Stakeholder Capitalism is WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s model for imposing his ethical prescriptions onto free-market exchange. Businesses will no longer be beholden to “the prevailing shareholder-primacy model of profit maximization”, but instead to “more socially conscious” stakeholders: experts in fields like environmental sustainability, racial and gender equity, and increased immigration. These stakeholder criteria are determined by the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals: including the elimination of all poverty (relative and absolute), gender equality, and economic equity between nations. This is an aspect of his ““Great Reset” of capitalism.”
Schwab asks us to envision a world where these values are totalised across “every sector.” The union of monopolistic business and government policy is a core tenet of fascism. Under lockdowns, businesses and governments accrued unprecedented power and profits while we were under house arrest. Politicians have stocks and shares in many of the businesses they legislate against — and big businesses support measures like universal corporation tax rates to impair their opposition. The unification of the public and private spheres to form a national body politic — a corpus — is the etymology of the term corporation. As emissaries of the WEF’s ethic, all commerce and governing bodies become organs of an international state, which everything is for, and nothing is outside or against.
Businesses will be subjected to performance evaluations concerning compliance with ESG targets, to ensure their continued eligibility for WEF partnership perks. This involves gathering data on their employees and customers. This requires a vast digital infrastructure with algorithms tracking everything from purchasing habits to demographic trends. Your consumer behaviour will be scored on its carbon footprint, or proportion of patronage of “Black owned business”. The disparity between the targets and a business’ performance will provide an incentive for businesses to nudge their customer bases toward partaking in what they see as “ethical” and “sustainable” consumer behaviours.
To accelerate the process, businesses will form special interest lobbying groups to pressure governments into passing legislation that increases compliance with environmental and social policies. Eventually, boycotts will be done on your behalf. Dissidents to this new public-private ideology will not be able to buy from any business working with the WEF. Given the WEF’s partnerships with governments, monopolistic enterprises like Amazon and Silicon Valley social media giants, and international bodies like the WHO and WTO: that will be the majority of businesses.