“Decapitalism, Left Scarcity, and the State
I want to address four main oversights and weaknesses, as I see them, of the accelerationist project as it currently stands.1 I will mostly be drawing on the texts gathered together in the Accelerationist Reader, published last year,2 as well as some of the responses to it, including Benjamin Noys’s Malign Velocities: Acceleration and Capitalism (2014) and texts by McKenzie Wark. The four areas I will discuss are 1) labour, 2) the sequence of the development of technology vis-à-vis revolutionary transformation, 3) questions of temporal and geographical scale, and, to conclude, 4) the persistence of the repressive elements of the state in the global capitalist picture. Against the image of the “modern technosocial body” that Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams hold up as the bearer of lost possible futures, I want to emphasize at moments throughout this text another strand of thinking that we might call a theory of “left scarcity,” as represented by the late Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason(1960) and also by Ivan Illich’s rather more obscure Energy and Equity(1973).3 While Srnicek and Williams acknowledge the “breakdown of the planetary climate system,” their discussion of absence and lack as a methodological principle is mainly confined to a critique of the left—or their image of it, at any rate—from the last thirty or so years, and of the supposed “staggering lack of imagination” of our time.4 This image of lack (their version of scarcity) is, I think, predicated on an idealist image of political discourse as “speculative thought” that ultimately fails to connect up the modes of conceptual scarcity specific to capitalism and politics under capitalism with the material forces and institutions that inhibit such thoughts. As opposed to the vague calls for more imagination—of which, contra most accelerationists, I actually think we have more of than ever, just not the power to enforce it—I think it makes more sense to map material, rather than conceptual, scarcity at all levels from a left perspective. This is not simply reducible to miserabilism or finitude-mongering, or whatever other insults get conflated under the general heading of “enemies of acceleration.” This is not, however, to unconditionally posit a drab decelerationist program against the excitement of a futural technophilia, but to reconfigure the terms on which the debate takes place and to serve as a reminder that there are counter-histories to a narrative of relentlessness that at times sees technology as detached from energy and the consumption of energy (usually of finite resources), as if technology is somehow autonomous and self-moving. And we can note that Karl Marx’s almost breathless, frictionless image of the automatic system of machinery as “a moving power that moves itself”5 is partly responsible for this. As Noys puts it, this description of the machine feeds into “capitalism’s own fantasies of self-engendering production.”6 Less deus ex machina than deus sive machina. I want to note, by way of Wark, in his critique of accelerationism, “that the forces of production are also energy systems,”7 and agree with his point that that the replacement of human energy with fossil-fuel energy is central to the history of capitalism’s development. As Illich puts it inEnergy and Equity, there is a direct relation between social form and energy use: “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.”8 The free-floating spaceship as the speculative horizon of a non-earth-bound post-capitalist accelerationism can be read as a fantasy, albeit a cool one, but also a desire for a lack of dependency, whether it be upon finite terrestrial resources or the labour of others. Celestial fetishism and its self-spinning heavenly machines can also be read as a desire for a perpetual-motion machine in place of, or rather comprising, a permanent revolution, a kind of resistanceless infinite burst of invention. I want to place in opposition to this smooth accelerated image of technology in post-capitalist, post-terrestrial space an idea of “decapitalism” rather than “anti-capitalism,” the latter too tainted by Srnicek and Williams’s dismissive critique of “the folk politics of localism, direct action and relentless horizontalism.”9 What I am proposing as “decapitalism” is linguistically and conceptually like Illich’s idea of “deschooling,” but also similar to “decolonization”: the point is to take back what is left, along with the technologies that have contributed to despoliation and exploitation, and turn it back against this same destruction. This does not depend upon a “going through” capitalism to get to the other side, but rather involves cutting off the heads of those who control technology—decapitating capitalism, as it were. This proposed redistribution of an already highly advanced series of technologies (industrial, communicative, medical) does not imply some kind of neo-Luddism, but rather a recognition of what resources already exist and a mapping of production, consumption, and the amount of time it would take, say, to clean polluted waters or to distribute food adequately. This project of decapitalism is not, then, a call for slowing down, a call as open to recapture as acceleration itself (and I appreciate Srnicek and Williams’s attempt to detach acceleration from speed in this respect), but rather a beginning with a recognition of the damage and depletion that has been done and continues to be done, without lapsing into fatalist despair or a desire to fuse with machines, capitalism, and technology and somehow come out the other side (as what?). The version of decapitalism I’m describing starts by recognizing that which is often hidden in plain sight but without which systems, both capitalist and communist, would fall apart.

read the rest @ http://fillip.ca/content/decapitalism-left-scarcity-and-the-state#notes via philpercs