IT COULD be tempting to treat Elon Musk’s provocations as the attention-seeking of a petulant plutocrat who was born into the wealth of his father’s mining business in apartheid South Africa.
Then there is the line from the most craven US allies — Britain’s laughable Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the EU’s woodentop Ursula von der Leyen — in response to Donald Trump mulling the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal. It seems to be not to take him seriously.
That would be a catastrophic mistake. Musk is in effect co-president of the US, having spent $100 million on Trump’s election campaign.
He is in the company of other reactionary billionaires such as Peter Thiel, who has sculpted the nominal vice-president and faux blue-collar champion, JD Vance.
Trump may be quixotic, but he is far from the clueless blow-in of liberal imagination. He represents US capital in its majority.
The centrist conceit eight years ago was that Trump’s ruling-class backing came from a kind of lumpen bourgeoisie living in the segregationist past and running outdated industries. That was contrasted to the thrusting cosmopolitan tech sector with its global workforce in Silicon Valley.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg … one by one the tech broligarchs have come in behind Trump. They especially back his moves to curb China’s tech industry and any European regulation they don’t like.
That stands higher than their rows with the extreme nativist Trump base over keeping specialist visas for tech-sector experts. Notably, Trump sides with Musk and them when it comes to that “globalist,” niche labour market. The anti-immigration crusade is going to be more carefully and cynically focused: capitalist-compliant.
Whether there is partial “fact checking” or “community notes,” disinformation to serve US interests remains a Silicon Valley constant. See social media’s manipulation of the truth over Palestine. It matches the New York Times, the BBC and other institutions of a dying Western-dominated international order.
In parallel, and outlandish as it may seem, acquiring Greenland is a goal long mooted in US policy-making circles. The huge island has oil and mineral reserves. Climate heating — last year reaching the 1.5°C “safe” limit — is bringing a scramble to control sea routes through the melting Arctic. The US lags Russia in this Polar great game. It is behind China in battery technology.
Far from being some clownish Kremlin stooge, Trump is acting for the US empire with a set of policies that are not the cause of the accelerating breakdown of the post-WWII regime, but are a violent, militarist, yet rational response to it — in a capitalist, perverse sense.
Neither can Musk’s declaration of war against the Starmer government in Britain and backing for the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD) in next month’s federal election be treated as merely the rantings of a racist eugenicist ordering another toy to play with.
Of course it involves promulgating far-right and fascist fantasies, from the Great Replacement conspiracy theory to the fiction promoted by the AfD’s Alice Weidel this week, and endorsed by Musk, that Hitler “was a communist” and anti-semitism comes from left supporters of the Palestinians.
There is a deeper purpose. Musk’s entreaty to King Charles to dissolve parliament and call elections elicited derision at his lack of understanding of the country. Only one in five British people have a positive impression of him in any case. Though you wouldn't know that from his kid-glove treatment by the Establishment and the government.
The point, however, is that he has honed in on the catastrophic weakness of this government. It has record unpopularity after just six months. Polls vary. Still, they and council by-elections point the same way. One survey this week put Labour and Reform UK both on 25 per cent and the Tories on 20 per cent.
The left was lambasted for pointing out the lack of real support for Starmer-Labour at the general election, despite the landslide gain of seats. Now it is a commonplace observation among once Starmer enthusiasts.
There are ominous noises that rising government borrowing costs — with Britain especially vulnerable to a global trend — will lead to Rachel Reeves slashing public spending in March. You can envisage a political earthquake come the May elections.
Meanwhile, the Tory Party remains mired, like so much of the transatlantic historic centre right. Kemi Badenoch has proved to be another over-rated Thatcher tribute act with an opinion of herself wildly out of kilter with reality.
In just two months as leader, and parroting Muskite reaction on social media, she has not managed to boost the Tories but Nigel Farage and Reform UK instead.
She has also given a lift to Robert Jenrick, who she beat by only 56 to 44 per cent in November’s Tory leadership contest. Jenrick is a faintly ridiculous though deeply sinister character. He is bent on the method of Enoch Powell and the finally departed Jean-Marie Le Pen of uttering a taboo-breaking provocation in an already crowded field of reaction. Thus his blaming “alien cultures” for child sexual exploitation in a country whose 400-year-old state church is in crisis over abusing kids.
Farage has tried to rid himself of previous association with outright fascists. He wants to con people that he is merely anti-Establishment … like Jeremy Corbyn, he says. It’s a lie. It is one made easier to spin thanks to the vicious centrist assault on Corbyn and the left that pretended the same thing.
Musk’s dangling of £100 million in front of Reform UK and then saying that Farage should be replaced as leader, while championing “Tommy Robinson,” perhaps reveals an ulterior motive. The AfD in Germany has managed to grow and to radicalise towards fascism. At the same time: confounding the idea that greater electoral support will domesticate the far right.
Farage is trying to detoxify, like Marine Le Pen in France. Jenrick, as a former government minister and a frontbencher of Britain’s historic ruling party, feels able to toxify. Again and again. Like Powell did in the 1970s.
It is possible Musk has in mind that “uniting the right” — the slogan of the far-right rampage in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer seven months into Trump’s first term — requires in Britain someone like Jenrick creating a new alliance of the Tory extreme right with a refashioned Reform UK, and with Robinson’s violent street fighters in some working relationship as Trump maintained.
That is the AfD’s strategic aim, after all. It has already forced the Tory CDU (the Christian Democratic Union of Germany) further to the right while presenting it with a dilemma: will it break the Merkel-era block on coalition with the fascists or again have to govern through the diminishing centre parties?
This is way beyond Musk’s fixation upon toppling Starmer. That is but a “morbid symptom,” to borrow a phrase from the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, of an old order dying and a new one yet to be born.
The dangerous reaction that wants to impose its New Order is growing out of the old. It was not only the Trump-dominated US House of Representatives this week that dealt another blow to the “international rules-based order” by sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC).
So did the liberal prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk. He said Poland will not act on the ICC’s arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits this month.
Champions of the liberal order defend annulling the presidential election in Romania because the “wrong guy” was set to win, and refusing to accept that the “right woman” is no longer president of Georgia even though her term has ended and the elected parliament chose someone else.
Starmer-Britain participates in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians. Germany — without the AfD in office — deploys paramilitary police thugs against peaceful protest and crushes freedom of expression more than at any time since 1945.
These are not aberrations. They are driven by the development of the global capitalist system that only two decades ago we were told would lead to borders coming down, peaceful international relations and progress.
Instead we see the kind of rising state authoritarianism, militarism and imperialist clashes that characterised the first third of the last century.
Self-styled liberal internationalists have been keener than most on promoting all that through the war in Ukraine, Israel’s expanding war in the Middle East and posing an existential clash with China and with those who are not in the US-dominated set of Western alliances. All this took place under Biden.
Along with the enormous expansion of the wealth of the billionaire class and its deeper direct penetration into government and state.
Musk’s career is one of opportunism. His fortune like so many US billionaires flows from privileged contracts with the state, especially the military. The opposite of free enterprise genius.
We are in an epoch of manifold crises and of the rising role of the strong state. Domestically, with the police baton and a battery of laws against democratic resistance and worker organisation.
Economically, with tighter bonds between capitalist states and favoured corporations clashing with others in global competition, however destructive to people and planet.
And militarily. The global expansion of arms spending and drive to war is matched by militarism at home. Rosa Luxemburg, whose murder at the hands of proto-fascist reaction in Germany in 1919 we commemorate in a few days, identified militarism, arising from crisis-wracked capitalism, as the driving force of reaction.
Beneath the ghoulish theatre of Musk and Trump, that is very true today. It should guide the labour movement in responding — as the Starmer-Labour government will not — to the serious danger of outright fascist reaction.
Stopping the radical and fascist right in Britain will mean drawing in the widest social forces combatively.
It requires a bigger and more effective anti-capitalist left that will not allow the threat of the far right to be used as a scarecrow to discipline people behind the failing centre. Instead, we have to fight now for the “world that is not yet born” that we want to see.