Publié le 20 Mars 2025 par Pantopolis, 20 March 2025
« All these stars... these immense worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex the other planets » [Sarah Millin, (Cecil) Rhodes, Chatto & Windus, London, 1933, p. 138].
The Macedonian Alexander the Great conquered half of the Orient, and twenty cities bore and even continue to bear his name, from Alexandria in Egypt to Alexandria in Arachosia (present-day Kandahar in Afghanistan).
In the course of European colonial expansion, all the new conquerors dreamt of giving their names to immense lands conquered mostly by iron and fire, to establish regimes of organized predation sacred to "civilization".
Since Christopher Columbus and Simon Bolivar - and well before[1] - Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) is the only empire builder to have given his name to a newly conquered territory: Northern Rhodesia (Zambia since 1964) and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe since 1980), to which he added Nyasaland[2] . This clergyman's son, businessman and prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896) was the founder of the British South Africa Company, whose aim was to colonize and exploit the territories north of the Transvaal. He is celebrated in the stock exchanges of the capitalist world as the creator of the De Beers diamond company. Above all, he is the archetype of carnivorous Anglo-Saxon imperialism, successfully extending His Gracious Majesty's African empire from Cape Town to Cairo.
Cecil Rhodes epitomizes the imperialist ambitions of the time. The first colonial power was officially extending its domination over part of the planet "to make peace, liberty and justice reign everywhere". In his first will - written at the age of 24 - he envisaged the British Empire absorbing all the Pacific islands, including Japan (sic), the Chinese coast and South America. In 1877, he even toyed with the idea of "reconquering the United States of America".
Although he had not conquered the entire planet, Rhodes prided himself on being the most authentic philanthropist; he had donated scholarships... but strictly reserved for white students. Rhodes launched the slogan of equal rights for "all civilized men", taking care to specify that a black man capable of writing and working was worth more than a lazy or idle white man[3] ...
Colonialism à la Cecil Rhodes, for the benefit of a capitalist state or a small European kinglet (the Belgian Leopold II), ruler of the Congo, was nothing more than a method of plunder and enslavement in his "personal" colony. His record is one of historical tragedy for the populations subjected to his rule[4]
The record of colonial policies pursued in Africa by the capitalist states of France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Great Britain can be better quantified. The French Empire also shamelessly boasted of having brought, in the words of Education Minister Jules Ferry: "peace", "liberty" and "justice"[5] . The British Empire, whose colors Rhodes bore, caused colossal famines in India. They were worse than those of the Soviet Union, Mao's China and North Korea combined, with 100 million deaths .[6]
The daily obsession of Cecil Rhodes and his confraternal rivals (the French, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, etc.) was that the unemployed, starving people below should not rise up against "their" "fatherland", but engage in all-out class war against Capital.
"Yesterday I was in the East End, and I attended a meeting of unemployed people. I heard the most frenzied speeches. It was all one cry: Bread! Bread! Reliving the whole scene on my way home, I felt even more convinced than before of the importance of imperialism... The idea closest to my heart is the solution of the social problem: to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a murderous civil war, we colonizers must conquer new lands to settle our surplus population, to find new outlets for the products of our factories and mines. Empire, I've always said, is a matter of the stomach. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists" .[7]
These direct calls for bloody wars of plunder against populations subjected to the colonial iron heel, starved, exploited and repressed without respite, did not prevent the outbreak of the first great imperialist butchery, for which the proletariat of both metropoles and colonies paid the heaviest price. The drastic rationing imposed by the capitalists and spiraling food price inflation hit the proletarians of the British Empire hard, though less so than those of the Central Empires, victims of a better-organized blockade .[8]
Rhodes didn't live to see his empire crumble with the end of a doomed colonial system in the aftermath of the war. More than 120 years after his death, his statues have been dismantled or discarded .[9]
Elon Musk, a South African like Rhodes, has set himself up as a legitimate successor, a white supremacist who has dreamed of reclaiming "white" power since childhood. At the head of the supreme power, with his compatriots Trump and Vance, he accuses "non-whites" of wanting to "confiscate land" ("white") and "treat certain categories of population (read: "white"), VERY BADLY" threatening to suspend American aid to the "rainbow nation", pending a "full investigation into the situation"[10] . Musk's sights are set even higher: not only does he want to take over the entire sublunar capitalist world, he wants to engender an extraterrestrial, even extragalactic capitalism in the supralunar world
The SpaceX company, which Musk founded in May 2002 with the profits from the sale of PayPal[11] , is now well known in the field of space exploration. With an estimated value of $180 billion and undeniable technical successes, such as the Starship, a reusable rocket capable of carrying over 100 tons of payload. Despite several in-flight explosions[12] , the company seems determined to turn this childish dream into reality. Whatever it takes, to borrow a well-known antiphon...
In the new Muskian saga, Earth is doomed in the short term (but not capitalism, which is assured of sui generis immortality). Earth is an endangered (capitalist) Atlantis, which must be abandoned without delay with myriads of spacecraft)[13] . America's new Gulf "genius" promises to build a colony on Mars with titanic resources
- giant reusable rockets (except for the risk of periodic explosions...), which would reduce launch costs;
- a space fleet financed by public and private capital, capable of transporting up to 100,000 people at each orbital synchronization!
- a long-term strategy (or rather, prophecy...) involving thousands of launches to create a city of a million inhabitants on the icy "red planet", devoid of oxygen, water or any infrastructure to support the future conquerors of the void.
Elon Musk, a clone of Doctor Strangelove, sinks into a hallucinatory nirvana, punctuated by (unrepressed) Nazi salutes. For him, launching a Starship would cost "only" $2 million. With a target of 100 ships built per year, SpaceX could have 1,000 Starships within a decade, all capable of carrying a megatonne of material per year.
In the same vein as Trump, who builds smoky (and mafia-like) projects that always flop[14] , "Kekius Maximus" (nickname of the Space Imperator) maintains that a ticket to Mars could cost less than $100,000. "Going to live on Mars will someday cost less than $500,000, and maybe less than $100,000," he indicated on X. "A figure low enough for most people in the developed world to sell their homes on Earth and move to Mars if they wish" (sic), and with no guarantee of return...
Elon Musk also set out his societal vision for Mars. Favoring a "direct democracy" rather than a "representative democracy", he advocates that the first inhabitants themselves decide on their mode of governance. In his view, the colonization of Mars is not just about survival, but about building a "civilization" of new Croesus, based on the virtual, since the currency would be bitcoin, the sole guarantor of the "direct democracy" of these space imperialists.
The first unmanned Starship missions could take off as early as 2026, with the aim of landing humans on Mars four years later. Ideal launch conditions, which occur every 26 months, would punctuate the stages of this project. The inhabitants of this planet of nothingness, should they survive, would be veritable zombies controlled from Musk's operational base in Texas: Starbase[15] . It should be pointed out that the zombies of extraterrestrial space would have brains devoid of "Muskian genius", but implanted with electronic chips to activate or deactivate them at will...
All these projects of a retarded adolescent megalomaniac - whose "humanity" is limited to making the Hitler salute - rest solely on the putative longevity of the Trumpian iron bar.
This assumes that :
- the brutal, whimsical policy of all-out tariffs does not jeopardize the highly uncertain stability of trade and the stock market, and therefore the viability of the American economy;
- the sale of Tesla electric cars, manufactured in China, the USA, Germany, etc., continues without a hitch, while fierce boycott campaigns or effective Chinese (or other) retaliation measures are developing;
- the workers in Musk's industrial lagoons still behave like "gentle" submissive slaves, despite merciless exploitation, a total absence of rights, and the reign of fear instilled by the Musk-Trump-Vance mafia camarilla supported by powerful far-right "social" networks.
A month and a half after the "legal" seizure of power at the ballot box, this regime based on manipulation, "fake news" and corruption is already so heavily in debt that it is sowing doubts in the minds of the capitalists themselves. The matamores of the heralded "golden age" are already facing the spectre of bankruptcy:
"The value of X has plummeted since its takeover; new projects have sunk into limbo, with 80% of the workforce laid off; advertisers and users are fleeing. And in Wall Street, London and Paris, banks have just offloaded more than 5 billion in potentially bad debts out of the 13 billion in debt contracted by the tycoon to buy the platform at the end of 2022. There's nothing invincible about Elon Musk. He's a colossus with feet of clay. In politics as in business.[16]
For the moment, Musk has unlimited use of the federal "phynances" pump drink himself dry. It's not certain that this mafia-style plundering for private use will last indefinitely, as it did in the blessed days of imperialist piracy, when there were no brakes to limit the rapacity of the great barons of private capitalism.
Year after year, this system unlimited imperialist plunder destroys the entire planet, reducing its population to a state of advanced decay. The deleterious effects of the capitalist system are even more tangible with the reign of Musk-Trump-Vance and their compatriots Putin and Xi Jinping, increasingly engaged in endless imperialist wars.
The imperialist system is inevitably doomed, in the short to medium term. The destruction wrought imperialist wars is already piling up on our doorsteps: Ukraine, Russia, Israel-Gaza, the Middle East, Africa (Congo, Sudan, etc.), pending conflicts over Taiwan and Korea in the Indo-Pacific. There is no place on earth where humanity is not now in danger.
No, capitalism cannot perpetuate itself for the sole benefit of a few profit-hungry oligarchs, who do not hesitate to spill the blood of the exploited, either by ferociously repressing them or by throwing them away as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars. Not on the "blue planet", nor on some fantasy planet that imperialism, in its delusions of grandeur, dreams of conquering, the better to destroy it
Imperialism, in all its versions ("liberal", "illiberal", state capitalist, "communist", etc.) is destroying planet Earth meticulously, hour after hour, through the simple pursuit of profit, in generalized wars between capitalist pirates to get the last accessible and saleable crumbs on capitalist markets.
The ball is now in the court of the American-Canadian and European proletariat. Everything now depends on its class reaction, and therefore on its ability to organize in order first to break capital's offensive, and then to pose the question of the seizure of power by the exploited.
Pantopolis, March 16, 2025.
[1] The Ottoman Empire, which Erdoğan wants to re-found, derives from the name of Emperor Osman, the first of the dynasty. It was founded at the end of the 13th century (in 1299) in northwestern Byzantine Anatolia (today: Turkey).
[2] Nyasaland's history is marked by the massive takeover of African communal land by white British settlers. Nyasaland was renamed Malawi in 1964.
[3] Jean Werz, Le Monde, July 6, 1953, "The memory of Cecil Rhodes, builder of England's African empire, is celebrated by Queen Mother Elizabeth".
[4] In 1885, Leopold II created the independent state of Congo as his personal property. His "vigorous" colonial action earned him the title of "Lord of the Congo". The generally accepted figure for the victims of royal colonization could be several hundred thousand, although historians are unable to agree on a plausible figure. Cf. Tanguy De Wilde D'Estmael, Université catholique de Louvain and College of Europe Bruges: leopold-ii-roi-des-belges-et-souverain-du-congo-une-figure-historique-confonte-aux-mythes-memoriels.pdf.
[5] Speech to the National Assembly on July 28, 1885 ("Les fondements de la politique coloniale"), just before a military expedition to Madagascar: "Can you deny, can anyone deny that there is more justice, more material and moral order, more equity, more social virtues in North Africa since France made its conquest? When we went to Algiers to destroy piracy and ensure free trade in the Mediterranean, were we acting as pirates, conquerors and devastators? Is it possible to deny that, in India, and despite the painful episodes encountered in the history of this conquest, there is today infinitely more justice, more light, more order, more public and private virtue since the English conquest than before?"
[6] "How British colonialism killed over 100 million Indians in 40 years", "crises" site: https://www.les-crises.fr/comment-le-colonialisme-britannique-a-tue-100-millions-d-indiens-en-40-ans/
[7] Emphasis added. The text comes from journalist W.T. Stead (1849-1912), quoting his friend Cecil Rhodes. Cf. Die Neue Zeit, 1898, xvie year, no. 1, p. 304, and Lenin, in his work L'Impérialisme stade suprême du capitalisme (1916). W.T. Stead did not experience the sinking of capitalism in 1914, but rather the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, which was his final resting place...
[8] For Germany, see Nicolas Patin, "Réflexions autour des victimes allemandes du blocus de 1914-1918", Les Cahiers Sirice, 2021/1, no. 26, pp. 95-107. In Germany, the number of victims of hunger due to the naval blockade was around 500,000.
[9] The Rhodes must fall movement, led mainly by students in South Africa, has spread around the world thanks to social networks, in order to fight against "white supremacism".
[10] Cf. Le Monde, February 5, 2025: https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2025/02/05/quand-l-enfant-du-pays-elon-musk-s-immisce-dans-la-politique-americaine-vis-a-vis-de-l-afrique-du-sud_6532289_3212.html
[11] The PayPal platform is an alternative to payment by check or credit card.
[12] The Starship rocket exploded over the Bahamas on January 16 again on March 6, 2025. This is not stopping Musk from his short-term plans: https://www.rfi.fr/fr/am%C3%A9riques/20250308-explosion-de-la-fus%C3%A9e-starship-le-doute-plane-sur-l-agence-am%C3%A9ricaine-de-l-aviation
[13] Brilliantly illustrated in Edgar P. Jacobs' L'Énigme de l'Atlantide, Dargaud.
[14] Cf. Le Monde of October 18, 2024, on a financial project of Trump, carried by "dubious businessmen": https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2024/10/18/donald-trump-fait-un-flop-avec-world-liberty-financial-son-projet-de-cryptoactif_6355332_4408996.html
[15] Le Point, January 25, 2025: https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/bienvenue-a-starbase-la-ville-revee-d-elon-musk-25-01-2025-2580781_24.php
[16] Rosa Moussaoui, "Elon Musk un colosse aux pieds d'argile", L'Humanité, February 19, 2025. Elon Musk runs up against legislative roadblocks concerning the income of large capitalists. A Delaware judge has just rejected a staggering 55.8 billion compensation package for the Tesla boss.
