Lenin summed up this dynamic nicely in The State and Revolution. A few choice quotes:
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich–that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”–supposedly petty–details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,–we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life.
We cannot do without officials under capitalism, under the rule of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is oppressed, the working people are enslaved by capitalism. Under capitalism, democracy is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery, and the poverty and misery of the people. This and this alone is the reason why the functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted – or rather tend to be corrupted—by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.
Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state… ceases to exist”, and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom”. Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.
Where has Schwab ever stated this? Nowhere, this claim originates from one blog post that was speculating about the future, it was never intended to be a part of WEF’s agenda. Conspiracy nuts have then started to regurgitate that claim and blog post around in their own echo chambers.
The WEF does not have a ‘stated goal’ to remove everyone’s private property by 2030. As addressed in previous Reuters fact checks, these claims likely originated from a WEF social media video from 2016 that stated eight predictions about the world in 2030, including: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.”
Danish politician Ida Auken, who wrote the prediction in question (here), said it was not a “utopia or dream of the future” but “a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse.”
In a written update, she clarified that the piece aimed to “start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.”
And why is Bill Gates there? He has been in some previous G20 Summits like in 2011 when he was invited by Nicolas Sarkozy – but not in this one. Klaus Schwab was at B20 summit that was held concurrently with G20 in Bali.
Although several reports prior to the summit claimed that Gates was planning to attend the event, he was in fact in Kenya, meeting with leaders and officials to discuss developments in health care, agriculture, and information technology.
Gates was interviewed by Kenyan press at the time the G20 summit was taking place and sent a number of tweets while in Nairobi showing him with the country’s leaders.
While neither Bill Gates nor his former wife Melinda attended, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was among three organizations that have committed alongside G20 nations to the launch of an international “pandemic fund.”
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), did go to Bali, but he was attending B20, a concurrent event that is part of the G20 summit that invites global business leaders for a series of keynote addresses and speeches.
Schwab was among a list of speakers, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who delivered talks at B20.
This nuance, however, was missing from the posts questioning why “non-politicians” were attending the summit in Bali.
Stop getting your news from Twitter of all places and spreading false claims made by whackos. Asking that question doesn’t make anyone a conspiracy theorist, if the basic facts are right in first place.
You voted for Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos by buying and using his products for decades. Even if you use a Mac, or Linux, or BSD, most of the world’s businesses run Windows, and the vast majority use Azure or AWS, and nearly everyone in a First World country shops on Amazon.
I suspect Gates is at G20 not directly because of Microsoft, but because he’s a self-styled philathropist, using his ill-gotten gains to buy himself some moral redemption at the end of his life. He’s probably there as the face of Charities.
Focusing on individual solutions while ignoring systemic problems is a liberal fallacy. People act in a way that makes sense for them to act given the systemic pressures they’re exposed to. Most people living in a capitalist society will use Windows and buy from Amazon because that’s what the norm is, and it’s what’s most convenient. This is thermodynamics at work, people follow the path of least resistance because it takes less effort to do so.
Real change can only be achieved when the entire liberal/capitalist system is overthrown and replaced by a system that encourages different behaviors.
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Lenin summed up this dynamic nicely in The State and Revolution. A few choice quotes:
It’s a quite disgusting circus, it’s hunger games age. With meta VR headsets
Where has Schwab ever stated this? Nowhere, this claim originates from one blog post that was speculating about the future, it was never intended to be a part of WEF’s agenda. Conspiracy nuts have then started to regurgitate that claim and blog post around in their own echo chambers.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wef-idUSKBN2AP2T0
And why is Bill Gates there? He has been in some previous G20 Summits like in 2011 when he was invited by Nicolas Sarkozy – but not in this one. Klaus Schwab was at B20 summit that was held concurrently with G20 in Bali.
https://www.newsweek.com/were-bill-gates-world-economic-forum-klaus-schwab-g20-this-year-1760386
Stop getting your news from Twitter of all places and spreading false claims made by whackos. Asking that question doesn’t make anyone a conspiracy theorist, if the basic facts are right in first place.
You voted for Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos by buying and using his products for decades. Even if you use a Mac, or Linux, or BSD, most of the world’s businesses run Windows, and the vast majority use Azure or AWS, and nearly everyone in a First World country shops on Amazon.
I suspect Gates is at G20 not directly because of Microsoft, but because he’s a self-styled philathropist, using his ill-gotten gains to buy himself some moral redemption at the end of his life. He’s probably there as the face of Charities.
Focusing on individual solutions while ignoring systemic problems is a liberal fallacy. People act in a way that makes sense for them to act given the systemic pressures they’re exposed to. Most people living in a capitalist society will use Windows and buy from Amazon because that’s what the norm is, and it’s what’s most convenient. This is thermodynamics at work, people follow the path of least resistance because it takes less effort to do so.
Real change can only be achieved when the entire liberal/capitalist system is overthrown and replaced by a system that encourages different behaviors.