On April 5th I attended a lecture by the English journalist Paul Mason entitled “After Capitalism?!” The interrobang at the end of this title is either a little bit embarrassing, or devastating, depending on your relationship to anti-/post-capitalist discourse in general, and to the various new liberal third positionisms that seem to be getting a lot of attention over the last couple of years. I’m Highly Ambivalent.

What most non-reactionary accelerationists argue is that the transition between and production of economic forms is not ultimately accomplished by the activities conceived of as political during a given form’s lifetime, but rather by the emergence, out of a given form, of the new material conditions for the succeeding one; and that this process can be actively accelerated. The logic goes: capital was produced by the self-intensification of the economic relations of old-imperial mercantilism, so if we wish to move beyond capitalism  we need to figure out which of capital’s characteristic relations are potentially liberatory (especially those that make is so remarkably adaptable to new challenges) versus those that are primarily conservative. If we can get a better image of this then we can locate the places where these things that are contradictory in principle are contradictory in material form, and then we can intensify or accelerate the relevant processes. It is a fundamentally marxist position, but one which (whether explicitly or not) amputates most marxist theory of revolution from Marx’s ontological core of dialectical materialism.

I have no idea if Paul Mason considers himself an accelerationist, or whether he’s ever heard the term, but as far as I can tell he is working from this same basic logic. Where he differs is in his focus not only on the positive capacities of the technologies of capital, but also on roles these play in what he sees as a necessary acceleration in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As traditional market growth slows and stagnates the digital economy increasingly colonizes our subjectivity. Desire for both immaterial goods (and really only secondarily the material media of these goods) is a new market front, but one which requires constant reproduction, as the labor input and consumption are increasingly identical. Facebook et al are valuable to a given user because, and only so long as, many others are using it frequently: practically any direct competition begins pushing surplus value production toward zero; so they can only remain profitable as long as a sort of trust exists between the biggest tech and digital monopolies to simultaneously reduce competition and mutually produce in consumers habits and desires that mutually feed their models rather than freeing the consumers or the media up for alternative activities. This seems to mean that any breaks or resistances to this feedback loop could produce an opposite one in which the power of capital is diminished or threatened while more and more people are simultaneously interacting with each other and with technology in new, creative, and potentially liberatory ways.

Like I said, I’m ambivalent. I agree with the economic logic and hope the possibility for lines of flight out of the current internet desire-machine is a real one, but I’m frustrated to hear another person saying this sort of thing without any idea how to really begin producing these resistances or lines of flight. I also share some of the pessimism of one of Mason’s interlocutors, Hans-Jürgen Urban, who fears that the crises of capital that have already been occurring are producing new forms of conservative power (which may look more like pre-capitalist ones and therefore not be threatened by the same things) faster than Mason and other utopianists recognize. There’s really a lot to say about all of it, and I don’t think that either of the two criticisms I mention here are good reasons not to try what Mason (or other accelerationists) is ultimately suggesting, but I find myself with no more clue how to start than I did before hearing him speak and I think that’s a harder problem than he makes it out to be.