that pathogens do not care for international travel, their emphasis on supranational solutions risk causing more deprivations in democratic accountability.

New avenues for surveillance

On page 166, Covid-19 (the book) describes that the pandemic will most likely lead to a demand for more surveillance and monitoring for health reasons, and that new technologies are already in the making which will make it possible for institutions such as governments and corporations to for example measure the blood pressure and heart-rate of every citizen in real-time, which together with geo-location can help authorities map an image of the feelings, thoughts and aspiration of the individual citizen. The book itself states that it could become the basis for a totalitarian society, explains the mechanisms for its arising and the technologies needed for it to occur, but does not describe any type of resistance or counter-trends (like for example more advanced VPN or cloaking technologies, or the advent of parallel economies, based on Crypto or RBE principles). Rather, the type of resistance described is formatted in passive terms, with “individuals feeling that the system is oppressive, but choosing to try to keep their personal dignity.”

While the authors seem to lament the loss of personal or communitarian freedom replaced by a techno-managerial system, they seem unable or unwilling to imagine any type of conceivable, realistic alternative to this dystopia.

In summary

Critics of Schwab, the WEF and the book seem often to believe that the main purpose of the WEF is to institute a techno-totalitarian future – which often is envisioned as an extreme version of the type of cancel culture and banning waves which often affected right-centrists and right-wingers during the waning years of the Trump Presidency and the Pandemic, and that this is the hidden, nefarious purpose of their every action. To a large extent, Schwab seems to increasingly replace George Soros as a Blofeld-esque bogeyman in this mythology.

Supporters of the WEF views the book as a well-intentioned call for a more compassionate, fair and equitable system.

Most people (who aren’t a part of the Young Global Leaders or those 0,0001% of the global population which is ostensibly following the WEF, which as of this moment has 717 subscribers on its main Youtube channel) seem to not know so very much about it and some would even believe that the terms have been created by conspiracy theorists.

What then, is the Great Reset?

The book is not that very helpful in that regard, though it briefly touches upon multiple subjects, all from Green Energy to social policies and international cooperation. If we look at the introduction video with the same title for the Davos Agenda of 2021, it is described in this manner:

“The pandemic has radically changed the world as we know it, and the actions we take today, as we work to recover, will define our generation. It’s why the World Economic Forum is calling for a new form of capitalism, one that puts people and planet first, as we come together to rebuild the world after COVID-19.”

The only thing that stands clear is that a change is needed, and that this type of change will be a “new form of capitalism” (which is described as “stakeholder capitalism”, which would “put planet and people rather than profit, first”), and that “we must come together to rebuild the world after Covid-19”.

Who are that “we”?

Among those featured in the video, with short quotations combined with a type of music that indicates that something great is going to happen, is a high-ranking official of the International Monetary Fund, the UN Secretary-General, the CEO of Mastercard, the CEO of Salesforce, and a high-ranking operative of the WEF itself.”

This leaves room for an interesting, critical perspective which has unfortunately not been aired more.

The Great Reset in actuality is a quite apt term, even if it is quite vague.

It is envisioned as a reset of capitalism itself, which is (rightfully) seen as unsustainable, and that by moving towards a type of capitalism which “takes into account” the interests of stakeholders (“working class people, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, eco-systems”) the “bad parts of capitalism” could be replaced with “good parts”, and a “good capitalism” where the inner contradictions of the systems would be negated could arise.

This is not a new idea. Already in the 1840’s and 1850’s, the early Victorians believed that charity and Christian compassion could birth such a type of society. To some effect, the 20th century Labour movement realized that in bits, though if we take a global outlook, what in reality happened was that the exploitation of the human body in debt slavery, child labour and sweatshops transferred towards the developing world (which during the 19th century merely had been the place where resources and raw materials were extracted).

From a purely ecological perspective, the ideology underpinning the Great Reset is a techno-optimistic type of green market-based social liberalism. It is an ideology that deals a great deal with hope and sentimentality as its basis, and with the perceived unity of interests between the ruling elite and the people – or rather those parts of the people who are platformed by the ruling elites for five second snippets of Sandfordian statements like “it is important that we all come together for the greater good” and “humanity has never been at such a crossroad as today”. Within the EOS, we call that type of ideology “Cornucopianism”.

The vision offered is one of a capitalism without inner contradictions, where the important actors are the leaders of major supranational institutions, powerful governments, multi-national corporations and think tanks such as the WEF. Human rights activists, indigenous leaders and other types of grass-root representatives are sometimes invited to hold speeches for the leaders of “the international community”, but are seldom parts of steering committees and workshops.

And we agree with Schwab &/co.

Humanity needs a restructuring of its socio-economic system. Currently we are living on the annual equivalent of what 1,7 Earths could renew each year, we are rapidly destroying the oceans, the soils, the fresh-water reservoirs and the bio-diversity of key life-supporting biomes.

It is highly unlikely that we can achieve a kind of sustainability within anything resembling the current system without new wonder technologies which currently do not exist (proponents of the current system mean that greed is the only driver for innovation which “will” make these technologies a reality).

Cornucopians generally present a binary choice between “Old Capitalism” and “Stakeholder Capitalism”, and claim that the only alternative to the latter is a collapse of the world.

We (as in the EOS) claim that there are more alternatives, and that one must dare think outside the box.

One of the tenets which we need to question is the term “we”. Is “humanity” responsible for the degradation of the planet? Is humanity responsible for the destruction of the ecosystems? Is humanity responsible for the advent of an ecological collapse by 2075?

Or is the culprit a socio-economic system based on a model of growth which automatically transfers 80% of any revenue to the 20% at the top of the income ladder, and where the growth in profits correspond with the growth of resource usage?

This is a system which is both emergent, as in being a consequence of the laws of supply and demand of the market, and designed, in terms of being directed, streamlined and affected by sophisticated institutions and corporations which – when put into place – would want to protect their own continued existence.

And is not the WEF to a large degree consisting of the very same people who are a part of this super-structure which has helped to move the Earth this close towards a sixth mass extinction event?

When we look at the convergence of crises which we already are suffering from, and which will be exacerbated in the future due to the type of socio-economic system that has been imposed on humanity, those who are suffering the most and who will suffer the most are the majority of the Earth’s population, consisting of farmers and workers in the developing world.

The Great Reset may be several things, on a spectrum.

In its most benign but inefficient form, it is a marketing ploy and a way for the corporate and financial elites of the planet to legitimize their continued dominance for themselves internally, by showing how much they care for the planet by producing flashy films and summits in an Alps country famous for clocks, cheese, tax evasion, money-laundering and summer holiday homes for ultra-wealthy dictators. In that regard it would be dishonest, but nothing spectacular – already l’ancien regime of France sponsored portraits of Marie-Antoinette distributing bread to the starving peasant children of France.

In its most malign form, the Great Reset might be a stakeholder capitalism in the sense that it would transform capitalism into an integrated system of corporate, financial, institutional and social leadership, where the elites in a maternalistic fashion would take a keen interest in the life of ordinary people, to the extent that their physical health, their diets, their daily routines and interests, and their values and opinions should be an issue not for the individual and not for their local communities, but for “the Davos boys”.

The WEF may mean well.

The problem is that any real solution to the current crisis would not be a “reset”, but the establishment of an entirely new system – one which would need to do away with the kind of wealth and inequality that makes possible such institutions as the WEF.

Another problem is also that a stakeholder capitalism may become a more authoritarian, dystopian, corrupt and elitist society than what we have today, and therefore far more volatile. The same neoliberal elites which brought us the Great Recession and the rise of right-wing populism are now supposed to lead the revolution towards a utopia based on green energy, progressive politics and a responsible stewardship of the planet, under the guise of a new, “green liberalism”.

This is and remains the real conundrum.

 Introduction

The emergence of a global pandemic – in this case manifested as an extremely contagious lung virus, a mutation of SARS – was but a matter of time. Since humanity started to utilize other creatures in agriculture and husbandry, viral mutation rates have seen numerous plagues emerge from the gens animalia to make the leap over to human hosts, from an animal to another. While the excess deaths caused by the sudden overstretch of hospital capacity throughout the world has been tragic, especially as said deaths were preventable, we still should consider ourselves lucky.

The pandemics of the pre-industrial era often wiped out 10-30% of entire populations. The Black Death, the hitherto most lethal pandemic, may have killed half the European population and left an entire civilization devastated. The Coronavirus Pandemic may have been less lethal if the governments and corporations of the world had been more prepared, already from the start in December 2019.

What now are at stake are the healthcare systems, and the ability to even give those seriously infected care. Many states have chosen to install quarantine regimes which has been damaging both to the service economy and to the very complex and established trade networks which have evolved since the end of the Second World War.

Pandemics will continue to emerge as long as we intend to have large-scale animal husbandry – though they most likely would still be relatively rare occurrences. As it previously has been stated, compared with the Spanish Flu and the Black Death the Covid 19 pandemic has been relatively mild, though every human who dies is a tragedy – especially as their deaths would most likely have been preventable with the proper care.

What we however could do is to design our economic system in such a manner that it won’t collapse every time a new unknown disease rears its ugly head.

TL;DR Summary

• The two dominant theories on inter-regional economic exchange for the last five hundred years have been mercantilism and free trade.
• Mercantilism stresses that a country should export as much as possible and import as little as possible.
• Free trade states that there should be as few trade barriers as possible and that each country should ideally only focus on producing and exporting the good which they are “least worst at producing” (David Ricardo).
• Both these approaches are deeply flawed, and that for other reasons than primarily epidemiological.
• The idea that Coronavirus will create a more sustainable world is flawed if we look at social sustainability.
• We argue there is a connection between democratic sovereignty and the ability of a polity to sustain its own basic needs.

The arguments for Free Trade

Most of our current trade theories emanate from Europe and from the European imperialist experience (proto-global trade existed before, in the incarnation of the Silk Road). With the Trans-Atlantic trade came spices, gold, silver and slaves which could be shuffled around the trade networks. At the same time as the maritime powers developed colonial empires, Europe as a whole was in a process of emergent statehood – where unified and permanent bureaucratic-administrative bodies grew from what previously had been a collection of feudal fiefdoms.

It was also a period with prevalent and expensive warfare, necessitating the acquisition of gold and silver. Thus, the predominant theory of trade, which also was the first unified theory of trade in a European context, was Mercantilism, the idea that a country should export as much as possible and import as little as possible except for gold and silver. In the context of 17^th century European statehood, the state was pre-dominantly seen as a machine to help support a standing army which could expand the state’s territory.

Within mainstream Economics today, Mercantilism is often used as an example of an irrational, pre-modern theory of trade. Irrational both for the individual actors and for the system at large – because if everyone would want to maximize exports but minimize imports soon there will be no one to export to, and everyone would be poorer for this. Yet, if the goal is to acquire enough gold to both buy mercenaries and pay for the arming and feeding of your standing army, if you have a country that is mineral-poor, then Mercantilism is probably the way to go on a continent which is embroiled in a Thirty Years’ War and where the mercenaries expect to get paid in gold.

Having written that, Free Trade has for the last two centuries been the predominant theory of trade in the world. It is a theory of trade which emphasises that the goal of trade should be to maximize the wealth of a country engaging in it, and that the best way to achieve the outcome of wealth maximization should be free trade. With this would mean either two things – that there are as few laws or regulations as possible pertaining the import and export of goods over borders, or that laws and regulations are harmonized as to achieve the same aim.

This article is not going to take a stand on whether or not Free Trade always is to prefer before Protectionism. Some countries with infant industries have managed to take the leap from underdeveloped countries to industrial powerhouses because of protectionist measures which have protected infant industries. The United States, Germany, Japan and South Korea are but four examples. Yet, there is one undisputable mathematical formula which holds an argument for Free Trade, namely the Ricardian Theory of Comparative Advantages, which show that if each of two countries involved in trading focus on the good which they are least bad on producing in terms of efficiency and cost. Thus, they can shift their production toward the potential profitability maximization and thus incur economic growth.

One of the predominant arguments for Free Trade has been the argument that unrestricted trade makes countries co-dependent on one another and thus inhibits them from waging war upon one another. This argument was put to the test in 1914 and largely failed, though since 1945 at large an augmented version of that argument has held sway, namely that free trade guaranteed by a hegemon (America) or by treaties which disconnect vital resources from the state’s ability to use them for strategic purposes.

Thus the arguments for Free Trade is two-fold, namely that it creates economic growth and that it facilitates peaceful relations between countries.

The arguments against Free Trade

There are two kinds of arguments against Free Trade, the first one being the protectionist argument that Free Trade would threaten certain sectors of society, for example farmers, miners, industries or certain types of companies which cannot compete against the wages or efficiency of foreign competitors. This argument is treated with contempt by most economists, which sees this as sacrificing the well-being of the entire economy for special interests groups and driving up consumer prices, which is true under a market economy.

The other argument runs against how Free Trade was implemented visavi Developing Countries under the Washington Consensus model, where participating countries were obliged to privatize industries and utilities such as water, electricity and education. This was critiqued by the Alt-globalization movement because these policies were often demanded as conditions for the easement of debt by the IMF and the World Bank (institutions controlled by Western governments), thus bearing unfortunate similarities to blackmail or unethical employment practices built on power disparities. Some of the countries implementing these policies grew in terms of their GDP, others stagnated and others experienced crises. Yet, the common profile of countries like these were that they had large segments of their population living in poverty, and that making resources such as water less accessible helped to cement the steepness of the segments between the income levels, thus keeping the poor poor, though it is debatable whether that was the original intention.

If we also look at industrialization historically, we can see that even the wealthy countries did not initiate industrialization at the same pace. “Late-starters” include all countries apart from Britain and France, and we can see that some countries managed to industrialize under Free Trade regimes, such as Sweden, but that it has been far more common that countries have industrialized using varying means of protections, from South Korea and Japan, to Germany and the United States (protectionism used to be so commonly utilized in the United States that it often was referred to as “the American system” contra the “British system” in the early 20^th century). It should also be noted that while the United Kingdom employed Free Trade ideals in their bilateral trade with other countries, that they also until the 1940’s restricted access to British colonies.

Since the 1990’s, arguably, there has been a push for an increased amount of deregulation and harmonization between economies. Examples include the transition from GATT to WTO, the introduction of the Maastricht Treaty, the NAFTA, the TTIP and TPP Free Trade treaties and the discontinued MAI treaty. This policy direction could be said to be what could be  called “globalism”, which originally was coined as a neutral or positive description but in 2020 it is having negative connotations on both sides of the debate, where one side refers to it as a nefarious plot, and the other side refers to it as an anti-semitic conspiracy theory.

The on-going pandemic has showcased the characteristics not of Free Trade, but how the Free Trade Ideology has affected different countries. This is easy to see as different governments and countries during the last 30 years have been more or less utilitarian or ideological in their implementation of Free Trade agreements, and some countries have even voluntarily moved further and made cutbacks on their stockpiles of vital goods such as food, medicine, munitions and equipment such as helicopters and vehicles intended for emergency management. Or oxygen inhalators and face masks. One example is Sweden…

Stockpiles are not trendy

The Cold War was over, and so was industrial society. Instead, we had entered into an entirely new era… one where the national stockpile of not only military equipment but also disaster relief were not essential. Instead, we would focus on a flexible system adapted for aid in distant countries and for advocacy through multilateral forums. This was very much the Zeitgeist of the 1990’s and the 2000’s, and it carried into the 2010’s. At the same point as the apothecaries were privatized (Sweden had a government monopoly on selling prescripted drugs), the government of that era – in its infinite wisdom – decided to trim the stockpile of certain medical equipment, among them face masks and certain medicines. In the case of a medical emergency, it was thought, Sweden would simply buy the things it needed on the world market or ask other countries within the EU for help.

Fast forward ten years and the entire world is engulfed in the Covid-19 Pandemic, and all countries experience a need for hospital beds, medicines, oxygen inhalators and face masks. This would cause problems for countries heavily reliant on the market forces to sort out a global crisis. This crisis is not unique for Sweden – other countries heavily reliant on Free Trade, such as the United States, experience the same kind of hardships and have initial difficulties in assembling stockpiles which they until then have been happy to import from other places, for example China.

Hardly surprising, a lot of the anti-capitalist milieu has piled upon the Neoliberal order, that the failure for the markets to make up for the absence of stockpiles without government intervention is disqualifying the entire post-1991 discourse. That and the subsequent collapse of the service economy brought forth by the pandemic. Much of the economy in the developed world consist of services which – though they may have had a positive impact on local communities and employment, are essentially non-essential for the well-being of the community. Spas, coffee shops, smaller stores and restaurants are employing a significant portion of the young urban population. Most of these companies are hardly making any profits, and are extremely dependent upon their monthly returns. A shock such as the current pandemic will kill a large amount of these companies, turning their employees unemployed, which will decrease their ability to consume and thus lead to a further decline of profits for all companies, turning what initially was a shock in consumer demand into a new great depression, ninety years after the last one.

This has led to triumphant expressions that this current crisis has proven that Neoliberalism is dead, and that we will see a new post-pandemic world. In the 2007-2009 recession, identical claims were made, and they were proven to be equally flawed. So, let us see how the Post-Covid world would probably look like…

Welcome to Planet Corona

Covid-19 will not bring forth a sustainable transition in itself. Any such transition will mean a break from the trajectory which was well underway before Covid-19, and as we will see the virus will in fact accelerate our journey through this trajectory. The world was already moving towards creative destruction of smaller and middle-sized companies. E-trading and new net-based forms of delivery were putting traditional family-owned businesses and shops under severe strain, and many firms were already closing down prior to the crisis in most developed countries.

What Covid-19 has done has merely been an acceleration of this trend, and a deepening of it. Companies dependent upon full-time employees and physical places cannot hope to compete with companies that lack physical space to occupy and pay rent for, and employees which they need to cater to. The small to medium-sized companies likely to succeed under this crisis would be companies either heavily reliant on robots or on part-time employees with flexible contracts. This will of course spur the already growing gig economy which already is existent. It will not by itself cause any migration away from the cities and towards the countryside. There could possibly be a lowering of prices of urban properties because of lowered demand, a sort of deflation of the housing bubbles – but that will not increase the demand for workers in cities.

Some may claim that the aid packages offered to companies, and the limited nationalizations which a few governments have engaged in may represent a new paradigm shift. Similar claims were made about the stimulus packages of the Great Recession, yet those gave way to a way of austerity which would hit the social benefit structures of many developed economies. In short, in order to prevent the powerful structures which underpin our financial and economic new world order to collapse under the weight of their own fundamental unsustainability, nominally democratically elected governments decided to transfer wealth previously directed at the poorest members of society to the wealthiest. The same people who were in power in 2010 are still fundamentally in power today, they are funnelled through the same educational systems and think tanks, taught in the same ideology and thus their ideological and mental equipment is based on a philosophy increasingly at odds with reality. Thus, in most countries, apart from perhaps outliers like New Zealand, we are going to see an increased amount of austerity, which will have an added effect of increasing the unemployment in the public sector.

This crisis will last – at least, until around 2024 (and that if we do not experience any other shocks which may prolong it, such as a war in the Middle East or a wave of natural disasters). Eventually, employment numbers will start to rise again, but not to the same levels as around 2019. The new jobs created will also comprise a larger share of part-time contracts, independent contracts, micro-jobs and substitution labour. We could very well hit a new baseline unemployment of around 10%. The global debt will continue to balloon, and new shocks will continue to hit us.

And then, there is automation.

What we are heading towards now if everything is moving ahead in the current trajectory, notwithstanding the climate crisis and the massive over-usage of resources, is a society of extreme inequality, where large segments have fallen into a barter economy while the idea of public education and healthcare will become successively less attractive for an elite dependent on a shrinking class of managers to administrate the IOT-heavy, crypto-funded gated communities within which they thrive, communities which ever-more will resemble medieval fortresses of old.

Does this mean there is no hope?

Rise, we will

What stands clear with the pandemic of 2020, is that the current world economy is very sensitive in the face of shocks, and we can expect the number of shocks to increase, for ecological, social and cumulative reasons. Therefore, it is essential that we self-organize and build up holonic and holarchic communities with the capability to show resiliency in the face of crisis.

The time is here and now, to build parallel institutions and parallel governance, to build online educational facilities to reach the early 21^st century Zoomer generation. We need to form communities with the ability to fulfil their own needs of:

• Food
• Energy
• Reserve parts
• Medical equipment
• Transport infrastructure

A large part of the future which we would want to help bring about for humanity would be about self-management. This does not mean autarchy or an end to long-distance trading, or that we want to isolate from the wider society. What we need to do is to reach out to, organize and provide education for the classes of people who are seen as increasingly superfluous by our automated world economy – the unemployed and underemployed youth. By giving them access to networks and an ability to create their own economy, we can and we will grow the future technate within this decaying late capitalist civilization.

But this will not come by itself. We all – that includes you – will have to organize, which means join together to increase your resiliency, your ability to survive communally and live in dignity when the superstructure contracts and no longer is capable of providing you the type of life your parents and grandparents once had.