The Musk slips
A clumsy brutality has replaced US hegemony. It's sowing the seeds of its own demise.
The far right plutocrats who won power have now got their hands on the money. An unelected billionaire with a straight right arm broke into the Treasury and commandeered America’s $6.8 trillion annual budget.
In his phony quest to lower spending Elon Musk can now more or less decide who gets paid and who doesn’t.
Who gets paid will include his own companies, Space-X, Starlink and Tesla — already major recipients of taxpayer largesse. Any group he doesn’t like — ethnic minorities, the retired or those on low incomes — he can cut.
In doing so the techno-supremacist-in-chief granted himself and his elitist cronies the ability to run amok unhindered by the checks and balances that supposedly distinguish the US constitution.
Never mind the state being a committee to manage the whole affairs of the bourgeoisie; Musk is the state.
Musk then “fed the US Agency for International Development into the wood chipper”, ending half a century of US soft power. The suspension of programmes like the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief will not only reduce America’s reputation abroad but harm thousands of people.
The programme claims to have saved 26 million lives and prevented millions of HIV infections. The world was, until now, winning the fight against HIV/AIDS in more than 50 countries.
USAID’s $40 billion annual budget was by far the biggest of any aid donor worldwide. Its more than 10,000 employees and their families were told to fly home immediately.
The international development landscape has been irreparably damaged. If the old world was one where we issued band-aids to the global have-nots, the new order is where we ripped off the sticking plaster.
Next, all 21,575 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staff were offered buy-outs as the incoming Director sought to shape the agency to his new agenda.
As Professor Julia Steinberger of the University of Lausanne said on Bluesky, the CIA is hardly to be admired. But the purge will shove the old agency aside, allowing the new US plutocrats to “pursue their business interests and bullying trade wars, covert or over dirty deals with tyrants from Putin to Netanyahu, and even worse takeovers of countries and regions (Greenland? Gaza? Ukraine? Who's counting?) on their own terms.”
Musk then moved on to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The techno bullies apparently barged past security in at its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington DC and demanded access to the IT systems. At the time of writing NOAA’s carbon tracker website was offline.
The far right doesn’t like science, or anything that sounds progressive or green. As they targeted the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords circulated, flagging suspect grants for potential cuts - words like biased, women, diversity and equality.
Science, degraded. Bye-bye US soft power.
As the zone flooded with shit, Trump’s much hyped tariffs and subsequent climbdown seemed the least of the world’s problems.
One of the week’s more egregious acts of sabotage was the decision to pull out of a global tax cooperation treaty negotiated over the decade until last year at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Under the deal, if corporate profits were taxed below 15% in the country where the multinational was headquartered, signatories could potentially charge top-up levies. The treaty aimed to avoid tax revenue leakage and a race to the bottom on tax. It was expected to raise the tax take from the world’s biggest multinationals by up to $192bn a year.
The pact may have been far from perfect, but poor countries wanted it because it ensured that the likes of Meta and Apple paid their share where they made their money, supporting government coffers on home territory rather than spiriting profits away to some tax haven.
Rich countries liked it because they, too, were losing revenues. But Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook and co. told Trump to pull out because they’d prefer to stash their billions in the Cayman islands or pretend their headquarters were in Ireland.
The new face
Events are so rapid-fire and so appalling to any rational person that they’re hard to comprehend. Amidst the inferno, it’s difficult to gain clarity.
What’s likely, though, is that February 2025 marks a fundamental shift in America’s relation to the world. In the post-world war II order the US achieved its ends through soft power, trade deals, dominance of the global institutions and threats.
The US accounts for a quarter of the world economy. It issues the world’s currency and sets global interest rates. It runs the institutions of the post-war world like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It supported the launch of the World Trade Organisation and it’s the most prominent member of the OECD.
Biden allowed last year’s OECD tax deal because it would boost government revenues and the US could veto it when it liked.
Learning the lessons of British colonialism, US leaders realised they didn’t need to own foreign lands. They could extract wealth and sell their products around the world without the costs of running colonies.
By setting the rules of global tax and commerce, American multinationals could take advantage of cheap overseas labour, oblige the world to buy their pharmaceuticals, install their monopoly software and communicate via their platforms. If the US didn’t like the rules, it could change them.
Multinationals didn’t need to physically interfere to break open markets or force people to buy their stuff like the Brits did. The military threat hung in the air but didn’t lead to the conquest of new territories.
In the meantime, projecting a kind face to the world paid dividends. In this, USAID was cost-effective. Its humanitarian programmes did good.
Now, the super-rich have taken over the state to pursue their commercial interests in a much more blatant — and clumsy — way. Trump has said he wants to invade Canada, Greenland and Gaza, and take the Panama canal.
This naked muscularity is prompted by relative US decline alongside the rise of China, but it’s also because of inequality.
The 1% enriched themselves so much in the past few decades, and so many new billionaires were minted in recent years that they’d always end up setting their sights on the White House and Capitol hill.
After the first billion, it stops being about money — it’s about power. No-one can spend $100 billion in their lifetimes. When you’ve already got several superyachts and jets, you don’t need any more. Sooner or later the worst and most greedy individual was going to wade in and seize the government’s purse strings and foreign policy.
Whilst the state used to be a softening mechanism to temper the worst of capital’s excesses, the gloves are now off and the new robber barons are in control.
The global pushback
The problem is, these people are unsophisticated and ignorant, and the world is hardly sitting idle. If Trump thinks that he can ethnically cleanse Gaza to build one of his bad-taste resorts, his Saudi friends have other ideas — not to mention Jordan, Egypt, Europe and “shithole countries” like “Nambia”.
Musk knows no truth other than money and power. This is a character who in 2018 declared himself socialist, then became a libertarian free speech “absolutist”, before promptly chucking a load of journalists off his propaganda platform Twitter and turning fully to the far right. He has no moral clarity or consistency of thought.
Trump’s tariffs are an own-goal that will hurt American manufacturers and raise prices for the very people who voted him in on his promise to tackle inflation. No wonder he backed down so quickly in Canada and Mexico.
Against such buffoonery, China will be a powerful opponent. It immediately retaliated with tariffs on oil and gas and restarted investigations into Google and Nvidia for violating antitrust laws. Chinese exporters are already moving to third countries like Cambodia and Vietnam where they can freely export to the US.
Mexico and Canada easily dealt with Trump by pretending to station more troops near their borders. Canada threatened tariffs. The election looks likely to be fought on anti-American nativism.
As Paul Krugman said, nobody will trust the US any more in trade talks and the end of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement will hurt the US the most. What Musk and co. don’t seem to realise is that the trade deals that they’re ditching contain rules that work to their own benefit.
For example strict intellectual property clauses oblige other countries to use US technology and platforms. Freed from such rules, there’s little to stop other countries from jailbreaking US tech, copying drugs or creating their own app stores.
By hobbling the WTO, pulling out of trade deals and withdrawing from global treaties, the US is less able to influence the rules of global commerce. The rest of the world will carry on regardless.
One of the hallmarks of world order since the end of the cold war has been its fractiousness. Amidst such disorder, the United States ruled unchallenged.
Now, other countries may be forced to organise. The BRICS Alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates represents half of the world’s population and over a third of the world’s GDP.
It used to be a broad and disunited grouping with unrealistic aims like a new world currency to rival the dollar. These countries have little in common and don't really trade with or invest in each other - indeed they're competitors in many areas.
But groupings like this, several of whose leaders detest the US, are being pushed closer together. It's almost as if Trump’s baiting the BRICS and others to collaborate against him.
Not only the BRICS, but even the disunited and weak EU is beginning to speak with one voice. In early February Brussels said it would mobilise its so-called trade bazooka, which allows the EU, by some measures the world’s biggest trade bloc, to impose restrictions on trade in services.
The legislation can revoke intellectual property rights protection and their commercial exploitation like software downloads and streaming. The law can bar foreign direct investment and block market access for banks, insurers and other financial services.
On top of the long-running antitrust legislation, this could directly threaten the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Meta and Google. If you’re already in Trump’s crosshairs, why not seek further leverage?
Several commenters are suggesting the rest of the world might even begin to decouple from the US. For example the doyen of trade policy, Professor Doug Irwin of Dartmouth College, suggested in an interview with the Financial Times that countries threatened with barriers might start trading elsewhere.
Whilst protectionism and confrontation might work in the short run, Trump, Musk and their clumsy cronies seem to have forgotten that the more they come to be perceived as a common enemy, the more they will unify opponents. A previously fractious world has started to unite against a display of brute force.
It may turn out that America’s place atop the post-war unipolar order was ended by a bunch of far right billionaire bully-boys. Musk may have slipped in more ways than one.
"Never mind the state being a committee to manage the whole affairs of the bourgeoisie; Musk is the state."
Not really, for all the reasons you set out later in your post. The state is the state of the ruling class, and, today, the ruling class is a global class of speculators, "coupon-clippers" as Marx and Engels called them, in "Anti-Duhring", owners of fictitious-capital (shares, bonds and derivatives) from which they derive interest/dividends, and in the last 40 years, more significantly, capital gains from inflated asset prices, mostly fuelled by central bank liquidity.
Musk is certainly an important and powerful individual, but he remains that, at best he might reflect the interests of similar US tech billionaires, though I doubt even that. Most o them have fallen into line, simply because they are spineless, and sought to avoid coming into the cross-hairs of Trump's regime. Already, of course, those tech billionaires came into conflict with the MAGA base, because they need continued migration into the US to meet their needs for skilled labour-power. Its a similar contradiction to that faced by the Brexiteers in Britain, as net immigration rose massively after Brexit, the very thing that those that voted for it wanted to stop!
So far, there is nothing in what Trump and his regime have done that seriously threatens the global ruling-class, or even its US fraction. Most of the things he threatened such as the ridiculous tariffs, he has had to abandon, at least for now. If he tries to reintroduce them, the bond market will sell-off again, and the stock market will follow suit, indicating some of the real power of that ruling-class, as also Truss found in 2022.
But, the real power of the state resides in a thousand institutions, and social and family connections. Ultimately, it resides in the armed forces and bodies of armed men, which do not need, in the US to even go as far as an open coup, such as that which faced Allende and others on the Left. A simple bullet to the head has more often been sufficient in the US to remove the threat of a troublesome priest. Indeed, the last time Trump's strategy was tried in the US, by McKinley, in the 1890's, a time when the rest of the world had entered a new period of secular growth, not only did it cause US growth to be hit hard, prices to rise and so on, but it caused the Republicans to get wiped out, and later McKinley himself took a bullet.