THE World Economic Forum is meeting in Davos this week. The gathering of many of the wealthiest corporate elites and state leaders compels consideration of directions global capitalist chaos may take us in 2023. What lessons did we learn from the devaluation of so many economic assets — including the lead plutocrats’ own wealth — in 2022, amidst so much geopolitical, environmental and socio-economic suffering?

In part reflected in the Forum’s new Global Risk Report 2023, there is a new sense of nervousness among than 2,700 attendees, who this year — the 53rd such meeting under Klaus Schwab’s direction — include leaders of the European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Germany, Finland, Greece, Spain, the Philippines, South Korea and South Africa, along with at least 100 billionaires (but none from Russia due to sanctions).

The forum theme, ‘Co-operation in a Fragmented World’ reflects the use of a new term: ‘We have this risk of polycrisis emerging’, Schwab’s successor Saadia Zahidi argues, ‘because so many things are happening at once.’ In a time of near-useless multilateral interventions, New York University economist Nouriel Roubini’s latest book boils these global crises down to ten MegaThreats.

Most Forum attendees are acutely aware of the economic dimensions of polycrisis. Even beyond the several trillions of dollars’ worth of destruction associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy and food market upheavals, climate calamities, durable Covid-19 or China’s abrupt end to pandemic lockdowns, there have been other tectonic shifts in how assets are valued that worry these elites, many of whom come to Davos much poorer than the prior meeting last May.

And such concerns could also guide social, labor and environmental movements — and perhaps a few leaders of progressive governments — when assessing the changing fields of capital accumulation that they struggle on, a point taken up in the next essay.

For example, 2022’s sovereign debt crises and wild stock market and currency fluctuations — mainly associated with rising interest rates applied by the US Federal Reserve and allied central banks, to combat relatively high price inflation — are important indicators. They not only already inform the world’s renewed economic justice (‘cost-of-living’) movements, but also reflect a deeper unravelling that by nearly all accounts will in coming months cause terrible social pain and prevent desperately-needed environmental healing.

We can start by recalling how extreme uneven development processes have been caused by both structural economic contradictions and counter-productive state policies over the last 50 years, since the 1973 catalysts of power shifts within the global political economy:

— long-term (50-year) tendencies to the ‘overaccumulation of capital’ — ie, excess capacities emerging in the world economy’s productive sectors, inventories, financial assets and labor markets — that have never been properly resolved, but instead displaced, such as via East Asia’s long boom;

— a resulting stagnation in Western capitalist output, aside from the extractive industries which were occasionally dynamic — from 2005–014 and 2020–22 — as ‘commodity super-cycle’ price hikes enticed investors and rewarded the extractive circuits of capital;

— the closures of many labor-intensive industries that once boasted mega-factories, and widespread replacement of workers with machines;

— the ascendant class power of not only domestic and international financial capital, but also in many economies, export-oriented and mercantile capital; and

— the dominance of ‘Washington consensus’ ideology, promoting neoliberal deregulation, privatisation and for-profit provision of not only goods and services but also infrastructure (and hence the systematic underinvestment in areas of the word not deemed sufficiently lucrative).

Following the first stage of global overaccumulation crisis in the 1970s, mainly taking the form of ‘stagflation’ (stagnation combined with inflation), the 1980s were for the Third World a lost decade as a result of debt overhangs. From the late 1980s, periodic outbreaks of financial bubbles — and partial bursts — became obvious, leading the US Federal Reserve to a bail-out policy for institutions deemed “too big to fail.” As financial laxity continued through the mid/late-1990s emerging markets crises, Long Term Capital Management’s failure, the dot.com crash, so too did inequality soar.

Official western central bank wisdom began to include ‘Quantitative Easing’ — running the currency printing press at full speed — on top of bail outs and ultra-low interest rates from late 2008, as investment banking, insurance and then wider economic meltdowns moved from the US across the world. The process was repeated from March 2020 until November 2021, and with the financialisation of economies at record high levels, poverty and inequality worsened alongside Covid-19 suffering, as at least 15 million people died (with another million Chinese anticipated to perish in early 2023 as tight lockdowns were eased).

This was all satisfactory to those at the very top of the pyramid of wealth, until 2022. Earlier, from March 2020 until November 2021, the wealth of the world’s ten richest men soared from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion.

At that stage, the rich list was led by a Pretoria-born, Johannesburg-raised tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, whose main firms were Tesla and SpaceX. By late 2021, his wealth peaked at nearly $300 billion, having exploded by more than 1000 per cent during Covid-19. Amazon shopping founder Jeff Bezos claimed just over $200 billion in assets, and in the 4th-8th positions were tech and Big Data tycoons Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Ballmer, all between $104-138 billion.

The plutocrats’ roller-coaster

BUT matters changed radically in 2022, as most of the world’s dozen wealthiest portfolios collapsed by year’s end.

Due to factors largely beyond the control of even these plutocrats, during 2022 they suffered unprecedented wealth shrinkage, with the top 500 individuals and families down $1.4 trillion. Musk halved to $146 billion after gambling $44 billion on buying his social-media hobby, Twitter. Tesla’s share value crashed by 65 per cent in 2022 given renewed investor mistrust in his time management, maturity and common sense, with early 2023 providing no end in sight to the losses. Bezos’ net worth also collapsed, to $107 billion, mainly due to Amazon losing half its value (and the aftermath of a wealth-debilitating divorce).

This left French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault as the world’s richest man, but nearly all the other ultra billionaires were from the US, with the exception of two Indians — Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani — and Mexican telecommunications privatiser Carlos Slim. The overall Forbes’ 2022 rich list recorded geographically-specific declines among 2,668 billionaires: ‘The most dramatic drops have occurred in Russia, where there are 34 fewer billionaires than last year’ (oligarchs hit hard by financial sanctions included Vladimir Potanin, Leonid Mikhelson, Vladimir Lisin, Alisher Usmanov, Alexey Mordashov, Roman Abramovich, Gennady Timchenko, Suleiman Kerimov, Victor Rashnikov, Alexei Mordashov and others).

Meanwhile in China, Beijing’s strict regulation of Big Tech shrunk the number of Chinese billionaires from 694 to 607 (second to the US with 735), including those in Hong Kong and Macau. The two most famous, ‘Pony’ Ma Huateng of Tencent and Jack Ma of Alibaba, fell to less than $40 billion in assets each.

William Robinson writes in his new book, Can Global Capitalism Endure?, that this group represents leadership of a Transnational Capitalist Class forged from global ‘integration of the leading sectors among national capitalist classes.’ But the durability — and capacity to act in unison — of ‘the owners and managers of the giant transnational corporations and financial conglomerates that now drive the global economy’ certainly came into question in 2022.

Transnational capitalists’ strategic void

WHILE rhetorically there appears to be such a grouping, with names and ideas either made public or left discrete (through the likes of the World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group and other elite networks), it is in turning words into action that the coherence of a class can be identified. And the class power of transnational capitalism is in question, given its lead institutions’ recent failures, especially in multilateral inter-state fora: notably the Bretton Woods Institutions and World Trade Organisation, or even the most useful venue Big Oil enjoys against climate regulation of fossil fuels — the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty, which provides an Investor-State Dispute Resolution mechanism favoring capital and preventing decisive emissions-reductions policies.

To be sure, the failure of multilateralism in recent decades does indeed reflect transnational corporate libertarian hostility to the kinds of international solutions required for the current round of global crises. As Robinson puts it, these elites and their hired politicians still ‘lack functional political structures to resolve the crisis, stabilise a new global power bloc, and reconstruct capitalist hegemony, given the disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority.’

Without a coherent approach to capital accumulation, the lead financial managers appeared to become ever more frivolous, for ‘As opportunities have dried up for speculative investment in one sector the Transnational Capitalist Class simply turned to another sector to unload its surplus’, Robinson observed. Indeed in 2022, the boom in monetised Big Data may have ebbed (at least temporarily, as did a Dot.Com bubble burst in 2000-01), especially among the founders of the 2010s’ explosive FANG shares (Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google) and China’s two biggest companies (Tencent and Alibaba).

Nevertheless, massive share value appreciation during 2022 did occur in other sectors. The world’s largest corporate finance market — the New York Stock Exchange — witnessed soaring valuations of ‘fictitious capital’ (what Karl Marx termed the paper representations of assets, such as stock market shares) in three sectors: Big Oil, the Military-Industrial Complex and Big Pharma. This good fortune was a result of the energy crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and provision of 13 billion Covid-19 vaccinations in 2021-22, respectively.

The US firms Exxon and Chevron led the NYSE in 2022 gains, at 80 and 53 per cent share price increases respectively, while the next four largest — Norway’s Equinor, London-based Shell and BP and Paris-based Total — all witnessed share value increases from 28 to 40 per cent in 2022. From Big Pharma, the two main winners were Merck and Eli Lilly at 45 and 32 percent, respectively, following dramatic 2020–21 price increases once Covid vaccine and treatment profits were boosted by the Trump regime’s unprecedented “Operation Warp Speed” subsidies.

Fictitious capital’s vanishing act

BUT these were the exceptions, because with the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates from late 2021, economic growth slowed and debt stresses emerged. With interest-earning assets now a better investment bet, the Wiltshire Index of all US listed shares dropped 21 per cent during 2022, and among the top 500 firms (the S&P500) there were only 132 gainers and the rest losers.

Aside from Tesla, the next major firm to suffer a formidable NYSE crash was Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook), down 64 percent, followed by three other major West Coast IT companies: Advanced Micro Devices (55 percent), Bezos’ Amazon (50 percent) and Nvidia Semiconductors (also 50 percent). The values of the largest content providers — Netflix and Disney — collapsed by 51 and 44 percent, respectively. The NYSE’s two biggest shares, Apple and Microsoft, fell 27 and 29 per cent respectively. The two biggest banking shares — Bank of America and JP Morgan — also lost 26 and 15 per cent of their valuation, respectively.

In Asia, the single most valuable firm in recent years was Tencent, listed in Hong Kong with a peak early-2021 market capitalisation of $916 billion. But by October 2022, at the point Xi was re-elected at the Communist Party’s conference (causing many international investors to dump Chinese shares given his hostility to private-sector Big Tech), Tencent’s market value was down to $251 billion, a 74 per cent collapse (though it soon doubled in value). The second most valuable Asian firm, Alibaba (dual-listed in Hong Kong and New York), peaked in late 2020 at $868 billion but after being investigated for violations of competition and consumer legislation, fell 81 per cent to a low of $168 billion two years later.

So much for the blind faith that so many investors harbored, that Blue Chip shares would best ride out the storm of devaluation. The top 100 firms on the world markets lost $7.2 trillion in share values in 2022. The losses were greatest in the strongest bastion of world capitalism, the US, host to 16 of the top 20 firms (the non-US corporations were second-place former Saudi oil parastatal Aramco, 11th-largest Tencent, 14th-placed Taiwanese semiconductor producer TSMC; and Arnault’s 15th-ranked Louis Vitton, or LVMH).

Geographically-uneven overvaluations

THE devaluations were predictable, given stock market overvaluation fueled by loose monetary policies, but geographically uneven. In late 2020, near the peak moment for speculators, the ‘Buffett Indicator’ — ie, market capitalisation (the total worth of listed firms) divided by gross domestic product — helps assess where features of national markets provide signals of where financial capital flowed or instead became stuck, typically due to exchange controls. There are several anomalies. In first through third places in the Buffett Indicator, and indeed the fastest-rising indexes during the late 2010s, were Hong Kong (with a 1777 Buffett Indicator in December 2020), Iran (508) and Saudi Arabia (345).

All three had unique features. First, the Hong Kong Hang Seng index hosted both Tencent and Alibaba — Asia’s two largest companies until 2022 — and hence peaked in early 2018, prior to the first round of Beijing’s clampdowns on Big Data. The index then crashed 57 per cent to its recent low in October 2022. Second, the Saudi Tadawul Stock Exchange soared mainly due to the Initial Public Offering of Aramco in late 2019, rising to a peak in April 2022, after which the market fell 26 per cent through the end of 2022. Third, the Tehran Stock Market had boomed in March-August 2020 due to three factors: partial privatisation of 49 state-owned enterprises, government’s use of its sovereign wealth fund’s foreign revenues to invest in the local market, and roaring inflation that channeled many households’ spare cash into shares (so as not to lose funds in banks due to depreciation). By August 2020, the Tehran bubble reached break point, and over the subsequent nine months crashed nearly 50 per cent before a slight recovery.

The fourth-to-sixth most expensive share markets in late 2020, as defined by the Buffett Indicator using primary stock markets, were South Africa (312), Switzerland (277) and the United States (193). After dramatic 2021 increases and then 2022 crashes, these ratios were relatively unchanged. South Africa’s was most volatile since so much of the local share capitalisation depended upon Tencent, given that nearly one-third ownership in the Chinese firm was due to a lucky 2001 investors’ bet of $35 million in Pony Ma’s vision. That led his firm — the apartheid-era white-power media firm Naspers — to soar in price, encompassing nearly 30 per cent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange at peak before 2018.

In the next tier among major stock markets were better-established, less volatile markets: Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

When measuring the markets’ absolute size (not the Buffett Indicator’s relative terms), the United States reached nearly $40 trillion by late 2022, followed by China at $10 trillion, Japan and Hong Kong at around $5 trillion, and then much smaller markets in the UK, France, Canada, India and Switzerland.

Stock markets were not along. Other speculative financial assets rose and crashed much further, such as Bitcoin’s value, down from nearly $1 million each in November 2021 to $293,000 by early 2023, as total cryptocurrency valuation fell from $3 trillion to $850 billion over the same period (Bitcoin typically represented nearly 40 per cent of the market, followed by Ethereum at 18 percent). As the craze came to an end, one of the main marketplaces — FTX, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried — was unveiled in late 2022, during a humiliating high-profile bankruptcy, as a fraud-riddled Ponzi scheme. (Also noteworthy was that he had backed dozens of corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party office-holders with $40 million in 2022 campaign contributions — mainly in the primaries against progressive alternative candidates — in order to receive more rapid legislative and regulatory support for his endeavors.)

A great deal of the speculative froth entailed in these fictitious capital price dynamics — first upward and then from early 2022 downward — could be traced to central bank managers’ macro-economic powers. Thanks to Quantitative Easing, bank bailouts and low interest rates in 2009–13 and 2020–21, fictitious capital gained in price, far beyond genuine valuation of underlying asset values.

But herd instincts prevail, and control over vast flows of funds in the world’s stock markets have remained concentrated far too much in the hands of several lead investment houses: BlackRock with $9.6 trillion in asset management in late 2022; Vanguard Group, $8.1 trillion; Fidelity, $4.2 trillion; Union Bank of Switzerland, $4.4 trillion; State Street, $4.0 trillion; Morgan Stanley, $3.2 trillion; JP Morgan Chase, $2.9 trillion; Crédit Agricole, $2.9 trillion; Allianz, $2.8 trillion; Capital Group, $2.7 trillion; Goldman Sachs, $2.4 trillion and the like. The ultimate beneficiaries of absurd stock market capitalisations were mainly these and other institutional investors.

The desired demise of the dollar

STARTING in late 2021, central bankers should also be blamed for strangling the real economy with tighter-than-appropriate monetary policy. Fed chair Jerome Powell’s aim was to halt fast-rising inflation, even though it was increasingly obvious through 2022 that the primary source of price increases was not excess consumer demand and worker wage increases. (Progressives instead blamed corporate oligopolies’ pricing power.)

The inflationary surge represented a direct devaluation of money’s intrinsic worth, which in turn hurts poor people whose income typically does not have inflation adjustments. But with inflation, so too do debt obligations — repayment of both principal and interest — fall in real terms (for at least those liabilities that were not priced on a variable rate basis, i.e. rising with the market interest rate).

But even if inflation was useful (as a devaluation process) to those borrowers with fixed-rate loans, the overarching problem for the period ahead was the world’s debt load. Indeed, if Quantitative Easing is not reapplied during times of future stress so as to displace the financial crisis once again, a full-fledged domino debt-default effect could transpire.

In October 2022, the IMF’s October 2022 World Economic Outlook conceded that the burst of post-Covid optimism had run its course:

‘Global economic activity is experiencing a broad-based and sharper-than-expected slowdown, with inflation higher than seen in several decades. The cost-of-living crisis, tightening financial conditions in most regions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the lingering Covid-19 pandemic all weigh heavily on the outlook. Global growth is forecast to slow from 6.0 per cent in 2021 to 3.2 per cent in 2022 and 2.7 per cent in 2023.’

On the other hand, global capitalist managerialism had, by the time of the 2008–09 world financial meltdown, become good at postponement and other crisis-displacement tactics. Hence repayment of dollar-denominated debt by the world’s largest borrower, the US Treasury, was still readily funded by international creditors. The simple reason for such flows moving even into low-return assets like U.S. Treasury Bills, is the role that the US dollar currency has had as a safe haven, since 1944. To be sure, there was a brief late-1970s interlude when gold took over due to US inflation.

As Polish-based political economist Richard Westra remarks of that period, with the ‘dollar as global hub currency, US domestic inflationary travails were exported throughout the world. Advanced economy competitors, in particular, began flirting with ways to replace the dollar in its post WWII position.’ In spite of the capacity of the Treasury and Federal Reserve to abuse that global-scale macroeconomic power, nevertheless the dollar held firm, even with, reminds Westra, ‘dollars flooding world markets under conditions where real interest rates were below rates of dollar inflation, creating a surreal global dollar borrowing paradise, Federal Reserve Chair of the day, Paul Volcker, unilaterally raised US interest rates. Nominal rates would soon spike to around 21 percent.’

Similarly, amidst the current volatility, the dollar rose against most other currencies in 2022, just as in 2020 and 2008. Whether an alternative currency arrangement can emerge from the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa grouping, as is often hypothesised by enthusiastic supporters, remains to be seen. But given the bloc’s major differences and economic instabilities, and precedents for BRICS leaders promising much in the way of global financial reform but delivering next to nothing (merely a small, corruption-riddled World Bank-style New Development Bank), a full-fledged attack on the dollar’s power seems extremely unlikely. Hopes for an alternative to the IMF (the $100 billion ‘Contingent Reserve Arrangement’), or to the biased New York credit ratings agencies, or to the BRICS economies’ reliance on dollars for international trade, never materialised.

However, there is an anticipated expansion of the bloc, a ‘BRICS+’ process, perhaps as early as August when the leadership summit will be held in South Africa. Amongst a dozen potential new members are several dictatorial petro-states — Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Nigeria and Algeria, which won the support of Beijing and Moscow in 2022 — which may shift the calculus.

It was, after all, the 1973 ‘petrodollar’ arrangement (oil priced in dollars and mainly-Arab windfall profits recycled through New York banks) that gave the US currency durable clout after Richard Nixon revoked the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971. His default on $80 billion worth of what were US liabilities — ie, to pay one ounce of gold stored in Fort Knox for every $35 presented by international dollar holders – plus inflationary stagnation (‘stagflation’, in part reflecting tight labour market conditions and stronger trade unions at that time), had thrown Washington’s monetary hegemony into question. Volcker’s high-interest regime was the central decision that changed US fortunes (at the expense of a world recession), restoring dollar hegemony for at least the period 1980–2020.

Today, many weaknesses in US-centric economic management are abundantly apparent, not least of which is, once again, stagflation. Yet notwithstanding all the recent discussions about a new monetary and payments-system strategy, the role of the dollar in international capitalism remains profound. In early 2023, nearly 60 per cent of the world’s foreign exchange reserves held by central banks were in dollars (down from a 65 per cent average from 2000-20). The dollar’s share of foreign exchange transactions was then 90 percent, of cross border loans 52 percent, of international debt securities 50 percent, of trade invoicing 50 per cent and of SWIFT payments 42 per cent (even before Russia was evicted in March 2022). The U.S. economy can today claim only 22 per cent of global GDP and 12 per cent of global trade, so the use of dollars by the world’s capitalists gives the Fed enormous clout.

Moreover, when it comes to the currency denomination of preferred investments, it still appears that the second largest single investor in US Treasury bills, China (with more than $900 billion in late 2022, slightly behind Japan’s $1.078 trillion), is uninterested in rocking that boat at this stage, notwithstanding Beijing’s steady, gradual sale of dollars. The other major locales each hosting the holders of more than $100 billion in US Treasuries were US allies or self-interested investors unwilling to engage in a mass sell-off for political reasons, to dislodge dollar power: the United Kingdom ($638 billion), Belgium (327 billion), the Cayman Islands ($297 billion), Luxembourg ($296 billion) and Switzerland ($263 billion). With between $100 and $250 billion in T-bill holdings, are another half-dozen generally Western-centric economies: Ireland, Brazil, France, Taiwan, Canada, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Saudi Arabia.

Powell appears to be following the older script of dollar restoration, no matter how painful. After all, in 1979 the Volcker Shock had caused a global recession and unprecedented debt crises for households, companies and dozens of middle-income and poor countries. In the early 2020s, with the Fed using its power to raise global interest rates, the possibility remains that a return to global recession would catalyze another round of what could become contagious debt crises.

Global economic growth anticipated in 2023 and beyond was lower — and also much more unevenly distributed — than the levels required to outrun indebtedness experienced in most economies. In even China, property markets and major housing developers had begun to collapse by 2022. New York University’s Nouriel Roubini, one of the very few mainstream economists to predict the 2008-09 meltdown, expressed concern about unprecedented levels of explicit overborrowing, as well as the west’s ‘implicit debts such as unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go pension schemes and health-care systems — all of which will continue to grow as societies age. Just looking at explicit debts, the figures are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200 per cent in 1999 to 350 per cent in 2021. The ratio is now 420 per cent across advanced economies, and 330 per cent in China. In the United States, it is 420 percent, which is higher than during the Great Depression and after World War II.’

This ‘megathreat’ (one of ten), for Roubini, was the basis for: ‘a hard landing — a deep, protracted recession — on top of a severe financial crisis. As asset bubbles burst, debt-servicing ratios spike, and inflation-adjusted incomes fall across households, corporations, and governments, the economic crisis and the financial crash will feed on each other. To be sure, advanced economies that borrow in their own currency can use a bout of unexpected inflation to reduce the real value of some nominal long-term fixed-rate debt. With governments unwilling to raise taxes or cut spending to reduce their deficits, central-bank deficit monetisation will once again be seen as the path of least resistance.’

Concludes Roubini, ‘The mother of all stagflationary debt crises can be postponed, not avoided.’

To its credit, the World Economic Forum is aware of these contradictions, and in its new Global Risk Report lists a series of concerns, including many reflecting these economic contradictions:

— Asset bubble bursts: Prices for housing, investment funds, shares and other assets become increasingly disconnected from the real economy, leading to a severe drop in demand and prices. Includes, but is not limited to: cryptocurrencies, energy prices, housing prices, and stock markets.

— Collapse of a systemically important industry or supply chain: Collapse of a systemically important global industry or supply chain with an impact on the global economy, financial markets or society leading to an abrupt shock to the supply and demand of systemically important goods and services at a global scale. Includes, but is not limited to: energy, food and fast-moving consumer goods.

— Debt crises: Corporate or public finances struggle to service debt accumulation, resulting in mass bankruptcies or insolvencies, liquidity crises or defaults and sovereign debt crises.

— Failure to stabilise price trajectories: Inability to control the general price level of goods and services, including commodities. Inclusive of an unmanageable increase (inflation) or decrease (deflation) of prices.

— Proliferation of illicit economic activity: Global proliferation of illicit economic activities and potential violence that undermine economic advancement and growth due to organised crime or the illicit activities of businesses. Includes, but is not limited to: illicit financial flows (e.g. tax evasion); and illicit trade and trafficking (e.g. counterfeiting, human trafficking, wildlife trade).

— Prolonged economic downturn: Near-zero or slow global growth lasting for many years leading to periods of stagnation; or a global contraction (recession or depression).

The dilemma, though, is that these are only the economic problems on the table. Far more durable environmental, social, geopolitical and health megathreats loom, as well. And as the next essay will show, the current incapacity of multilateralism — even imperialist/subimperialist combinations such as the G20 — to address the polycrisis has not appeared as profoundly debilitating, for at least the past 80 or so years.

CounterPunch.org, January 16. Patrick Bond is professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.