A Capitalist-Ethnonationalist Contradiction in the MAGA Coalition

The limits of Elon Musk and the Big Tech overlords’ alliance with white supremacists

Now that I do so much video and audio content in addition to writing, I’m sometimes torn which medium I should prioritize when dishing out hot takes. Writing wins out this time.

I quickly want to flag something profound, and which I had foreseen, but which I did not anticipate seeing so soon.

There’s been a huge public dustup between Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and large swathes of the tech-bro world confronting the ethnonationalists (among them, specifically, Laura Loomer) who are equally a part of the MAGA political coalition.

Elon, as the tweet above conveys, has personal commitments to the H1-B visa program because it’s how he got to America. Vivek—and many Silicon Valley bros—feel similarly, because America’s best tech talent is actually recruited from abroad. These commitments to legal immigration nested comfortably within the old world of neoliberal globalization, which permitted (even necessitated) human and capital mobility.

But as I’ve written many times, that world is being partially displaced by a world of nationalist-imperial rivalries.

The conflict that Elon is courting in the above tweet is a key site of contradiction in the MAGA-National conservative-Tech coalition…before Trump even takes office!

The capitalist class needs surplus labor in order to keep labor cheap and politically weak. If there’s a labor shortage, wages go up because demand for labor increases. But increased wages mean increased working-class power. So in the previous era, capitalists dealt with this by outsourcing cheap labor from the global South/Third World, and importing cheap labor (immigrants from abroad).