By TARSUS GENUS*
Musk says that a general jam is needed, without the State and without structured classes, so that society only recognizes subjects as individuals fighting to be more unequal on merit.
A billionaire foreign businessman, here in Brazil, commands the opposition to democracy and popular sovereignty and seeks foreign allies, in nearby countries, to wage his war against the sovereignty of the State, the Republic and the idea of nation, which was at the root of our constituent process. And he does so supported by a fascist crowd, allied with the worst of authoritarian neoliberalism, an enemy of fundamental rights and popular sovereignty. This is Elon Musk.
Elon Musk's idea is to establish a new type of State, through a private structure of sovereign power, that can corrode democratic values - inside and outside the normative structure of the established State - depriving it of its sovereign power legitimized by the democratic elections, to create a criminal system of private power that controls the Republic, from the outside in, without territorial occupation of a military nature.
Erik Olin Wright seeks, in the concluding part of his book, Class analysis – approaches, an answer to the dilemma “if class is the answer, what is the question?” – formulating the specific question: “how people, individually and collectively, subjectively situate themselves and others within a structure of inequality.” It is an axial question to place us today in the new structure of classes and “non-classes” of financial capitalism boosted by new technologies, globalized by unequal and exasperated consumerism.
Elon Musk and Karl Marx would follow the same path with the aim of providing answers with different meanings and ideals. Marx would say that through the political struggle between classes – peaceful or armed, according to the Marx we read – we should achieve a state of extinction of classes, in a society guided by equality with the recognition of differences. Elon Musk says – like Javier Milei – that a general jelly is needed, without a State and without structured classes, so that society only recognizes subjects as individuals fighting to meritively be more unequal.
It seems ironic to place in the same text the influence on reality of two very different practitioners and thinkers. But it won't be, if we think that Marx is the main heir of the 18th century enlightenment and Elon Musk is today the main agitator and “an influencer” of the end of bourgeois humanism. This, at the same time as it destroys illustrated humanist heritages, promotes an aesthetics of decadence, which embodies – with its provocative idiocy and its perverted talent – the idea of monetizing scoundrels as added value to its performance audacity.
Elon Musk's experience as CEO, chancellor and leader of a new global sovereign power, which rises on the horizon of contemporary history, is not only the new outline of a libertine fascist epic, today dubbed “libertarian”, but it is, above all, , the promise of a new stage – at the time of the dissolution of the traditional imperial-colonial project – that moves towards another level of power of global financial capital, in the current world system.
Elon Musk conceives a political line, as a special agent of the technological and informational changes of the great piracy of capitalism, as an informal representation of new sovereign entities. Different and distant from the modern states formed so far, Musk's State is the “flow state”, without a homeland and without humanist prurience: a total global state of a private nature, which crushes the public agencies that created the rules of State power. right.
These States challenge the genetics of the rule of law – national and social – by capturing opinion in the dictatorship of the market and which has at its limit both war and military dictatorship as its ultimate resource. The naturalization of violence, the end of any social protection and the multiplication of the police State, in the face of the degradation of what remains of the State's public functions, are its path.
Elon Musk embodies the fact that there is another reality underway, where the concepts of homeland, nation and solidarity will be buried by these new managers, scoundrels of capitalism in crisis, full of “shine” in the most exciting moments of their lives, for whom nothing matters: poverty, destroyed families, murdered children, young people starving, precarious work and winter nights without heat. Nothing matters to them.
What matters to them is the next stock price and how the idiotic and pathetic editorials of the inhumanity of the major press organizations will see their conduct defying the democratic order, to negotiate with them the results of the monetization of lies industrially produced in the catacombs of the networks.
The alarming naturalness with which the mainstream press treats Elon Musk's piracy against the continent's democracies, in Bolivia saying that a coup d'état would be great so that the country can be colonized to deliver its lithium, in Brazil attacking the powers of the Republic, the president of the Supreme Court and subverting the political struggle to transform it into an angry kennel of protagonists of the fascist right, he, Elon Musk, walks an ocean of delusions like a foreign agent of a state without a country.
The synthesis that Elon Musk represents is the following: his power left “free” will result in the implementation of a “new type” sovereignty, whose normative order will only be a digital and communicational flow, combined in a sequence of company networks – real and virtual – in whose intelligent “nodes” will be the commands of the new private sovereignty, accepted as if it were an invading National State that has already dominated the territory.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts) [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]
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