Bernes’s response came in a paper arising out of the blockade of the Port of Oakland in 2011, a moment in the wider US Occupy movements. He pointed to how logistical infrastructure, such as a high-tech port facility, is implicated both in the digital deskilling of work to mindless button-pushing, and in capital’s search for cheap labour. For workers to take command of such systems, ‘to seize, in other words, the control panel of the global factory’, would, Bernes (2013) asserted, be to assume management of a system constitutively hostile to them. The very design of end-to-end logistics is predicated on the ‘high-volume and hyper-global distribution’ of the commodities whose necessity was precisely what should be thrown in question by social revolution. Finally, Bernes posited that the idea of taking over global systems evaded the necessarily local nature of revolts against capital, revolts which would, at least initially, be isolated within a still-dominant world market, and have to make do with technologies at hand, rather than immediately taking over global infrastructures. Invocations of ‘the literal deus ex machina of supercomputers’ to establish a new social order would thus be largely beside the point (Bernes 2013).
Toscano (2014) replied to Bernes, suggesting that the revolutionary reconfiguration of capitalist technological systems did not preclude a critical evaluation of their specific component sub-systems, and criticizing as romanticism Bernes’ suggestion that emancipation required technologies yielding ‘the transparency of the small community or commune’. The debate has subsequently ramified in a number of directions (Degenerate Communism 2014; Cuppini, Frapporti and Pirone 2015; Chua 2017), including a direct entry into discussions of left accelerationism. Srnicek and Williams, in their argument for a full-automation socialism, acknowledge the issues Bernes raises, but suggest that ‘repurposing’ capitalist technologies is a matter for pragmatic experimentation (2015: 145–53). Bernes (2018) has criticized this ‘mix-and-match’ theory of transition, in which revolution can ‘discard unusable technologies (nuclear weapons: bad) and cultivate useful ones (antibiotics: good)’. He suggests this is a view that thinks of technology as ‘discrete tools, rather than an ensemble of interconnected systems’, and reiterates his fundamental challenge to accelerationist thought: ‘The standard assumption among Marxists and many others is that, despite its toxic excretions, the more developed technology becomes, the easier it will be to produce communism. But what if these technologies actually make it harder?’
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