Elon Musk Is The Perfect Avatar Of Capitalism
Musk provides a public lesson of how capitalist production works, while the public show we only like capitalism when we pretend it is something else.
Probably the only positive to come out of Elon Musks chaotic purchase of Twitter is that it has pulled away the veneer of him as some kind of uniquely superhuman entrepreneur single-handedly building Tesla and his other companies into brilliant successes.
Much like Trump, he owes a good deal of his success to inherited wealth and a knack for controversy. This in itself is not particularly interesting; we are well adjusted to generational wealth and C-level psychopaths and were able to accept these traits in Musk with grace.
No, the controversy has instead centred around what Musk has done with the company he purchased. He moved in and within a couple days drastically shifted Twitter into a direction he wanted, firing nearly half the workforce with little to no consultation with workers. He unilaterally decided to revamp the trust system and eliminate content moderation teams based on his own preferred style of free speech.
In short, he was barging around the place barking orders as if he owned it.
Now I’m not entirely sure which ideological category I’m meant to be in. I’ve lost track of what the “Left” and “Far Left” categories are supposed to mean and I’m not sure anyone less than 150 years old is really settled on what “Marxist” is meant to convey.
What I do know for sure however is that Musk is a to-the-bones capitalist. His actions after taking over Twitter are just about the most Capitalist thing a capitalist could do. Had the god of Capitalism sent its only son to lead a Fortune 500, an Avatar to teach us the ways of Capital, it might look very much like this.
After all, isn’t this what we wanted? What are we so upset about? Isn’t this how it’s meant to work?
Capitalism at its core is about the relationship between an owner and an employee. The worker does all the stuff and the owner makes all the decisions. The owner decides to fire half the staff and change the direction of the company? It’s no big deal, they’re the owner, that’s their right. Or not even a right, their sacred responsibility. As a rando on Twitter said recently:
We’ve convinced ourselves that this is not merely one way to organise production, it is in fact the only way.
The conflict we are now experiencing with Musk is the realisation that the values embodied in our social structure do not reflect the ones we actually hold individually. We desperately want to believe we are egalitarian and meritocratic in a system that is anything but.
Instead of addressing this conflict we usually cover it up in corporate jargon and euphemisms. Instead of “Musk has decided to fire half the company to save himself from bankruptcy” we usually say “Twitter has decided to undertake a radical re-organisation to reduce costs and increase efficiency”.
See how much better that is? Now we don’t have a person to blame, it’s the “company” that decided. It wasn’t in the interests of the owner, it was in the interests of the “company”.
This is a total inversion of the relationship. It pretends that the decision is made by the collective in the interests of the collective, which could be not be further from the truth.
This is the kind of language we are used to and it works. It lets us cosplay egalitarianism and pretend the entire system is not built on exploitation.
What Musk did to Twitter differs from what happens in other companies only in form not in substance. The public was given a front row seat, with honest and transparent reasoning along the way. Instead of hiding behind a faceless collective, he owned it all. He made the choices, it’s his company and his vision. This is the raw core of a capitalist organisation.
Why did we not rush to Musks defence when he fired half his workforce. “That’s his right! It’s his company!” we should have cried out. This is the only way the system works! Anything else would be communism! We didn’t, because most people are good and having a functioning ability to feel empathy and harbour a sense of what constitutes fairness.
It is now evident that we only like capitalism when it is made to look like something else. We don’t take the cover off the system because the cover is the only thing making it bearable.
what if we didn’t have to be conflicted?
People often mistake capitalism to be about free markets and private companies, and in a sense it is associated with those things. But free markets existed long before. There were free markets for slaves, there were free markets in feudal systems, after the lord had taken their ‘share’. The real core of it is within the organisation, it is the relationship that exists between the owner and the worker.
It doesn’t need to be this way. It’s not a natural law, it’s just a set of social norms and property law. There’s no natural right giving the person at the top of a hierarchy ownership of everything produced by those below them.
We certainly don’t do that with the parts of society run democratically. In fact we have a polar opposite ideology - we believe in democracy, we claim, because everyone has a right to a say in the decisions that affect their lives. If that is true for the local city council (admit you have no idea who your local member is), when why isn’t it true in the place we spend the majority of our productive lives?
No matter how intelligent or not they might be, the owner or CEO is only a small part of the organisations they lead. Musk did not help build a single Tesla. He didn’t write the code in its software or conduct research and experimentation for its design and construction.
The employees in Tesla did all the work. If Musk had not been there, they still would have been able to do everything, and it might be a somewhat different result, but without the employees the company would be today worthless, no matter how brilliant he was. To be sure Musk did play a part - he has his own skills and contribution as does every other employee - but there is no way in which his input is worth a thousand, million times that of any other person.
Given it's the workers that make the company, I want you to imagine for a moment that we flipped the owernship model of Twitter and turned it into a democracy. A democratic Twitter would be one in which every employee has an equal share of ownership and participates in electing representatives (maybe the CEO and board of directors?) to run the company.
Any important decision, such as firing everyone or changing the high level strategy would be put to the employees to decide.
How would this change recent events? For a start Musk could still feasibly be CEO if he had applied for the role and the employees voted for him. It would have been their choice. But he’d be accountable to them and not the other way around. Everything he has done would be subject to their approval. We probably wouldn’t have a dumpster fire and thousands of people looking for work.
We’d also probably have a smaller organisation, one that is more transparent, one that might be more difficult to subvert by state actors like DHS has done.
These organisations already exist, they are called worker cooperatives and I highly recommend reading up on them at Democracy@Work.
Capitalist production isn’t the only way to organise society, but until we start looking critically at the way we are organised now, its strengths and its flaws, we will not be able to make progress.