Infiltrating soc dems=pointless, infiltrating neo-liberals=success?

Brassier's critique is pretty good. I like the original Land in his Bataille days, but his goddamn "unaffective worship of deterritorialized flows" is silly implying worship isn't ==affective==.

Here's a good quote from Land when asked why we should accelerate in the first place to find revolutionary potential, "I don't know".

Anyways, this quote does well.

For Land, there is no longer any kind of fulcrum for the point of reversion, the conversion from secondary to primary process, because there are no individuated bearers left any more. This convergence does not unfold at the level of experience. In that regard, the whole vocabulary of intensification and disintensification becomes redundant. The paradox is simply this: under what conditions could you will the impossibility of willing? How could you affirm that which incapacitates all affirmation?

This is a conceptual problem with interesting practical and political consequences. It has a political valence, because I think it explains Nick’s political trajectory from a kind of radical ultra-left anarchism. From a point when, in a paper called “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest: a polemical introduction to the configuration of philosophy and modernity”, he says “the state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limits.” Interestingly, in this paper, it’s radical guerrilla militant lesbian feminists who are the only revolutionary subjects.

He moves from this moment, where he’s perfectly willing to endorse or affirm radicals, where his critique of the Marxist left is that it’s not radical, revolutionary, or critical enough, and then five or six years later he seems to realize there is no bearer of revolutionary intensification left. Therefore politics must be displaced, it must be deputized, and all you can do is endorse or affirm impersonal processes which at least harbour the promise of generating or ushering in the next phase of deterritorialization.

What does this mean? It means affirming free markets, deregulation, the capitalist desecration of traditional forms of social organization, etc. Why? Not because he thinks it’s promoting individual democracy and freedom. He has to instrumentalize neoliberalism in the name of something allegedly far darker and more potentially corrosive, but in the process it seems you end up… if your enemy’s enemy is your friend, there comes a dangerous point where you forget the conditions under which you made this strategic alliance, because you can no longer see, you can no longer identify what the goal is any more. You end up endorsing and embracing a kind of neoliberal politics or ideology, and the pretence of instrumental distance, that this could just be the cunning of schizophrenic reason, quickly evaporates because it’s not possible to dissociate praxis from identifiable ends any more.

In other words, once you dissociate tactics and strategy–the famous distinction between tactics and strategy where strategy is teleological, transcendent, and representational and tactics is immanent and machinic–if you have no strategy, someone with a strategy will soon commandeer your tactics. Someone who knows what they want to realize will start using you. You become the pawn of another kind of impersonal force, but it’s no longer the glamorous kind of impersonal and seductive force that you hoped to make a compact with, it’s a much more cynical kind of libertarian capitalism.

Benjamin Noys confuses the Acceleration towards a crash, with acceleration towards communism.

Williams and Srnicek advocate accelerationism on the grounds of producing alternatives to the modern neo-liberal dogma of global capitalism that wants MORE production, less speed (more stupid consumerist shit no one needs and less jobs). Accelerationism means to burn through that and use neo-liberal tactics to undermine global capitalism from the inside. Things like public domain are pure cancer to capitalism , yet they are still invented, by small research groups and tiny companies that depend on donations and gov funding. To kill capitalism we need to kill:

1. The first estate, undermine the hold on intellectual property, technology, space (through rent) the current mega corporations have.

2. Kill the second estate, the bureaucrats and politicians that function as enforcers of their corporate masters, no peace with political establishment or hope for democracy, lets watch it crash and burn in chaos, while we prepare already existing alternatives

3. Use the speculative market to manipulate speed, by using things like crypto-currencies, co-ops and start ups. there is litteraly no limit to what you can do today. 3d printing is already changing the face of production, and will put millions of people out of work in asia.

In a sense what I am promoting is a Leninist New Economic Policy, for the 21st century.

This only works if you buy into the late capitalism meme

Okay, Williams and Srnicek are more tolerable than most accelerationists. Nevertheless there's big problems with their analysis (predominantly the view that the left needs to focus upon seizing state power on a national level, when accelerationism tends to result in the conclusion that you simply can't control capital in that way any longer).

regardless, I'm rather drunk, but would like to continue this discussion tomorrow.

Haven't read Brassier yet, I'll have to get round to that. Got any useful links?

I'm a christian so I can't call myself a "Brassierian" metaphysical naturalist nihilist, but he's fun.

Here's the link to the article.
moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/

thanks awfully comrade.

Nonsense, for this to happen you would need the creation of a new left, a left that breaks off from all the sentimentalities of the past and wakes up and smells the coffee. Fighting to keep your bullshit job that will be replaceable by a robot is no only unrealistic, it's unrevolutionary, it's pure conservatism. Instead of working to use your own means to start up alternatives to Capital, the modern left fights this dog and bone fight with teh Capitalist themselves. Eventually the capitalists pack up and leave with their profits nicely stacked on the Cayman islands. What does the left do then? It begs the state for regulation, and even worse it begs to rehire those same people with the bullshit jobs, only now on the public sector ( as it happens in Europe) effectively creating the neo-cameralist state we have today. Run by bureaucrats, ruled by capitalists. A new praxis must be formed that uses the weapons of the enemy, like how Lenin used war communism.

I agree this sounds excellent and is a point of contention. Though I think they mean it in the sense of infiltrating the state and providing technological alternatives to existing modes of distribution and control (things like cybersyn), rather than just play the game of regulating the market.

The whole thing sounds kind of Foucauldian, which is also kind of outdated, the state as a monolithic center of power, instructing the ways one lives and dies, through biopower, is kind of outdated. The capitalists are today more in bed with the state than ever before, they dictate policy and they form consensus.

lol fucking word-filter I meant to say it sounds *iffy not excellent.

But that "New new left" is basically just people like the NeoReaction, Fascists, Trumpers and other counter revolutionaries that see "alternatives to neolib" by giving up on the revolution and being Right Populists who oppose globalization.

A total fucking joke, a bunch of internet kids jacking off to the idea of ethno-states and dreaming about living in an idyllic agricultural setting as a farmer-worker. They don't realize that Capitalism has made states useless and explosion of information and distribution of global capital has undermined traditional roles/morality. They need to read their Anti-Oedipus again.

Basically want the welfare state back, poor proles/lumpenproles that were deterritorialized too fast. Europe wants them as controlled opposition, but their traction in re-inventing politics is so limited it will never happen.

basically Keynensian conservatives.

I'm not saying their methods work, I'm justsaying pragmatically this is what you have as a starting place to align yourselves with.

How are they allies? They are in fact enemies.

For example Neo-reaction are not good neo-liberals. Their mistake is that they romanticize Capitalism as a "corrector" of imbalances that the liberal democratic state fails to control. If they read their Austrian theory, they would know that neo-liberalism uses the state not as a regulating mechanism, but as a control mechanism that keeps the thing running, while it picks up the peices when a crisis hits due to over-speculation and bubbles. Misses and Hayek would never advocate for the breakup of the state, nor due the ignore that crises is fundamental aspect of how Capitalism functions.

Acceleration like this forgets one key notion; the end of capitalism is not exactly equal to the dawn of socialism.

It is "socialism or barbarism", not "socialism no matter what".