Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ACCELERATE MANIFESTO For An Accelerationist Politics
ACCELERATE MANIFESTO For An Accelerationist Politics
ACCELERATE MANIFESTO For An Accelerationist Politics
talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half
of the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries).
7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true
acceleration. Similarly, the assessment of left politics as antithetical to
technosocial acceleration is also, at least in part, a severe misrepresentation.
Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must be one in which it
maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.
03. MANIFEST: On the Future
1. We believe the most important division in todays left is between those that
hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism,
and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at
ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.
The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of
non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing
foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday
infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very
beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains
of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance
structures, and mass pathologies will allow.
2. All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to why it was that
the worlds leading economist of the post-war era believed that an enlightened
capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours.
In The Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes
forecast a capitalist future where individuals would have their work reduced to
three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of
the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the
emerging social factory.
3. Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at
least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea
monopolisation are contemporary phenomena that point to both capitals need
to move beyond competition, and capitals increasingly retrograde approach to
technology. The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to
less work or less stress. And 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.
4. We do not want to return to Fordism. There can be no return to Fordism. The
capitalist golden era was premised on the production paradigm of the orderly
factory environment, where (male) workers received security and a basic
standard of living in return for a lifetime of stultifying boredom and social
repression. Such a system relied upon an international hierarchy of colonies,
empires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national hierarchy of racism and
sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation. For all the nostalgia
many may feel, this regime is both undesirable and practically impossible to
return to.
5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the
material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to
be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a
capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards postcapitalism.
6. Given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives (especially
since the late 1970s) we surely do not yet know what a modern technosocial
body can do. Who amongst us fully recognizes what untapped potentials await
in the technology which has already been developed? Our wager is that the
true transformative potentials of much of our technological and scientific
research remain unexploited, filled with presently redundant features (or preadaptations) that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted capitalist socius,
can become decisive.
7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we
are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be
sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political
action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another,
and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas
the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will
automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should
be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.
8. We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The
faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously
constitute a novel socioeconomic system that isnt simply a return to capitalism
is nave at best, and ignorant at worst. To further this, we must develop both a
cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future
economic system.
9. To do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific
advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is
not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner
possible. Economic modelling is simply put a necessity for making
intelligible a complex world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly
accepting mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of illegitimate
authority not of mathematics itself. The tools to be found in social network
analysis, agent-based modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium
economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding
complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist left must
become literate in these technical fields.
10. Any transformation of society must involve economic and social
experimentation. The Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this
consider the location and conduction of such funding flows essential to begin
reconstructing an ecology of effective accelerationist left organizations.
21. We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over
society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or
achieving victory over capital. This mastery must be distinguished from that
beloved of thinkers of the original Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of
Laplace, so easily mastered given sufficient information, is long gone from the
agenda of serious scientific understanding. But this is not to align ourselves
with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as proto-fascistic or
authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we propose that 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, in a
politics of geosocial artistry and cunning rationality. A form of abductive
experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world.
22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for postcapitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also
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. The movement towards a
surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle
for a more rational global society. We believe it must also include recovering
the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century
until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of 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. After all, it is only a post-capitalist society, made possible by an
accelerationist politics, which will ever be capable of delivering on the
promissory note of the mid-Twentieth Centurys space programmes, to shift
beyond a world of minimal technical upgrades towards all-encompassing
change. Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and the properly alien future
that entails and enables. Towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of
self-criticism and self-mastery, rather than its elimination.
23. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised post-capitalism or a slow
fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological
collapse.
24. The future needs to be constructed. It has been demolished by neoliberal
capitalism and reduced to a cut-price promise of greater inequality, conflict,
and chaos. This collapse in the idea of the future is symptomatic of the
regressive historical status of our age, rather than, as cynics across the political
spectrum would have us believe, a sign of sceptical maturity. What
accelerationism pushes towards is a future that is more modern an
alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. The
future must be cracked open once again, unfastening our horizons towards the
universal possibilities of the Outside.
http://syntheticedifice.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/accelerate.pdf
En: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-anaccelerationist-politics/
For the last forty years the vision of our societies as progressive and heading in
a better direction has been systematically eroded. Under the permutation of
capitalism that began in the 1970s, gained traction in the 1980s, appeared
victorious in the 1990s, and faced serious problems in the late 2000s the
future has been cancelled. Today, it is common sense to presume that climate
change and its effects will wreak havoc on the environment, that real wages
will continue to stagnate, that jobs will become more precarious, that
retirements and pensions will be eliminated, and that inequality and the
exploitation of societys weakest will only worsen. This is the future offered by
the variants of neoliberal political economy that dominate the developed world
today.
We see this erasure of the future in the political left as well much of which
has been reduced to a conservatism which desperately seeks to merely retain
the remaining parts of the welfare state and social democracy. Against
austerity! is the rallying cry of this mainstream conservative left today. This is
to say that in the leading European nations much of the established left has
been reduced to trafficking in the politics of fear, rather than the politics of
freedom and the project for a more just society. All the while, the long-term
prospects for social democracy are slowly eroded through technological
innovation, financial engineering, and ever-more flexibilised job markets. While
attempts to safeguard the gains of social democracy are to be lauded, they
also remain totally inadequate. Faced with the newfound rapaciousness of
neoliberalism after the 2008 financial crisis, such politics might be capable of
minor victories, but the recent tide of history appears to flow in the opposite
direction only.
And yet, in the mobilisations of the masses across the world from Greece to
Spain, from the US to the UK, from Brazil to Turkey, and from Sudan to Egypt
there is a real sense that the future doesnt have to be over, and that a new
and very different future must be constructed. It is this desire which we have
attempted to give a name to with the term accelerationism to begin to aid
the project, still inchoate, unborn and implicit, to reclaim the future for a left
politics. In other words, what we have called accelerationism is the attempt to
consider what a left politics of the future might look like. This remembrance of
the future is what the mainstream left of parliamentary political parties often
finds difficult to see. For commentators in the media it would seem that
accelerationism must be reducible to the old categories: either the horizontality
of networks or the verticality of the old Stalinist or trade union left; either
parliamentary democracy or authoritarianism; either technological utopia or
primitivism.
Other commentators have taken accelerationisms surging popularity as a sign
that it is merely fashionable nonsense, an academic game designed to please
the enervated minds of intellectuals far from the concerns of day-to-day
politics. But its a curiously elitist position that lies behind this argument it
presumes that any political idea which mobilises the passions of the people
must be fashionable and empty, by definition. By that measure, the staid,
En: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/10/accelerationism-rememberingfuture/
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
The Speed of Future Thought: Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek interviewed
by C. DERICK VARN AND DARIO CANKOVICH on JULY 15, 2013
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek are the authors of the Accelerationist
Manifesto.
There has been a lot spoken on Nick Lands vision of accelerationism
and your acknowledgement and distancing from Lands anti-human
embrace of neo-liberal capitalism. Would you draw out your implied
critique of Nick Lands conclusions?
First, it is worth emphasising that the manifesto bridges two sets of ideas, some
more philosophical and others more political. The critique of Land (beyond the
most obvious humanist-left rejoinders) is multilayered. But the most important
of criticisms is the distinction between Lands presentation of capitalism (akin
to a science fictionalised hyper-inhuman variant on Hayek) and its humdrum
actually-existing reality. This is why we believe it is worth engaging with figures
such as Land as they present a reductio ad absurdum of neoliberal capitals
own popular self-image. We think there are important elements within this
image that are necessary for any new left to engage with: real desires that this
political-economic form has captured and conducted towards its own ends. If,
as seems plain, it is insufficient to simply negatively oppose the worst
incursions of capitalism, then working out what within neoliberal ideology is
seductive and worthwhile is one starting point. So the most obvious critique of
Lands conclusions is the empirical reality we dwell in everyday: a world, at
best, of profound disappointment, and at worst, of staggering inequality and
squandering of human potential. But what is interesting is that the neoliberal
hegemony remains relatively impervious to critique from the standpoint of the
latter, whilst it appears fundamentally unable to counter a politics which would
Still, these organisations are far from resolving many of the major problems we
face, in particular in terms of modulating labour interests in a broadly
successful fashion, or in being able to generate more fully worked out new
economic counter proposals. A lot of this is still, necessarily perhaps, remaining
at the level of critique. While it is a time honoured tradition of the left (one
which we seek to uphold) that progressive politics must begin with the moment
of critique, there is of course the need to move beyond such a moment. Many
of these problems can perhaps be resolved by existing (or revised versions) of
pre-existing organisational forms, but only once their efforts undergo
something like a qualitative shift at the level of their emergent effects, that is
to say, in terms of the resonance between different kinds of agents working on
different projects at different levels (local, regional, transnational, global).
Why have the current ecology of organizations failed so completely in
your view?
The image of scavengers is quite a nice description of a lot of ultra-left activity,
a sort of zero sum game regarding members. Youre right to point out that, in
the UK for example, there are a number of examples from recent years of
united fronts, focusing upon particular issues. But outside of Unite Against
Fascism, most of these have ultimately been failures (though obviously Stop
The War faced an incredibly tough challenge in seeking to shift Tony Blair and
New Labour from their determination to make war in Iraq). Most of these are
fronts which come together to confront particular issues. The problem of this
approach is that they are habitually short-termist and lack any kind of big
picture beyond immediate objectives and attracting membership. The left
remains reactive, and there is little sense that the current mix of organisations
and the relations between them is going to be able to mount a serious
challenge to neoliberalism, even given that after the crisis it is totally
intellectually and economically discredited.
Our alternative is not that there should be a single organisation doing the longterm thinking, or that all organisations ought to be doing so instead a
healthy political ecosystem will feature a kind of division of labour between
different kinds of organisations, with different kinds of structures and interests.
What is missing to tie these together is a broad ideological vision. And just as
with the right, the important thing about such a vision is not that it be
necessarily coherent, but that on a material basis it works, that it has a kind of
efficacy in conducting action and conjoining political entities together in
virtuous cycles of feedback.
There is no single model for an effective organisation, at least not one that can
be known fully in advance. Leftist politics therefore must become more
experimental, less tied to certain ways of organising and acting which, whilst
once effective, have now become blunted. This is what we call folk politics
how previously cutting edge ways of organising and acting become worn out,
through arms race dynamics with opposing political forces, and through
broader socio-technical-economic change. Much of the debate around the
digital worlds where every action and transaction can be known immediately,
we will find a much higher resolution of empirical evidence, necessary to begin
to model better the interactions between micro and macro scales within an
economy. Rather than the stale formalism of much current economic modelling
(particularly DSGE models), theres the potential here to start properly learning
how to organise an economy.
While it rarely goes mentioned except in a mutated form by Austrian
economists, central banks today are massive examples of institutions which
employ cutting-edge technology in order to shape, manipulate, and intervene
in economies. You have not only huge macroeconometric models being
developed and used here (with thousands of equations involved), but also a
real experimentation going on with the possible uses of big data. Now the uses
that are made of this technology (e.g. quantitative easing and the inflation of
asset prices) are contestable, it still demonstrates that technology for
modulating an economy is rapidly developing. The question to be asked is how
can this machinery be repurposed towards collective and post-capitalist ends?
Our overriding theory of change is one which is revolutionary in character
without either being tied to the model of change via spectacular statetakeover, nor a secession or subtraction from the state. Instead it proposes we
need to begin to think in terms of a technics of transition(s), identifying
capitalism as a technology itself (both conceptual and employing technical
systems) and that therefore previous radical attempts to surmount this
technical system have failed in part because they lacked the tools, and the
intellectual resources to fully supplant it, to fully repurpose techniques,
machines, and concepts in a way which enables a full phase transition towards
a post-capitalist state of affairs. What they didnt lack, and what we will also
need, is of course popular and widespread mobilisation also. We consider the
development of a technics of transition(s) to be a singularly important task for
left actors today, in particular because the technical environment now enables
various points of ingress which were previously absent. This entails establishing
platforms for further transformations. For instance, basic income (if properly
implemented) could drastically alter the labour-capital relationship by negating
the forced quality of work. It could liberate leisure time for the pursuit of
collective ends. And it could weaken the disciplinary aspects of the welfare
state by making income unconditional. From this configuration of the social
platform, all sorts of new options begin to open up.
Do you think that the open-source and peer-2-peer communities
(which have in many ways been at the forefront of defending the
Internet infrastructure against neoliberal incursions), or the Internet
itself, can serve as a model of how to build networks? How do we
harness the power of the Internet to our cause?
The internet, like every technology, alters the costs and benefits of a wide
variety of behavioural possibilities. It decreases the costs of organising, while
also decreasing the costs of state and corporate surveillance, for instance.
Theres nothing inherently liberating (or repressive) about it, and so the
problem is always how to use it best.
Certainly the P2P and open-source movements, along with pirated intellectual
property (and with 3D printing, potentially material property as well), are all
important movements. They are contributing to the material basis of a postcapitalist economy by eliminating some areas of resource scarcity and forming
networks to make collaboration and distribution easily possible.
Despite these material advances, two tendencies need to be warded off
tendencies which are particularly prevalent in the discourses around the
internet. The first is nave techno-utopianism, privileging the new in itself.
Theres nothing inherently progressive about novelty, and theres no reason to
think technology will supersede political conflicts. Instead it has to be
recognised that any new technology can be employed as a weapon in these
conflicts. Theres no utopianism here, merely a recognition that the terrain and
infrastructure of political conflicts are constantly being transformed by
technology, and any left worth its name needs to recognise this and adapt.
The second tendency to avoid is the reduction of politics to internet issues.
While open sources, freedom of information, and privacy in the face of big data
are all significant issues, there is nevertheless a large group of internet
activists for whom these issues become the totality of politics. More interesting
to us, is work that seeks to bridge how computational infrastructures are
altering traditional politics. As one example, a friend of ours does immensely
interesting work on Amazon cloud computing, demonstrating how the platform
logic of such entities evades traditional boycott methods. Others, such as
Benjamin Bratton, are looking at the emerging geopolitical transformations
being wrought by massive internet companies these are increasingly taking
on the function of polities, and the question to be raised is what can be done
with or against them?
Lastly, this is something we unclear on from your manifesto: How
much could accelerationists focus on particular polities (such as
specific) nation-states and how much should we be working around
such entities?
We need to begin from what we know about power. Politics, for all the
transformations of the spatiality of power, remains deeply imbricated with the
nation state. At the very least, we cannot ignore the state as probably the
principle battleground of action today. This isnt necessarily because of a
reformist or entryist position, but simply that, when we look at the spread of
new political ideas, the state is the key territory within which they occur.
Scalarity is important here. The state, in spite of the growth of transnational
networks and organisations of different types (from new social movements to
corporations), retains a high degree of territoriality.
Globally spreading ideas must localise at the level of the state, as well as at the
level of the local. The history of neoliberalism demonstrates the use of key
states as hubs within the establishment of broader networks of power. The old
1990s activist maxim to think global, act local was an attempt to think the
complexities of power in a multiscalar political world, but one which posits only
two poles: the global and the local. We consider both of these to be important,
along with the regional, the national, and the transnational. Each of these is
involved in the geometries of power and we cannot fetishise as horizon of
action any of these.
While the nation state is (highly) problematic, in particular for the global
dynamic of international competition which generates immensely perverse
problems, this does not mean that it can be ignored.
En: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9240