#left accelerationism

[crionic-soc]

Soon after the Occupy London Stock Exchange movement had begun, the novelist turned Conservative politician Louise Mensch, appeared on the BBC TV programme, Have I Got News For You?, taunting the protestors with the claim that the occupation had led to the “biggest ever queues at Starbucks”. The problem, Mensch insisted, was not only that the occupiers bought corporate coffee - they also used iPhones. The suggestion was clear: being anti-capitalist entails being an anarcho-primitivist. Mensch’s remarks were ridiculed, not least on the programme itself, but the questions that they raise can’t be so easily dismissed. If opposition to capital does not require that one maintains an anti-technological, anti-mass production stance, why - in the minds of some of its supporters, as much as in the caricatures produced by opponents such as Mensch - has anti-capitalism become exclusively identified with this organicist localism? Here we are a long way from Lenin’s enthusiasm for Taylorism, or Gramsci’s celebration of Fordism, or indeed from the Soviet embrace of technology in the space race. Capital has long tried to claim a monopoly on desire: we only have to remember famous 1980s advert for Levi jeans in which a teenager was seen anxiously smuggling a pair of jeans through a Soviet border post. But the emergence of consumer electronic goods has allowed capital to conflate desire and technology so that the desire for an iPhone can now appear automatically to mean a desire for capitalism. Here we think of another advertisement, Apple’s notorious “1984” commercial, which equated personal computers with the liberation from totalitarian control.

- Postcapitalist Desire, Mark Fisher

[sweet-like-salt1]

i’ve been listening to a lot of josh citarella recently and i really do see his point of view….

[owlyouth]

Thought: Visions of a future

On an accelerated future

Connolly and Wolin worry about an accelerated future. Their prescriptions for a ‘slow-time’ in addition to any acceleration tend to mirror that of Zuboff's demand for individual sovereignty. Srnicek and Williams on the other hand seem to have no time for slow 'folk politics'. 

Each side in its their own right seems to be a good advertisement for their counter. The clarion call for ‘slow time’ seems to exhibit something reactionary, or at the very least unrealistic, while the call for an embrace of speed seems to assume that this must be done in the dust of democratic deliberation.

In between these two camps seems to sit a call for fast democracy, digitally-enabled democratic platforms. In many ways this is a policy problem. We should consider what each position says about its proponents view of the role technology plays in shaping the international.

[maxksx]

Really, what does ‘kitsch Marxism’ or ‘neoliberalism’ or any ‘ism’ whatsoever mean in such an age? We can no longer pretend that the tsunami of disenchantment will magically fall just short our intentional feet. Disenchantment, the material truth of the Enlightenment, has overthrown the normative claims of the Enlightenment—or humanism. “This is a project which must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment,” the authors of the Accelerationist Manifesto write, “to the extent that it is only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and our world better (our social, technical, economic, psychological world) that we can come to rule ourselves” (14). In doing so they commit the very sin of anachronism they level at their critical competitors. They fail to appreciate the foundational role ignorance plays in intentional cognition, which is to say, the very kind of moral and political reasoning they engage in. Far more than ‘freedom’ is overturned once one concedes the mechanical. Knowledge is no universal Redeemer, which means the ideal of Enlightenment autonomy is almost certainly mythical. What’s required isn’t an aspiration to theorize new technologies with old concepts. What’s required is a fundamental rethink of the political in radically post–intentional terms.

[wwworlding]

“But politics is not all hopeless. Left Accelerationism is an alternative, and it’s the idea that the only way out of multinational late capitalism is through it. Capitalism has one direction at this point and that’s collapse. Either it collapses into socialism or fascism, but it’ll collapse. Technological growth is a consequence of capitalism and technology. It can and should be repurposed. Left acceleration anticipates this collapse and aims to utilize technology to not only nudge the collapse Leftward, but to seize control via a counter-hegemony symmetrical to right populism. Marxism for the 21st century is nothing if not left Accelelerationism.

Accelerationism in its left alignment acknowledges that capitalism is the common denominator in all global conflicts which all affect one another in a complex schema. Horizontal & local politics can’t contend with this planetary complexity. Capitalism has in the past made socialized concessions to prevent its collapse. Make all the jokes you want about “fully automated space communism” and the implausibility of such a world, but that’s part of why the Left keeps dissaponting itself. Left Accelerationism urges the larger left to reject nostalgia and embrace Bogdanovian “tektology” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektology) and global systems.

Punching Richard Spencer is satisfying but the left also needs new political infrastructures. In the last five years Left Accelerationist action has mostly amounted to intellectual elite meetings, high-quality publishing, contemporary art projects and academic conferences. Left Accelerationism needs to leave behind its safe theoretical embryo and its current status a new intellectual cult around certain figureheads and a new brand identity for personal career advancement in arts and academia and instead become a real planetary political movement.”