things will not happen spontaneously, in order for a communist group to take advantage from accelerationism it must be organized and ready to do so, which is not a thing in the vast majority of the imperial core. There are far more fascist groups organized in the imperial core and ready, they’re the most likely to get benefited from a political crisis in the imperial core.

Still, i think undoubtedly a communist revolution cannot happen without a political crisis, the people will not be swayed when things are relatively stable. In some way, most communist revolutions happened due unintentional accelerationism by the status quo, think of WW1 in Russia, the constant natural and man-made disasters in China before the communist takeover, french colonialism in Vietnam, japanese occupation in Korea, etc…

Another thought, unions are kind of accelerationism on itself since it hinders the development of production and accelerate the decline in profits for the capitalists.

There is no point in making material conditions worse. Bourgeoisie will do it much more efficiently.

Good post. I’m not going to get into the accelerationism debate because you addressed that part well and quite extensively, but i have to say this about unions:

You can’t have a communist revolution without first building class consciousness and an organized working class. If you just have rapidly worsening conditions but no class consciousness and no organized working class, all you are likely to get is fascism, as there are reactionary forces that are already organized and ready to exploit the false consciousness of the masses.

Unions are a way of getting the working class used to engaging in collective struggle. They build awareness in the working class of itself as a class, teaching it how to work democratically and how to organize itself, as well as boosting the confidence of the working class in itself as a proactive actor and driver of history instead of a passive bystander waiting for a “great man” or putting misguided hope in some electoral process.

Of course not all unions are the same, some unions are indeed reactionary and collaborationist with capital and empire, and many are reformist. Unions in the imperial core suffer from many of the same problems (e.g. chauvinism) that the broader left has here. Only few are truly revolutionary and it is those which are connected to a larger militant labor movement. They are by no means a replacement for a vanguard party, but they should also not be written off entirely.

There are many reasons why communists should be involved in the labor struggle, from using it as an opportunity to educate, agitate and organize, to cadres rapidly gaining experience in leading workers in collective struggle, but one of the most important ones is that it is a way to earn the trust of the masses. You cannot appoint yourself the vanguard of the revolution, it only the masses that can do it.

None of what i am saying is a novel concept, in fact if BE had read Lenin, he would understand all of this already because Lenin said very much these same things. And he didn’t just say it, he did it. Before his exile he and his comrades were frequently involved with the struggles of the factory workers, and they recognized the nascent labor movements in the factories as fertile ground for education, agitation and organization.

Recommended reading for the day: Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions? from “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder by V.I. Lenin

(BE apparently suffers from the above mentioned infantile disorder)

I do have kind of third worldist sympathies, but wow what a stupid tweet. Aside from anything else, how are you going to do a revolutionary defeatism without organizing first

I understand what he’s getting at here, the dockworker unions in amerikkka protested not too long ago, stopped all work except they carved out an exception for Amerikkkan military and “israel” shipments.

But I don’t think it’s fair to give this blanket statement to all unions

That’s such a keyboard warrior position. Htf would you personally feel about your life getting progressively worse? What about the minorities?

For Global South countries, it’s actually good to advocate for social reforms to slow down deteriorating conditions for our people. That buys us time to outperform fascism

I really do not understand why people here defend this jackass

I agree with your points. I don’t think any leftist party can officially have accelerationism as part of their platform for obvious publicity reasons to the uninitiated. However, I can’t really see how it hurts for USians to privately root for it by sucking money out of the USA and pumping it into the Global South.

Firstly, we in the USA unfortunately have a very limited timeline at this point to win the revolution. There are only two permanent ways to resolve the class contradiction. Either the workers get rid of the capitalists, or the capitalists kill all the workers and replace them with robots.^[1] This is why Sam Altman and co. are so excited about AI.

In less than 100 years, the US capitalists will probably have AIed and automated everything, from AI production chains to robot cops. They will never need a human worker to touch shit again, and there is nothing said worker can do about it. There is nothing a worker can do to fight against robot terminator cops. It will allow capitalists to genocide, or mentally lobotomize, the former ‘working’ masses who are now nothing more than a nuisance, unwanted livestock.

To anyone who thinks that this is far-fetched, they are sorely misguided. Peter Thiel and co. are already talking about this future:

People who are not ‘productive’ would best be converted to biodiesel. Barring that, “our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma.”

“The best humane alternative to genocide”…is “to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

— Curtis Yarvin, with approval/following from Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Marc Andreessen ^{[2] [3]}

Secondly, against this timeline, it is imperative for U.S. Socialist parties to organize as hard as they possibly can. As conditions deteriorate for Americans, we can expect these parties to grow in popularity. However, what we need to avoid along the way is for the US bourgeoisie to not be rabid enough, to freak out from the socialist organizing, and add back enough social safety nets FDR-style to get people to go back to sleep, just to finish the full robotization and then kill us all off.

We sort of need the bourgeoisie to walk a fine line. We want them to respond somewhat to socialist parties’ demands, so that socialists can get small wins to use to further organize, but never wins big enough to demobilize the working class, and to always have a creeping line of oppression that we can mobilize further against.

Thirdly, the US Empire survives to this day only because the Global South is still mostly weak as fuck and has no money and no power. Out of the entire globe, the U.S. is the country with the most colonially-stolen money. So if any accelerationist can take money out of the U.S. and pump it in to the Global South, that is strictly a net benefit.

Based on these conditions, if a so-called accelerationist and socialist sympathizer wants to deliberately drain money out of Americans and pump it into the Global South, there is nothing wrong with that. They just need to regulate the amount of extraction such that it maintains the necessary creeping rate of oppression. This means ramping up exploitation when other capitalists want to give back concessions, and ramping it down when things are deteriorating too fast for good organizing to take place. That way they can play the bad cop to socialist good cop and hopefully drive stuff towards a better end.

If I somehow do end up getting a fuck ton of money in the US, and the socialist parties are still falling behind, my goal will be to use the money to further drain as much money from Americans as possible and shuttle it to China or whatever other promising Global South or AES states. Even if the USA becomes a capitalist wasteland, at least the Global South will be developed enough to ignore the dying Americans.

As much as I cheer for the Empire’s inevitable destruction (that cannot come any sooner) it’s not like I want the people here to suffer. Besides, “let’s actively make things worse than they already are” is a shitty party line that no one will agree with

I kind of get when people make a passing comment here and there that sounds a bit, uh, overly enthusiastic about people in the imperial core going down. A lot of people have suffered immensely due to the empire’s actions and some of it is currently ongoing, so I’m not going to sit there and worry about some people’s righteous anger sounding visceral at times. But when another human being explicitly says to you “hey, I need to eat” and you’re like “no, you don’t,” you look like a sociopath. There’s no rationalizing of theory that will make that exchange look good.

Something I notice in how anti-imperialist entities tend to talk about the empire, is they aren’t against its regular people. Presumably some of this is optics, but I figure a good portion of it is simply that they are not bloodthirsty like imperialists are raised to be. For the imperialist/colonizer raised person, philosophy about life is like the game of Six Degrees of Separation but instead of connections between people, it’s “how many steps from where we’re at to where murder becomes acceptable”. Notably, however, the one form of murder that is taboo is the revolutionary kind directed toward ending imperialism and colonialism. People who get into weird corners of thought like this youtuber has, they might think they’re breaking from the taboo, but they’re still within the normal realm of imperial obsession with murder; in this case, they are implicitly supporting social murder, the killing of the empire’s own people through neglect. This is not a kind of death and loss that is remotely revolutionary and supporting it only validates the bloodthirst of the empire and validates the idea pushed by the empire that human life doesn’t matter and can be treated as disposable, as long as the cause sounds good on the surface. This is not to be confused with organized revolutionary sacrifice, where it is coming from a place of directed purpose and managed risk, in order to accomplish specific and actionable goals completed within a defined time frame.

Or to put it more simply, encouraging people to lay down and die is right in line with the empire’s goals. And that’s ultimately what this youtuber’s position ends up looking like. It’s encouraging of devaluing life rather than encouraging of risking your life when all other options are exhausted so that others can have better; these are two very different things!

The belief that in order for a revolution to happen, material conditions must worsen and, ergo, the goal of socialists should be to make those material conditions worse.

What specific left-wing identifying political organizations in the imperial core can anyone name that claim to be pursuing this as a deliberate strategy? As long as the answer remains “none”, then this is not a serious issue.