Half a century ago, in the great hippie year of 1967, an acclaimed young American science fiction writer, Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political. One plot strand concerned a group of revolutionaries who wanted to take their society “to a higher level” by suddenly transforming its attitude to technology. Zelazny called them the Accelerationists.
[…]
Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.
[…]
In some ways, Karl Marx was the first accelerationist. His Communist Manifesto of 1848 was as much awestruck as appalled by capitalism, with its “constant revolutionising of production” and “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions”. He saw an ever more frantic capitalism as the essential prelude to the moment when the ordinary citizen “is at last compelled to face … his real conditions of life” and start a revolution.
This was a pretty good summary. Didn't know the origins that well.
Brayden Clark
Was Santa Marx really the first accelerationist?
Daniel Gomez
from a Marxist perspective accelerationism actually makes sense.
Grayson Thomas
Shouldn't you be at a Trump rally, Holla Forumsyp?
Carson Butler
Communism will only come about when capitalism fails. The more capitalism you have closer failure gets due to capitalism inherent flaws.
Gavin Rodriguez
Man, I wonder why.
Here's a tip to knowing whether or not a journalist writing about Marx knows what he's talking about: is he using the Manifesto for reference? Then he doesn't. Both Marx and Engels spent the last decades of their lives begging people to join the class struggle in every conceivable front. Unions, co-ops, parliaments, etc.
Also, regarding the second paragraph of OP, why do people always assume that it's the most vicious and aggressive capitalism that produces more technological innovation?
Dominic Martin
That's horseshit. People were more open to radical ideas during the 60s than they were during the 30s or ever since.
Nathaniel Cruz
Leftism did incredibly well during the 30s and WWII, that's why the fascist counter-reaction was so strong ironically enough.
Jordan Bell
And yet the "radical ideas" of the '60s were all horseshit and ended with a dud, while at least the radicalism of the early 20th century managed to create movements that actually held pure proletarian power, if only for a few years.
Jason James
France nearly collapsed to a worker's movement. The president of France fled because he thought the country was being taken over by communists.
We haven't seen shit like that since. Instead, Reagan and Thatcher dominated the west and we've been backsliding into barbarism. The liberals are in shambles and the left has no party, just figure heads like Bernie and Corbyn. Meanwhile, polls say despite all of the fuck ups, scandals and sell outs (the AHCA), republican voters still favor their party. We are looking at a wall of shit, the 60s was an incredibly more active and successful time period for leftism than what has been going on. People made communes, terrorist cells tried to assasinate politicians, union, student and anti-war protests were omnipresent. We live in a hopeless shit hole right now, the 60s must have felt so fucking promising.
Connor Foster
Unrestrained capitalism means leaving small businesses in the dust. Big business means big money, which means big competition with big stakes. Cutting costs by a fraction of a percent can mean increasing profitability by millions, so need for innovation is very pressing. Small businesses tend to jerk off about muh mom 'n' pop and other bells and whistles shit.
Blake Nguyen
Can someone spoonfeed this basic Marxist principle to me?
Marx said every society is created by contradictions of interests, right? So how could communism be free of those contradicting interests? Wouldn't communism eventually collapse and be replaced by a DIFFERENT form of social organization?
Tyler James
The 60s were DUDE WEED LMAO: The Decade.
Elijah Richardson
The anti-war movement had a shitload of legitimate radicals.
And the Panthers and black liberation movements.
Jaxson Martin
On the one hand, this is descriptive not prescriptive. Marx wasn't saying this is inherent society, but that all societies had these contradictions.
On the other hand, Marx never claimed communism was the final form of society. He wasn't interested in predicting what could come after. He wasn't very interested in predicting what communism itself would look like because there were too many unknown variables.
Elijah Thompson
Compared to now, sure. Not compared to all other decades and certainly not the 30s.
David Perry
Because under Communism classes are abolished and in theory everyone's interests are the same. Doesn't mean there couldn't be a Nazi masturbation fantasy and eugenics afterwards or whatever, Capitalist exploitation is just the main driver of conflict in our [current mode of production]
Leo Harris
1968 hit hard man. That was basically the beginning of the counter-"revolution" (in America at least. )
Adrian Smith
Maybe I don't get dialectical materialism, then.
Isn't it saying that competing class interests are inherently what drive all human progress?
Landon Miller
History isn't progress.
Jaxon Howard
If it drove all human history, wouldn't it make sense that it would drive humanity's future too?
Michael Mitchell
No. That would be really fucking stupid. He's saying that the contradictions push an existing system toward collapse, which would allow a new system to take its place.
It can't drive humanity's future it it's fucking gone.
Luke Jackson
How can you dialectically analyze a society that doesn't have a dialectic
Austin Williams
If it doesn't have a dialectic why would you dialectically analyze it? That works for capitalism but what if communism's problems are beyond Marx and require entirely new paradigms? The ultimate goal of a critic is to make his criticism obsolete.
Owen Walker
Thesis: Alive people Antithesus; Dead people Synthesis: Zombies Seize the brains!
Eli Howard
I love how everytime someone brings up the banal reality the accelerationist memers falls silent.
There's also this meme that the 60s was just hippies and the liberal idpol. It's not true. The period between the 50s and the early 80s was the heyday of class consciousness in european workers.
Dylan Miller
the 60's-70's were an interesting period.
I think one of the biggest factors that caused the change was simply the oil-crisis in the United States, and the flight of capital from european and american banks to places that were more remote.
other factors include a sense of "protest fatigue", along with experience with communes and the like (that quite often ended in abusive power-structures, or fell apart out of apathy).. Stagflation in the US, issues in Europe, the Brezhnev Stagnation, Iranian Revolution, and the end of South Vietnam, along with revelations of what the fuck was up with Cambodia, really ate away at optimistic visions of the future..
Elijah Bennett
Very likely. It's been repeatedly misunderstood and distorted.
