Trump and Musk have ushered in a terrible era of cataclysm capitalism. But I have a plan to counter it

The Guardian

02-04-2025

Everything is moving too fast. The Trump-Musk administration is tearing through US government, universities and health organisations, firing tens of thousands of employees, eliminating billons in funding. The scope and speed of the attack is dizzying. It is almost impossible to keep up with the ongoing destruction, let alone to organise the resistance. None of this is accidental.
We need to understand the origins of the Trump blitzkrieg to counter it in the US and prevent it from spreading abroad. The speed of the attack can be traced to Trump strategist and 'accelerationist' Steve Bannon, and aligns with his information warfare tactic to 'flood the zone' to confuse, disengage and disorient. Whether on climate or Covid, rumours, lies and conspiracy theories create a chaotic cacophony, leaving the public disoriented, fearful and prey to oversimple Trumpist messages: blame the woke, migrants, transgender people, Muslims, doctors, scientists. Musk's purchase of Twitter/X supports Bannon's agenda.
What we are seeing is the coming together of two major forces of the Trump world: the fossil fuel-funded Heritage Foundation and the world of tech. The former authored Project 2025, a plan for Trump's first year in office. Curtis Yarvin, PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel's favoured theorist, has expressed the desire to 'reboot' a whole country, substituting the outmoded democracy software with something far less accountable and more business-friendly. Together, both industries poured hundreds of millions into Trump's campaign.
So far, regulatory positions have been eliminated, cryptocurrency will be able to bypass democratic oversight, budgets have been cut to allow Musk to cash in with SpaceX and Starlink contracts, and fired government employees are to be replaced with AI products.
Many industries sense the winds of change and no longer even bother with greenwashing or climate commitments, as they drop all pretence of responsibility for a livable world. The climate and ecological implications of this shift are as disastrous as they are deliberate. We need an appropriate name for this new era of fossil and tech bros accelerating attacks on democracy and the planet: cataclysm capitalism.
Cataclysm capitalism is the worthy heir to neoliberalism and its disaster capitalism. As Naomi Klein described in her book The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal economic ideology took advantage of crises to deregulate and privatise public services, hobble trade unions and civil society, and generally create conditions ideal for private wealth accumulation and disastrous for equality, work and welfare. Cataclysm capitalism does all this, and goes further. The pace of change is accelerated, the dismantling of public institutions more complete, the attack on democracy more overt. Perhaps the most frightening aspect is that the industries laughing in the face of planetary and social destruction have made a clear calculus: they don't need prosperous economies to profit. Neoliberalism at least claimed to be serving a form of greater good via winner-takes-all market competition. Cataclysm capitalism dispenses with this illusion altogether.
The fossil fuel companies, the rightwing tech magnates and the financial companies hurrying in their wake have somehow convinced themselves that they don't need prosperous economies to prosper themselves. They have learned to profit from disruption and destruction. They know from experience that immiserated populations will endure exploitative working conditions and go deep into debt to keep themselves and their families alive.
Paradoxically, the creation of vast economic insecurity favours far-right politics. Voters in a constant state of fear and stress, without a clear understanding of the system creating hardships, are an easy prey for far-right rhetoric blaming migrants, woke and trans people. Sadly, since neoliberal ideology has devoured previously centre-left parties (UK Labour and US Democrats), we are left with much less of an organised opposition, and much more of a pipeline to accelerating disaster.
The picture is grim. We are faced with an organised hostile takeover of democracy, coupled with a dismantling of the economy in favour of the sectors and industries most beneficial to the fossil-fuel and tech magnates, to our detriment and the detriment of all life on Earth. What can we do? I propose a three-pronged plan, short and schematic – enough to get started.
First, understanding is power. We need to learn more about the devourers of our world, from the fossil fuel thinktanks to the far-right tech accelerationists. We need to explain to our fellow citizens who we are facing, and what their ultimate plan is. Replace helpless fear with knowledgable anger.
Second, we need to organise, come together, in trade unions, in neighbourhood groups, in any collectives we can form. At this point, we were all raised in neoliberal cultures of individualism and isolation. Organising sounds foreign and difficult. Indeed, our learned organisational helplessness is integral to the endeavour of disaster capitalism.
However, as an exceptionally cooperative species, in reality, we all have impressive innate capacity. Quite literally, organising is what we, as social animals, were born to do. At its most basic forms, organising consists of gathering people, raising awareness of the causes of our common problems, discussing possible avenues of action, putting them into operation. Rinse, repeat; make it part of your life's hobbies and work.
Third, we need to respond to the Trump-Musk project at the strategic level, not blow by blow. We know we can expect nothing but destruction and corruption from them: we have to put forward a positive vision, worth fighting for. From my research, I would describe it as scientifically informed democratic decision-making for the common good. This also means creating our own organisations for mutual aid and protection of vulnerable people. We have everything to lose if we don't act, and everything to gain if we do.
Julia Steinberger is professor of societal challenges of climate change at the University of Lausanne