by Angela Eagle
Accelerationists appear to be fixated on merging and fudging boundaries: between reality and the virtual world; between the digital and the human; and between fact and fiction. They are especially focused on going beyond the limits of the earth and colonising other planets. They frequently assume an end to resource scarcity, which will be achieved when humans are able to mine asteroids. All too predictably, taking their cue from Nietzsche and the will to power, what interests them is ‘collective self-mastery’ and ‘command of the plan’ married to the ‘improvised order of the network’.7 This approach is more about achieving power and control than anything that is recognisably progressive. It is at best ‘post democratic’; at worst downright authoritarian. It is not democratic or socialist to celebrate the power and enrichment of a few or replace one powerful undemocratic privileged elite with another.
Nick Land, the nearest the accelerationist movement has come to a founding guru in the UK, celebrated what he called the dark will of capital to rip up political cultures and delete tradition in disturbing writings which were darkly nihilistic and anti-human. Creating what he called a ‘group mind’, the rogue CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) at Warwick University, he declared that humans were something for ‘it [a group intelligence] to overcome, a problem, [a] drag’. Accelerationists seem to be mesmerised by power and contemptuous of people. Little surprise, given this attitude, that there is a right-wing as well as a left-wing iteration. Accelerationism has directly spawned the odious alt right, NRx and the presidency of Donald Trump. NRx, the self-styled neo-reactionary movement, has had direct contact with Breitbart and Trump campaign mastermind Steve Bannon and openly admires white supremacists and Nazis. It wishes to abolish democracy, hates egalitarianism and argues for a return to authoritarian rule by powerful Wall Street businessmen and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It is the modern version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and spouts just as unpalatable a set of semi-fascistic political beliefs.
There are those who see themselves as left-wing accelerationists (though many of them would argue that the political terms ‘left’ or ‘right’ are now meaningless), yet even these are worryingly sceptical of democracy and appear to be elitist. In #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek argue for the creation of an accelerationist’s equivalent to Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society, the secretive network he set up in the 1940s. It is credited with creating and then propagating to devastating effect what has been dubbed ‘the neoliberal thought collective’ (NTC for short),8 which ensured the continued influence worldwide of the dubious ideas of market fundamentalism. The accelerationists wish to use hi-tech social platforms to build a ‘complex new hegemony’ and, in the Accelerationist Manifesto, they talk of ‘refurbishing mastery in a new and complex guise’. This is as revealing as it is disturbing, because the Mont Pelerin Society was and remains an unashamedly elitist network of the already powerful and privileged who meet semi-secretly to propagate their own self-interests in the guise of certain economic and political dogmas. As such, they are a top-down power structure that is unaccountable and undemocratic. No progressive movement that is interested in empowering the mass of people and achieving real ‘bottom-up’ democratic change would suggest the use of such a power structure to bring it about.
Accelerationists believe that Marx is outdated by cybernetic theory, but they retain a cod Marxist belief in the inevitability of the transformation of capitalism or its collapse. One of their cultural heroes is the relentless killer cyborg in the Terminator film series, first played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movies. Revealingly, the accelerationists do not seem to be inspired by the human freedom fighter the terminator is seeking to destroy. (Personally, we were rooting for Sarah Connor.) This is millenarian, extremist, apocalyptic stuff out of which it is impossible to imagine anything progressive or socially desirable emerging. Wishing for the collapse of the system as an end in itself has never been the way of democratic socialists, who believe that by working together we can build a better society for the common good. The belief that the worse things are the better they are has been the approach of nihilists the world over and experience shows that what follows the collapse always seems to be brutal and inhumane.
A preference for collapse over reform would not have assisted the world’s prospects during the global financial crisis in 2008, when an accelerationist approach might have indicated that it was better to let the entire financial system collapse, destroying people’s savings and bringing down the political system with it. This is not politics. It is a dereliction of duty which could only have been seriously contemplated by irresponsible people who thought they would be personally insulated from the consequences. It is always the poor and vulnerable who lose out most as a result of collapse. Look at what has happened in Russia. There, the collapse of Communism led directly to mass larceny and the rise of the oligarchs, the creation of an amoral kleptocracy and steep declines in life expectancy for ordinary Russians. Authoritarian dictatorship rather than democracy is all too often the outcome of collapse. Accelerationism as a theory seems to care little about the continuation of democracy itself, and as the futurist movement in Italy degenerated into fascism, it appears that the tendency of accelerationist analysis to crave collapse indicates that its modern-day heirs may end up going the same way.
An engagement with accelerationism has spawned two offspring on the left in British politics: post-capitalism and fully automated luxury communism.
POST-CAPITALISM
The post-capitalist approach speculates that the seeds of the destruction of the system have long been sown, and that it will indeed be superseded by something else. In the 1990s, Peter Drucker published a book called Post-Capitalist Society. In it he coined the term ‘knowledge society’, arguing that the internet age would usher in a transformation from an industrial to a knowledge-based system which would render obsolete the adversarial distinctions of labour and capital. This was an idea enthusiastically taken up by New Labour, but we do not believe it has come to pass. If anything, the intervening years have re-emphasised that the very adversarial contest of labour and capital is alive and kicking. And currently labour is losing. The labour share of national income has shrunk across the already industrialised nations as the owners of capital have taken a much larger share and levels of inequality have soared. And so, albeit in a modern guise, the political challenges facing democratic socialists are eerily familiar and we believe will endure for the foreseeable future.
American economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin celebrates the dawn of a new era and the coming of what he calls the ‘collaborative commons’. He believes that this is enabled by the rise of a super internet which will produce a world of distributed and collaborative power. In his book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, he argues that the costs of production are being lowered to such an extent that the traditional, vertically integrated corporation will be destroyed. This is the phenomenon that has already disrupted the music industry and made it virtually impossible for all but the most famous composers and musicians to be paid for their work. Rifkin regards this development as a new paradigm and the first new economic system to appear since the rise of capitalism and socialism in the nineteenth century. Currently he believes we are living in a hybrid society, where the new and the old systems are existing side by side. Rifkin believes that the collaborative commons will supersede capitalism, though how this will come about he does not really say. Rifkin’s theory does not deal with the established vested interests of ownership of network infrastructures and the super-profits they are delivering to certain technology companies. Nor does he deal with the effects of the bombardment into personal timelines of mass advertising. This advertising is what pays for the system. As well as turbo-charging consumerism, it leads to the harvesting of mass data on every individual which can be used to build individual profiles of the behaviour of every user and to target political propaganda cheaply to everyone involved in the system. While
this data could be used for good, it is predominantly being used currently to propagandise and to make monopoly profits for a few gigantic companies.
Paul Mason, in his book PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, makes much the same case for the sharing and collaborative economy. He argues that this new world will evolve spontaneously out of the current system. Indeed, he believes that this is already happening. He cites myriad examples of resistance to oppression which he covered as a BBC reporter, ranging from the revolts of the Arab Spring to the heroic resistance to the extreme austerity that was imposed on Greece. He pronounces the proletariat dead and believes it will be superseded by a network of millions of individual, educated and connected human beings who will challenge and change the system. In reality, as the rest of the world industrialises, the proletariat and – we would argue – the new piecework-driven, apparently selfemployed ‘precariat’ has never been larger. Indeed, it is possible in the UK to purchase these thought-provoking books online from Amazon and have them delivered the very next day, after an ‘Amazombie’ – working a twelve-hour shift in one of their ‘fulfilment centres’ for £8.20 an hour, who is expected to find 300 items in that time – has packed it for you. It will then have been given to a ‘self-employed’ courier who is expected to deliver up to 100 parcels a day, six days a week, being paid 48 pence a delivery. And if that wasn’t enough, they also have to supply their own transport and fuel. To fight against exploitative employment conditions such as this, to create a more humane society, was why the Labour Party and the trade unions first came into being. Now we need to renew our efforts to do just that, not slink into history, discouraged and defeated.
There is certainly a place for idealism and vision in the fight to end the scourge of market fundamentalism and the exploitation it has brought in its wake, but the power of the state cannot be as easily dismissed as Paul Mason does. However networked and educated the individuals who occupied Tahir Square in Egypt were, the fact is that the military are now back in power and many of the protesters who occupied the square are in jail. These idealistic visionary accounts also tend to assume that technology is neutral as a medium, when it clearly is not. The internet did not come into being as a public good and nor did the World Wide Web, even though it was originally envisaged that way by its creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The reality is that it has evolved in an entirely different way. The technology has been ruthlessly commercialised, and the ‘network’ which now connects millions of people the world over has been created by corporations who have come to dominate the globe in rapid time. The libertarian approach of many in Silicon Valley is hard-wired into the design of the operating systems which now power the internet and it is not at all clear that building a ‘collaborative commons’ will be easy in such a hostile environment.
The new dominant corporations of our era have been very adept at designing the infrastructure to make colossal profits for themselves and the companies they have built. As we shall see below, they have used every trick in the book of every monopolist since time immemorial to exploit and keep their market power. They do not like paying tax to any government; they have installed free but proprietary operating systems and software; and they have quickly swallowed up any rivals they could not destroy. Much of the output available on the internet is addictive in the extreme, deliberately designed to keep people on the page in order to make money through advertising. This produces a very different internet experience than that which would have been produced if the internet had been developed as a public good, free of commercial advertising. It might be that, contained within the potential of all this technology designed for profit and exploitation, there is something kinder and better that can be grown and come to predominate. But many other nastier futures are just as plausible if there is not some sensible regulation of the internet, an enforceable internet bill of rights and a commitment to establish and maintain a trusted hub for the fact-based provision of information.
FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM
Fully automated luxury communism envisages a tech-enabled utopia just around the corner. It suggests that the advent of widespread automation should be speeded up so that human beings can enter a ‘post-work’ society in which robots and automatic production will remove the requirement to work for more than a few hours a week. Full automation of everything would go hand in hand with common ownership of all of it. In exchange for all this leisure time, people would be provided with a universal basic income, free housing, education and healthcare.
This unashamedly utopian vision contains no detail as to how we may get from where we are now as a society to this startling future. For one, how would we achieve common ownership of the automation of everything? At the moment, all this infrastructure is owned and controlled by corporations and individuals. It is also diffuse and global. So, are we contemplating fully automated luxury communism in one country or across the entire world?
All of this relies on a very optimistic view of the potential of technology to solve all practical problems and generate enough value to finance a world of mass leisure and luxury. But – and it’s a big but – even if enough value were to be generated by mass automation, how would the redistribution to all citizens work?
There are other serious problems. Fully automated luxury communism has little to say about the environmental or energy constraints that will be barriers to luxury mass production, whether commonly owned or not, to say nothing of the recycling bills. Indeed, fully automated luxury communists suggest that the solution to the issue of the finite resources available on earth is to look to the stars. They claim that scarcity could be overcome by mining asteroids. But, again, this fails to deal with the issue of ownership and control. Elon Musk and his SpaceX company would be unlikely to hand over the profits of his space-mining ventures if they were to be successful, and as yet there is no extra-terrestrial law on the ownership of mineral rights on passing asteroids.
If all this utopian speculation sounds a bit too good to be true, that’s because it is. And the luxury communists’ view of the future does not accord with current facts or our experience of previous periods of rapid industrial change. The demise of work has been anticipated for over two centuries now and, despite the fact that we are about to enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, work is still stubbornly failing to disappear. As the TUC points out in a recent discussion paper, ‘Shaping Our Digital Future’, breakthrough technologies have been disrupting the established order for over 250 years and in each case new technologies have resulted in more, not fewer, jobs. Far from disappearing, they say, jobs are more plentiful than ever. Statistics show that the UK employment rate is close to a record high. The real issue is the quality of the jobs available and the type of pay and conditions that come with them. Those issues are the core concerns of the labour and trade union movement and always have been. There is no discussion in this vision of a ‘post-work’ society of the desirability of separating people from the identity and satisfaction which have long been associated with work. Many of those who work with the unemployed will testify how destructive the lack of purpose and ability to contribute that often accompany joblessness are to individual wellbeing. Further to this, good work positively enhances wellbeing. It creates a sense of pride, belonging and purpose which helps make life meaningful. Luxury communists are silent on caring jobs. In their brave new world, who would care for the elderly or children? Housework and domestic labour would be unlikely to disappear, even if production and some services were automated and everyone was wearing self-cleaning clothes. Or doesn’t domestic labour count as work in their view?
A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
The idea of introducing a universal basic income has recently reappeared in left-leaning political circles and is on the global agenda, in part in response to the anticipated labour market disruption and loss of jobs caused by the march of the robots. The nature of the transition from the old to the new era is what worries policy-makers, but the advocates of universal basic in
come make strange bedfellows: from the super-rich tech elites of Silicon Valley, via Sir Richard Branson to the fully automated luxury communists. In the UK, both the liberal Royal Society for the Arts and the right-wing Adam Smith Institute are advocates. One of market fundamentalism’s high priests, conservative economist Milton Friedman, proposed a version of universal basic income in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom. Essentially, his idea was to introduce a negative income tax as a temporary transition on the way to what he called a ‘transfer-free’ society. By this he meant that the goal would be that no tax revenues whatsoever would be ‘redistributed’ from one individual to another by the state. The needs of the poor would be looked after by the voluntary action of civil society and charities, not government. This was a bit like an earlier version of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, which is currently providing cover for the Conservative government’s effort to dismantle the British welfare state. Unlike David Cameron, however, Friedman was quite explicit about his motives. He intended that the introduction of the universal basic income would enable big savings to be made in existing state expenditures, with even more to come in the future. He wished to eliminate state-funded social security payments and programmes such as old-age pensions, public housing, public health programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid, hospitals and mental institutions. To Friedman and his intellectual aficionados on the market fundamentalist right, the universal basic income was a way of dissolving the state and the social security safety net completely over time. In this way, the state itself can come as close to being extinguished as possible. Some on the right even argued that non-taxpayers should be denied the vote as a logical extension of this system, where only those who pay taxes get a say and those who receive assistance should be grateful, but voiceless. Where market fundamentalists are concerned, it is important to appreciate the dynamics of any system they propose over time to discern their real end point. In Friedman’s case, it was the smallest government expenditures possible and a return to Victorian systems of charity for the poor. President Nixon was similarly persuaded that introducing a universal basic income was a good idea, and he presented the Family Assistance Plan, which would have introduced it, to Congress in 1969. It was passed by the House of Representatives but rejected in the Senate and subsequently overtaken by the unfolding drama of the Watergate scandal.
