Acceleration Afterthoughts

Stasis, Capital and Class Struggle

Ed Note: I wrote this brief post back in November, but never published it. I’m returning to it now to kind of round out some dangling conversations that emerged back then.

A few stray thoughts continuing on from the previous post on Vince Garton’s collected writings and accelerationism—

In the comments to that post, questions were raised about a prospective book, to be published by Urbanomic, half of which would be penned by Vince, the other half by myself. At the current stage of things I can’t really comment on the status of that project, which was intended to contain a full theory of the Metacartel—time is very scarce for the foreseeable future, so we’ll see. But the comment did prompt Leszek Stalewski to say the following:

Maya(? - geez not sure), replied to me about this some time ago. It's not dead, but you Ed owe us an Accelerationism book, you published in Italian but not yet in English. Why Ed, oh why?

My response:

The Italian book—which was really not a book about accelerarionism per se, but a history of avant-political subcultures in the 20th century, though it does contain a chapter on the CCRU—had the supreme misfortune of being published concurrent with the outbreak of covid in 2020, so a lot of plans for English translations etc sort of got lost in the mix.

On the topic of a more generalized book about acceleration(ism), it’s not a position I’ve identified with a long long time so I’m not sure how something like that would be handled. Sort of hinted at it in this post but I’ve come to view the project/position as both a phantasy (in the psychoanalytic sense) and an aesthetic program that seeks to pose a grasping response to the real situation, which is precisely the inverse of acceleration. The instances that we might tap something that resembles those dynamics is a mistaken identification with what we could instead call a frenetic standstill. Acceleration, at its core, is really just the sense of vectoral transformations—particularly when it comes to how we relate to experiences of time and space—under the conditions of a rapidly transforming modernity; when modernity suspends, there is a general sense of chaos, but it’s a chaos that is boxed in place.

So any future treatment would have to begin on this basis. The more bracing problem too is that, in my mind at least, stripping it all down to its ultimate core returns us to the key positions of the Marxist project, albeit under radically new conditions. Which is to say, we loop back to the structures of class society, social mediation, and, in the final analyses, the limits of analyses itself in a popular, class-based struggle to realize the new earth.

I’d like to draw out a few additional thoughts from the above, beginning with the notion of the ‘frenetic standstill’. As much as I wish I claim to have come up with this phrase, it actually comes from German sociologist Harmut Rosa’s book Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Rosa’s sense of acceleration can be read as something closely related to the acceleration we’re dealing with here—just as with accelerationism, his is all about the question of time—but there are also some significant points of departure. He is much more interested in speed as such, whereas in accelerationism, particularly in its unconditional variety, speed is treated as epiphenomenal, it’s what ‘falls out’ from a much more higher level process that is at play in the world. Speed, and all the variants that postmodern theories take up (like the idea of ‘space-time compression’ that geographers deal with or the ‘collapse of possibility space’ that constantly dogs military planners) are just the more immediate manifestation of this process—the process grasped at the level of appearance.

Where Rosa gets really interesting is that he couples acceleration to its opposite, inertia. Phases of historical development are presented as being characterized by the rhythmic interplay between the two, something that recalls, in a weird way, the historical cycles of Vico—the Corso e Ricorso. Yet what makes modernity idiosyncratic is the subordination of the latter by the former: acceleration takes precedence, inertia is moved into the backseat and is transformed into something of a muted aftermath for accelerating change itself: future-shock, time sickness.

This situation is not infinitely sustainable, writes Rosa. In Social Acceleration’s conclusion—intriguingly subtitled ‘The End of History?’—he speaks ominously of the “unbridled onward rush into the abyss”. The nature of this abyssal moment is given: it is the “final collapse of the antinomies of movement [change or transformation] and inertia and the realization of the vision, which has accompanied modernity from the start, of a frenetic standstill”. In the original edition of the book, the term used is rasender Stillstand, itself borrowed from the German translation of Paul Virilio’s late concept of ‘polar inertia’.

Rosa maps directly to Virilio. Polar inertia is a phenomenological sense of weightless, a ‘timeless time’, or the time that remains when all traces of temporality have been evacuated from it. Empty time and bare repetition. If this sounds all needlessly esoteric and academic, it shouldn’t be so: who hasn’t commented, in the wake of covid and its profound disruption of life—described by Vince as the emergence of a ‘wholly technicised world’—of the loss of any ability to slot things into a properly chronological accounting system. Where do event falls? Did they happen six months ago or were they three years ago? It all becomes so slippery.

In the end, the frenetic standstill is boiled down to a single sentence: “nothing remains the same but nothing essentially changes”.

A figure that is mostly marginalized by Rosa is, surprisingly, Marx, with a mere forty mentions of him in the body of the text (the analysis in Social Acceleration draws much more heavily on Durkheim and Weber, but Rosa does get himself in a position where he must admit that Weber was ‘further away’ than Marx from developing a theory of ‘social acceleration’.

An accounting of the experience of accelerating transformation, as the defining leitmotif of modernity, must be grounded in Marx, as modernity was but the extension of the great and apocalyptic rupture in the world that was thrown forth by the explosion of capital from Europe’s feudal soil. What that tells us that an analysis of acceleration’s inversion, terminal inertia or the frenetic standstill, must be grounded on the same basis. But there’s a problem. Decline, slowdown, conditions of freeze-out do not appear in Marx’s analysis.

The average Marxoid might make a complaint at this juncture: how can you say that Marx doesn’t immediately himself to that sort of analysis, if he gave endless assessments of existing capitalist crises and theoretical explanations for why the occur?

This is exactly the point: Marx’s mature version of crisis theory is emphatically not a theory of capitalist decay and subsequent collapse, what became known in Marxist circles in the first half of the twentieth century as Zusammenbruchstheorie. In the third volume of Capital, the ultimate causal force of crisis is coupled to that endlessly debated and highly controversial topic, the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which holds that across the spine of (capitalist) history, the profitability realizable at the total level veers downwards towards the zero-point. The rate of profit momentous decline is in turn fundamentally bound to another tendential element in the evolution of capitalism, a rising organic composition of capital.

The organic composition of capital is also widely misunderstood; in the hands of Marxist economists like Michael Roberts, it is treated merely as the ratio of variable capital (the inputs of human labor costs) to constant capital (inputs of non-human, i.e. raw materials, machinery, etc). This would actually be what Marx calls the value composition of capital, while another avenue explores is the technical composition of capital. This would be the ratio of productive labor to sheer, physical quantities of the means of production. In the final analysis, the organic composition of capital is the dynamic interplay between the value composition and the technical compositions of capital.

When the organic composition of capital rises, it means that constant capital and means of production are steadily increasing, expanding, more investment capital flowing into then, over that which is represented by variable capital and productive labor (which may even be shrinking in the face of these developments). The easiest way to understand this is that as capital becomes evermore mechanized, more densified with the pathbreaking revolutions in technology and science, the more the human element retreats. Yet under capital, it is value that is the true fountain of what we later call ‘profit’, and as the pace of work quickens under mechanical conditions, the more the human is expelled from the production process, the less value that is imparted to the individual commodities being churned out.

Taking the capitalist system in the full totality, the rising organic composition of capital automatically entails the falling rate of profit. So if crisis is periodically triggered by this falling rate, crisis is bound to increasing efficiency in capitalism’s productive dimensions.

What’s more is that Marx maintains that crisis actually allows for a ‘reset’ of this entire process; after the sharp and violent downturn of economic disaster strikes, the deck is effectively cleared, old capital is annihilated and its remains are subsequently absorbed into larger masses of capital, and the circuits of production, accumulation and reproduction can resume at an even larger scale. “Capitalism works by breaking down”—this is no situation of impending capitalist breakdown and collapse.

That’s why we can say that Marx’s mature theory does not give us a readymade picture of real situations of profound and endemic stagnation.

There is, however, a precedent for this: the analysis offered by ‘heretical’ French Marxist Georges Sorel. Regarded alternatively as a nincompoop (by Marxist-Leninists, despite his open and rather poetic support for the Bolsheviks), an anarchist (due to his syndicalist inclinations), a reactionary (a byproduct of his own relative conservatism), and a theoretical progenitor of fascism (a flimsy narrative pushed by Cold War liberal intellectuals backed by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom), Sorel is in my opinion one of the most fertile and overlooked Marxist thinkers out there.

I touched on his perspective in a recent (re)post, but a quick summary: Sorel was writing from his post in France at the tail-end of the ‘Long Depression’ that swept Europe and elsewhere and which kicked off around 1873. There was a widespread believe, infrastructural at the level of cultural production but fundamental within the socialist movement of the time, that capitalism was coming to an end, that it was slowing down into irreversible heat death. Indeed, capitalism had gone totally retrograde, with trade indices, wages and real investment (the stuff needed to push the development of productive forces) declining sharply. Sorel gave a name to this situation—‘decadence’.

Because this situation deviated so sharply from Marx’s own prognosis of capitalism’s trendlines, Sorel suggested that the situation was one of capitalism undergo a profound deviation from its historical role. But why?

The answer he discerned, found in texts like Reflections on Violence, is due to a degeneration of the class war itself. Sorel lambastes what he calls the “parliamentary socialists”—political socialists who are reformist in orientation and seek to work closely with middle class intellectuals and the moderate bourgeoisie to bring about a post-capitalist society from on high. This collaboration between classes in the name of socialism sharply diverges from the class struggle as such, and Sorel writes that instead “Socialists should therefore abandon the search (initiated by the utopians) for a means of inducing the enlightened bourgeoisie to prepare the transition to a better system of legislation”.

Class war must be intensified, the line in the sand between the worker and capitalist drawn in a way absolute and unshakable, because it is

only then that the development of capitalism is carried out with the inevitability which struck Marx so strongly and which seemed to him comparable to that of a natural law. If, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie, led astray by the nonsense of the preachers of ethics and sociology, returns to the ideal of conservative mediocrity, seeks to correct the abuses of the economy and wishes to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, chance is introduced and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.

Distilling it further: the breakdown of class struggle, which Sorel links to class collaboration through the ‘enlightened’ activities of the parliamentary socialists, throws capitalism into this state of decadence, which in turn, ironically, begins to mute out the possibility of a future socialism. The relative autonomy of the proletariat, again, acts as a developmental motor.

Here’s we’ve crossed the bridge, abandoned acceleration(ism) entirely—insofar as accelerationism is understood as the auto-intensifying machine of modernist development, a process without subject (or, in a reading that can draw equally from Nick Land and Moishe Postone and even the grimmest points of Marx), a process through which capital itself is the historical subject.

My position is fairly simple: we’re experiencing effectively a repetition of the Long Depression, persisting from the 1870s through to the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution—the eternal return of Sorelian decadence. The solution is simple in words, but appears impossible in deed. The only path out from the frozen prison cell of the frenetic standstill, the polar inertia of decadence, is the re-drawing those absolute class boundaries, to re-activate class war in the heart of the decaying empire. Only then will a sense of possible futures be opened until to our endless present.