Accelerationism [Glugglugglug]

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ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

OwlFancier posted:

Well, that's the thing, the "revolution" as described by Marx & co is not necessarily murderous violent overthrow. In fact there's very little reason for that at all, an ideal form of it would be entirely bloodless because it is argued that the proletariat hold the true power, they just do not exercise it because they are not organized. Capital cannot function without Labour, so if Labour deigns to withdraw itself then Capital is powerless, because it doesn't actually do anything except tell everyone else how to live. The machinery is operated by the workers, the laws are enforced by the workers, the wars are fought by the workers. If everyone in the country said tomorrow "actually we won't be giving you any of our labour but we will keep coming to work and distributing the products of our labour as we see fit" then Capital would overnight become completely impotent. They only 'own' the machinery in the sense that they tell everyone else they own it, and Labour as a general rule will go along with this, they don't have the ability or the knowledge of how to actually use it.

Of course that is extremely unlikely because what currently organizes the proletariat is Capital, largely because everyone goes along with it out of habit. It would be very difficult to get everyone to do that. And there'd be some organizational issues with how to handle distribution of goods and stuff without it being dictated by who has money, but it doesn't really diminish the fact that the entire structure of our society is predicated on the people who make the world go round consenting to allow it to continue. And also on people being organized into Labour and Capital.

Because even ignoring the need for humans in the production chain, you also need the proletariat as a market to sell to. The whole desire of Capital is to accumulate more Capital, which it does by producing and selling to Labour, Labour necessarily being the majority of the population and the majority consumers of what is produced. If Capital shot everyone then what does it do now? It can't sell to the dead, so that would still necessitate a complete social restructuring and, I suppose, would possibly constitute a kind of backwards form of socialism, whereby the majority of the people own the means of production and distribute based on need, not wealth. On account of everyone else being dead and money/markets as a concept becoming entirely farcical.

Of course that assumes we invent self-sustaining and constructing murderbots before we invent robots which cause mass unemployment generally, which is possible but perhaps unlikely. Once Labour is replaced by machinery very thoroughly, you run into the aforementioned problem of wage-labour not making a whole lot of sense any more because nobody's being paid to work because there's nothing for them to do, and if nobody's being paid, they're not buying things.

The primary argument against accelerationism however is not that there's something wrong with allowing capitalism to progress, because that will happen whatever you do,the argumens against it are that it tends to focus on simply destroying society rather than accelerating the inevitable changes. And further, destroying existing society will not cause people to organize better and seize control.

What accelerates the march of capitalism is still what is described by Marx, mechanization. I don't imagine it's quite has he envisaged it but it's right in the manifesto, that eventually Capital will replace Labour so completely that the conditions of Labour's existence will necessitate a change in social organization. Simply pulling things like social security or abolishing the government don't advance that at all, they just make living conditions worse, but there is no need to change society because of that, it would merely be very unpleasant to live in for Labour. Society worked just fine with absolutely abysmal working conditions for hundreds of years. But if Labour is no longer paid to work, then Capital cannot function as it currently does either because it cannot make money without a market. The most accelerationist things in the world would probably either be the development of fusion power or the advancement of robotics and computing.

putting aside the Singularityesque/Pikettyesque increasing-substitution-of-labour-by-capital idea...

a large chunk of capital is now stored in the form of "human capital" - the kind of capital that derives its value through improving the productivity of labour, is costly to invest in, and depreciates like any other capital, but unlike normal capital, is possessed by only one person and is hence inalienable and non-expropriable. In a typical developed country, assessing human capital stocks in the same way that physical capital stocks are estimated generally puts national human capital at higher than national physical capital stocks

I underscore that this is true right now, and has been true of the developed world for a while already: a large share of the modern world's wealth is produced by means of production involving highly skilled individuals as a tiny share of the national labour force, rather than labour-intensive light industry. Automation serves to make a handful of engineers with 30+ years of educational investment in their personal human capital ever more productive, rather than making several hundred thousand semi-skilled individuals with high school education ever more productive.

This is a good time to reflect upon this graph:

ronya fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Dec 26, 2015

# ¿ Dec 26, 2015 03:43

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 11:39

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

asdf32 posted:

Capitalism sells to people with money and doesn't care who has the money. If small proportion of rich people have all the money then they're the consumers and that's fine from capitalism's perspective...

This is indeed the mainstream assessment. Here is some decent 2012 discussion (from a heterodox perspective). FWIW I think the mainstream has it, and the underconsumption-trap thesis does not look pretty three years on.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2015 03:49

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

My point was on human capital, which makes a select group of people more relevant and the larger group of people less relevant, rather than automation per se.

Capital is not built on full employment and constant growth; rather, the politics of developed welfare states are built on full employment and constant growth, as a legacy from the golden era of social democracy. If you consider the developing world, however, you can readily observe that neighbourhoods or even whole cities can exist at a developed-world quality of life (with a degree of social insurance for the relatively poor amongst the ingroup), with the rural and suburban poor outgroup existing at subsistence. That's crony capitalism red in tooth and claw, if you like.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2015 04:07

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

If you find it so unbelievable that a class identity can maintain an internally egalitarian ethic but nonetheless remain intensely hostile to any spread of this largesse to outsiders (who may mingle but not participate), consider the status quo attitude to economic migration in the West.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2015 15:45

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