You say you got a real solution Well, you know We'd all love to see the plan
For me, one of the great things about the Internet are the ideas and folks I never would've met in real life. Several years ago, (un)fortunately [haven't quite decided yet] met up with former members of the Ccru. Sitting between three ghettoblasters, Simon Reynolds & Renegade Academia: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.
My interaction with "Ccru" (and associated websites & bloggers) began around the 2004 presidential election. Most of them were British, one was Persian, which provided an interesting perspective of the United States and our War on Terror. What was really interesting were the numerous (Marxist and otherwise, but almost totally non-American) responses to the 2008 financial meltdown this group produced.
Can't say I understood it all, but it certainly informed my American POV over the past 10 years. Since some of those themes seem familiar, at least to me, today at Daily Kos, I thought it might be interesting to look at one of them: Accelerationism. What makes this a, possibly, useful topic is the broad spectrum of theory, criticism, bloggers, and an international conglomeration of continental vs. analytical vs. speculative disagreements & other kinds of ivory tower stuff.
What is Accelerationism?
…the idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that have historically characterised it, should be expanded, repurposed or accelerated in order to generate radical social change.
…Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.
…divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants
…Prominent theorists include right-accelerationist Nick Land…[and] left-accelerationists include Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics"
A good starting point, I think, is the introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. I'm bolding some things that might resonate:
Accelerationism is a political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions, but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. The term was introduced into political theory to designate a certain nihilistic alignment of philosophical thought with the excesses of capitalist culture (or anticulture), embodied in writings that sought an immanence with this process of alienation. The uneasy status of this impulse, between subversion and acquiescence, between realist analysis and poetic exacerbation, has made accelerationism a fiercely-contested theoretical stance.
At the basis of all accelerationist thought lies the assertion that the crimes, contradictions and absurdities of capitalism have to be countered with a politically and theoretically progressive attitude towards its constituent elements. Accelerationism seeks to side with the emancipatory dynamic that broke the chains of feudalism and ushered in the constantly ramifying range of practical possibilities characteristic of modernity. The focus of much accelerationist thinking is the examination of the supposedly intrinsic link between these transformative forces and the axiomatics of exchange value and capital accumulation that format contemporary planetary society.
This stance apparently courts two major risks: on the one hand, a cynical resignation to a politique du pire [refers to Louis XVI & the French Revolution; see possible translations here & here], a politics that must hope for the worst and can think the future only as apocalypse and tabula rasa; on the other, the replacement of the insistence that capitalism will die of its internal contradictions with a championing of the market whose supposed radicalism is indistinguishable from the passive acquiescence into which political power has devolved. Such convenient extremist caricatures, however, obstruct the consideration of a diverse set of ideas united in the claim that a truly progressive political thought—a thought that is not beholden to inherited authority, ideology or institutions—is possible only by way of a future-oriented and realist philosophy; and that only a politics constructed on this basis can open up new perspectives on the human project, and on social and political adventures yet to come. This assumption that we are at the beginning of a political project, rather than at the bleak terminus of history, seems crucial today in order to avoid endemic social depression and lowering of expectations in the face of global cultural homogenization, climate change and ongoing financial crisis. Confronting such developments, and the indifference of markets to their human consequences, even the keenest liberals are hard-pressed to argue that capitalism remains the vehicle and sine qua non of modernity and progress; and yet the political response to this situation often seems to face backwards rather than forwards.
Despair seems to be the dominant sentiment of the contemporary Left, whose crisis perversely mimics its foe, consoling itself either with the minor pleasures of shrill denunciation, mediatised protest and ludic disruptions, or with the scarcely credible notion that maintaining a grim ‘critical’ vigilance on the total subsumption of human life under capital, from the safehouse of theory, or from within contemporary art’s self-congratulatory fog of ‘indeterminacy’, constitutes resistance. Hegemonic neoliberalism claims there is no alternative, and established Left political thinking, careful to desist from Enlightenment ‘grand narratives’, wary of any truck with a technological infrastructure tainted by capital, and allergic to an entire civilizational heritage that it lumps together and discards as ‘instrumental thinking’, patently fails to offer the alternative it insists must be possible, except in the form of counterfactual histories and all-too-local interventions into a decentred, globally-integrated system that is at best indifferent to them. The general reasoning is that if modernity=progress=capitalism=acceleration, then the only possible resistance amounts to deceleration, whether through a fantasy of collective organic self-sufficiency or a solo retreat into miserablism and sagacious warnings against the treacherous counterfinalities of rational thought.
Needless to say, a well-to-do liberal Left, convinced that technology equates to instrumental mastery and that capitalist economics amounts to a heap of numbers, in most cases leaves concrete technological nous and economic arguments to its adversary—something it shares with its more radical but equally technologically illiterate academic counterparts, who confront capitalism with theoretical constructs so completely at odds with its concrete workings that the most they can offer is a faith in miraculous events to come, scarcely more effectual than organic folk politics. In some quarters, a Heideggerian Gelassenheit or ‘letting be’ is called for, suggesting that the best we can hope for is to desist entirely from destructive development and attempts to subdue or control nature—an option that, needless to say, is also the prerogative of an individualised privileged spectator who is the subjective product of global capital.
From critical social democrats to revolutionary Maoists, from Occupy mic checks to post-Frankfurt School mutterings, the ideological slogan goes: There must be an outside! And yet, given the real subsumption of life under capitalist relations, what is missing, precluded by reactionary obsessions with purity, humility, and sentimental attachment to the personally gratifying rituals of critique and protest and their brittle and fleeting forms of collectivity? Precisely any pragmatic criteria for the identification and selection of elements of this system that might be effective in a concrete transition to another life beyond the iniquities and impediments of capital.
It is in the context of such a predicament that accelerationism has recently emerged again as a leftist option. Since the 2013 publication of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ [MAP], the term has been adopted to name a convergent group of new theoretical enterprises that aim to conceptualise the future outside of traditional critiques and regressive, decelerative or restorative ‘solutions’. In the wake of the new philosophical realisms of recent years, they do so through a recusal of the rhetoric of human finitude in favour of a renewed Prometheanism and rationalism, an affirmation that the increasing immanence of the social and technical is irreversible and indeed desirable, and a commitment to developing new understandings of the complexity this brings to contemporary politics. This new movement has already given rise to lively international debate, but is also the object of many misunderstandings and rancorous antagonism on the part of those entrenched positions whose dogmatic slumbers it disturbs. Through a reconstruction of the historical trajectory of accelerationism, this book aims to set out its core problematics, to explore its historical and conceptual genealogy, and to exhibit the gamut of possibilities it presents, so as to assess the potentials of accelerationism as both philosophical configuration and political proposition.
What resonates for me—the accelerationist view of capitalism sounds similar to Bernie Sanders' criticism of "billionaires", PACs and Wall Street; and that, as a "shill" for capitalism, Hillary Clinton is equated — by many of her critics at DK — with the "regressive" and the "decelerative", and the "restorative solutions" of the status quo. In other words, Hillary Clinton is seen not as a participant of any sort of credible "revolution", but as the "adversary of the revolution". This is the oil and water that can never mix: because Accelerationism is, apparently, all about dealing with the Hillarys of the World and their failed policies of politique du pire.
Snippets & Reviews
Accelerationist Reader includes Antonio Negri's Reflections on the “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (available online). His discussion about "The Reappropriation of Fixed Capital" seems pertinent because: "the Left has to develop socio-technological hegemony …we first have to mature the whole complex of productive potentialities of cognitive labor in order to advance a new hegemony".
Let’s get back to us. First of all, the “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” is about unleashing the power of cognitive labor by tearing it from its latency: “We surely do not yet know what a modern technosocial body can do!” Here, the Manifesto insists on two elements. The first element is what I would call the “reappropriation of fixed capital” and the consequent anthropological transformation of the working subject.9 The second element is sociopolitical: such a new potentiality of our bodies is essentially collective and political. In other words, the surplus added in production is derived primarily from socially productive cooperation. This is probably the most crucial passage of the Manifesto.10 With an attitude that attenuates the humanism present in philosophical critique, the MAP insists on the material and technical qualities of the corporeal reappropriation of fixed capital. Productive quantification, economic modeling, big data analysis, and the most abstract cognitive models are all appropriated by worker-subjects through education and science. The use of mathematical models and algorithms by capital does not make them a feature of capital. It is not a problem of mathematics—it is a problem of power.
No doubt, there is some optimism in this Manifesto. Such an optimistic perception of the technosocial body is not very useful for the critique of the complex human-machine relationship, but nonetheless this Machiavellian optimism helps us to dive into the discussion about organization, which is the most urgent one today. Once the discussion is brought back to the issue of power, it leads directly to the issue of organization. Says the MAP: the Left has to develop socio-technological hegemony—“material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.”11 Without a doubt, there is a strong reliance on objectivity and materiality, on a sort of Dasein of development—and consequently a certain underestimation of the social, political, and cooperative elements that we assumed to be there when we agreed to the basic protocol: “One divides into Two.” However, such an underestimation should not prevent us from recognizing the importance of acquiring the highest techniques employed by capitalistic command, as well as the abstraction of labor, in order to bring them back to a communist administration performed “by the things themselves.” I understand the passage on technopolitical hegemony in this way: we first have to mature the whole complex of productive potentialities of cognitive labor in order to advance a new hegemony.
From Orlando Reade's Accelerationist Reader review:
Accelerationism’s focus on technology carries with it an insistent universalism that overlooks geographic and economic difference. In their call for a reinvigorated Promethean politics, Avanessian and Mackay (paraphrasing Baruch Spinoza) divide humanity into Homo hominans, the humanity that creates, and homo hominata, created humanity. This distinction is not just a philosophical question (whether we should be anti-humanist, post-humanist, etc.) but also an effect of the division of labour based on gender, class and geographical location. Certain social conditions are obstacles to creativity. Accelerationism does not seem particularly interested in the ecological and human costs of technological production. This may be an accident of the location of this movement: in her ‘Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism’, the final text in #Accelerate, the artist Patricia Reed notes the ‘[This tendency is also mirrored in the (almost entirely) white-Euro-male origins from which the discourse springs—to remain strictly entrenched within this exclusive demographic would be a step of ironic brutality]’.
Years ago I loved reading Nina Power's blog (utterly hilarious, thought-provoking shots of all-embracing feminism; see her book: One Dimensional Woman). If I wanted to start a conversation about accelerationism and revolution, I'd definitely start with Nina :) Her "Decapitalism, Left Scarcity, and the State" is a must read—not just from a feminist standpoint, but to
…reconfigure the terms on which the debate takes place and to serve as a reminder that there are counter-histories to a narrative of relentlessness… The version of decapitalism I’m describing starts by recognizing that which is often hidden in plain sight but without which systems, both capitalist and communist, would fall apart.