Your Journey to the Alt-Right.

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
xenogoth said:
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.
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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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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
a significant amount of alt righters are honest leftists who have seen that leftism has succeeded and not failed. but that's exactly why they were never communists to begin with. and that's why so many people got hoodwinked.

we were discussing this stuff long before badiou in his poncy ecole normale (not so supereur) had a breakdown honestly. xenogoth is being duplicitous by not saying that.

The revolutionary alternative to left-wing politics

Subversion's critique of the radical left as being merely the state capitalist left wing of capital, as opposed to a revolutionary working class force.
libcom.org libcom.org
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yyaldrin said:
i don't know what this means either?
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it is just pushing for faster and faster social democracy until finally we break through in an opening in the market for a radical politics. Its concept of the class struggle is omnipresent, not something with setbacks and leaps.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
accelerationism became a foil for being a cunt because the left wing version it was trying to revive was nonexistent. Workers in bangladesh, turkey etc are striking against the unions and the official parties, not for them. It corresponded to no developments in reality. and this is why cultural studies has always been a pretty fake discipline which should have died with Adorno. This is what I mean when I say the Beatles was pushed by anglo-american imperialism. not that they weren't relevant or could have existed in another time (they obviously couldn't have) but that their cultural outlook was exactly that of the domesticated non-radical bohemian. you want real psychotic amphetamine music, check out the Deviants. But this is exactly why Motown was far superior to the beatles. it was just a reflection of daily life in America, with Gordy churning them out like it was noone's business, but he did not pretend otherwise.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
important to note the difference between hippy and freak music also. freak was much closer to soul 45s, (culturally) but with a hard rock/proto-metal vibe.

 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
xenogoth said:
i am really not trying to be an opportunist. but every time i get pinged here it is about something i have done elsewhere lol. i respect y'all and what you do here, i'm just not good at forums. get teenage flashbacks of proto-twitter hellthreads and an inability to keep up. too many channels to pay attention to. it's only when i get an @ ping or a blog clickback i take a look... which is bad form on my part... but too much to try and pay attention to already.

that being said, the lectures i wrote for that lecture series are relevant here. (i'm hoping to hammer it into a book over the next few months so it doesn't languish behind a massive paywall forever.) it's based on a bit of blogosphere archaeology i've been doing. i found that the pop understanding of the beginnings of accelerationism is so convoluted at this point, even amongst those who were there, but following the blogposts written around that time, particularly by Steven Shaviro and Alex Williams, the intention seems to be pretty clear.

around that time, Badiou and Zizek were teaming up and going on about the crisis in negation -- how Marx's negation of the negation wasn't really going the way he planned. capital vol 1 cliff notes: the negation of private property, which leads feudalism to become capitalism, frees serfs to become a working class that earns a wage and can own individual property. this allows the world to evolve but the capitalists have opened pandora's box because opening the possibility of individual ownership up to everyone creates the shadow of universal individual ownership -- and what is universal individual ownership if not social ownership, i.e. socialism? that's why, for Marx, capitalism will inevitably lead to socialism. but once capitalists know this, they can try to attempt the negation of the negation of the negation and now we find ourselves flailing about in the resulting stasis, where culture stalls and the shift on the horizon is not socialism but rentism -- i.e., renting everything (not just homes but our access to culture et al) increasingly becomes a convenient mod con norm. for Badiou in particular, this has had nefarious political consequences and we tumble towards neoliberal stasis. It was Shaviro who noted Badiou's argument in this regard but also critiqued it really well, highlighting that whilst he and Zizek seemed to have their finger on the pulse at some point, they were increasingly falling into the same trap that they themselves had described, at once diagnosing why we are afflicted by a crisis of imagination whilst not being able to see beyond it for themselves. (for me, this post is where accelerationist questions first start being asked, although they wouldn't be answer in the blogosphere for a while.)

the hauntological blogosphere, seemingly in isolation, was talking about this from a cultural perspective, of course, but this cultural version wasn't quite connecting with the political version except through a shared melancholy. It was Alex Williams who then made the first accelerationist post, thinking how best to use contemporary economic thinking to update Marx's theory of the negation of the negation. Land was a big influence at that time -- Williams referred to his thinking as a "left-Landianism" or a "post-Landianism" at that time -- but so was Badiou (negatively perhaps) and also Ray Brassier's writings on nihilism (recognising the fact we live in an indifferent universe and using that as a Promethean basis for acting anyway -- he started a project that seemed to apply this logic to capitalism explicitly but then he abandoned it.)
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Wrong, there is no individual property in capitalism, only class property. capitalism is a social system, in contradistinction to petty-producer peasant production which existed in russia prior to 1917, which itself can only truly be defined as an individualistic mode of production - the individual consumes or sells the products which they have worked on, and this enables the individual to possibly acquire property. in capitalism however the proletarian is *dispossessed* of all tools and means of production, hence that property itself is alienated from his social relation of being a proletarian. it's not about what x or y individual does but how they exist in a specific moment in time. By your definition you'd have to argue that capitalism exists transhistorically to an extent, as you see it as a structure, and not a dynamic configuration within a phase of human history.

The dialectic of expropriation of the expropriators – which we have read about a hundred times in the Manifesto, in Capital, and in Anti-Dühring – cannot be reduced to a sin redeemed, to the restitution of loot, to a banal ‘give Caesar what is Caesar’s’, as it seems to the narrow-minded immediatist, but it is the historical addition of one leap forward to another, of a revolution to a revolution, which were generally widely separated in time but which both did a good job.
In capitalism, the most collective form of production replaced private production, and in essence this thesis also applies to the appropriation of products. Those products that were first distributed in minimal quantities among autonomous producers, who could consume them or exchange them, now become available in bulk to the few, or to those who are still fewer in number: the owners of enterprises.
That portion of products which we today call capital goods or instrumental goods (the first term is better because, in addition to tools and machines, it also includes the semi-finished products that will enter another processing cycle) continues to circulate in large masses, while only that portion of final products which is called ‘consumer goods’ finds on the market an opportunity to be more finely subdivided and widely distributed by being exchanged against money that comes from the wages of the proletarians, or from the revenue of the capitalists, or even from those belonging to other classes inherited from ancient societies.
Therefore capitalism is a mode of production that is no longer individual but social, and it is only its mode of distribution which is individual. However, even this second part of the thesis cannot refer to capital goods, which form the largest portion [of the social product], but only to direct consumption goods, which everyone does their share of buying, although certainly not in equal quantities.
It should be noted that not even this inequality, just like the previous injustice, is a valid defining feature of capitalism in our doctrine, which rather defines it as the suppression of the freedom of the producer. None of this has prevented the political superstructure of capitalism from decking itself out in freedom, equality, and justice.
Indeed, socialism will do much better than to subdivide land, means of production, and products into as many particles as there are human beings; a thing that would be manifestly absurd when it comes to all goods that are not directly consumable, and childishly expressed when it comes to those that are.
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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
“As a man you have, of course, a human relation to my product: you have need of my product. Hence it exists for you as an object of your desire and your will. But your need, your desire, your will, are powerless as regards my product.

That [this powerlessness] means, therefore, that your human nature, which accordingly is bound to stand in intimate relation to my human production, is not your power over this production, your possession of it, for it is not the [faculty of appropriation (thus we translate the term Eigentuemlichkeit)], not the power, of man’s nature that is recognised in my production.

They (your need, your inner desire) constitute rather the tie which makes you dependent on me, because they put you in a position of dependence on my product. Far from being the means which would give you power over my production, they (your desires) are instead the means for giving me power over you."

Money can slip under the power of the capitalist. neither the proletarian or the capitalist is free under capitalism. thus rentierism is nothing to do with the transition between feudal and capitalism. Rentierism has been there from the outset of capitalism. Houses themselves become capital goods in relation to whether they are used for the production of the bourgeoisie - let us not forget that there are many companies with no fixed location. let us also not forget that the merger of enterprises into joint stock companies also reduces the personage of the individual capitalist - to a personification of a category, not even an inventer or pioneer like we would have had in the industrial revolution era. real capitalism is about bords of directors and offices, not necessarily the private appropriator, which in any case must be compelled to invest the majority of his profits into enlarging production for productions sake. If we all lived like jay-z as capitalists the system would collapse. so to talk about the idea of the shadow of universal ownership as presaging socialism is fundamentally wrong. ownership will not exist in socialism. this is where left accelerationism is based on Rousseau, not marx. that somehow the general will of the state can be universalised. On the contrary! Marx argues that this separation - the separation of the political bureaucracy from its civil society is constitutive of the state as such. We must consider the state itself as possessing the political - illusive freedom counterposed to capitalist society, which is debased, and where men are made appendages of alien powers (I mean what do you think the elimination of humanity from the substrate of the process means, for fuck's sake!) It is in this very antagonism that the state, and national consciousness can exist.

Land, to his credit, understood this. He accuses the left as wanting to be free from capital's autonomisation, itself an antiquated position which is more influenced by pre-marxist forms of utopian socialism. This should not surprise us. The left can only aid in ever completing the French revolution. It was thus then correct for Zhu Enlai in the 1970s to say that it is too early for us to assess the impact of 1789.

and this is what I find hilarious about Srnicek and Williams, they are actually the worst people to make a case against nick land. they want to chuck the manual vitesse out and just leave the motor revving up, ignoring that all cars are automatic today.

So what you get is absolute petty-bourgeois nonsense like this:

Where Deleuze and Guattari ultimately counseled caution, to accelerate with care to avoid total destruction, Land favored an absolute process of acceleration and deterritorialization, identifying capitalism as the ultimate agent of history. As Land puts it, “Capitalism has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence, [and it is] vast beyond human anticipation.” Here, the deregulation, privatization, and commodification of neoliberal capitalism will serve to destroy all stratification within society, generating in the process unheard of novelties. Politics and all morality, particularly of the leftist variety, are a blockage to this fundamental historical process. Land had a hypnotizing belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological singularity. In this visioning of capital, even the human itself can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilizations. As Land has it, through the acceleration of global capitalism the human will be dissolved in a technological apotheosis, effectively experiencing a species-wide suicide as the ultimate stimulant head rush.
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bloodclaat artattack! ok, we get it, you have never done lsd, mr. Williams. but why should the process care about you wanting to slow it down. all you can do is generate surplus value for it, or be surplus to production - we're talking about the basics here!
 
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pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
118953380_2732256840391608_6713604551528908722_o.jpg

Image shows a big budget presentation going on in a massive conference hall with the words

Turn customers into fanatics
Products into obsessions
Employees into ambassadors
And brands into religions

On the wall
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
vimothy said:
"a man has as many masters as he has vices"
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and all those masters are themselves slaves to other masters.

Land might be a right wing troll, but he understood marxism better than those inventing the future wasteman.

in case you didn't see my full edit to the post.

thirdform said:
“As a man you have, of course, a human relation to my product: you have need of my product. Hence it exists for you as an object of your desire and your will. But your need, your desire, your will, are powerless as regards my product.

That [this powerlessness] means, therefore, that your human nature, which accordingly is bound to stand in intimate relation to my human production, is not your power over this production, your possession of it, for it is not the [faculty of appropriation (thus we translate the term Eigentuemlichkeit)], not the power, of man’s nature that is recognised in my production.

They (your need, your inner desire) constitute rather the tie which makes you dependent on me, because they put you in a position of dependence on my product. Far from being the means which would give you power over my production, they (your desires) are instead the means for giving me power over you."

Money can slip under the power of the capitalist. neither the proletarian or the capitalist is free under capitalism. thus rentierism is nothing to do with the transition between feudal and capitalism. Rentierism has been there from the outset of capitalism. Houses themselves become capital goods in relation to whether they are used for the production of the bourgeoisie - let us not forget that there are many companies with no fixed location. let us also not forget that the merger of enterprises into joint stock companies also reduces the personage of the individual capitalist - to a personification of a category, not even an inventer or pioneer like we would have had in the industrial revolution era. real capitalism is about bords of directors and offices, not necessarily the private appropriator, which in any case must be compelled to invest the majority of his profits into enlarging production for productions sake. If we all lived like jay-z as capitalists the system would collapse. so to talk about the idea of the shadow of universal ownership as presaging socialism is fundamentally wrong. ownership will not exist in socialism. this is where left accelerationism is based on Rousseau, not marx. that somehow the general will of the state can be universalised. On the contrary! Marx argues that this separation - the separation of the political bureaucracy from its civil society is constitutive of the state as such. We must consider the state itself as possessing the political - illusive freedom counterposed to capitalist society, which is debased, and where men are made appendages of alien powers (I mean what do you think the elimination of humanity from the substrate of the process means, for fuck's sake!) It is in this very antagonism that the state, and national consciousness can exist.

Land, to his credit, understood this. He accuses the left as wanting to be free from capital's autonomisation, itself an antiquated position which is more influenced by pre-marxist forms of utopian socialism. This should not surprise us. The left can only aid in ever completing the French revolution. It was thus then correct for Zhu Enlai in the 1970s to say that it is too early for us to assess the impact of 1789.

and this is what I find hilarious about Srnicek and Williams, they are actually the worst people to make a case against nick land. they want to chuck the manual vitesse out and just leave the motor revving up, ignoring that all cars are automatic today.

So what you get is absolute petty-bourgeois nonsense like this:



bloodclaat artattack! ok, we get it, you have never done lsd, mr. Williams. but why should the process care about you wanting to slow it down. all you can do is generate surplus value for it, or be surplus to production - we're talking about the basics here!
Click to expand...
 
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