Another World Economic Forum (WEF) event is in full swing high in Swiss ski country at Davos. Or is it in full downhill decline? It all depends on which version of this year’s annual meeting of the world’s mighty power thinkers one accepts as true. The overriding official theme is the struggle to overcome a unique avalanche of global crises. In the words of Klaus Schwab, founder and current head of the organization, the world faces “unprecedented multiple crises” that are “converging and conflating and creating an extremely volatile and uneven future.”

To set the scene for readers who may not be up on all the crises the great Davosian brainiacs are attempting to resolve this week, here’s an outline from the WEF’s official Global Risks Report:

“As 2023 begins, the world is facing a set of risks that feel both wholly new and eerily familiar. We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks — inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare — which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced. These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world. Together, these are converging to shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come.”

My apologies for subjecting readers to that long quotation. But there’s more. “While ongoing shocks unfold, the world stands at a crossroads. As we enter a low-growth, low-investment and low-co-operation era, the actions that we take today will dictate our future risk landscape. We must ensure that addressing current crises does not detract from the longer-term view. Recent and current events such as COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis are steadily eroding economic, educational and health-related gains in a widening proportion of the population, with a growing divergence between advanced and developing countries. This in turn is interacting with a multiplicity of environmental and geopolitical risks — climate change, ecosystem collapse, multi-domain conflicts — to further threaten the security and stability of societies around the world.”

The WEF then invented a new concept. “The collective vocabularies stored in the world’s great dictionaries didn’t appear to hold a single word to sum up all this strife. So here’s a new one: Polycrisis.”

But fear not the polycrisis, because the WEF research crew produced an uplifting solution in the final words of the report. “There must be a better balance between national preparedness and global co-operation. We need to act together, to shape a pathway out of cascading crises and build collective preparedness to the next global shock, whatever form it might take. Leaders must embrace complexity and act on a balanced vision to create a stronger, prosperous shared future.”

I recently conducted a deep analysis of this call for action and concluded the WEF believes the polycrisis can be resolved by galvanizing world power elites to adopt a collective balanced vision of shared preparedness on a pathway to a prosperous future.

This collective preparedness pathway is a little on the rocky side of economic theory. As outlined in detail over the years by Klaus Schwab, the long-term plan is to transform the global economy via a new world order controlled by a coalition of state and corporate power, via a Great Reset of global economic thinking and the  adoption of new governance models such as stakeholder capitalism, Sustainable Development and ESG — accurately described by Bruce Pardy in FP Comment earlier this week as capitalism-killing corporate socialism.

At a media briefing last week, Schwab words that in view of the polycrisis, the need for public-private co-operation “becomes even more essential today with the rising role of the state, on one hand, and the accelerating importance of business-driven innovation and technology, on the other hand.”

For complex reasons, the socialist left, long vigorously opposed to the rise of corporatist power within government, now seems enthusiastically aligned behind the WEF model. In 2020, the WEF embraced neo-Marxist Thomas Piketty’s anti-capitalism views. A WEF paper said Piketty shows that the dominant free-market ideas of the past are “based on fundamentally wrong assumptions and that dramatic transformation is possible with a change of mindset.”

Among the mindset changers is United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, a star performer at the WEF on Wednesday. Guterres, former head of the Socialist International, rang the polycrisis alarm with his usual rhetorical hysteria. “We are looking into the eye of a Category 5 hurricane,” he said. The multiple challenges — the polycrises — are “piling up like cars in a chain reaction crash.”

Like Schwab, Guterres is pushing the WEF socialist/corporatist solution. Business models and practices must be reworked to meet collective goals and global banking reformed, accompanied by a “massive engagement of the private sector” in reforms that will require trillions of dollars.

The polycrisis is upon us, say the WEF corporate socialists, so let us now seize the day.

• Email: tcorcoran@postmedia.com | Twitter: terencecorcoran