Elon Musk declares inevitable ‘civil war’ after anti-migrant riots in UK

Elon Musk’s intervention in the far-right riots in the UK underscores the billionaire’s role in fueling a global fascist movement.

On August 4, Musk tweeted “Civil war is inevitable” under a video of a far-right riot in Liverpool, which has since been viewed 9.6 million times. The video was originally posted by British fascist leader Tommy Robinson. Three days earlier, Musk responded to a post by Robinson attacking British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s response to the riots with two exclamation points, resulting in the video receiving 4.2 million views.

Screenshot of Musk’s message on X: “Civil war is inevitable” (Photo: Elon Musk/X)

A spokesperson for Starmer responded to the August 4 post by calmly saying: “There is no justification for comments like this.”

Musk then tweeted (with 5.6 million views) one of the far-right gangs’ slogans, “#TwoTierKeir,” absurdly accusing the British government of disproportionately targeting right-wing criminals compared to left-wing or Islamist protesters.

Another tweet from Musk (viewed 28 million times) asked: “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”, referring to the arrest of a man on charges of posting a message that was “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” Two others (viewed 108 million times together) promoted material aimed at fueling the narrative of migrants as a dangerous criminal class in the UK.

This week Musk retweeted a fake message Telegraph newspaper headline, “Keir Starmer considers building ‘emergency detention camps’ in Falkland Islands”, which claimed they would be used to hold far-right rioters and portrayed them as struggling martyrs.

The episode offers a glimpse into the development of fascism in the 21st century, with a racist and xenophobic minority emboldened by a social media audience that rallies around figureheads such as Nigel Farage, Robinson, Laurence Fox and others who may be less well-known nationally but have significant global followings.

Far-right activists play on the fears and anger about inadequacy that arise from economic insecurity, lack of purpose and broken communities. They oppose the racist scapegoats of Muslims and asylum seekers that are provided by mainstream politicians and media.

They are gaining a foothold in circumstances where social and political solidarity has been undermined by the continued disintegration of the labour movement and the systematic attacks on working class and socialist politics, tirelessly promoted by academia, the mainstream media and the major political parties, with the former Stalinist and social reform parties such as Labour at the forefront.

As a result, many workers have lost a clear sense of their common interests as part of an international class and have become victims of a nationalist witch-hunt against foreign workers and migrants, competing for jobs, education, housing and healthcare that have been pushed to the brink by decades of austerity and underfunding.

Musk is one of the chief conductors of this infernal orchestra. He took control of Twitter in October 2022 and has overseen a surge in far-right activity, including using his own weight on the platform (193 million followers) to promote or directly tweet fascist material.

In the week following his takeover, anti-Black slurs on Twitter/X increased three times over the year-ago weekly average, and anti-Jewish slurs increased 23 percent, according to data collected by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). During Musk’s first month in charge, anti-Black slurs continued to increase three times over the pre-takeover daily average, and interactions with those tweets (replies, retweets, and likes) increased 2.7 times.

As part of a “general amnesty,” the suspended accounts of Donald Trump, his fascist disciple Marjorie Taylor Greene, Robinson and many other far-right figures who had been banned from the platform for inciting racial hatred were reinstated.

A June 1, 2023, CCDH investigation found that 99 percent of posts from 100 “Blue Tick” users that researchers reported as violating Twitter/X’s own hate speech rules remained online. One of those was the claim that “the Jewish mafia wants to replace us all with brown people.”

A report published in September 2023 found that 86 percent of 300 posts reported for hate speech, from 100 accounts, were still online a week later, as were 90 percent of the accounts, with a total of more than a million followers.

Examples included posts that labeled Hitler as “A hero who will help secure a future for white children”; that claimed that “Blacks don’t need to be provoked before they become violent. It’s in their nature”; that encouraged users to “Stop Race Mixing”; and that promoted conspiracy theories that Jews are promoting mass migration and “controlling blacks.”

Musk attempted to sue CCDH over the reports, but the case was dismissed in March. Judge Charles Breyer described the lawsuit as one of the “most superficial legal extensions I’ve ever heard.” He explained: “This case is about punishing the defendants for their statements.”

Another study on X after Musk, conducted by a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and published in August 2023, found a 70 percent increase in retweets for a random sample of Blue Tick users active in far-right online networks – an increase that “outpaced any overall increase in engagement for other users.”

None of this absolves large sections of the mainstream media from responsibility for the outbreak of far-right violence – from newspaper crusades against migrants to the BBC describing fascist gangs as “pro-British” and “protesters”. What is particularly damaging about X, and all billionaire-controlled social media companies, is that this is done in the name of a more democratic, even anti-establishment, platform, “giving the people what they want”.

Musk’s role is no accident. Beyond the motivations of his reactionary personal views, he makes a large portion of his fortune from controversy: through revenue-generating scrolls on X and by helping him build a massive public persona that he uses to secure similarly large loans and investments.

He makes the other part of his fortune from industrial production, which directly benefits from cheap labor through attacks on migration. Reports of Tesla’s extreme exploitation of migrant workers in the construction of its factories and in the factory workforce are widespread. As are those describing the widespread abuses involved in the supply chain of minerals essential to the company’s production – workers kept in conditions of super exploitation, in part through heavy border controls.

Tesla’s growing interests in South America, the source of most immigration to the U.S., provide further incentive for his support of the anti-immigrant crusade. Whether unable to leave and send remittances or arriving in the U.S. to find themselves in ghettoized and terrorized conditions, Latin American workers are more vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation.

Musk speaks for a broad section of the ruling class that is driven by these concerns and interested in stoking racial hatred to divide the working class. He is, for example, just the latest in a long line of super-rich financial backers who have boosted Robinson’s profile.

Tommy Robinson in 2023 (Photo by Anything Goes With James English / CC BY 3.0)

Among them are Robert Shillman, another American tech billionaire who helped Robinson land a $5,000-a-month job at Rebel Media; the Middle East Forum, headed by arch-reactionary Daniel Pipes; the David Horowitz Freedom Center; and the Gatestone Institute. Behind the MEF is Nina Rosenwald, heiress to the Sears-Roebuck retail fortune; behind Gatestone is billionaire financier Robert Mercer; and the list goes on.

In Musk, the far-right agenda of this growing faction of the super-rich and the brute loudness of the likes of Robinson are combined in one person. He is exactly what Karl Marx had in mind when he described the French financial aristocracy of the 1840s: the social stratum that “made the laws, presided over the administration of the state, commanded all organized public authority, dominated public opinion by the actual state of affairs and by the press,” and grew rich “by pocketing the already available wealth of others.”

Characterized by “an unbridled affirmation of unhealthy and dissolute desires,” the “financial aristocracy, both in its mode of acquisition and in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the summits of bourgeois society.”

To the extent that Musk’s actions provoke ruling-class disapproval of his relations with the far right, as he did in a muted way with Starmer, it is purely a case of one faction warning the other not to let the carefully channeled movement overflow its boundaries and provoke a popular backlash. The row also provides useful cover for Starmer’s rollout of new policing and censorship powers, which will inevitably be used against the working class.

The lesson for the working class from Musk’s involvement in the UK riots is that fighting fascism to the end means taking on the oligarchs. Their vast wealth, used to promote reactionary social forces, must be seized and redistributed to address the bleeding wounds in society that the far right feeds on.