Accelerationism Without Accelerationism - The Disorder of Things
Accelerationism Without Accelerationism - The Disorder of Things
Accelerationism Without Accelerationism - The Disorder of Things
Accelerationism Without
Accelerationism
NOVEMBER 3, 2015 / GUEST AUTHORS
The second post in our forum on Nick and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future, from
Steven Shaviro. Steven is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He
blogs at The Pinocchio Theory.
The term accelerationism was coined by Benjamin Noys in 2010, in order to designate a
political position that he rejected. In Noys’ account, accelerationism is the idea that things
have to get worse before they can get better. The only way out of capitalism is the way
through. The more abstract, violent, inhuman, contradictory, and destructive capitalism
becomes, the closer it gets to tearing itself apart. Such a vision derives, ultimately, from the
famous account of capitalism’s inherent dynamism in the Communist Manifesto. For Marx
and Engels, capitalism is characterized by “constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation… All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Far from deploring such
developments, Marx and Engels see them as necessary preconditions for the overthrow of
Follow
capitalism itself.
The trouble with accelerationism, according to Noys, is that it celebrates “uncertainty and
agitation” as revolutionary in its own right. It doesn’t have any vision of a future beyond
disruption. In the 1970s, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we need, not to withdraw from
capitalism, but “to go still further… in the movement of the market, of decoding and
deterritorialization,” At the same time, Jean-François Lyotard exults over capitalism’s
“insane pulsions” and “mutant intensities.‟ By the 1990s, Nick Land ecstatically anticipates
the dissolution of humanity, as the result of “an invasion from the future” by the
“cyberpositively escalating technovirus” of finance capital. Today, transhumanists see
Bitcoin, derivatives, algorithmic trading, and artificial intelligence as tools for destroying the
social order altogether, and for freeing themselves from the limits of the State, of
collectivity, and even of mortality and finitude. This is what happens when “creative
destruction” – as Joseph Schumpeter calls it, in his right-wing appropriation of Marx – is
valued in and of itself.
In 2013, responding to all these currents, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published their
“#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.” In this text, they seek to reclaim
accelerationism as a genuine project for the left – one that can pick up the tools of capitalist
modernity, and detourn them to liberatory ends. This is not a matter of celebrating disruption
for its own sake; Srnicek and Williams emphatically reject Nick Land’s “myopic yet
hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards
unparalleled technological singularity.” Instead, Srnicek and Williams return to Marx’s own
suggestion that
The new technologies – digital and otherwise – of the last several decades are currently
straining against the “fetters” of the very system that initially produced them. Information
streams are censored and crippled as a result of so-called “intellectual property” laws;
companies like Apple and Google appropriate the profits resulting from research that was
conducted at public expense. The automation and robotization of so many jobs leads, not to
comfort and liberation from toil, but to precarity and dispossession.
Srnicek and Williams argue in their manifesto that we need to adapt these new technologies
for emancipatory ends, rather than resisting and opposing them. They argue for a future-
oriented left politics, “at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and
technology.” They suggest that we should seek, not to restrain, but rather to “unleash latent
productive forces.” They even call for a “Promethean politics of maximal mastery over
society and its environment.” We might say that Srnicek and Williams’ accelerationism
stands in relation to that of Nick Land much as early Soviet Constructivism stood in relation
to Italian Futurism.
Srnicek and Williams’ important new book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a
World Without Work, offers a full-length expansion of the program that was first outlined
in their manifesto. The most surprising thing about the book, however, is that the actual
word “accelerationism” scarcely appears anywhere within it. As the authors explain in an
endnote,
We largely avoid using the term ‘accelerationism’ in this work, due to the
miasma of competing understandings that has risen around the concept,
rather than from any abdication of its tenets as we understand them.
What this means, in practice, is that Srnicek and Williams’ ideas are removed from the
incendiary context in which they were first proposed. Though the actual program of
Inventing the Future is much the same as that of the manifesto, the change in rhetoric
makes for a substantial difference. Without the expressive urgency connoted both by the
word “accelerationism,” and the hyperbole that is basic to the manifesto as a genre, Srnicek
and Williams’ proposals seem – well, they seem downright moderate and reasonable.
The authors start the book by offering a (mostly) comradely critique of the left’s recent
predilection for “horizontalist” modes of organization, for privileging local concerns over
global ones, for avoiding any explicit list of demands, and for direct democracy and
spontaneous direct action. All these have been prominent features of the Occupy movement
and other recent protest actions. But Srnicek and Williams argue that these tactics “do not
scale.” They may work well enough in particular instances, but they are not of much help
when it comes to building a larger and longer-enduring oppositional movement, one that
could actually work towards changing our basic conditions of life.
This line of argument seems irrefutable to me — although it will likely irritate large segments
of the book’s potential audience, particularly those whose general orientation is anarchist
rather than Marxist. It is not just a question of organisational work — something that,
admittedly, I have never done much of, myself — but also of orientation and basic vision.
Local and horizontal political tactics are incomplete in themselves; they need to be
supplemented by more global, or universal, modes of action and concern.
Unfortunately, Srnicek and Williams do not do themselves any favours when they
characterise localist and horizontal tactics as “folk politics.” Such an appellation is deeply
condescending. It is derived by analogy from “folk psychology,” the sneering term with
which reductionist philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists refer to our common-sense
beliefs and intuitions about ourselves. I entirely agree with the cognitivists that there is a lot
going on in our minds that is not directly accessible to conscious awareness. But this need
not entail that, as Paul Churchland notoriously put it, “our common-sense conception of
psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory,” so that things like beliefs and
desires don’t really even exist. The same holds for “folk politics” as for “folk psychology.”
Pointing out the incompleteness of a mode of understanding is one thing; but dismissing it as
entirely false and delusional is quite another. Srnicek and Williams convincingly argue that
we need a more expansive, and more fully imaginative, form of both action and theorization;
but they could well have pointed this out without the contempt and disparagement implied
by the term “folk politics.”
In any case, after the opening chapters devoted to “the negative task of diagnosing the
strategic limitations of the contemporary left,” Srnicek and Williams turn to the positive
project of spelling out an alternative. This is where they do indeed make accelerationist
proposals, while avoiding the needlessly provocative (one might even say “infantile leftist”)
connotations that the term has taken on in recent years. They suggest, first of all, that the left
needs to reclaim the mantle of modernism (the attitude) and modernity (the process) that it
held for much of the twentieth century. This means, among other things, embracing and
detourning new technologies, and finding a new sort of universalism that includes all the
many local needs and forms of struggle, bringing them together without erasing their
concrete particulars. (Here I wish that they had given consideration to something like Gilbert
Simondon’s notions of transversality and transindividuality — for a discussion of which, in
terms of left politics, see Jason Read’s new book The Politics of Transindividuality).
Beyond this, Srnicek and Williams analyze the ways that new technologies are transforming
capitalism. They focus particularly on the ways that computerization and robotics are
making more and more jobs redundant – without producing new sorts of jobs to replace
them, as was the case in earlier waves of automation. We are standing on the verge of a
“post-work world.” Given this situation, they suggest four basic demands around which the
left can and should unite:
1. Full automation
2. The reduction of the working week
3. The provision of a basic income
4. The diminishment of the work ethic.
It is not that these demands will solve all problems; obviously they fail to address racism,
sexism, and many other pressing needs. I myself would want to add a fifth demand to the
list: the right of migration, and abolition of borders. But even without this addition, I think
that the demands listed by Srnicek and Williams do indeed make sense as a “minimal”
program. For one thing, they would establish the material conditions – freedom from hunger,
homelessness, and other forms of severe want – under which racism and sexism could be
more forcefully addressed and opposed than is the case today. For another thing, although
these demands are in themselves concrete and attainable – as the world today is wealthy
enough, and technologically advanced enough, to realise them – their fulfilment would
require massive economic, social, and political transformations: ones that would take us
beyond the limits of capitalism as it actually exists today.
Even if the left is able to unite around this series of demands, actually attaining them will
remain a difficult task. Srnicek and Williams sensibly note that
Along these lines, they offer a number of concrete proposals, most of them good. They
remind us, especially, that we cannot hope for immediate results, but need to play a long
game. This is not a matter of the old debate between “reform” and “revolution” – an
alternative that is now outdated. Rather, it means that a lot of things need to be changed on
the ground in order for a massive economic and political transformation to be possible.
To illustrate this, Srnicek and Williams follow Philip Mirowski in tracing the history of the
“neoliberal thought collective,” as it moved from a fringe group just after World War II to
the dominant ideological force in the world after 1980. I have mixed feelings about this
example, however. The story of neoliberalism’s triumph does indeed demonstrate the virtues
of patience, cunning, keeping an eye on the long term, and understanding that the “common
sense” of the broader society needs to change if policies are to change. It certainly wouldn’t
hurt to have a “Mont Pelerin of the left,” concerned with more than immediate results. But
the long-term success of the neoliberals has a lot to do with their access to money and to
organs of public opinion. The capitalist class may well have accepted the Keynesian
compromise in the post-War period, but they were always amenable to a new formation that
would only increase their wealth, power, and influence. Ideological hegemony is a form of
class struggle by different means. A left counter-hegemonic project will never be able to
command the sorts of resources that the neoliberals had, as the moved from the margins to
the centre of policy-making.
The larger point here is that, as Fredric Jameson once put it,
This doesn’t mean that politics can be ignored; the task of making a better economic order
will always require deep political engagement. And Srnicek and Williams’ economic
analysis of the material conditions for a “post-work” economy is quite good. But it still
remains that they – like nearly all “Western Marxists” over the course of the past century –
are a bit too quick in making the leap from economic matters to political ones.
Still, I don’t want to end my comments on such a negative note. The greatest strength of
Inventing the Future, to my mind, is that it does indeed turn our attention towards the
future, instead of the past. A big problem for the left today is that we have too long been
stuck in the backward-looking, defensive project of trying to rescue whatever might be left
of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. While it is perfectly reasonable to lament our loss
of the safety net that was provided by mid-twentieth-century social democracy, the
restoration of those benefits is not enough to fuel a radical economic and political program.
Looking nostalgically towards the past is far too deeply ingrained in our habits of thought.
We need to reclaim our sense of the future from Silicon Valley and Hollywood. As Srnicek
and Williams put it at the very end of their book,
Post-capitalism (or better, communism – to use another word that is absent from this book)
today has only a science fictional status. It’s a hidden potentiality that somehow still
manages – just barely – to haunt the neoliberal endless present. Our rulers have been unable
to exorcise this potential completely; but thus far we have been equally unable to endow it
with any sort of substantiality or persistence. Inventing the Future looks beyond this
impasse, to extrapolate (as all good science fiction does) a future that might actually be
livable. This is its virtue and its importance.
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13 thoughts on “Accelerationism
Without Accelerationism”
dmf
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nickmennuti
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Lee Jones
Excellent post – situates the book nicely for those unfamiliar with the
debate. Personally the arguments of the book sound very attractive so I
have ordered my copy!
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