#accelerationsit

THE ACCELERATIONIST MANIFESTO / Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams

Today’s politics → beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats…

30 years of neoliberalism: rendered most left-leaning political parties hollowed out of radical thought. At best, they respond to our present crises with calls for a return to Keynesian economics, in spite of evidence that the very conditions which enabled post-war social democracy to occur no longer exist.

The new emergent social movements have been unable to devise new political ideological visions: instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy. They propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.

In the absence of a radically new vision, the hegemonic powers of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence. To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures, and the recovery of the future as such.

Capitalism → associated with ideas of acceleration. The essential metabolism of capitalism demands economic growth, with competition between individual capitalist entities setting in motion increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve competitive advantage. In its neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.

However neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which is essential.

It is a severe misrepresentation that left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration. If the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.

For all its exploitation / corruption, capitalism remains the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains are not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form. An accelerationist politics hence seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.

Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least direct them towards needlessly narrow ends (patent wars, idea monopolisation… are contemporary phenomena that point to capital’s need to move beyond competition and its increasingly retrograde approach to technology). Rather than a world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.

Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. The material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed, but repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

Any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in the idea that after a revolution people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve and ignorant. We must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system.

The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. While much of the current global platform is biased towards capitalist social relations, this is not an inevitable necessity. These material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.

“Direct action” is insufficient to achieve any of this: the habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success. We must be done with fetishising particular modes of action:

Politics must be treated as a set of dynamic systems, riven with conflict, adaptations and counter-adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each individual type of political action becomes blunted and ineffective over time as the other sides adapt. No given mode of political action is historically inviolable. Over time, there is an increasing need to discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities marshalled against learn to defend and counter-attack them effectively. It is in part the contemporary left’s inability to do so which lies close to the heart of the contemporary malaise.

The overwhelming privileging of “democracy-as-process” needs to be left behind: the fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action.

Democracy: cannot be defined simply by its means (via voting, discussion, or general assemblies) → must be defined by its goal: collective self-mastery.

The problems besetting our planet and our species oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex systems analysis is a new form of action: improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice which works with the contingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting. A new form of abductive experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world.

Capitalism is a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society.

Therefore movement towards a surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more rational global society → it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, such as the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising.