Socialist Alternative has launched a new campaign targeting “Nazi billionaires” like Elon Musk. Sylvia Ruhl writes about SAlt’s antifascist campaigns and how their campaign against Tesla is tailing Democrat Party style liberal activism.
Socialist Alternative (and the left more broadly), has over the last few months oriented towards campaigning against a nebulously-defined “far-right”. The main individuals at the centre of this campaign are recently re-elected US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who has been put in charge of the newly-anointed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative tasked with purging opposition to the Trumpist political program from the state. Australian Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, despite the impending election which could see him elected as Prime Minister, receives less attention from these campaigns. The successes of the far-right in Europe and the misogyny of young men are also highlighted, but only for the purpose of endlessly repeating statistics on these topics.
This latest wave of anti-fascist activism is, put simply, not socialist at all. It is liberal tailism. The content of this politics focuses almost entirely on Elon Musk’s latest racist stunts, and the immediate impacts of policies enacted by the Trump administration, with vague reference to the possible ideological motivations behind them. It is a politics no different than what one would hear from most liberal public figures, save for a “radical” facade barely maintained by making sure to mention the need to also fight capitalism.
That is to say, comrades will talk about how “bad” it is that this or that executive order was signed by Trump, or how “shameful” it is that the US now has a hard-right government that actively associates itself with Musk. No effort is taken to understand, or explain the class forces at play here or in the US, and protest after protest is called to hit the streets to simply “fight Trump” and “Oppose Nazi Billionaires”, without ever specifying what it actually means to do this in Australia (or even why we should bother with such vaguely-defined “fighting”).
This orientation is epitomised by the content approved and published by Red Flag, with a recent article calling for an “international anti-fascist campaign against Tesla”, which by the content of the article appears to mostly be a call to protest outside Tesla dealerships. The author even outright calls the decentralised “Tesla takedown” protest movement in the US a “positive development”. In the days following this article being published, the Brisbane branch of SAlt have even begun to officially organise a protest outside a local Tesla showroom on exactly this basis! What demands are being put forward by SAlt as part of this “Tesla Takedown” campaign? What role can it play in eventually bringing the working class to power? The answer to these questions are “none” and “it can’t”. The “official” website for this latest campaign that SAlt are currently tailing simply calls for the following actions: “Take action at Tesla showrooms everywhere”, “Sell your Teslas”, “Dump your stock”, “Stop Musk Now” [see: taketesladown.com]. This is a doomed attempt at a consumer boycott, and it has nothing to do with socialist politics. We need to fight together to strengthen working class organising and political education, not follow liberals on moralistic tantrums.
Another piece from the recent deluge of articles on the “far-right” by Red Flag was one strangely titled Resisting the right-wing vibe shift. The article discussed the Silicon Valley billionaires’ newfound support for Trump, explaining this realignment as follows: “Diversity, equity and inclusion programs fitted the vibe of the 2010s and early 2020s, when millions of people mobilised to demand racial justice and the #MeToo movement excoriated misogynistic corporate culture. Companies adapted to try to maintain relevance amongst their consumer base. But that moment has passed, and the naked pursuit of profit and power, the preferred state of affairs for the billionaires, is making a comeback.” Marxists do not attempt to understand the world by assessing changes in the “vibe” of society over time, we do so by examining the class forces at play, and this allows us to understand why certain sections of capital back the politics they do.
It is true that a significant and now larger tendency of tech capital, now referred to as the “tech-right”, has given their backing to the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. We cannot understand this as Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others simply becoming reactionary as part of the zeitgeist and leave it at that. The industrial capitalist class have long opposed workers organising, and sought to bring them under discipline and control in order to maximise profits. This has been a core part of modern digital computing since its earliest days, with the original tools on which computing was based being envisioned by codesigner Charles Babbage as tools for the automation and discipline of labour. Babbage’s famous volume, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, published one year before the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, included discussion of methods of labour division and surveillance that have roots on the Empire’s plantations.
The methods of labour discipline pioneered in industrial Britain have continued through to the present day, and the development of new technologies by the tech industry, including “Artificial Intelligence” (really just energy-intensive pattern recognition programs) is done explicitly to innovate in the surveillance of workers, whether that be at the workplace or at the nation’s borders. In doing so it helps to preserve the relations of exploitation. Babbage himself saw democracy and capitalism as being incompatible, and there is a clear line in the ideology of Silicon Valley from their earlier progenitors; not long ago largely the remit of Peter Thiel and his followers. The shift of the C-suite to the tech-right can be seen as part of this return to an explicitly anti-democratic worldview.
It is clear that the eugenicist tech-right ideology, whilst new in its all-but-open acceptance by CEOs, is not at all new within Silicon Valley. Regardless, even if it was, our task as communists and radical workers is not to campaign against the most anti-democratic figureheads of the ruling classes. It is to fight capital, and to bring the working class to power. Defeating the tech-right can only be completed if the working class expropriates the sprawling technological apparatuses and bring them under democratic control, repurposing their management for the collective and ecological good. Through this (and not through futile calls for a “Tesla Takedown”) will they finally be relegated to the dustbin of history.
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