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Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (HarperCollins, 2026).

Elon Musk is one of the most powerful people alive. SpaceX’s IPO in June made him history’s first trillionaire, and his companies increasingly control essential infrastructure both on and off Earth, from launch vehicles to satellites, EV production, AI compute, and a still-influential social media platform. His $44 billion purchase of Twitter helped Trump win the 2024 presidential election—Bloomberg found Musk to be the platform’s single most important spreader of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories—and his $288 million in Republican campaign donations allowed him to aim, at least for a time, the DOGE wrecking ball at the U.S. government’s administrative, assistive, and redistributive wing. Millions are projected to die as a result of USAID cuts, according to a Lancet study. Musk’s power, both corporate and political, is growing, and he is unafraid to use it to further his far-right goals.

The world is becoming ever more oligarchic. As private capital increasingly wields control over essential infrastructure, Silicon Valley’s expanding political influence is forging a new hybrid class of corporate/state rulers.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Elon Musk. This week he became the world’s first trillionaire thanks to SpaceX’s IPO, with the company trading at a valuation of nearly $1.8 trillion after investors around the world suffered serious investment “FOMO.” Musk is likely to continue to use his growing political-economic power to keep advancing a global far-right agenda.

Silicon Valley’s technologists have vacuumed up humanity’s near-total cultural output to build platforms with tremendous potential economic and ideological power. Generative AI has become the subject of enormous hype and staggering, trillion-dollar investments. So what can we learn about AI by reading it through the lens of a nineteenth-century thinker like Karl Marx?

What’s striking about AI, from a Marx-inflected perspective, is how little is fundamentally new about this technology in political-economic terms. In the Grundrisse, Marx describes how capitalism generates ever more advanced machines and scientific and technical knowledge, which become increasingly important factors in the production of wealth. In Capital, Marx shows that machines, from the capitalist’s standpoint, serve as a means of cheapening commodities and intensifying the working day, raising the level of surplus-value extracted from workers.

Progressives, especially in the U.S., are prone to bouts of romanticism about the Nordic countries. But things aren’t quite so rosy in reality—especially for immigrants and minorities. Denmark in particular has taken a hard turn to the right on immigration—so much so that Britain’s increasingly anti-immigration Labour Party, under pressure from Farage’s rising Reform UK, has said it is looking to emulate Denmark’s hardline asylum stance.

Since 2022, Denmark’s Social Democratic prime minister Mette Frederiksen has led an increasingly right-leaning coalition government. Initially head of a minority Social Democratic government, Frederiksen has, to be sure, inherited a slew of immigrant-hostile policies. In 2016, Denmark passed a controversial “jewelry law” legalizing the confiscation of asylum seekers’ personal possessions, including cash and jewelry above a certain value, to offset public spending. While the law has only rarely come into use, raising little revenue over the past decade, its real significance is its messaging effect, signaling Denmark’s shift to a nativist stance. The jewelry law’s racialized underpinnings were disclosed when the country, in 2022, clarified that it aimed to make an exemption for Ukrainian refugees, even as its treatment of Syrian arrivals was hardening—a case of “mismatched treatment” decried by Human Rights Watch, which rightly argued that Denmark should “widen its embrace of Ukrainian refugees to include others as well.”

Earlier this year, Norway’s $2.1 trillion Oil Fund—the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund—was the subject of a heated public debate over its links to Israel’s war in Gaza. In June, a group of Norwegian academics, the Historians for Palestine, revealed that the fund owned shares worth nearly $30 million in the Israeli company Bet Shemesh Engines, which reportedly maintained engine parts used by Israeli jets conducting airstrikes on Gaza. Beginning in 2023, the fund had increased its investment stake in the Israeli company in tandem with Israel’s mounting attacks on Gaza and rising Palestinian civilian deaths. The academics delivered their findings to the Norwegian Ministry of Finance in June. The Labour government, it seems, did nothing with them.

Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2025).

Breakneck can be read as the center-right counterpart to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s center-left Abundance. Where Klein and Thompson largely focused on California to make the case for an American “liberalism that builds”—a greener capitalism aiming to deliver higher living standards—Wang pivots to China to make the case for U.S. manufacturing renewal, now from a less progressive, more security-motivated angle.

Despite its critical acclaim, One Battle After Another is a dangerously mistimed movie for the left. Its first thirty minutes read like a MAGA fantasy, or nightmare, about the “antifa” left: In rapid succession, we see violence, bombings, and a deadly bank robbery carried out by a shadowy activist group calling itself the French 75—Thomas Pynchon’s parallel-universe version of the real-world, early-1970s Weathermen. Parts of the French 75’s activism is about breaking migrants out of camps, but other parts seem anarchic and aimless—as if Paul Thomas Anderson set out to provide cinematic validation for Trump’s confabulations about “radical left lunatics.” The collision between real-world MAGA talking points, on the one hand, and the film’s portrayal of violence is disconcerting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s whooping “Viva la revolución” while his band of fellow merry pranksters, led by the berserk Perfidia Beverly Hills, assassinate a security guard. The film’s essential cartoonishness doesn’t keep One Battle from handing the MAGA movement a broad brush to tar the left as amoral worshippers of lawlessness and disorder.

Much of the early media coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign-trail memoir, 107 Days, was essentially unfair. Political commentators and media outlets portrayed her book as divisive, splitting the Democratic camp at a time when unity against Trump 2.0 was the top priority. USA Today reported that 107 Days was filled with “score-settling.” Politico claimed Harris’s book constituted an “ambush of fellow Democrats” because—shockingly!—Harris “used her new memoir to speak her mind”; four days later, the outlet wrote, Harris was desperately trying to “unburn the bridges.” The Hill adopted a similar line, but outsourced the task of giving voice to it to Democratic strategists said to be “frustrated” with Harris over a book intent on “picking fights and causing divisions at the worst possible time for the party.”

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. Avid Reader Press.

One way of thinking about Abundance might be to see it as a blueprint for a Democratic victory in 2028. Structured around five chapters, Klein and Thompson want to teach liberals how to grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy. At the core of their vision is the idea that the state needs to take on a more active role in helping build green energy or basic infrastructure and funding daring new scientific research.

Some years ago, I was conducting research on the history of imprisonment in the Scandinavian countries, which later came to form part of my doctoral dissertation. One strand of this research took me to the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm where I came upon a series of boxes the containing the files of Karl Schlyter, Sweden’s progressive minister of justice in the mid-1930s. Schlyter had been something of a firebrand social democrat. His professional pedigree was impeccable, but unlike most bourgeois jurists, he had used his legal capital in service of a progressive reform of law and punishment—as seen in his advocacy for “emptying the prisons,” a radical stance for a highly placed former civil servant, judge, and then Minister of Justice.