Making things worse in the short term in the hope of bringing about a utopian society in the long term through social tension and misery… that sounds like a pretty evil philosophy to me. Ordinary people (non-communists) don’t care about some theoretical utopia, they want improvements to their quality of life now.
Am I missing something?
You’re not missing anything, and communism has nothing at all to do with accelerationism. Well except for posadism which is nothing but a meme.
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
- Karl Marx
So you think that voting for conservatives or fascists is a good thing in any way?
Way to twist my words with your bogeyman flavors!
You said it has nothing to do with communism and here I am giving you a quote by Karl Marx himself!
Your quote doesnt even mention accelerationism, just free trade.
Do you really chose to be so ignorant just to protect your established bias?
In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
Let me rephrase it for you since clearly you are having trouble here. It says: free trade accelerates social revolution and he, Karl Marx the founder of communism, said that he is in favor of free trade because it’ll bring social revolution faster.
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You are not. I’m very eager to see any examples of this working out in real life. When has destroying society magically lead to society being good? Are we supposed to be modeling ourselves after the decimation post-World War II?
When has destroying society magically lead to society being good?
Literally, always?
Every sort of progression removes something in favor of something better. Again, accelerationism, doesn’t imply spontaneous change in fact it’s the opposite: by embracing system you make it’s flaws apparent which results in increase of competition and acceleration of progress.Literally, always?
Oh what garbage. You’re telling me that Tommy Douglas got universal health care coverage in Canada by setting fire to Nova Scotia? Nonsense.
I’m not familiar with your anecdote but you realize some people lost even in your carefully selected example, right? Some feature of society was destroyed in favor of something else. By very definition change to good or bad is destructive activity. Some parts of society must be destroyed for improvement.
Again accelerationism does not advocate anarchy. Systems can be accelerated to graceful collapse. You somehow interpret “accelerate natural demise” as some sort of mad max style apocalypse which is just silly.
You have redefined “accelerationism” to mean “just kind of when anything changes at all” which is not what the word means.
Now that you ran out of arguments you start spewing bullshit 👏
Again you imply that accelerationism can’t have a graceful collapse without a single argument.
What are you even talking about? A “graceful” accelerationism is the exact opposite of accelerationism: it’s in the name! I genuinely can’t tell if you’re trolling or just genuinely ignorant but the idea that things will gradually get better is what progressivism is and the idea that the best way to have a communist worker’s utopia is to vote for a fascist is what accelerationism is. Note how everyone in this thread is disagreeing with you.
So I’ll go back to the question I initially asked and you ignored: “When has destroying society magically lead to society being good?”
(Screen readers, skip the rest of this comment): 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
A “graceful” accelerationism is the exact opposite of accelerationism
Why? Accelerationism is about embracing flawed systems so they collapse faster. The type of collapse is irrelevant be it grateful or chaotic.
You somehow imply that accelerated systems must collapse in chaos. Why?
Also chill with the emojis.
This feels like a binary interpretation of accelerationism, as if either every choice you make must support accelerationism or every choice you make must oppose it.
There are instances, like in the US 2016 election, where arguments could have been made in support of accelerationism; however, the same person who might have advocated for accelerationism in that context, might oppose it in some other context, on a basis such as: both of the major party presidential candidate options appear virtually identical, but when voting for senators or members of the house of representatives, it could be argued that there is more harm reduction opportunity. A pure accelerationist might vote far right in all cases under the assumption that it will help accelerate capitalism’s collapse.
I imagine most ‘accelerationists’ would have a nuanced take on these options rather than have an all or nothing approach.
I won’t vote for Trump in 2020, but I think Trump is the better candidate for the long term, because libs won’t go back to brunch if he wins again (or refuses to step down) like they will if Biden gets elected. If libs go back to brunch, I believe that their (admittedly slow) radicalization will very quickly stop. This could be considered an accelerationist take.
Edit: Sorry for the US centric take, it’s just one of the more obvious examples I can think of, and I know the politics there much better than the politics elsewhere.
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Accelerationism starts from the false premise that social systems reach a natural demise and bury themselves.
How is it false? Every system reaches natural demise. The idea is that we should allow system to fail rather than constantly patching them.
As Lenin said, capitalism is dying, but in it’s final years it has the possibility to claim the lives of millions of people, it must be aggressively fought.
Ironic.
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Nice wall of text but you didn’t really say much.
It is not simply a spontaneous process, but a struggle, it is a process connected with the clash of classes
This is not disagreeing with accelerationism which never implied any sort spontaneous change. Accelerationism agrees that there will be struggle and one should empower this struggle of powers rather than constantly patch it for “good enough” scenarios.
Yes, you are right when you say that the old social system is breaking down; but it is not breaking down of its own accord
Every system is breaking down on “it’s own accord”. There isn’t a permanent system in our universe, even universal constants are being disputed and as far as we know it everything will eventually end because of entropy. Sure comparing cosmic rules to societal change is a bit silly but it’s a factual observation — all systems fail and will fail and should be allowed to fail.
take Fascism for example.
Now that’s just irrelevant appeal to emotion.
Finally accelerationism never implies that it’s progression with the least discomfort — instead it’s the most efficient progression for intellectual systems. Only by embracing the system we can make it’s flaws apparent so we can improve ourselves and keep moving forward.
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When capitalism starts to fall apart, the Fascists come out to hold it together by weaponizing terror against all who threaten the ruling class. We need revolutionary organs of power if we want to overthrow it. If we just wait by for capitalism to drive us to economic collapse, many will die for no reason. Social systems are replaced by violence, and just waiting for capitalism to fall like a dead tree is historically unprecedented.
You make so many naive and unfounded assumptions. Why do assume that collapse of capitalism will be somehow violent and chaotic? Why couldn’t it be graceful?
I think you have way to many biases to even consider alternative philosophies to the ones you’re subscribed to right now. In other words, you’re still a camel.
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Making things worse in the short term in the hope of bringing about a utopian society in the long term through social tension and misery
Change always results through discomfort — there’s nothing evil about that. Accelerationism has nothing to do with “achieving utopia” in fact it’s completely against any sort of idea of “end state” like utopia. Finally it’s not even an exclusively political or societal concept.
Accelerationism as described on the sidebar is system control ideology. A flawed system will collapse under it’s own flaws when it’s allowed to. If you want a political analogy then capitalism will collapse if people stop patching it up with various socialism patches.
Accelerationism is an idea that a chosen system should be used efficiently and allowed to collapse so the overall environment can iterate and change quickly. In other words if we choose X philosophy to run our lives on we should stick through with it and let it fail as eventually all systems do.
Finally accelerationism favors individual mind by exchanging inefficient resistance to efficient embrace. For that you can read up on Friedrich Nietzsche who was one of the first proponents of accelerationist thought.
