Global Power Project: Bilderberg Group and the Tyranny of the Technocrats
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
19 December 2014
Originally posted at Occupy.com
This is the fifth installment in a series examining the activities and individuals behind the Bilderberg Group. Read the first part, second part, third part and fourth part in the series.
Bilderberg is an inherently technocratic institution. It brings together top “experts” and decision-makers from a number of important sectors to engage in off-the-record conversation, speaking a “common language” in order to help design and coordinate policies that more accurately represent the interests of concentrated power.
As such, Bilderberg not only serves a technocratic function, but it is also populated with a number of the world’s most influential technocrats who are members and invited guests: top officials of central banks, finance ministries, international organizations, think tanks, foundations and universities. Their participation in Bilderberg meetings provides them with a “private” forum in which to engage with the political, corporate and financial oligarchy. More concretely, Bilderberg meetings enable participants to promote the expansion and further institutionalization of technocracy. But to understand Bilderberg’s relevance to technocracy, let’s first define the concept.
What is Technocracy?
Technocracy is largely defined as “rule by experts,” or the exercise of power by “professionals.” As the Economist explained in 2011: “Technocracy was once a communist idea: with the proletariat in power, administration could be left to experts.” But the scientific management of society “was popular under capitalism too,” and the magazine noted there was even a prominent “Technocratic Movement” in the United States in the early 20th century.
The late 19th and early 20th century witnessed rapid industrialization, new oligarchies, mass migration, revolution, a clash of empires between old and new, emerging technologies and inventions, expanded literacy, new energy sources and novel forms of communication and transportation. It was an age of oligarchs and unrest. Many of the most powerful societies turned to technocracy to help manage the great transitions of the era. As the oligarchs sought to maintain their influence by institutionalizing it within society, they also while sought to manage the expectations and interests of the population: by engaging in social engineering with the objective of maintaining social control, or what the ruling class called “stability.”
Capitalist, Communist (or State-Socialist) and Fascist societies turned to technocracy and the rule of experts to transform the structure of modern civilization through a “scientific management” of human society – where oligarchic power is legalized and institutionalized, and the population gives its consent, or is at least its obedience, to the ruling structure.
The Chinese Communist Party and state is largely ruled by unelected technocrats, as are several military dictatorships and one-party states. On occasion, even Western “democratic” nations become ruled by unelected technocrats, though as the Economist noted, “only for a short time” and “in unusual circumstances.”
Recent examples include the imposition of technocratic governments in Italy and Greece, in late 2011 when democratically elected leaders were removed from power and replaced with economists and central bankers. Another recent example was in Ukraine, where, following the removal of the more pro-Russian president, the management of the government was handed to a former central banker.
Despite these exceptions of direct technocratic rule, there are technocratic institutions and individuals who oversee major parts of our society and determine important policies that have profound consequences for hundreds of millions, and often billions, of people around the world. Central banks, finance ministries, international organizations, think tanks, foundations and universities are all highly influential technocratic institutions, often managed by high-level technocrats and governed (or advised) by members of the financial and corporate oligarchy.
China’s Technocratic Tyranny
A November 2013 article in The Atlantic described Chinese politics as “a nightmare” for those who were “lovers of clear, concise language.” The author, Matt Schiavenza, cited the names of the top ruling body (Politburo Standing Committee), the major conference establishing policy and direction for the following years (Third Plenary Session of the 18th Party Congress), and the conference’s resulting document that promised to “comprehensively deepen reforms,” and argued: “Chinese politics are designed to attract as little attention as possible.”
The technicality and obscurity of the language serves to hide the exercise and effects of power behind an image of “expertise.” Only those who are experts in matters of law, finance, economics, political science, etc., are capable of understanding the language, and thus, the implications of its use. In China, the technocratic language of the Party and state hide the rule of not only the visible top technocrats, but of the powerful political and financial oligarchs and dynasties behind them.
China’s political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a new aristocratic class of what are called “Princelings,” the descendants of Communist China’s revolutionary leaders. These leaders wielded formal political power, and after the turn to capitalism, from the late 1970s onward, the descendants of these families came to dominate the economic resources of the country. As Bloomberg noted, in China “wealth and influence is concentrated in the hands of as few as 14 and as many as several hundred families.”
For foreign businesses and banks to gain access to the Chinese market, the most effective means has been through the practice of hiring or establishing relationships with the Princelings. Major global banks, such as Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and others, frequently hire princelings in order gain access and influence within China’s leadership, since the relatives of princelings themselves govern the bureaucracies and state-owned industries, determining the flow of money through society.
JPMorgan Chase has been under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its practice of hiring hundreds of princelings in China to gain access to its lucrative market. In the words of Bloomberg, these princelings have become China’s “new capitalist nobility.”
Wen Jiabao served as China’s prime minister for the decade leading up to 2012, and his family amassed billions in assets, a practice consistent for most (if not all) of China’s ruling political figures, including its new president, Xi Jinping. Almost all of the nine members of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee under the previous Chinese government were from families that amassed enormous fortunes and controlled entire areas of the economy, with corruption “more severe than at any time in history,” as the Financial Times quoted a veteran Communist Party member and journalist.
China is a one-party dictatorship with powerful military and security forces and high-tech surveillance. It is ruled by gangsters, oligarchs and technocrats. China is, essentially, a Mafiocracy. Yet the language of its technocratic form of governance obscures this reality behind the veneer of impartiality and expertise. Behind the scenes, gangsters rule and families feud.
This reality of Chinese politics was revealed in 2012 when one of China’s princelings and rising political stars, who was set to gain a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee in 2013, became the subject of a dramatic downfall worthy of the palace intrigue in ancient imperial China. Bo Xilai’s rise to power was turned into a life sentence in prison after his closest adviser sought asylum in a U.S. consulate, fearing for his life and telling the Americans that Bo Xilai’s wife had murdered a British banker in a hotel room with cyanide.
The fall of Bo Xilai and his family was not a subject the Chinese leadership wanted aired publicly. The popular attention and implications of the story were largely the result of social media being used by an increasing percentage of Chinese citizens. What was intended to be the behind-the-scenes factional power struggles of families vying for top-spots on the Politburo Standing Committee, spilled out into the public as the most dramatic news story since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and changed the course of Chinese politics.
It is also interesting to note that one of China’s top technocrats, Liu He, was invited to the Bilderberg meeting in 2014. In China, Liu He is one of President Xi Jinping’s top economic advisers, considered to be largely “pro-market” and seen as a prominent reformer. The Wall Street Journal described Liu He’s job as “nothing less than to craft an economic vision that will guide China for the decade to come.” He has also been referred to as “China’s Larry Summers.”
Technocracy in the West
Much like the powerful, dramatic and shocking figures and processes hiding behind the bland language of Chinese politics, the ambiguous language of global economics and finance hides its own ruthless realities. Behind the words and actions of central bankers, finance ministers and other top technocrats, we’re able to see countries collapse, governments overthrown, populations impoverished, societies destroyed, fascism and racism explode as people riot, rebel and revolt.
The language of “financial technocracy” belies a world of mass impoverishment, exploitation, domination and immense concentrations of power. These technocrats define and manage global financial and economic policy, construct the ideology the justifies the rule of the oligarchy, and implement policy which is intended to protect and expand the interests of that oligarchy.
As central bankers demand “fiscal tightening” and finance ministers implement “structural reforms,” the populations of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Spain and Italy were plunged into crisis. Meanwhile, poverty and unemployment rise, fascist parties emerge, social unrest and riots in the streets become common, suicide rates increase, health and education systems come under strain and collapse, and governing political parties lose legitimacy and turn to police repression to control the crowds. Economic opportunity and political democracy become things of the past. Behind the technocratic language of economics lies a world of brutality.
Bilderberg’s structure, members and objectives that promote and expand the power of technocracy are inherently destructive to democracy. Europe’s debt crisis, and the technocratic institutions and individuals that managed it, have had profoundly negative consequences on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The functions of technocracy and the actions of Europe’s top technocrats effectively serve the interests of concentrated financial and corporate power.
