How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? By merely posing his dazzling question in 1952, Aneurin Bevan captured liberal democracy’s greatest paradox. Today, in the era of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and their Big Tech brethren, Bevan’s time-honoured paradox has only grown preposterously.
Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Donald Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.
From their perspective, the deal they cut with Donald Trump is an incredible bargain with a rate of return that no conventional business can hope to emulate. For a few hundred million dollars that they invested in Trump’s re-election, within minutes of his victory they amassed extra wealth to the tune of hundreds of billions. To be precise, the value of Thiel’s Palantir shot up by 23% while Musk’s Tesla saw its stock rise by 40% to a capitalisation level higher than most of the rest of the global car industry combined.
For a few crumbs off their table, that they ploughed into the Trump campaign, the Big Tech brotherhood are in the process of receiving three amazing gifts: Gargantuan government contracts. A tremendous goldrush following the elimination of regulations that will allow them a gloves-off onslaught against the public’s concerns over their ways and wares (e.g., autonomous vehicles, rogue AI bots and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption). And, lastly, immense state-sanctioned bargaining power in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors and the rest of us.
And then there are, of course, the non-trivial concerns about their broader ambitions. Thiel’s favourite book is, reportedly, The Sovereign Individual. Its authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, literally and without the slightest hint of irony liken the broligarchs to the Olympian gods before going on to argue that it is only right and proper that they dominate the world. “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies”, they proclaim. As for Thiel himself, his explanation of why he likes this shoddy book so much is that it offers an “accurate” prediction of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” What Thiel neglected to say, of course, is that his dream is not one in which exorbitant power has withered but, rather, that it is a dream in which men like him monopolise it. At least he is honest enough to acknowledge that his version of freedom is incompatible with democracy.
But is any of this truly novel? However reprehensible the broligarchs’ practices and convictions might be, is it not possible that we are surrendering to a recollection of the past that is so recklessly optimistic that, by contrast, the present looks like a deterioration, when it is nothing but a recapitulation of our past? After George W. Bush violated the Geneva Convention, even the US constitution, to legalise endless torture in Guantanamo Bay, American friends lamented the loss of America’s innocence. I could not agree with them. Was America’s innocence not lost during the Civil War? The Spanish-American War? The Prohibition? Hiroshima? McCarthyism? Vietnam? The assassination of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? The Oklahoma bombings? Surely, an innocence so casually lost can be fairly easily recovered! Are we not doing the same now, appearing astounded that a bunch of oligarchs are going through the same revolving doors connecting Big Business and government?
In many ways, we have seen it all before. John D. Rockefeller, one of America’s original robber barons, headed a dynasty that makes Musk’s look amateurish, including a media mogul son and a grandson who would become Vice President. Thomas Eddison had an elephant executed in public, electrocuting him with George Westinghouse’s alternating current, to sway government in favour of his direct currency electricity generation system. Henry Ford bought a newspaper to strong-arm mayors and city councils into ripping streetcars off city streets to make way for Ford cars and buses.
Back then, Big Business did not enjoy the power of the internet but they had other ways of shaping our political, philosophical and cultural milieu. Have we forgotten how the oligarchs, e.g., the Koch brothers, spent decades funding the Atlas Network and the Mont Pellerin Society to turn neoliberalism into a universal creed that disguises a cruel class war against the majority as a campaign for freedom? Or how Goldman Sachs supplied Bill Clinton’s administration with its own CEO to be the Treasury Secretary that eliminated all the regulations which impeded Wall Street’s worst excesses?
That’s all true. However, there is a superpower, a hyper-weapon, that the broligarchy possess today that their Big Business and Wall Street predecessors did not. It is a form of capital that never existed until recently: cloud capital which, of course, does not live up in the clouds but down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest.
Unlike traditional capital, from steam-engines to modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce commodities. Instead, it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. These produced means of behavioural modification train us to train them to determine what we want. And, once we want it, the same machines sell it to us, directly, bypassing markets. In this light, cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, what it made us want. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us to sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour: As we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants and photos, we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs while, in the factories and the warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us are deployed – usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists – to make them work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time.
Unsurprisingly, the owners of this cloud capital, the cloudalist broligarchy, enjoy a hitherto undreamt power to extract: untold quantities of free labour from almost everyone in addition to mind-numbing cloud rents from vassal capitalists and, of course, surplus value from proletarians. Especially now that they have purchased a seat at Trump’s presidential table, their power is one that a John D. Rockefeller, a Henry Ford, even the still active Rupert Murdoch, would have given an arm and a leg to have.
Returning to Bevan’s brilliant question, today it is easier to see how wealth persuades poverty to give up its freedom and, instead, to serve the broligarchs-in-charge: via their cloud capital that has a capacity, unlike any hitherto form of capital or government department, to shape our behaviour automatically and directly. Nothing short of a revolution can restore any hope of personal agency, let alone of democracy.
For the Le Monde site, where this article was originally published, please click here.
