Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century
Image by James Duncan Davidson share under Creative Commons CC BY-NC 3.0

The reactionary evil of Trump’s oligarch courtiers 

Adam C. Jones

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel aren’t just billionaires—they’re architects of a reactionary order. Musk turns social media into a breeding ground for fascist ideas. Thiel builds the infrastructure of a surveillance state. Resisting their ambitions requires more than critique—it demands direct confrontation. 

In November 2016, following the announcement of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, a celebratory gathering was held in Washington DC by the National Policy Institute, led at the time by Richard Spencer. There he gave his most infamous of speeches which concluded with the words “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” The crowd burst into rapturous applause, a considerable number recognised they no longer needed to uphold typical pretensions of decorum—their arms were instead thrown outwards and upwards, leaving no ambiguity as to what ‘hail victory’ was in reference to, or to what cause they had collectively pledged their allegiance. It is possible that some of those in attendance made it to the Capital Riots on 6 January 2021, and that upon entering that gilded monument to US empire—with its stucco faces and paintings deifying their founding, enslaving, white emperors—they may have experienced great elation in believing that their leader was on their side. This time, at the official inauguration celebrations, no less, the order of performance was reversed. This time, the Sieg Heil came not from the crowd, but from the stage, cast into the world by Elon Musk, with the kind of irony that could only result from a man whose conduct has been granted such a level of impunity that he rarely—if ever—has to temper his worst impulses. Is Musk a fascist? In his heart of hearts we may never know. As to his personal political disposition we cannot say whether he identifies with that term. Nonetheless, he believes ultimately in the fusion of corporate power and state power, and he has routinely geared his personal fiefdom of X to be accommodating of fascist users and fascist ideas.

What I can say about Elon Musk, however, is that whatever his politics are, they are on the side of evil. One should rightfully roll one’s eyes at this term, for it is often used in polemics where moral seriousness trumps political seriousness. The notion of evil reeks of metaphysics, of the dialectical sin of idealism to which proper materialism wrinkles its nose and sharpens its pencil. Nonetheless, I say that Musk is on the side of evil because I am drawing on a very specific sense of evil, one formulated by the late Jean Baudrillard as ‘an irrepressible drive for revenge on the excesses of Good… vengeance, a retaliation that exercises and expresses a violent necessity for rebalancing’. It is a distinctly Trumpian evil, and was central to his inauguration speech in proclaiming that: ‘Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced.’ It is evil in this sense that I want to dwell upon in relation to certain tech-oligarchs within his court.

The political movement of oligarchs, of which Trump is a quasi-messianic figure, is a movement of and for such evil. It believes that minorities have had too much good done in their name, that the US has given too much away, that it has granted too much hospitality to the migrant and the refugee, too much recognition to transgender people, and has given away too many reparations and concessions to racialised minorities. In the sphere of cultural representation, the very semblance of social justice which displaces the discursive centrality of the white, propertied, cisgender, heteronormative man offends them to their core and enrages them to action. With these people ascendant, we can be sure that we are living in a period of permanent counter-revolution, without a revolution ever having actually taken place. Their counter-revolution is not preventative as Herbert Marcuse described the domestic counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers in Counter-Revolution and Revolt, but rather they see themselves as countering a revolution which has already occurred. They are partaking in the reactionary myth which, as Richard Seymour described, ‘blames this nefarious alliance between predatory elites and insurgent infrahumanity for destroying a happier traditional society’, and it is this ‘revolution’ which they believe they are countering. They are not happy with their billions, with their economic hegemony and unencumbered ownership of the means of production, they wish to be at the centre of the representative imaginary of imperial democracy, and they wish to be loved for exactly who they are.

The cultural composition of this movement can only be described as ‘terminally online’. It is marinated in representation, in politics as it appears through news outlets and digital feeds. They are reacting to representations of emancipation first and foremost, because no such liberation has occurred. Yet even the semblance of inclusivity for marginalised peoples and critical—albeit liberal—self-reflection on US’s bloodied history is enough for them to declare that it has been government policy to ‘socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.’ What ‘gender’ and ‘race’ mean is exclusively the excluded genders and races other than those of the cisgender binary and the white. In the realms of representation which dominate today in the digital sphere, the move is to make these spaces even more hostile to those already subject to horrific abuse, essentially converting platforms into accelerators of such hatreds with a greater intensity.  Even the ostensibly ‘liberal’ Mark Zuckerberg has joined in. In both a move to reduce the labour costs of moderation and to signal Meta’s credentials in this movement of evil, Zuckerberg’s platforms will no longer—and they were never very successful in doing this—ban accounts for hate speech against women and LGBTQ+ people. Algorithmic violence, incitement, and stochastic terrorism are now open for their deployment upon far more people, yet this may be just another example of the colonial boomerang of Aimé Césaire—Facebook’s systems have been demonstrably apt at accelerating the proliferation of genocidal violence in boosting hate content aimed at the Rohingya people, as Amnesty International has reported. Violence in the periphery returns to the core soon enough.

Tech-giants are always fully intertwined with the US empire and its military industrial complex. Google is often a contractor for the Pentagon (such as their drone-training program ‘Maven’) and has worked with Israel on their military’s so-called ‘AI’ technology. This is nothing new. What is arguably of some novelty is the ideological component and the drivenness of certain oligarchs to change the political landscape with institutional and ideological hegemony in mind, driven in accordance with the evil which I have described above. Musk and Zuckerberg have both made their platforms into spaces where fascism can accelerate its circulation, and where it has a space to reproduce itself; but all of this is subject to the capricious melee of other people’s posting. This includes Musk, he is not a fascist theorist or leader, but equally a product of the informational ecosystem in which he has become libidinally captured. The subjectivity of Elon Musk is a product of the evil which is its principle. Musk enjoys himself too much, he is a spectator and an influencer, and besides cod-prophetic sound bites about space colonisation, he is content to move with the flows and be influenced by them in turn. Fascist gestures and affiliated digital objects are toys to him, and he relates to them as a child, having unlearned all sound judgement by virtue of the fact that his wealth grants him impunity from correction and immunity from the barriers imposed on arbitrary brutishness by the lessons of experience.

Nonetheless, there is an intellectual tendency—bequeathed to us by the enlightenment’s fetish for abstracted ideals of ‘intelligence’ and ‘cleverness—which would lead us to rest in the safe assurance that the enemy, whilst evil, is nevertheless ‘stupid’, and hence doomed to failure. Adorno and Horkheimer once warned of the dialectical inversion which occurs between fascist ‘stupidity’ and non-fascist ‘cleverness’ and we should be wary of repeating it:

according to the clever people, fascism was impossible in the West. Clever people have always made things easy for barbarians, because they are so stupid. It is the well-informed, farsighted judgments, the prognoses based on statistics and experience, the observations which begin: “I happen to be an expert in this field,” it is the well-founded, conclusive statements which are untrue. 

The impracticality, irrationality, or nonsensicalness of an idea to which enough capital has been mobilised is no obstruction to it. Take, for example, the unworkable Neom project funded by the Saudi regime, a half-baked utopian mess which aimed to create—among other ludicrous things—a fully linear ‘smart’ city called ‘The Line’ stretching across the desert. Some 21,000 workers from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh have died, and will continue to die, in the doomed attempt to build this murderous gimmick for a despotic boy prince. The impunity of capital is a deadly matter for the working classes of the world regardless of its rationality. Nonetheless, Musk seems content with his phone for the time being, and despite his Hitlerite cosplay he is not the oligarch which I am the most concerned about. That infamy lies with Peter Thiel, Musk’s fellow PayPal mafioso and founder of the firm Palantir, which specialises in big data analytics in its military as well as civilian applications.

Thiel understands elite reproduction far better than some of his peers in the Silicon Valley Right. Musk gives out X premium subscriptions and shout-outs to memecoins. Thiel sets up scholarships for new startups he can use to extend his capital and its influence, he lays the economic ground for the cultural foundations of an enduring reactionary intelligentsia and cultural sphere, and he funds  faux-left, conservative media such as Compact magazine, which poisons the well of leftist thought to muddy the discursive waters and to incrementally normalise such ideas amongst a defeated and despondent left. Where Musk wants to be recognised as the high-scoring player, Thiel wishes to change the programming of the game itself. Thiel’s political motivations can be summarised by his admission that he does not believe freedom and democracy to be in any way compatible. It is therefore imperative for him that democracy be extinguished in the name of freedom, and he spends his money precisely to achieve these aims and to shape the political landscape in this direction. It was Thiel who led the charge to have JD Vance made Trump’s VP, spending $15 million to do so and achieving a far more precise level of influence than a Muskian hype-train or twitter storm. Vance is Thiel’s man in the White House. Both of them are disciples of the self-styled ‘dark enlightenment intellectual’ Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin’s ideology is simple: neoliberalism is failing because it remains tainted by democracy, the only realm of social production we haven’t fully applied capitalism to is the production of states themselves, and so the state should be run as a corporation, which citizens subscribe to for governmental services. If they do not like how their state is being run, they can switch their provider and leave (this is explicitly modelled, as the neoreactionary philosopher Nick Land describes it, on white flight from the suburbs). The key to achieving this fusion of corporate and state power (by collapsing the latter into the former) is the elimination of what neoreactionaries consider to be the ‘real’ ruling class of capitalism corrupted by democracy. Who is this? For Yarvin it is certainly not the capitalists. Of course, the true ruling class is a nebulous unity of liberal academics, journalists, communists, NGOs, people who call them stupid online, the list is endless. This they call “The Cathedral”.

This ideology is not significantly different from the reactionary myth cited above, but what makes Thiel a far more dangerous node of reactionary capital is his ability to integrate his interests into state institutions. In this Thiel is very much set on making Britain  a testing ground for new forms of techno-capitalist control and accumulation. Thiel’s ‘Founders Fund’ is what established the company Anduril with fellow traveller Palmer Luckey. This is the company which now runs so-called ‘AI’ towers all across the southern coast of Britain, and has since taken on a whole host of MoD contracts.. In November 2023, the NHS awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to create the platform that will manage patient data. Palantir, which wholeheartedly supplies data-infrastructure to the Israeli military, also secured a contract to work for the British police in countering ‘extremism’. Under our new regime, Labour’s yearning for big-data-bullshit means it is unlikely they will revoke Palantir’s access to British infrastructure before they have succeeded in making themselves indispensable to it. Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, joined their advisory board for public services, and will most likely foster good relations between our regime and theirs. The Labour Party will not slow the march of neoreaction through Britain’s institutions.

Musk is in your phone, and if you are unlucky, your car. Peter Thiel and his progeny are in your hospitals, in the police stations, and in the imperialist military. Whether or not these machines will be truly effective is secondary to the necessity that they be resisted regardless, a ‘smart’ weapon and a ‘regular’ one are still dangerous. Thiel wishes to purge what little there is of democracy in our societies, and he and his ilk are playing a much longer game. We cannot militate against a Muskian spectacle, but Thiel’s plans require infrastructure—data-centres specifically—which are very fragile and expensive assemblages of equipment, vulnerable to militant worker action. The properly materialist response to such evil is to demolish the ground of its vengeful fantasy. Their capital may buy them their toys of control, but it is we who remember that—as Hegel once said—the only rational thing to do with such toys is to break them.

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