INTRODUCTION

As war with Iran unfolds, we bear witness to a violent contradiction within the American imperial state. On the one hand, the power of the state has never seemed more invincible, with the American military able to annihilate schools full of children from across the world by leveraging highly advanced drone strikes and global positioning satellites. On the other hand, the state’s capacity for mass destruction appears increasingly dependent upon quasi-sovereign technology firms like Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla that escape the state’s direct command. Further complicating this contradiction is the struggle on both state and capital’s part to re-shore and re-concentrate supply chains and production along hardening national borders within a world that has never been more materially interdependent. And at the center of this world-historic decomposition of global capitalism is Elon Musk, one of the most powerful men on the face of the earth, whose increasingly erratic online activity betrays the anxieties of a man who senses himself losing control.

In “Muskism,” Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff attempt to make sense of not only Musk the man, but also the world that made his rise possible. Slobodian and Tarnoff have presented us with a comprehensive portrait of Musk, centering the late-20th and early-21st century productive and historical forces that have contributed to the international political chaos we presently find ourselves in. Per the cover’s tagline, Muskism gives readers a digestible guide with which to navigate the Trump II world, in addition to giving an account of the rise of Silicon Valley that most strongly situates it within the Global War on Terror throughout the 2000s.

This review intends to render more explicit the dynamics of class antagonism less visible within Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account. Slobodian and Tarnoff rightfully center dynamics like globalization, financialization, and contractorization in explaining the conditions that made Musk’s success possible. Such terms, however, can obscure the degree to which working-class struggle drove the conditions pressuring the recomposition of the state toward these increasingly privatized and contractorized forms of governance. Because Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account of Muskism focuses primarily on organizational strategy and ideological formation, class struggle becomes difficult to foreground at this level of analysis. Centering class struggle not only clarifies the dynamics underlying Slobodian and Tarnoff’s own framework, but clarifies the political field of possibility for organizing against the white supremacist cybernetic future of which Musk is the standard-bearer.

Musk’s strategy to integrate Starlink, X, Tesla, and SpaceX into a self-enclosed technological empire should be understood as an attempt to reassert managerial command over a global labor process that has achieved a significant degree of mobility over the past several decades of working-class struggle and transformation. The integration of precarious, logistical, and technical labor into an increasingly continuous, real-time system of coordination—accelerated by the Global War on Terror—has rendered traditional forms of labor discipline, segmented production, and institutional mediation under earlier phases of neoliberalism increasingly inadequate. Production, as a result, now operates across increasingly continuous and real-time global supply chains.

Musk, in response, has pursued a policy of vertical integration that seeks to synchronize these dispersed productive capacities within the firm, while at the same time intensifying the state’s dependence on his privately-controlled aerospace and energy infrastructures, i.e., satellite networks, launch systems, and energy grids. This strategy depends upon organizing hundreds of millions of workers in a tightly policed choreography across the global supply chain. In this regard, Muskism mobilizes race to reorganize the contradiction between global labor’s integration and fragmentation. Even as race divides the international proletariat socially, it materially integrates workers into global production via continuous supply chains. Under Muskism, racialized labor organization reintegrates “high-value” technical and productive nodes into the imperial core. At the same time, “low-value” logistical and productive nodes throughout the Global South are subjected to harsher border regimes, racialized policing, and labor discipline. Muskism, therefore, seeks to reorganize class antagonism along hardening racial lines. However, despite certain critics taking Musk’s purported anti-globalism at his word, Slobodian and Tarnoff astutely observe that Musk’s strategy accelerates the very mobility and labor fragmentation it seeks to overcome, presupposing a historically-constituted form of social labor that cannot be completely enclosed within any one organizational form, whether public or private.

In part, this review utilizes a framework that operates on a different level of abstraction from Slobodian and Tarnoff’s own intellectual history. Integrating a hermeneutic centered on class struggle necessarily transforms intellectual history as a genre, which often underscores elite political strategy and institutional mediation in ways that render collective political agency less visible. Again, this is not a limitation unique to Slobodian or Tarnoff themselves, who throughout the text carefully emphasize how Musk’s rise was enabled by concrete political decisions made by state actors and financial capitalists, as well as shifts in American political economy. Rather, intellectual history’s emphasis on ideological formation and institutional development can at times risk obscuring the degree to which capital must ultimately develop on terrain shaped by labor’s own recomposition. Beginning from this standpoint, we find that techno-rightists like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel appear less as grand strategists of a new world capitalist order than as contradictory responses to forms of labor recomposition whose material integration and social fragmentation continually generate the conditions for social crisis and revolutionary transformation.

PROLETARIAT MOBILITY

As a class strategy, Muskism only becomes intelligible in light of the ways in which capital was forced to reorganize itself by the growing mobility of labor throughout the late twentieth century. Generally, histories of late-20th century neoliberalism tend to frame capital as the primary agent and labor as reactive. So when the American and Western European working classes achieved real gains over the state in the postwar period, these histories frame capital’s response as introducing precarity and fragmentation via capital flight and lean production.^[1] Such accounts risk framing Musk as the primary agent within the story of labor rather than labor being the primary agent of Musk. Capital transformation was driven by labor’s achievements, forced to keep up with labor as it recomposed into something far more mobile and difficult to bind than the early and mid twentieth century. We must reframe capital as competing on labor’s terms to understand the proliferation of contractorization in the nineties and turn of the millennium that would lead to Musk’s rise to stardom. At first, contractorization emerged because capital can only discipline labor through racialized fragmentation, yet only by overcoming this same fragmentation can it coordinate production. It is in this contradiction that Musk will emerge as a solution, but one that reproduces the contradiction of fragmentation and integration at a higher level than just the contractor firm.

The postwar period was one in which labor forced the capitalist state to respond to its demands, achieving a degree of political and social mobility that would in turn pressure capital to recompose itself into forms more capable of recapturing command over an increasingly mobile working-class. Through the fifties and sixties, American labor won incredible achievements in political and social mobility. The Black working- and middle-classes clawed their way into jobs and professions hitherto barred from them while winning political protections through the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the sixties.^[2] Women entered formal wage labor and professional employment in increasing numbers, partially escaping patriarchal forms of control in the household, and winning the right to become homeowners and open credit accounts without male co-signers.^[3] Throughout this period, rank-and-file rebellions against shop-floor discipline proliferated, with blue-collar workers quitting on the spot to find work elsewhere.^[4] The mass suburbanization of the postwar period, the expansion of the highway system, and the rapid proliferation of mass communication technologies like television and radio gave the working-class a heightened degree of mobility that made firm-specific local discipline far more difficult. Some presumed in the 1950s that the integration of civil society into the postwar state, guaranteeing a certain level of the working-class social reproduction directly through state programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance, and indirectly through formally distinct civil institutions like churches and unions, would negate class antagonism through social integration.^[5] But such integration only exposed and accelerated the crisis of territorially bounded Fordist institutions like factories and trade unions as mechanisms for disciplining social labor.

But class struggle only intensified as the socialization of labor made it so that workers could no longer be directly disciplined within the firm.^[6] Although capital’s introduction of automation into the factory was successful in wresting control over the production process from labor, it only intensified class antagonism on the shop-floor, accelerated the problem of worker labor-power in its interchangeability with other workers, and induced shortages in skilled labor. As David Noble observes in his history of postwar machinist labor, “...these management strategies and objectives tended invariably to intensify worker hostility and resistance, thus handicapping its efforts and provoking serious challenge to its goals.”^[7] This contradiction, in which the firm’s attempts to discipline labor only further contributes to labor’s socialization and mobility throughout society, will demand a new class strategy to reimpose forms of discipline more adequate to a more mature neoliberal order. Muskism will later emerge as a means of partially resolving this contradiction, temporarily recomposing labor within the firm while nevertheless presupposing its mobility.

In this light, the explosion of contractorization through the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century emerges as an attempt to channel labor’s mobility into forms of discipline that temporarily recompose labor-power within tightly integrated global supply chains, even as it further disintegrates capital coordination and command. Capital, forced to compete on the terms of labor’s mobility, reorganized this mobility in order to reinstantiate discipline within and without the factory. Manufacturing firms began spinning off their productive units, opting instead for contractors and sub-contractors throughout a vast, global supply chain to whom they could pass off the responsibility for wages, benefits, and dealing directly with shop-floor struggles.^[8] Lean production emerges as a means of re-disciplining social labor on the basis of labor’s hardwon mobility: mobility was transmuted into precarity, flexibility became fragmentation as warehouse and shipyard workers were pressed to work harder to meet the “continuous” flow of demands from buyer firms upward, sellers downward, and competing contractor firms across the global value-chain.^[9] The increasing ungovernability of labor drove the development of electronic surveillance to control labor’s mobility, further intensifying the labor process.^[10] The fragmentation of global production is what would both make Musk’s strategy necessary for certain strata within the capitalist class and also act as the set of conditions that Musk will attempt to overcome through vertical integration.

Yet contractorization and the resulting differentiation of labor contribute to the incoordination and instability generated by labor’s increasing mobilization within global production. Race becomes central to organizing capital’s offensive against labor’s recomposition, stabilizing a highly fragmented but materially integrated workforce composed of precarious subcontracted laborers, logistical workers, and highly-skilled technical labor. Through intensified border regimes, race helps to surveil and manage differentially valued immigrant labor, coordinating labor mobility across transnational value chains. But race only heightens this fragmentation, stabilizing integration while hardening difference. Labor’s fragmentation via contractorization demands organizational stratification for capital to adequately coordinate production, but stratification requires stabilization in order to achieve integration. Although functionally integrated, these strata of workers are hierarchically organized and disproportionately exposed to risk along these value chains. Race becomes a means of naturalizing and reifying this process of differentiation: materially privileged white and East Asian engineers in Palo Alto design Tesla batteries that are then manufactured within increasingly automated gigafactories throughout the United States and China. At the same time, Musk simultaneously seeks to selectively reintegrate strategic nickel and lithium mining sites in central Canada and the American Midwest within the imperial core. Yet the lithium and cobalt composing these Tesla batteries are mined and shipped by incredibly precarious miners in Peru and the Congo.^[11] Muskism emerges as a means of reorganizing racialization via intensified border regimes and selective vertical integration of strategic supply-chain bottlenecks within the imperial core.

The increasing ungovernability of labor—and capital’s offensive disciplining of said labor through lean production, automation, and capital flight—drove late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century imperial state formation, integrating contractorization and privatization in order to more quickly and adequately address conflict across the span of the globe. In the mid-twentieth century, international Western capital broadly responded to mass labor’s growing capacity to force concessions from the nation-state through what Slobodian calls “encasement:” the construction of international institutions designed to insulate markets from labor’s expanding political power within mass democracy.^[12] The attempt at encasement was also a means of containing and partially neutralizing the successful decolonial movements blooming throughout the Global South that threatened the global hegemony of the United States and Western Europe. However, encasement grew increasingly inadequate through the late-twentieth century as both labor within the imperial core and the global periphery became progressively more socialized, mobile, and militant even as its political coherence increasingly fragmented at the level of the nation-state.

The mobility and fragmentation of late-twentieth century labor created the conditions that formed the American state towards contractorization and privatization, and for men like Musk to reap the whirlwind. Beginning in the 1990s, the Pentagon increasingly contracted out productive and intelligence services to private firms, a process that accelerated after the launch of the Global War on Terror.^[13] Slobodian and Tarnoff refer to a prescient speech made by Donald Rumsfeld the day before September 11 in which he outlined his vision of how “combat [would be] rewired for the dot-com era: the military would resemble the internet, with its ships and planes and tanks continuously exchanging information with one another in order to detect threats and coordinate a response.”^[14] This “continuous” form of state governance was grounded in the state’s growing inability to directly organize labor at the scale required, owing to its own capacities having been eroded by decades of social struggle and neoliberal restructuring. Rumsfeld’s vision of continuous, real-time coordination attains material realization in Musk’s strategy of subordinating the state to his infrastructural power as a contractor.

This is the moment of class struggle out of which Muskism arises. Late twentieth-century capital’s reorganization towards contracting may then be understood as capital accepting labor’s mobility, but disciplining it via racial, geographic, and professional differentiation, while at the same time losing direct command over labor. Contracting becomes a temporary means of recomposing command over labor without undermining the global supply chains and productive processes that presuppose it. In addition to the loss of direct command over labor-power, there also comes the cost of fragility. Global lean production and racialized value chains produce choke points in which localized struggle often sends shockwaves through the system. We may now deepen Slobodian and Tarnoff’s sketch of Muskism as not only a “modernizing project” parallel to Fordism, but a class strategy that strategically intensifies the contradiction, whose violence forces international capital into competing strategies to resolve at the level of the global market what cannot be resolved at the level of the contractorized firm.^[15]

MUSKISM AS CLASS STRATEGY

The instability of contractorization through the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has generated a host of competing class strategies, against which Muskism both competes but also attempts to subordinate. What we call Neoliberalism is constituted by a number of competing class strategies, each attempting to resolve at both the level of the localized firm and globalized production the same contradiction of ungovernable and global labor. Though Slobodian and Tarnoff go beyond other commentators in situating Muskism within political economy, their formulation at times leaves implicit how Muskism emerges out of conflict with fractions of capital against which Musk both opposes and attempts to synthesize, and the emergent tensions between them that Musk exploits in the midst of the crisis of imperial accumulation. Each of these strategies at once resolves one set of contradictions driving the crisis of international capital accumulation, while reproducing them at a higher level. Slobodian and Tarnoff’s analysis at times risks presenting Muskism as a coherent strategy rather than an unwieldy and contradictory gambit attempting to synthesize the coordination of finance, the integration of global production, and the real-time control of data firms within the firm, even as it depends upon these very same fractions. Slobodian and Tarnoff’s image of the “walled garden” is a strong starting point for understanding the ideological self-understanding of Muskism, but more radical insight requires centering the struggles between the class fractions that drive Muskism as an attempted resolution to the core contradiction at the heart of imperial accumulation.^[16]

The three fractions of capital against which Muskism poses itself are finance capital, globally distributed producers like Nike and Apple, and other formations of the tech right like Palantir. Where financial capital seeks to coordinate labor via abstraction, distributed producers embrace fragmentation while abandoning direct command, and the tech right governs fragmentation through data. Muskism aims to reimpose direct command over labor-power via selective integration into the firm, but can only do so because of the very fragmentation it purports to resolve.

The driving contradiction of finance that calls forth someone like Musk is its incapacity to directly command global labor power even as it indirectly coordinates it. As a financial strategy, Muskism seeks to subordinate finance capital to its high-growth, high-risk infrastructural projects, an aim in tension with financial capital’s historic preference for immediate short-term and guaranteed profit expectations. On the surface, Muskism and international financial capital appear in tension with respect to the manner in which they are materially grounded. However, regarding labor, each resolves one contradiction only to reproduce the other side. Although finance capital has incredible scope in its capacity to order global markets, enforce racialized debt regimes, and structure institutions, its abstractive nature means that it cannot directly command production and labor-power. Though Muskism attempts to reinstitute direct command over labor within the firm, it is forced to rely on the abstractive financial system that holds the means to do so. The abstractive nature of finance materially structures the racialization of global supply chains on which Musk depends by imposing debt regimes across exporter countries throughout the Global South. This process of racialized market structuralization is necessary for Musk to exploit the value chains from which he carries out selective vertical integration.

Slobodian and Tarnoff spend time in the text fleshing out the “financial fabulism” of Musk and the tech right—with their start-up boosterism in which the future is just a decade away—that grafts together Big Tech and finance through the 1990s to the present day.^[17] However, Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account at times risks smoothing over the contradictory tension between Muskism and finance capital regarding command over labor-power and the partially incommensurable profit horizons between the two. Muskism aims to subordinate financial capital to his infrastructural projects headed by Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink; but Musk can only achieve independence from finance capital by enlisting it, thereby driving him towards further dependence on the very capital fraction he seeks to escape through actions like Tesla going public in the early 2010s. Muskism’s financial strategy grafts the short-term profit horizons of finance onto the long-term temporal horizons of infrastructural production, a tension it is unable to resolve.^[18]

Dispersed global producers govern these global value chains by intensifying contractorization and creating conditions for Muskism to overcome productive fragmentation via vertical integration. If the struggle between Muskism and financial capital over command of labor-power appears abstract, then the fight between Muskism and distributive producers like Apple and Nike appears more concrete. As Slobodian and Tarnoff sharply observe, Musk early in the 2000s swam against the “globalizing currents of the 2000s, which positioned the factory as a node within an international production network woven together through supply chains.”^[19] Muskism, however, does not seek to negate these global value chains. Rather, Muskism aims to preserve the continual “just-in-time” nature of global production by vertically integrating select components within the firm, decreasing the workflow time between design and production. “Minimizing the number of managers meant engineers were empowered to make decisions on the fly. It also reduced the distance between Musk and his employees. [Musk] liked not having to dilute his dominance through an elaborate chain of command: he preferred to rule personally.”^[20] Muskism achieves selective vertical integration, but can only centralize control by intensifying instability downward throughout the “low-value” productive and logistical nodes, disproportionately absorbed by racialized and spatially fixed pools of labor throughout South America, East Asia, and Africa.^[21] This intensification concretely manifests through harsher labor discipline to keep up with production cycles, stricter productive timelines to meet continuous production schedules, and the volatilization of supply chain chokepoints. Thus, Muskism exists in opposition to older regimes of neoliberal productive dispersion, but doing so by selectively recapitulating those same relations within the firm itself, while increasing its dependence upon fragmented labor it cannot integrate.

The most fascinating but least explored class tensions within Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account are those within the tech right itself, specifically between Musk and Thiel’s Palantir. Slobodian and Tarnoff mention Palantir as an oftentimes ally with Musk in their shared aim to induce state dependence upon their infrastructures.^[22] As Sloboidan and Tarnoff frame it: “Thiel [through Palantir] would scour the world’s networks for traces of America’s enemies. Musk would help the Pentagon expand its orbital network to hunt those enemies from space.”^[23] However, Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account risks excluding how Muskism and Palantir deepen the very contradiction that either intends to solve, driving them to further rely upon the other. Palantir presupposes the opacity of a fragmented planetary capitalist society, offering the means of temporarily unifying this world at an epistemic level for state-level actors via surveillance and data analytics. Muskism, however, attempts to overcome this fragmentation materially through selective vertical integration and intensifying border regimes.

However, despite these differences, both class fractions of the tech right reproduce the conditions for and presuppose the other. Palantir manages fragmentation by rendering racialized labor-power legible to capital and the state, but data-driven governance requires increasingly centralized control over material infrastructure like launch systems, energy grids, and satellite capabilities. Importantly, Palantir offers the means to target and surveil racialized working-class populations most likely to confront carceral governance and discipline.^[24] In attempting to overcome fragmentation, Musk centralizes strategic nodes of material production within the firm, but Musk cannot totally overcome fragmentation globally and so relies increasingly upon Palantir’s continuous informational coordination of fragmented labor. Neither class fraction of the tech right can succeed independently, nor are their solutions completely compatible. The result is not a stable alliance, but a contradictory interdependence through which attempts to completely resolve material and epistemic fragmentation only deepen the very conditions that each strives to overcome.

The driving force underlying Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account is made fully explicit once we conceive of the class strategies of finance capital, dispersed productive capital, and the tech right as competing class strategies over how best to impose command over fragmented labor. What all three of these class fractions against which Muskism poses itself have in common is their continual drive to reimpose command over increasingly ungovernable labor in order to reimpose discipline over the racialized international proletariat’s struggle through a fragmentary imperial division of labor. And as these competing class strategies struggle to resolve the crisis of productive labor, we see how this burden is shifted onto the state, where the contradiction threatens to explode at the level of global empire and international production.

THE MUSKIFICATION OF THE STATE AND IMPERIAL CONFLAGRATION

The growing crisis in imperial accumulation throughout the early twenty-first century increasingly endangers the legitimacy of the capitalist state, as the contradiction between labor’s mobility and capital’s command forces the state to radically restructure itself in order to resolve it. Muskism now emerges from this crisis as a global class strategy, both attempting to assert supremacy within heightening inter-imperialist conflict while also containing the crisis erupting out of the American state’s increasing incapacity to govern labor through infrastructural access to satellite systems, energy grids, and launch capabilities. As Slobodian and Tarnoff put it, “the wager of Muskism is that sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial…if sovereignty could be purchased on a subscription basis, the terms of service would ensure that power remained in private hands.”^[25] Yet Muskism as a state strategy for managing the ungovernable fragmentation of labor accentuates it by centralizing power into the hands of private capitalists. And a central component of Muskism as a state strategy is leveraging race as the mechanism through which to spatially and biologically fix labor within both the imperial core and periphery. The crisis of the late imperial state is driven by its increasing incapacity to politically mediate and administer mobile and abstract international labor, which forces the state to fall back on more immediate and direct forms of racialized control provided by infrastructural capitalists like Musk that further undermine its own capacity to function as a formally depoliticized mediator.

Muskism’s “anti-institutional” bent must be understood as a response to the breakdown of political mediation as a means of managing and containing labor mobility and class conflict. Slobodian and Tarnoff make explicit Musk’s two-step process of denouncing the state while benefiting immensely as a state contractor. But their account sometimes leaves implicit what exactly the main contradiction is that has structurally produced such opposition towards international institutions like the IMF and WTO. It is from this standpoint that Muskism emerges as a partial resolution to the crisis of mediation by channeling governance through capitalist technocrats. However, such a shift towards immediacy only accelerates the crisis by politicizing the very markets Muskism attempts to insulate from politicization.

The far-right within the imperial core out of which Muskism ideologically emerges coalesced during the international capitalist crisis of the 1970s. Since the late twentieth-century, international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and later the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been forced by the debt crisis across the Global South to impose austerity regimes to maintain the global financial and productive system, but at the cost of politicizing themselves as partisan actors. Fearful of these international institutions turning around and imposing these regimes onto countries in the imperial core, the response of the far-right throughout the imperial core has roughly been the rejection of these institutions in favor of forms of governance that more radically depoliticize the market and reimpose discipline, i.e. human genetics, hardening borders, and gold or cryptocurrency.

Institutional breakdown in the imperial core throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has generated the conditions for far-right class formations’ attempts to resolve the crisis of mobile and ungovernable labor. This shift is captured in Slobodian’s movement from Globalists to Hayek’s Bastards. If Globalists is about the build-up of international institutions that mediate and encase capitalist markets through the early-to-mid twentieth century, then Hayek’s Bastards concerns the breakdown of these institutions, failing to manage labor’s growing mobility and thereby contributing to the conditions driving the rise of far-right class formations to manage this crisis. Slobodian grounds the ideology of the “New Fusionists” and paleoconservatives in the “three hards: hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.”^[26] Crucially, these three “hards” can only fix labor by displacing the contradiction into progressively naked forms of political and racial domination, further contributing to the very crisis of state legitimacy throughout the imperial core they aim to resolve.

These three “hards” are very useful for gaining a more precise understanding of Muskism’s selective anti-globalism, yet must be slightly reformulated to center their purpose as responses to the crisis of globalized labor in the wake of the perceived failure of older forms of neoliberal state management. Musk’s anti-immigration preference for “hard borders” is an attempt to spatially fix labor and thereby perpetuate the global value chains on which Musk both depends and selectively repudiates—at the same time that such intensified border regimes intensifies national fragmentation and enflames geopolitical fragility throughout the system. Musk’s embrace of hardwired human difference and white nationalism emerge as a response to the crisis of managed difference that abstract labor threatens, attempting to reinstitute the hard differences between the races behind the depoliticized appearance of hard science—yet at the cost of amplifying social conflict by intensifying regimes of racial domination. And finally, hard money, i.e. gold or cryptocurrency, disciplines democratic states by forcing them to adhere to hard monetary policies that proscribe the funding of wealth redistributive policies that threaten to interfere with market forces and labor flows via money printing—but in exchange for destabilizing state governance by limiting the policies capitalist states may pursue to address social conflict.^[27] Slobodian’s “three hards” that undergird the framework for the “New Fusionism” expresses the increasingly abstract ungovernability of labor to which Muskism emerges as partial resolution. Each “hard” aims to spatially, racially, and genetically fix abstract labor, but in doing so, only intensifies the instability generated by globalized labor.

In this sense, the rise of international fascism is a political attempt to reimpose immediacy where mediation is increasingly breaking down within the imperial core. Trumpism is one expression of the culmination rather than repudiation of capital’s decades-long struggle to discipline international labor. The restructuring of the state to keep up with and manage the fluidity of labor has hit increasingly harder limits that have forced it to rely on men like Musk and Thiel, who offer the very infrastructure and platforms necessary for governance. This reliance has accelerated throughout the 2010s amidst renewed tensions with China and the 2020-2021 crises of COVID-19 and George Floyd rebellions that revealed the dangerous contradictions of dispersed production and networked governance. Race becomes a crucial mode of governance for international fascism as a means of differentiating, immobilizing, and disciplining mobile labor under conditions in which political and economic mediation break down. But this growing dependence upon infrastructural contractors to manage and discipline this fragmentation through more immediate forms of confrontation via racialization only accelerates the contradiction as platform and infrastructural capitalists within the tech right garner increasing sway over state governance.

Yet this “state symbiosis,” as Slobodian and Tarnoff conceptualize it, produces its own contradictions that prove dangerous for Musk’s power.^[28] The more Muskism succeeds in inducing state dependence on its infrastructural access, locking it in as a permanent client, the more exposed the state becomes to competing fractions of American society as beholden to a particular class fraction, losing its legitimacy as a mediator of social conflict. The acceleration of state symbiosis we see throughout the 2020s is an intensification of what proceeded during the 2008 financial crisis, during which the state, via the Federal Reserve, moved to bail out finance capital at the expense of the American middle- and working-classes, saving American capitalism at the cost of the state and market losing their status as autonomous mediators.^[29] Attempting to radicalize this direction, Muskism moves to push the state beyond favoring this or that particular class fraction towards favoring particular *owners* of infrastructural capital.

In attempting to depoliticize power by embedding it in intensifying border regimes and algorithmic governance, Muskism intensifies political polarization and more volatile confrontations between the American racialized working-class and the state. The state continually loses both its capacity and aura as a mediator of social conflict. Muskism, thereby, is a strategic attempt to overcome social fragmentation by transforming the state into an infrastructural relay for privately controlled command that can more directly suppress working- and middle-class dissent. But the more successful this strategy becomes, the more it undermines the state's legitimacy as an autonomous mediator of social conflict i.e., the very condition that makes such a strategy viable in the first place.

Muskism’s attempted heightening of societal conflict domestically accentuates imperial conflict abroad. As Musk concentrates control over “high-value” and technical nodes of production within the nation-state, doing so requires the enforcement of “low-value” and racialized nodes of production throughout East Asia, Central Africa, and South America. Musk’s vertical integration requires the American state to compel other capitalist states to intensify labor discipline over the nodes of production situated within their borders. As Phil Neel observes, the US-China “trade war” is less a trade war and more “a process of geopolitical policing designed to secure the apex position of the US within the world market by diversifying its imports and undercutting Chinese firms’ ability to acquire technologies within the sectors that could pose a more direct competitive threat in the future.”^[30] Muskism drives the American state to enforce the global supply chains on which Muskism depends while the American state drives Muskism to vertically integrate in order to better secure the “apex position” of its highly-technical labor within the higher-value links of these global supply chains. Yet this only intensifies conflict abroad, stoking imperial ambitions among subordinate powers to escape the thumb of the premier imperial powers. In turn, these states turn increasingly inward to intensify labor discipline and suppress domestic working-class unrest in order to maintain or surpass their position within global production.

At the same time, multiple nation-states competing with one another are plugged into Musk’s infrastructure, a dependence driven by the differing degrees of incapacity on the part of nation-states to command labor-power. Before February 2026, both Russia and Ukraine depended upon Starlink satellite internet before Musk signed an agreement with the Ukrainian government to limit Russia’s “unauthorized access” to Starlink satellite internet.^[31] This grants Musk a position, presiding over access to the infrastructure that has become necessary for many states to exercise their sovereignty. And Musk is unafraid to exercise this power, as Slobodian and Tarnoff demonstrate in allegedly temporarily deactivating Ukraine’s Starlink access in September 2022 to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian naval ships.^[32] Thus, Muskism emerges to overcome this global fragmentation, but does so by concentrating power into the hands of infrastructural capitalists like Musk, thus deepening this fragmentation that foments further conflict.

Yet Muskism itself possesses its own limits that threaten collapse. Musk’s attempt at selective vertical integration of high-value nodes and enlistment of the state to enforce these global value chains within the imperial core and outside in the periphery pressures other imperial states like China to pursue their own processes of vertical integration within their borders. Because Muskism depends upon the very fragmentation of production it alleges to resolve, the imperial race to vertically integrate high-value nodes of these global productive chains within domestic borders endangers its strategy even as it stokes this imperial and social struggle.

Even nations hosting “low-value” links within these global value chains increasingly become serious sites of imperial struggle, as Russia, China, and the US compete to divert the flow of low-value commodities towards the infrastructural firms within their borders. The racialized proletariat becomes further differentiated by border regimes and imperial policing, but such methods only accelerate the material interdependence of these nodes, generating supply chain chokepoints and stoking militant labor action whose local struggles can quickly have global consequences. Muskism reveals that any attempt to reinstitute command over labor that presupposes the global fragmentation of production only intensifies the crisis, in which every proposed fix only stokes the flames of international revolt that consume the global political order.

AIRING OUT THE MUSK

As empire and capital rush to resolve the planetary crisis, Muskism stokes the conflagration engulfing the global capitalist order. Violent escalation has become the watchword of the day. “The end goal” of Muskism, Slobodian and Tarnoff write, “is a purified community defined by cultural and genetic membership in a white, European West garrisoned by superior ​­technology—​­a fortress to protect the best of humanity from the worst.”^[33] As an intellectual history, Slobodian and Tarnoff’s *Muskism* is the best attempt yet to understand Muskism as a phenomenon and how developments in late-imperial America not only make a man like Musk possible but also increasingly intelligible as a response to late-imperial crisis. Yet Muskism’s “walled garden” strategy only accelerates these crises, requiring the intensification of racial domination and imperial exploitation upon which these global value chains are built upon. The international militarization of borders in both the United States and Western Europe possesses a domestic side: the US-Mexican border no longer projects outward into other Latin American countries, but inward into cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where federal policing and mass incarceration attempt to discipline racialized and undocumented labor, extracting bare obedience at the cost of further delegitimizing both capital and the state.^[34] Such an intensification of migratory policing, both from without and within, serves only to generalize the social crisis that international capital is attempting to resolve. In the end, Muskism’s reliance on naked domination and algorithmic governance seems only to contribute to the crisis of the state, both domestically and internationally.

Foregrounding imperial command over labor-power as the main contradiction of Muskism deepens Slobodian and Tarnoff’s account of Musk’s strategy. Situating Slobodian and Tarnoff’s *Muskism* within the dynamics of class struggle clarifies the depths of the international capitalist crisis that Muskism attempts to resolve. Most importantly, centering class struggle reveals how the international proletariat’s collective political agency continues to drive the antagonistic development of international capital. Our contemporary moment marks the most mature level of this contradiction’s development, in which capitalist integration and fragmentation constitute one another in an extreme polarity. Capitalist production has never before been more integrated and exposed. Yet the very same fragmentation that deprives international capital of its capacity to resolve the crisis also curbs the international proletariat’s capacity to achieve a durable revolutionary formation. However much international labor struggles to develop political forms adequate to today’s revolutionary conditions, Muskism’s success in exploiting racialized fragmentation to the benefit of its imperial clients only further deprives capital of its capacity to nullify the crisis. Crisis by itself is insufficient for revolutionary transformation. But it does lay bare the nakedly partisan structure of both capital and the state, generating the conditions of possibility for international solidarity whose revolutionary potential remains the nightmare of capitalists like Musk.

1. One example of this historical narrative is Louis Hyman. Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. Viking Press.

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2. Elizabeth Hinton. America on Fire: the Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. W. W. Norton & Company. 253-254.

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3. Lane Windham. Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. University of North Carolina Press. 35-38.

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4. Melinda Cooper. Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Orbis Books. 140-144.

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5. David Noble. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. Routledge. 22-25.

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6. See my essay on the postwar working-class driving the crisis of state subsumption of civil society: https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/03/against-civil-society-a-review-of-anton-jagers-hyperpolitics/

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7. David Noble. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. Transaction Publishers. 266.

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8. Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. Viking Press. 143-144.

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9. Phil Neel. Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory. Brill. 139-140.

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10. Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Haymarket Books. 24-25

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11. “Elon Musk Mining Plans: Tesla Ready to Enter Lithium and Nickel Mining, Eyes Asteroids and the Moon for Future Supply,” Canadian Mining Report: https://www.canadianminingreport.com/blog/elon-musk-mining-plans-tesla-ready-to-enter-lithium-and-nickel-mining-eyes-asteroids-and-the-moon-for-future-supply

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12. Quinn Slobodian. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press. 95.

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13. Laura Dickinson. Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs. Yale University Press. 31-33.

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14. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. Muskism. HarperCollins Publishing. 34.

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15. Slobodian and Tarnoff. viii.

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16. Slobodian and Tarnoff. viii-ix.

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17. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 23.

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18. Adam Becker. More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Basic Books. 22-25.

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19. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 46.

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20. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 42.

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21. John Smith. Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism's Final Crisis. Monthly Review Press. 101-132.

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22. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 147.

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23. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 37.

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24. Mara Hvistendahl. How the LAPD and Palantir Use Data to Justify Racist Policing. The Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2021/01/30/lapd-palantir-data-driven-policing/

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25. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 56.

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26. Quinn Slobodian. Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Princeton University Press. 23.

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27. Slobodian. Hayek’s Bastards. 152-153.

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28. Slobodian and Tarnoff. 19.

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29. Nick Srnicek. Platform Capitalism. Polity Press. 25-34.

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30. Neel. Hellworld. 183.

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31. Maria Kolomychenko. How Will the Loss of Starlink and Telegram Impact Russia’s Military?. Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center: https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2026/02/russia-starlink-telegram-shutdown

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32. Slobobidan and Tarnoff. Muskism. 55.

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33. Slobodian and Tarnoff. viii.

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34. Stuart Schrader. Authoritarianism from Below. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/02/14/authoritarianism-from-below-trump-city-takeovers-police/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2026-02-14_Schrader-policing-1

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