The 2025 iteration of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland illustrates how far the neoliberal love-in has fallen when it comes to the calendars of the powerful.
The theme of this week’s elite gathering is “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age,” with the agenda focused on reimagining growth, industries in the intelligent age, investing in people, safeguarding the planet, and rebuilding trust. Meanwhile, the world that the WEF helped create continues to go up in flames.
Ten years ago there were speeches by the then-leaders of Brazil, China and India. They’re absent this year. Russia has not been welcome for some years now. UK PM Keir Starmer won’t be there. Emmanuel Macron won’t be there. In fact, the only G7 leader attending will be the soon-to-be ex-German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
A grab bag of leaders from smaller countries — Spain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands — will represent Europe, along with the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, plus the leaders of the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, World Health Organization and World Trade Organization.
Chinese Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang will represent China, not, as previously reported, Premier Li Qiang. Argentina’s Javier Milei and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be there. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who would turn up to a kid’s birthday party if it would help him fight Putin’s invasion, will also be there.
For decades, the WEF was an important tool in legitimising the neoliberal consensus, both via its annual Davos gathering of global elites — including an increasing presence of pop cultural figures like the egregious Bono — and via publications like its Global Competitiveness Index — happily recirculated by gullible media outlets — which championed countries that looked after large corporations and immiserated workers.
Every year, leaders gathered in the luxury resort town as neoliberalism wreaked havoc across economies via the destruction of communities, the increasing precarity of workers, the growing power of large corporations freed from accountability or taxation, a climate catastrophe unchecked by governments unwilling to offend corporate or media interests, and the increasing resentment of voters towards an economic system that had long stopped delivering for them and seemed only to deliver for investors, company executives and the super-rich.
The result was Brexit, then Trump, then the rise and rise of right-wing populists across Europe, South America and India and, now, the return of Trump again, riding on the back of voter rage at inflation perpetuated, if not created, by global corporations.
Davos has bravely carried on through all of this. As always, it presents a foul-tasting mix of management-speak pabulum and sanctimony in purporting to be addressing actual global problems — or as one blurb puts it, “constructive, forward-looking dialogues to identify impact-oriented solutions that will contribute to a better world, focused on sustainable inclusive growth”.
The author of that drivel? McKinsey & Company, a “strategic partner” of the WEF and the single most evil consulting firm on the planet (a title for which there is stiff competition). No mention in the WEF pabulum, curiously, of McKinsey’s role in the corruption free-for-all that was Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, or its ongoing responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans via the opioid crisis that McKinsey made a motza from.
McKinsey’s role is the perfect symbol of a repugnant, exploitive economic system that puts profits far ahead of the public interest or even the lives of ordinary citizens. But that, after all, is what the WEF is all about.
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