ELON MUSK, who claims to be the world’s richest man (and also probably the most indebted one), has bought the social media giant Twitter.

In doing so, he has sacked, often illegally, thousands of Twitter employees, and raised the question of whether it will continue at all.

As often with capitalism, appearance and reality differ. Twitter is a free-to-use platform for anyone to raise and discuss more or less anything, with limited constraints. That means it has numbers of racists and fascists using it, but also significant use by those from marginalised areas of society that the mainstream media reliably ignores.

The Morning Star’s own Twitter account has flourished for example, even to the extent that BBC-related accounts tweet the front page of the paper to thousands, where otherwise the paper is deliberately ignored.

Yet, as always in a market society, behind this is a story of cost and profit. Twitter, despite its huge number of users, has not been profitable and efforts to sell advertising on the site have had limited traction. Reports suggest that efforts were being made to sell it to Facebook or Microsoft long before Musk appeared on the scene.

Musk has said that Twitter should, in effect, be a “virtual town square.” That is: a forum for the democratic exchange of views and debate. This seems a laudable idea in principle, but ignores the reality of how to grapple with those who don’t respect the “rules” of such debate, which often privilege the status quo.

It might be suggested that even if Musk’s idea for Twitter is a good one, he, as a right-wing megalomaniac, is not the person to be running it.

The point is not lost of course on governments which have long been seeking ways to regulate Twitter. Some of this is prudent. Racists and sexists, often breaking national laws and pursuing individuals on the site, do need to be pulled up, even if the current Home Secretary Suella Braverman thinks this is a waste of police time.

Governments also, however, want to deal with politically awkward material that can be found and linked to on Twitter. Twitter itself, for example, has had a focus on preventing a good deal of reporting and discussion on Palestine.

It might be asked at this point what has all this got to do with labour history? Karl Marx, after all, did not have a Twitter account, and given his propensity to engage in robust debates with opponents on occasion, would probably have had his account suspended before too long.

But Marx well understood the difference between appearance and reality in market-capitalist economies and societies — and the difference between what the productive forces developed by capital could do, and what they actually did.

He summarised these points in a speech at a dinner organised by the Chartist People’s Paper at the Bell Hotel on the Strand on April 14 1856:

“On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire.

“In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.”

Hence Musk’s Twitter. Potentially a source of democratic discussion and exchange. In actuality a loss-making debacle.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian — Twitter: @kmflett.