{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f","title":"Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781782793007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f","id":"22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f","uuid":"22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f","title":"Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism","normalized_title":"malignvelocitiesaccelerationismandcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781782793007","isbns":["9781782793007"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":91,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Malign%20Velocities%20Accelerationism%20and%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/22405f8c-4831-4be7-9f62-07a7c0012c4f/search"},"page":{"printed_page":7,"pdf_page":65,"physical_index":65,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c347567d557e4d79ef942b8be8c9a5d438716ee00211fb1cb056d0fb5b3a6298"},"chapter":"WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT","content":"Emergency Brake\n\nFredric Jameson, reflecting on the contemporary moment, comments that:\n\nwe may pause to observe the way in which so much of left politics today – unlike Marx’s own passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future – seems to have adopted as its slogan Benjamin’s odd idea that revolution means pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of History, as though an admittedly runaway capitalism itself had the monopoly on change and futurity.1\n\nIn light of the persistence and resurgence of accelerationism Jameson’s characterization of the contemporary left is dubious. Acceleration hasn’t gone away, and Jameson’s own retooled productivism is part of a ‘passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future’ that persists and even increases at our moment of crisis.\n\nI want to pause on Jameson’s reference to Walter Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’ that revolution might be an act of deceleration, interruption, or stopping the ‘runaway train of History’. This obviously suggests a counter to accelerationism. The reference is to the notes for Benjamin’s 1940 essay ‘On the Concept of History’, where he writes: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.’2 For Jameson, obviously, this conception is an ‘odd idea’ because it is a failure to measure up to Marx’s own embrace of capitalism, and capitalist production, as the condition of revolutionary change.\n\nBenjamin’s ‘odd idea’ had an explicit context. This was the critique of German Social Democracy, especially in Thesis XI of ‘On the Concept of History’, where Benjamin chided it for ‘moving with the current’.3 The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress and acceleration, and not least technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively. Beyond this historical argument I want to suggest that there is something more to Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’, both then and now.\n\nIf we return to Benjamin’s work we can see that it is closely engaged with questions of acceleration and production, especially in his dialogue with Bertolt Brecht. After they met in the late 1920s Brecht and Benjamin engaged in an intense debate over how to subject capitalist production to ‘refunctioning’ (Umfunktionierung).4 While this took place in a very different historical context – the failure of the revolutionary wave after 1917, inflation in Germany and global capitalist crisis, and the rise of fascism – the Brecht/Benjamin debate resonates in our moment. Invocations of Weimar, the 1929 Crash, and anxieties of incipient fascism or war, have become familiar tropes in commentary on our crisis. This is a rather speculative connection, but Brecht and Benjamin offer resources to interrupt a capitalism lockedinto crisis and destruction.\n\n7","previous_page":6,"next_page":null}