“Elon Musk” published in August 2018 on Olly Thorn’s ‘Philosophy Tube’ YouTube channel
I recently watched this very interesting Philosophy Tube video, but found that I needed to make some notes to get my head around all of the arguments, these can be found below.
Parts 1/2: The ‘Comprehensive Designer’
Elon Musk has cult status, a kind of Tony Stark billionaire. The counterculture of the 1960s has led to modern Technoculture. 1960s Counterculture had two strands:
1 Radical Left Wing
2 New Communalists (our idea of 60s counterculture) - seen as ‘cool’, close links with early Technoculture which saw computers and the internet as a possible means to ‘set people free’ and overturn the old, stuffy order. The Comprehensive Designers (a 1960s term meaning a “synthesis of artist, innovator, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist”) were the new countercultural heroes.
Part 3 The Backlash
Susan Faludi claimed in The Backlash (1991) that those whose privilege is threatened by progress fight to challenge that progress (and have access to the levers to power to do so effectively). By the 1990s the countercultural Technoculture entrepreneurs were very rich and now had a powerful incentive not to change the structures of privilege they previously challenged, indeed as they got richer they pushed for deregulation and smaller government (ie Liberal values). They had become Techno-Libertarians. The tech billionaires have mythologised their status as ‘self-made’ (fitting into a libertarian narrative) however many came from rich backgrounds, and they built on the work of others.
Part 4 Che Guevara T-Shirts
Slavoj Žižek coined the term ‘Liberal Communists’ as those who simultaneously want to support and seek to destroy Capitalism (a deliberately self-contradictory term). It is like flirting, both sides are deliberately ambiguous and know the nature of the game that is going on, and can plausibly disavow their real intentions if challenged. If your wear a Che Guevara T-Shirt it has probably been made by an underpaid worker in a poor country and sold to you for a profit by a large corporation. This goes against what Che Guevara would have stood for. However if you claim to be wearing in ‘ironically’ you can disavow the exploitation that went into its production. Žižek claims that such disavowals are not a valid excuse, the real world consequences of the consumption of the T-Shirt (or other goods or services) are what matters.
So Liberal Communists are both massively benefitting from the existing capitalist system yet simultaneously (and very publicly) criticising it. Wealth creation only happens by under-compensating labour (Marx, Das Kapital, 1867) - unless you pay a worker less than the true monetary value that they create through their labour then there is nothing left over for capitalist profit. So (a Marxist would argue) all of the enormous wealth of the Liberal Communist Techno-Libertarian billionaires is built on the exploitation of the labour employed in creating that wealth, and they (the billionaires) will use their power and influence to protect that wealth: for example by donating to political parties, or ‘discouraging’ workers from joining unions (thus denying them the chance to collectively bargain for better terms and conditions for example, so leaving the employer/employee power dynamic very one-sided in favour of the employer).
The Liberal Communist tech billionaires will support (fund) those ‘think-tanks’ (whose job is to develop policy and advise governments) that do not threaten the wealth of billionaires or seek to give more rights or protections to workers, thus ‘manufacturing’ a political consensus (in their favour).
Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism claims “far from constituting any kind of progressive alternative to official capitalist ideology, liberal communism constitutes the dominant ideology of capitalism now”
The aesthetics of counterculture have been appropriated to sell us symbols of anti-capitalist resistance (oh, the irony!) (after Horkheimer & Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944). The power of any genuine anti-capitalist ideology is thus blunted and the prospect of any real change neutralised. Liberal Communist Techno-Libertarians are therefore powerfully supporting the capitalist status quo.
Part 5: The Real Elon Musk Was Inside You All Along
The myth of the ‘Tech-Daddy’ (aka the Liberal Communist Techno-Libertarian billionaires) is used to sell Backlash to men. Corporations will use similar tactics to appeal to other groups: “There are corporations who have floats in the London Pride Parade who sell weapons to countries that use those weapons on LGBT people…” (no reference was given for this claim unfortunately) “… counterculture will have the anti-capitalist strains removed, and what is left will be used to sell you shit”.
Thorn concludes with the question of whether the process of ‘Counterculture into Backlash’ is inevitable for leftist YouTube channels as they become successful.
