By Alejandro Iturbe
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently took place. Better known as the Davos Forum, after the Swiss town where these meetings are held in great luxury, it boasted the participation of Donald Trump and the Argentine president Javier Milei, in addition to the new stars of the “new technological bourgeoisie”. What happened at this WEF meeting, and why is it significant?
The Davos WEF was created in 1971 on the initiative of the German economist Klaus Martin Schwab who encouraged the holding of annual meetings of CEOs of the world’s largest companies and banks, political leaders of the major powers and the presidents of international financial organisations including the IMF, the World Bank and the ECB. They were also to be joined by economists, political analysts and intellectuals.
As we said in an article published last year, the richest and most powerful elites of world capitalism (la crème de la crème) meet at the Davos Forum to analyse the most serious problems facing the capitalist system and to develop proposals to respond to them[1]. One fact clearly shows the class content of the WEF: “The Forum is financed by contributions from about a thousand member companies. The typical member company is a global corporation with a turnover of more than five billion dollars”[2].
The international economic and financial crisis that broke out in 2007-2008 and its aftermath caused a crisis in the WEF itself as a “beacon” of imperialist capitalism due to its inability to come up with viable and effective proposals. Bankers, heads of international financial organisations and orthodox economists were no longer the “stars” that everyone wanted to listen to and were discredited. New technologies and their application took centre stage. This change was clearly evident at the 2010 meeting, whose theme was “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
The setting was still the exclusive and very expensive international ski resort. But the WEF became a kind of luxury Shark Tank[3] where some aspiring “technological innovators” saved for years to be able to pay the $20,000 basic registration fee and another $20,000 for a mid-range hotel, drinks, food and appropriate clothing. It was an ‘investment’ to be able to offer their ideas and attract investors from large companies. Latin American presidents also regularly attend to “offer up” their countries to “big investors” (Brazil’s Lula in 2010 and Argentina’s Macri in 2018).
Davos deepens its “technological shift”
It was therefore no coincidence that one of the central themes of the conferences and meetings was Artificial Intelligence (AI)[4]. Not only was this new technology discussed in terms of the production of chips and hardware and the creation of new products, but in terms its application, as a tool to reduce jobs and increase worker productivity.
For this reason, one of the “technological stars” of the WEF was Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, which was created in 1999 and is currently the most important company in the sector known as CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Benioff had numerous meetings in Davos, including, as we shall see, with Javier Milei.
Trump’s speech
A few days previously, Donald Trump was sworn in as the new president of the United States. He had previously announced, in his usual loud style, that during his term in office his country would regain ownership of the Panama Canal, buy the island of Greenland and that Canada would become part of the US[5]. However, his immediate international action has been to “aggressively pressure” the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza (which Netanyahu has so far flatly refused to sign)[6]. At the same time, he has already begun to implement the deportation plan for immigrants that he proposed during his election campaign.
In Davos, Trump confirmed his willingness to meet Putin to put an end to the war in Ukraine (“an absolute killing field”). Certainly, he has in mind already the plan proposed by Biden: to hand over to Putin the eastern part of the country that he now dominates (thus giving him a “dignified exit” from the war) and to put pressure on Zelensky and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie to accept this division[7].
At the same time, his speech to the big businessmen of the world was “calm” compared to his usual style, although very clear: “My message is very simple, come and manufacture your products in the United States”[8]. To support this call to invest in his country, Trump added that “we will give you some of the lowest taxes of any nation on earth”. In fact, a significant reduction in corporate taxes is a central plank of the economic policy that Trump intends to implement (he already made a significant reduction in his first term).
At the same time, he announced that beginning on February 1, he would apply a protectionist policy with tariffs on all imports into the U.S., which is currently the world’s leading importer and has a significant trade deficit. In order of import value, the main countries of origin are China, Canada, Germany, Mexico and Japan.
Imports from China are treated differently. So far, there has been a 100% tariff on electric cars and a 25% tariff on steel and aluminium. Before Trump’s second term, finished electronic products, such as mobile phones, tablets, personal computers and monitors, did no pay tariffs. Neither did what are known as “miscellaneous manufactured goods” (jewellery, toys, sportswear and some household appliances).
Now China will have to pay a “general duty” of 10%[9]. This will increase costs for companies such as Apple and Microsoft, which manufacture their products in China and then “import” them. It will also affect the large retail chain WalMart, which imports many of the products it sells from China. These products are usually manufactured by “captive” Chinese companies.This general 10% tariff will also apply to imports from Germany, Japan and other countries.
At the same time, he announced that a 25% tariff would be applied to imports from Canada and Mexico, which had previously paid nothing under the 1992 free trade agreement with the U.S. (NAFTA). In any case, these countries are very different.
Canada is a strong imperialist country that has developed its economy through partnership with its “big brother”, thus gaining access to its large domestic market, to which it exports crude and refined oil, natural gas, light and heavy vehicles and machinery. This accumulation has allowed its bourgeoisie to expand and become one of the main powers in world mining, with heavy investments in several semi-colonial countries (Argentina, Mexico and Peru).
On the contrary, Mexico is a semi-colonial country that has “suffered” the consequences of NAFTA. On the one hand, its traditional maize-based agriculture has been reduced, bombarded by subsidised U.S. production. At the same time, its national industry has been drastically reduced and transformed into maquilas for US companies (especially in the north of the country), whose products are then “exported to the U.S. by these companies or their ‘national’ subsidiaries”. An entire sector of the Mexican economy is based on these maquilas. But beyond their profound differences, this Trump measure represents a severe blow to the economies of Canada and Mexico.
Trump claims that he will return the U.S. to its “golden age”, when the country was the hegemonic imperialist power and, within this framework, the main industrial power. The latter began to change in the 1980s with so-called globalisation, when the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie began to transfer a significant part of its industrial production to countries with much lower labour costs (the Asian Tigers, China and the maquilas in Mexico and other countries). The U.S. economy then shifted its focused on dominating the global financial system and tightly controlling new technologies.
Trump is trying to reverse this process and induce companies into making industrial investments in the U.S. again. He plans to do this by offering tax breaks that will compensate for higher domestic labour costs, which will certainly be supported by the majority of the American bourgeoisie (as it was during his first term). On the other hand, he plans to use tariffs that make these imported products more expensive. On this last point, Trump intends to go “against life”. That is, against the objective tendencies of the current accumulation dynamics of imperialist capitalism.
Milei’s speech and the “Argentinean laboratory”
The participation of the Argentinean President Javier Milei was one of the most talked about by the international press. At the Central Meeting, Milei gave a disgusting speech full of hatred against the LGBTQ+ community and denial of oppression and violence against women. At Davos, the WEF participants chose to remain silent and “look the other way”.
But there was an important response in Argentina. A group of activists from the LGBTQ+ community called a meeting on January 27 that was attended by thousands of people. At that meeting, in addition to condemning Milei, it was decided to call a national anti-fascist and anti-racist pride march for Saturday, February 1 in Buenos Aires and other cities around the country. A large number of sectors and organisations are joining and calling for the march, which could become a unified expression of the struggle against Milei’s government.
At the same time, Milei participated in many smaller meetings. In them, the leaders and other participants expressed an idea formulated last year by the French economist Robert Boyer: Argentina is the laboratory for a social experiment on how much adjustment a society can endure without rebelling or exploding[10]. In other words, they are watching Argentina’s dynamics with anticipation to see how far “hard adjustment” policies can be applied without leading to an explosion.
It is interesting to note that Donald Trump’s government intends to carry out a major adjustment of the U.S. fiscal budget as well, especially in social spending. From a bourgeois point of view, this adjustment is essential because of the loss of income that will result from the reduction in corporate taxes. The person planning this adjustment is Elon Musk, who constantly praises Milei and his brutal austerity. Musk has already warned that the minimum basis of this adjustment will be a 26% reduction in spending[11].
In search of “investors”
After delivering his hate speech, Milei turned to the main purpose of his trip: to look for “international investors” to “sell the country to”. He did find one investor: Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, who “pledged to invest $500 million in the country over the next five years”[12].
Salesforce is a major U.S. technology company specialising in “AI innovation, digital transformation and workforce development”. It plans to create a “technology hub” in Argentina to serve as its base in Latin America. In the country, it will be the company that “digitises” the state apparatus and serves leading companies such as BBVA, Ford Argentina and Telecom[13].
Benioff is trying to follow in the footsteps of Elon Musk, to whom Milei will sell the state-owned company ARSAT (with a strong presence in the country’s telecommunications sector), which he is emptying out in order to privatise[14]. In addition, Milei issued a decree to “deregulate communications in the country”. In this sector, Musk’s project is for Argentina to become the continental base for his company Starlink (specialising in high-speed internet via satellite)[15]. Musk had already announced that he would build a Tesla electric car factory in Argentina, the company’s first in Latin America. Musk is thus taking advantage of the “abundance of benefits” offered to him by his friend Milei.
Meeting with the IMF
In Davos, Milei also met with Gita Gopinath, vice-president of the IMF, an international financial organisation that for decades has “supervised” Argentina’s economic policy in the successive “renegotiations” of the country’s foreign debt in order to guarantee its payment. Since taking office, Milei and his Minister of Economy, Dante Caputo, have been asking the IMF not only to facilitate the renegotiations, but also to grant an additional loan of 10-15 billion dollars to strengthen the Central Bank’s reserves and thus be able to eliminate the “exchange clamp” (restrictions on the purchase of dollars in the official banking system), which leads to the existence of an official foreign exchange market and a parallel one.
So far, the IMF has been reluctant to grant this additional loan. Shortly after Davos, an IMF mission went to Buenos Aires, where it praised Milei’s austerity policy and his “progress” in “macroeconomic stabilisation”, but did not release a single new dollar[16]. In this context, Milei’s government issued a bond to try to obtain these funds from the private financial sector[17].
At the Davos meeting, Milei asked Gospinath what his government should do to attract foreign investment[18]. She replied that it should provide “an environment that generates private investment”.
Let’s remember that Milei’s government has already made great strides in providing this “environment”: severe fiscal adjustment, harsh attacks on wages, salaries and working conditions of workers, and a legal structure at the service of these investments (the RIGI)[19]. In spite of this, foreign direct investment (FDI) has been arriving to Argentina in a very sporadic way. The most significant investments so far have been aimed at exploiting natural resources (oil, gas and minerals), and some may now reach the technology sector.
Against this background, Gospinath deepened his analysis in the direction of global processes: “Domestic investment [by capitalists]” and “the entry of international capital has declined in the last 25 years”. Therefore, “there is no tailwind, the headwind continues”. In the case of Argentina, we must add that the “big investors” lack confidence in investing in the country, as does the IMF itself in the country’s ability to stabilise the situation without “society” reacting with a “social explosion”.
Some final thoughts
In numerous articles on the Davos Forum in previous years, we said that this think-tank of imperialist capitalism was in crisis because it had “few answers” to many serious global problems, such as wars, the economic crisis, the growing poverty and hunger and destruction.
The latest WEF did not provide answers to these problems either. However, unlike the previous ones, it did provide a “recipe” for what it proposes to do in this turbulent environment. We have summarised it in the title of this article: the intensive use of AI and tough fiscal adjustments.
The way capitalism uses AI and harsh fiscal adjustments make the situation of the workers and the masses worse and worse. In a way, this is inevitable: the same imperialist capitalism and its governments that led us to this reality cannot be the ones to resolve and overcome it.
Therefore, we, the workers and the masses, should hold our own international meeting, which will allow us to coordinate, unite and strengthen our struggles in the immediate future to fight in the global struggle against imperialist capitalism and its governments.
Sources
[1] https://es.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2023
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7201300.stm
[3] Reality show on US television, launched in 2009.
[4] https://www.perfil.com/noticias/canal-e/la-ia-empieza-a-tomar-relevancia-en-la-transformacion-economica-global-es-una-tecnologia-aceptada-como-una-realidad-ineludible.phtml
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abuOVNz12vM
[6] https://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/eeuu-y-canada/asi-fue-la-presion-agresiva-de-donald-trump-para-que-netanyahu-e-israel-aceptaran-una-tregua-en-gaza-3417869
[7] https://litci.org/es/el-imperialismo-acepta-repartir-ucrania-con-putin/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser [9]
[7] https://litci.org/es/el-imperialismo-acepta-repartir-ucrania-con-putin/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
[9] https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2025/01/22/eeuu/productos-caros-trump-arancel-productos-chinos-trax
[10] See https://www.ihu.unisinos.br/categorias/640145-a-argentina-vai-se-tornar-o-laboratorio-social-do-futuro-entrevista-com-robert-boyer
[11] https://www.cronista.com/usa/economia-y-finanzas/el-primer-despedido-elon-musk-reconocio-su-derrota-y-admitio-no-podra-cumplir-lo-que-le-prometio-donald-trump-fui-demasiado-optimista/
[12] https://www.salesforce. com/mx/blog/2025-01-22-argentina-investment/#:~:text=SAN%20FRANCISCO%20and%20DAVOS%20–%2022,World%20Economic%20Forum%20in%20Davos
[13] https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/22/convertir-a-la-argentina-en-un-hub-global-de-ia-y-digitalizar-el-sector-publico-como-es-el-proyecto-de-salesforce/#: ~:text=Salesforce,%20the%20CRM%20(company%20dedicated,during%20the%20next%20five%20years.
[14] https://www.pagina12.com.ar/776403-el-gobierno-pone-de-remate-a-arsat-y-le-deja-la-mesa-servida
://www.pagina12.com.ar/776403-el-gobierno-pone-de-remate-a-arsat-y-le-deja-la-mesa-servida[15] https://tn.com.ar/tecno/novedades/2023/12/20/que-es-starlink-el-sistema-de-internet-satelital-de-elon-musk-del-que-hablo-milei-en-la-cadena-nacional/? gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAhvK8BhDfARIsABsPy4hGMemmI-2pWbkGhHLQWM4P5mc6Ygpog8BxSKPLDiRSuxQoeqRB9CMaAl7GEALw_wcB
[16] https://www.ambito.com/economia/silenzio-stampa-del-fmi-se-fue-la-mision-y-el-gobierno-gana-tiempo-las-presiones-dolar-y-reservas-n6107796
[17] https://www.ambito.com/economia/deuda-el-gobierno-javier-milei-emitira-un-nuevo-bono-del-tesoro-pesos-n6086977
[18] https://aaaci.org.ar/mensaje-del-fmi-que-necesita-la-argentina-para-atraer-inversion/
[19] https://litci.org/es/argentina-el-regimen-de-incentivo-a-las-grandes-inversiones-rigi-es-una-mesa-servida-para-el-imperialismo/?utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=browser
