The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Great

Reset and the End of Life as We Know it

 

How Capitalism in the 21st Century will take

all species to the brink of extinction

Álvaro J. de Regil

This paper is an excerpt of “Marketocracy and Capture of People and Planet”, published in June 2021, which provides a holistic assessment of the unsustainable trajectory that humanity has been following since the First Industrial Revolution and the capture of democracy by capitalism.The purpose of “Marketocracy and the Capture of People and Planet” is to examine the trajectory that the world has been following since the centres of power imposed neoliberalism on humanity half a century ago.

The “Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset” contains three sections. The first one covers the trajectory that humankind has been following between the First Industrial and The Third Industrial Revolution, with the emergence of capitalism and its creation of the gradual metabolic rift with the environment that greatly accelerated during the Third Industrial Revolution in the Twentieth Century. The second section proceeds with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), touted to maximise efficiency and effectiveness in materialising with great precision all results. To accomplish this, it would radically change the way humankind lives as the result of a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. The 4IR is a marketocratic driven phenomenon that will have tremendous repercussions in every realm of human life, on the life of all living things and on the capacity of our planet to remain a liveable planet. The 4IR will impact the way we go about our public and private lives profoundly. It will also affect the lives of all living things to various degrees, with many already on the brink of extinction, finding their ecosystems no longer adequate for their reproduction.

The last section assesses the so-called Great Reset, touted as the solution to humanity’s existential problems (caused by the marketocratic paradigm). It is positioned by the World Economic Forum (WEF)—and supported by the metropolises of the system—as the way societies should deal with our existential problems of sustainability. The pretence is to completely reset the structures of society towards a new capitalist paradigm anchored in the 4IR. The goal of the Great Reset, using the COVID-19 pandemic as carpe diem, is to offer insights to help inform all those determining the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, and the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. Drawing from the vision and vast expertise of the leaders engaged across the Forum’s communities, the Great Reset initiative has a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being.9 However, as I will expose, this is a preposterous and cynic initiative to accelerate the implementation of the 4IR strictly from the perspective of the less than 1% global elite to maximise their wealth and power.

Needless to say that the Great Reset downplays the tremendous negative impacts that will have on the life of our planet, which is already in a perilous situation where we may have already crossed a tipping point that disables preserving life as we know it. Indeed, three significant realms of life will endure a colossal impact with the advance of the 4IR through the Great Reset. From a societal perspective, labour and human rights are being profoundly impacted, with dire consequences. However, overarching every sphere of life, the health of our home, Planet Earth—to which we belong as just another species of it—will be impacted to the point that it is exceedingly likely to cross the threshold of no return, as the unrelenting quest for growth, accelerated by the 4IR, continues unabated. If this happens, it would mean that we had reached the end of our existence.

Hence, this is my contribution to raising the questions and finding the answers to critical events that we are witnessing as I write. This should help the common citizenry gain knowledge, take consciousness, and empower themselves to make well-informed decisions that can contribute in turn to organise and put in check the agenda pursued by the global elite of the less than one per cent. The current events must make saving our species and our planet the fundamental issue and the overarching and quintessential cornerstone of our effort to transition to a new sustainable paradigm. It cannot be one of many vital issues, but the single element that drives our vision to achieve sustainability that fundamentally determines how we draft our new paradigm. It is in our self-interest to become cognisant about the damning catastrophe that we are facing, stop our numbness and individualism and coalesce to change the current doomed trajectory and veer to what Paul Burkett calls an eco-revolutionary tipping point. This is the cross-sectoral defensive struggles of ecological, communitarian and urban movements coalescing as an ecological socialist movement against this system of monopoly-finance capital and its state functionaries,8 the tiny elite who thinks it owns our planet.

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