Muskism, Futurism, Fascism
"We are not afraid of the future. We are the future."-Benito Mussolini.
Yesterday I discussed wth students in my "Dictators and Dictatorships" upper level undergraduate seminar the cult of the future in Fascism. Today, I read an excellent piece by Jean Lepore in NYT. It is profound and illuminating. I mentioned yesterday to my students the relation between Fascism and Futurism and I showed some images with Marinetti's paintings. Muskism is an avatar of the technocratic ideology. It merges the cult oif the Future, the cult of Youth and the Cult of the Leader. Vigor, muscles, masculinity.
"Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology. In 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who helped staff DOGE, wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," predicting the emergence of “technological supermen.” It consists of a list of statements:
We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being.
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will. …
We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. …
We believe in greatness. …
We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.
Mr. Andreessen cited, among his inspirations, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” which glorified violence and masculine virility and opposed liberalism and democracy. It, too, is a list of statements:
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. …
We want to sing the man at the wheel. …
We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. …
Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!
Ten years after Mr. Marinetti wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” fists raised to the stars, he co-wrote the founding document of the movement led by Mussolini: “The Fascist Manifesto.”
Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.
That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html