but, of course, accelerationism never really recovered from its own naming ceremony, when Noys took Williams' gesturing towards a radical reformulation of Marx's labour theory of value and the potentials of real abstraction and summarised as "make things worse so they can get better."
what interests me about this at the moment is that the confusion fostered by this tension, that was there from day one, has led accelerationism to become the kind of thought it initially set out to critique -- a kind of impotent thought that is trapped in cynical stasis; a negative project with no practical advice on how to move forwards. at its best, accelerationist thinkers still occasionally thrust towards what Badiou demanded of 21stC philosophy -- we need a new thought to usher in a new understanding of the world around us; a la "Kant and Newtonian physics; Deleuze, Nietzsche, Bergon and biology" -- (i'm thinking of "gender accelerationism" and "xenofeminism" here specifically) but this is often buried underneath a superficial tendency online towards edgelording.
it's sad more than anything, because i think the story of accelerationism's development isn't all that unique but it is very telling for where we're at right now and how this kind of heretical Marxism could devolve so far to become the absolute opposite of what it wanted to be -- by becoming an impotent empty signifier for being a cunt and exacerbating chaos just to forestall social progress. it is a particular kind of journey from a potentially dangerous kind of "post-left" thinking to an alt-right uselessness. but how that has happened is useful to note, if only because it shows how fucked up we really are and how many attempts at bringing about new thought and new politics are doomed from the start, because everything is rotten with static impotence.
i saw that meme earlier in the thread, for instance, that says accelerationism is an edgy and pretentious name for neoliberalism and always was. the point is, it really really wasnt, but it is now. whinging about how the name is being used and abused doesn't do anything though, of course, but excavating that very recent history, that shows how a desire to formulate a radical new politics (in explicit response to the impotence of Occupy Wall Street) can become so twisted as to be a byword for the very tendency it saw emerging before anyone else, eventually falling on its own sword.
if it can happen to something as marginal as accelerationism, it can sure as hell happen to any other leftwing project.
I know I'm going to sound like a horrible dickhead, but honestly I'm sick and tired of your obscurantist kind playing with radical politics for their own fancy with no grounding in struggle, so I don't care how this comes across.
Take the sock out of your mouth. Accelerationism is just existentialism for bourgeois left malcontents. there's really nothing else there apart from a self-confessed impotence and the inability to analyse what the left was in the 20th C. So what we get is a half-hearted attempt to resurrect a nonexistent material dynamic. It's no wonder k-punk ended up never abandoning labour. it's the last hope of the white man who has defined their career on a vague semblance of Hippocratic transgression.
There are many reasons why we don't have socialism but those are to be found in a serious and quite boring study of political economy and agriculture, not the frigid sex scene of kids whose parents went to oxford. don't be a nob and actually tell people the truth.
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