• Accelerate with 1Dime

  • Mar 7 2022
  • Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins
  • Podcast

Accelerate with 1Dime

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  • Summary

  • Beginning at the end of 2020, 1Dime and A New Conversation have conducted a series of discussions on Marxism today and its relationship with theories on postmodernity. The first discussion ended with a promise to expand on theories of accelerationism, and while we recently covered the book Inventing the Future, at last we've arrived at the topic!

    Accelerationism is not a politics as such, but a notion through which we might analyse socialist strategy, and help us determine our approach to factors like the demands a workers movement should make today and how it might avoid the pitfalls of settling with short term gains at the cost of our ultimate goal.

    The discussion covers what historical phase of capitalism ought a workers movement act, and the role of idealism in Marx's historical materialism. As the previous chat covered Williams and Srnicek Inventing the Future, much of the concept of accereration comes from their #Accelerate manifesto. It covers the difference between social progressivism and socialism, and how reactionary trends can happily coincide with the former, and questions which way we might want society to accelerate towards.

      It links Srnicek and Williams' manifesto with Marx and Engels' Communist manifesto by identifying the acceleration of productive processes the latter supported under capitalism, and how these might be continued beyond capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat. While it accelerated certain aspects of our society in a progressive manner, without a transfer of the means of production to society in general, capitalism quickly degenerates dangerously. The discussion argues that accelerationism is not the pursuit of this degeneracy to induce the material acuteness to prompt the working class to act, as historically this has not led to socialism; but rather that workers movements should capitalise on the wave of progress under capitalism and struggle for an ever increasing share in its product.   It is perhaps through this struggle and the inevitable coming up against the limits of what capital may concede, that the system might be transcended, and the workers seeks more than the mere product of their labour, but the means of production in total. In order to engage in such a struggle it seems necessary that the libidinal desires of people are activated, and, in terms of Srnicek and Williams' work, there is scope among communists and socialists for looking to the future and imagining new ways of being, working beyond our currently cancelled future, one of the legacies of the neoliberal period. The discussion argues that this form of limited utopianism is distinct to the utopian thinking Engels and Marx critiqued, where the efforts of some bourgeois socialists were strictly assessed on the ideals and idealism they held subjectively, without considering the objective materiality of relations to production.
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