This is a basic preliminary post to something that I’m hoping to actually make into something more professional.

To preface: This is a thought I’ve been meaning to share after BE’s “don’t join a union” post over on Twitter. I generally just ignore his stuff for the purpose of left unity, especially in these trying times, but his sentiment is something ive seen a lot and something I don’t particularly agree with.

Post in question:

To define accelerationism on the left, it’s

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.

This is my definition but it’s not a new one or esoteric, at least I don’t think it is. And it makes sense from the first go around, and generally confers to marxist theory*

*except that it doesn’t.

The problem with this idea is a few things.

  1. Yes, standards of living decreasing generally makes people more agitated, and even more class conscious. But this is not a guarantee. Just look at Nazi Germany. Weren’t living standards horrible? During the Weimar era, shouldn’t have there been (another) communist uprising? How did capitalism keep going when living standards were so bad. This basically applies most places.

2.This leads to the second, and main, point. This is economism, pure and simple.

When I first heard Antonio Gramsci being described as a “marxist humanist,” I was skeptical of his work. Is this some form of “left nietzchein” or “left hegelian?” (I.e Zizek?) No, Gramsci is extremely important reading for any modern leftist. They must understand they are a part of the human social system, the same as everyone else, and must work to break down the Bourgeois hegemony that exists. The key to this thought is how people develop consciousness. They develop it by being given a way out, and hand to help them out of a pit of despair.

To get more specific, the four main points are

A.No reasonable offline person believes this.

No really, imagine trying to convince some person, no matter their race or geographic origin, and your argument is “we should sit on our asses, not join a union, not agitate, let fascism get worse to own the libs, and fight for welfare getting dismantled.” Yeah, I’m sure whoever you’re trying to convince is going to follow marxism if that’s the goal.

B. This is the same logic economism-ites used to say “there is nothing we can do.”

This happens a lot unfortunately, but it’s especially annoying seeing it repeated in the other direction. Economists in communist parties essentially believe they hold an outside role on the changes in social order and production. That they are simply to sit there and wait for economic crisis to hit and then to spring into action. This happened in Norway (I actually reccomend a YouTuber named Fredda if you’re more interested in this period) and of course it happened in many other places. Accelerationism is just the opposite side of this, that there is no point in agitation or trying to foment consciousness if the economic conditions aren’t bad enough yet. It only took me a minute to realize that what the accelerationists were saying was very familiar. Maybe they’re still better than economism-ists, but only by a small margin. The idea is that you, and every other soldier for the working class, is part of the great historical movements, and these great historical movements only gain momentum by the exposing of contradictions and the proposing of alternatives to the masses.

C.You…just need something eith organizational capacity dumbass.

This is more specific to BE, but in order to have a revolution, nay, even just to fight against the imperialist actions of the nation you live in, then you need organizational capacity.

Yes, there are bad and reactionary unions. But there are also bad and reactionary “left” parties. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be joining parties. How do you get people to strike against delivering Israeli cargo? How do you get boycotts and work stoppages and wildcat strikes? How do you do these things without an organization like a union? The simple answer is that you can’t.

And how do you deliver results to the people without fighting for them? This isn’t to say we should stop of social democratic reforms, obviously, but who is to take credit for successful policies or increases in wages and such? Without organizational capabilities then employers can just choose to give concessions occasionally and get worker love for pennies, because they don’t know they can have it all.

D. A great way to make conflict occur is protecting welfare.

To oversimplify a lot, let’s say the state and Bourgeoisie has a combined leftover budget of 1 million dollars. If they have no resistance to policies and such that make things worse, they can use that 1 million dollars on weapons of war or militarized police forces or other things to engender imperialism and such, while dismantling social security or safety laws to make up the difference. But, let’s say hypothetically, the state and Bourgeoisie has to fight to get rid of these institutions, or let’s say employers have to fight tooth and nail with Unions to cut pay and workers and safety measures. That’s certainly going to make the entire world genocide thing a lot harder isn’t it? And of course, what’s going to radicalize someone more? Life just getting worse, or the mask of humanity falling from the Bourgeoisie’s face as they unite to take away their maternity leave or work breaks?

Again, this is preliminary. I’d prefer to write a full polemic on this at better times, but knowing BE and the world, he’ll probably say something else stupid before the world gets better. Also sorry for any mistakes and such, I’m writing this late and i don’t feel like proof checking againt.

And also, I want to repeat that I know this is mainly said by people online, but I’ve seen it enough that I’m starting to get concerned how many people don’t engage with the world because they think everything beings worse will make things better automatically.

And lastly, this is not an argument against anti-imperialism. I know if I was brainded enough to be on Twitter then people would definitely accuse me of making an argument for social imperialism. These are not separate things, but accelerationism is a different argument. Anti imperialism does argue for restricting the potential super profits that are used to bribe labor aristocracy, but that’s not exclusive to accerationist ideas. And after all, shouldn’t an accelerationist want more wars? After all, more war means worse conditions and worse conditions means revolution. Just look at Russian and Germany in world War one obviously.

  • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml
    134·
    13 days ago

    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.

    1. https://www.versobooks.com/products/59-four-futures ↩︎

    2. https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas ↩︎

    3. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-2-profit-strategies-for-our/ ↩︎