The Future is the Past: The Failure of Accelerationism - Accelerationism

2021/04/15 (四) 10:38:09

Rosa Janis takes on all the different tendencies of the intellectual fad of ‘Accelerationism’ and reveals the poverty of their visions of a better future and contradictory beliefs. An emancipatory movement must develop a vision of a better future without internalizing the logic of capitalism.


by Rosa Janis on 2018.09.15 at Cosmonaut

There is a major difference between what is now called ‘accelerationism’ and its utopian futurist influences from the early 20th century: whether human reason is powerful enough to not only overcome the conditions of capitalism but ultimately the biological limits of humanity itself. “Big-A” Accelerationism, on the other hand, is devoid of human reason as a force of history: capitalism’s tendency to uproot and reconfigure (“deterritorialization” in Deleuze-talk) destroys not only Humanity but the concept of agency altogether. The disagreement on human reason makes the similarities between so-called early “accelerationisms” and accelerationism proper almost completely superficial, as these philosophical differences are the difference between communist utopia and cyberpunk hellscape. Where technology allows humankind to transcend its limitations in early “accelerationisms”, technology in Landian Accelerationism is an alien force that consumes all of humanity.

Therefore we find it helpful to use a completely different term categorize the early “accelerationisms”. We shall instead use the term “Speculative Utopianism” to refer to them, these materialists who nonetheless preserved a utopian imaginary for a future world. One might wince at the term utopian being used positive manner, as the fathers of communism Marx and Engels used the word as an insult to their opponents. But then again, Marx replaced the Hegel’s concept of spirit with the agency of the proletariat and brought Hegelian-idealist emancipatory desires into the material realm of class struggle. Here I will use the term ‘utopian’ to describe people who are not necessarily futurist mystics who reject material reality: but, rather, in the sense of speculative fiction writers who take the social relations and forces of production that already exist in our reality, and seek to build upon them towards a new world. Since the experience of ‘actually existing socialism’ defines the perception of communism amongst most people (including other supposed communists) it might be necessary to imagine what communism would look like in more detail than Marx and Engels attempted in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. For example, the failure of central planning in the Soviet bloc means that envisioning an alternative system of planning becomes more important in order to make the communist project viable.