In this germinal accelerationist matrix...

jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/

Other urls found in this thread:

theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Land here is trapped in the hall of mirrors which constantly shift direction to give the impression of revolution while the servos beneath the floor which drive them remain put.

That being said, apparently my ideas posited in the Empirical Marxist thread weren't just rambling without coherence as some tankie sperged at it - DeLeuze and Guattari simply beat me to the punch by many decades, although it appears that they denied a strict division between base and superstructure (itself an early example of a social feedback loop analyzable by means of a cybernetic framework) and therefore naturally ended up wandering the latter because the former seems so impoverished as a field of analysis if you do not understand its precise and distinct relation to the latter.

I've read the Manifesto For An Accelerationist Politics by Srnicek and Williams before, and while I didn't learn a particular lot from it, I was impressed and stunned by how similar their own conclusions were to mine. That being said, my emphasis on creating and implementing systems and putting action before idea (organicism vs democracy) makes me the Bordiga to their Lenin.

I guess this does mean a final break with Marxism and dialectics altogether, though, as what I do know is that it's fundamentally derived from Kant (as there is no Marx without Hegel, and no Hegel without Kant) and Kant is incompatible with Hume (the basis for DeLeuze's thought). I hate to sound like one of the "pick ideologies like cereals from a shelf" people, but accelerationist and Marxist perspectives always did seem to come out at odds with one another when I tried reasoning through their respective lines of thought on various points and see if there was some relation by which one defines the other through mutual opposition (thus laying the basis for a critique of both and dialectical synthesis through a development of this critique). For a while, I simply considered myself an anarcho-communist like Kropotkin because he completed lacked a metaphysical framework beyond a mechanistic empiricism (admittedly closer to my own perspective, in hindsight), but always knew that I wanted to expand beyond this and incorporate cybernetics. Now I'm certain that I'm an left-accelerationist, and that I always have been.

I haven't read Land's works yet, but my impression so far is that he hasn't read Society Of The Spectacle or its Comments sequel and realized that he is thoroughly engrossed in the integrated spectacle to the point that he has constructed for himself and others in its grasp a new framework of reality which only makes it harder to break out of it. Imagine being in The Matrix, rejecting the red pill, and then creating your own full simulation of a world within it and consciously deciding to live in it while denying that this meta-meta-reality is itself not real reality. So he really is a drugged-up maniac, isn't he?

Land fucked himself on uppers. There were reports of him doing weird snake dances in Warwick University during his days as a professor. Sometimes, I think he is just role playing IRL.

Have fun in that egotistical hall of mirrors.
You didn't even read the fucking article.

-t Nick Land

jacobite is published by reactionaries. stop trying to force it.

Lenin ended up standing for democracy in name only

Land confuses me, just yesterday I was hearing this podcast with the Red Ice Radio people, both him and the host were sperging out about muh death of the west, the thing is, based on what little I know about Land he should be embracing the new, more dynamic (and yes, more authoritarian) capitalism emerging out of the east, my only conclusion is that he's an opportunist that says what the right wants to hear but is ultimately doing his own thing. In some other thread about Land an user compared him with Dugin, now I see what that user was talking about.

Yes, I think the man has to a large extend embraced being a living meme

I thought he eagerly awaited the violent liquidation of humanity by hostile AI? Why would you lament the death of Western society if you thought this way?

All this stuff just degenerates into sperging about Muslims and blacks at the end of the day.

How can you be a left accelerationist and know what Deleuze was talking about on crisis and the development of capitalism. The more crisis capitalism has, the better it continues to work as it further and further disconnects itself from reality. We have seen time and time again that capitalism is perfectly capable of dealing with massive crisis. You only need to look at 2008, the great depression, the latin american debt crisis, ect.

What will destroy capitalism is its external limits, not its internal ones, unless there is a distinct intervention on the part of class warfare, or similar insurrection. This aligns perfectly well with the marxist position of historical development, even if not with Marx's exact view of the position of capitalist crisis in this development. If communists resolve themselves to do nothing because they expect capitalism to destroy itself, then nothing will change. Men make their own history after all, even if they don't make it as they please.

You're problem is seeing ideology as single boxes of cereal, discreet packages. On the contrary, ideology is only sets of logic. Loot the supermarket of ideology, take what you please, what makes sense together, and you'll be better off.

muh capitalism is collapsingā€¦ .. any time now.. any timeā€¦

Exactly, this is why I suspect he's an opportunist LARPER

Like, you write all this stupid political theory, when all it really comes down to is:


You would think someone eager for the liquidation of humanity, who sees Islam as the chief enemy of civilization, would just come out in favor of an extermination campaign.

What is with Land's writing style? It is unsettling, but I do not know why.

It collapsed in 2008 you massive retard, and the only thing keeping its tottering bulk from keeling over entirely is the federal reserve dumping trillions of dollars into it every year.

The Great Depression happened and we still haven't ever actually recovered from that. Then Reaganomics and the recession in 2008? Capitalism is pretty much dead in the water.

You have to be crazy to not see that our current arrangement is unsustainable, even if you don't think socialism is the answer.

Oh he fully embraces it, he even lives in Shanghai
theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in

utopians get out

I already wrote a long response to this 2x and accidentally deleted it both times because it was too long
I disagree with Srnicek and William's "left accelerationism", even if it comes to similar conclusions such as the relevance of Project Cybersyn, because it is merely Leninism with an eye towards technological developments, which isn't accelerationism. Like I said above, Marxism is incompatible with accelerationism in any form, and this is what Land is getting at - anarcho-communism, however, actually holds a lot of insights potentially useful to it, as it relies on a mechanistic empiricism in its original form.
So, then, what does a real left accelerationism look like? Well, what are the dominant trends of capitalist society in this technologically-accelerating age when put in the context of society's history and its own?
First off, we must broadly define the roots of capitalism and its deterritorializing tendencies within the context of the regular relative deterritorialization which has defined previous cybernetic societies, "organized rule" in two words, going back to Mesopotamia. In all societies then and since, the defining feature has been the continual process of brute force directing labor power to benefit those who control labor power and extend this power. On a semi-related note, I would argue for a directed-work (work here in the physics sense of the term) theory of value derived from an extension of Adam Smith's conception of the labor theory of value; in it, value is created by the abstract social system in order to maintain and grow itself by means of brute force acting upon an intelligent mediator which transforms energy from one form into another which is usable to further develop and reproduce the very system which gave birth to it. What defines capitalism is that the direction of capacity to work by force is no longer carried out by a ruling individual or even caste or bureaucracy a la Machiavelli - rather, it is the abstract force of capital, which contains within itself as prerequisites both to its own existence and to its reproduction both a tendency to command the collective capacity to work, organizing itself around capital's self-reproduction and simultaneous self-destruction of its former physical incarnation, and a tendency intertwined to drive forward technological development to better reproduce itself.
It obeys certain rules given an early stage of development, that of brute submission of work-capacity to the productive process of vulgar industrialism; in other words, it relies upon the clearly-defined control mechanisms of separating human work-capacity from spatial and temporal constraints by means of the firm and its strict, hierarchical internal structure. For example, look at how, with early firms in the Industrial Revolution, the water wheel was a far more productive source of energy, but the steam engine came to be preferred even at the cost because it could universalize and generalize the transformation by work of energy into usable forms. Due to the tendency of the RoP to decline, however, this vulgar industrialism could not last - it came to an end in viability in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when it became necessary to once again further remove constraints on capital's self-reproduction by restoring profitability. This, however, heralded something entirely unknown previously - the coming of the deterritorialization of capital, previously purely an affair within the firm, as something which actively pervaded daily life and which intensified the connecting social control mechanism arising from its own existence, the Spectacle identified by the Situationists (not a big fan of their Marxism, but their observations were spot on in many ways - their solutions were shit, though).
(cont)

In the Conquest Of Bread, Kropotkin talks about the "tendency towards decentralization" of the Gilded Age of his time, and as capitalism has finally returned from the centralizing reaction to the "Soviet threat", we see it once more and with renewed vigor in modern society, what with its frantic acceleration of information technology's development to extract more value by better mediating work's micromanagement and intensification. Whereas what Kropotkin observed were the mutual aid societies created by workers in response to the failure of centralized, firm-based capitalism to meet their needs, however, today the deterritorialization of technological advance has proceeded to such a point that the firm has ceased to be little more than a site of value production/extraction and valorization. If you look at new firms in new markets such as Valve, they are all highly decentralized, being a sea of free associations of producers internally with only a looming mechanism of value extraction which makes it a photonegative of communist utopia. The free software movement's relations between its participant individuals are communistic in the fullest, but its truly relevant individual actors are corporations behaving communistically towards one another. The gig economy is people sharing things at the gunpoint of poverty to make profit for someone not actively involved. The jobs of managers are being automated faster than those of other workers by use of ERP programs. Work is ceasing to be an activity distinct from life, similar to how Dauve states that the true meaning of communism as being the abolition of work as a distinct category of life; rather than life conquering work, work conquers life. This is all because the runaway nature of technological development as a mechanism of intensifying value production/extraction and the accompanying revolutionization of all previous forms of control means the destruction of all forms of control but the unspoken, uncapricious logic of the market, of capital. The big corporations and states, the old disciplinarians, are in fact in firm opposition to this trend because it means their own eventual destruction, even if they do not know it in full themselves - they actively want automation because they can then have their taxes on machine productivity paid out as UBI to artificially keep the gravy train going.
(cont)

A left-accelerationist project therefore consists in the immediate intensification right now of capitalist exploitation by making the coordination of labor according to value production universal by creating an economic planning calculator, a FLOSS-based bastard child of Cybersyn and Bitcoin, which allows for a completely atomized and marketized network of spontaneous associations of producers without the inefficient big firms, which encourages 3D printing and other innovative forms of production which leaves traditional organization of capital in the dust. Then, it must pivot and grow to supersede the state. Social revolution has never been immediate and violent, and there's no reason to think it will be any different this time because "muh dialectics".
The logical development of Kropotkin bears some resemblance to "The Coming Insurrection", but rejects that lifestylist charlatan Bey for the application of the works of cyberneticians such as Beer to entire social systems and a materialist analysis of history paralleling but never crossing into Marx's own trajectory.
He's in it not because he's an accelerationist, but because he lacks a totalizing conception of history which gives context to capitalism as simply the latest development in a long line of control systems which direct work. At least that was my first impression of him, and this article didn't change it. It doesn't matter that he has read Marx; what matters is whether he has a coherent response to his full conception of history as a process, which is necessary to give capital's own intrinsic revolutionary properties context to properly grasp their scale. You see this all the time with the Right, and it's an unfortunate trap.

user that was great, you should run a blog or something

Accelerationism is intellectual resignation. It's saying that workers having it a little bit easier will make it harder to convince them that things need to be changed, therefore it should be avoided at all cost. In other words, "if something is hard, then it's impossible".

It's not that absolutist. The worse things are, the easier people are to convince and the more people will be looking for somewhere to turn. And there's nothing about accelerationism that says you can't also convince workers. The real issue with accelerationism is the lack of context. Accelerationism in the context of a robust and organized left ready to pick up the pieces will put the left in an advantageous position to start a revolution. Accelerationsim in the context of a shattered left poisoned and infested with identity politics and the rise of reactionary/neofascist thought is a recipe for the next Nazi Germany. Revolutionaries and reactionaries are always gunning to take advantage of a crisis. If one is much stronger than the other it will probably succeed.

You have a point, but the thing is that all accelerationist arguments can be ultimately summed up as "intellectual" arguments, as opposed to material. It's not saying that concrete material conditions that prevent action are to be avoided, on the opposite it's saying that conditions that make consciousness and action harder on an intellectual level are to be avoided at all cost, including up to the point where it brings forth worse concrete material conditions. Which is extremely dumb.
It's trying to avoid intellectual hardship, which you can to some extent do something about, at the cost of material hardship, which you mostly can't do anything about.

relevant reading

if you want to read land

And this is where you lose me. You seem to be taking the change in management style caused by the application of cybernetic techniques/technologies to management, to mean that capital itself is decentralising. Nothing could be further from the truth. The size of firms only tends to rise as time goes on (and technology advances, and the number of firms in the market tends to decrease over time. Far from decentralising the market is moving towards monopoly faster than ever, with large conglomerates rapidly displacing or buying up smaller firms.
It's also a massive error to see the automation of management as somehow increasing the autonomy of workers within these firms: they are more tyrannical than ever. technological/cybernetic management tends to mean management has increased control over your work, allowing them to police even the most minor things (conversation and toilet breaks for example). Firms like Uber are very much an exception to the rule (the "gig economy" is a massive bubble anyway, many of these firms struggle to make a profit and uber's investment structure has been compared to a ponzi scheme), a better example would be amazon, who's management practices combined with increased automation are rendering the work of it's staff increasingly more machine-like.