Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

The result was the birth of ‘a new sensibility made up of little strange montages.’ (15) In pugnacious style Lyotard has little time for those who don’t accept the experience of workers as an ecstatic one: ‘“Jouissance.” The French think it means the euphoria that follows a meal washed down with Beaujolais.’ (18) Rejecting this sanitization of masochistic pleasure Lyotard, like Lewis, points to the longer form of the worker’s engagement with the machine. This is implicit in the forms of Futurism, which flirted with anarchism and syndicalism, as well as Fascism. The difficulty of accelerationism, which will thread its way through this book, is its attempt to solve this suffering of labor by integrating labor into the machine. If war, for all its destructive power, can be flipped into heroism, labor remains more resistant.

Lyotard’s mechanical sublime, which he will later translate into a tragic register by taking the Holocaust as his model, indicates, at this point, an excess that is utopian. The rupture is one that places the worker at the center, on the condition they disappear into an aesthetic of forces. Such a model speaks to the Futurist’s ‘statistical sublime’, which was their attempt to map an accelerated access that exceeded the forces of structure and control. For Lyotard this sublime moment would mark his departure from the left, and the Futurists were even more politically dubious. It seems that the desire to transgress leftist ‘pieties’ leads to the embrace of the sublime, and an embrace which restores that trope to its conservative roots. Excess is not necessarily good.

Unknown Soldiers

Paul Virilio draws out a whole genealogy of the celebrants of speed: ‘whether it’s the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, Olympic champions or travel agents, the military-industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction, into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds’.17 The Futurists are the pioneers of this new order. The brevity of their own moment, disappearing into a war which killed several of their leading members before a brief interwar revival, is one sign of their own desire to accelerate into the future. Their own lived experience of avant-garde time was predicated on speed and obsolescence. In the Founding Manifesto Marinetti announced that ‘others who are younger and stronger will throw us in the wastebasket, like useless manuscripts. — We want it to happen!’18

This logic of obsolescence speaks not only to the frantic emergence and extinction of the avant-garde, with each trying to accelerate beyond the other, but also to the experience of labor. The worn-out bodies of factory workers, or other laborers, are retired or dumped to be replaced by new ‘younger and stronger’ bodies. In a way Futurism zeros in on this logic of replacement – first, in its attempt to replace the soft and decadent bourgeois body with a new hardened Futurist body, then with the discarding of that body as it wears out. This model of finitude implies that acceleration and technology do not smoothly unfold in a linear teleology that delivers us beyond the limits of labor. Instead we seem to remain at this limit as a point of struggle and contradiction.

The aim of my discussion of Futurism as the crucible of accelerationism has been to explore this limit. On one hand, Futurism appears mimetic and apologetic of the acceleration of capitalist technology, if not wanting to re-order this in Fascist forms. On the other hand, the non-linear and destructive moments of Futurism threaten to collapse this ideological programme and put accelerationism into question. That I don’t think this questioning goes far enough should be obvious. The reappearance of acceleration today, however, suggests the equivocal attraction of an avant-garde that promised an intervention which could grasp, or attempt to grasp, technological forces. Our current moment, as we will go on to see, lacks this hope and tries to recover it from the past. The irony is that accelerationism, which is relentlessly directed toward the future, turns out to be nostalgic. This irony will recur. The nostalgia of accelerationism suggests, I think, the difficulty in engaging with the problem of labor and with disengaging from the existent lines of flight that determine acceleration. The revenge of replication is one which haunts the accelerationist pursuit of the sublime, whether in warfare or in industrial production. The Futurists did not predict the retooled future of technology integrated with man they intended, but rather the brutal history of displacements and reworkings that fall back within the forms of value. In trying to escape to some statistical sublime, they fall back into the value sublime.

Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!: Communist Accelerationism

The Revolution has cut time in half.

Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924)

Robin Blackburn reports a story told to him when he worked for the Cuban Ministry of Soviet Trade in the 1960s. At an economic conference convened by the then-President Osvaldo Dorticós there was a discussion of a particular plan for a sector of the economy. One adviser argued that the aim must be to produce the maximum output for the minimum effort and expense. Dorticós emphatically disagreed: ‘This is not the revolutionary way,’ he insisted, ‘instead we aim to achieve the maximum of output with the maximum forces (fuerzas).’1 I want to explore this attitude as key to what I will call ‘communist accelerationism’. We have seen that accelerationism is usually a strategy that tries to ride the infinitely self-expanding value of capital. Communist accelerationism, of the kind practiced by what Chris Arthur calls ‘no-longer-existing socialism’,2 did something rather different. It tried to find a find a new and superior mode of production – one that could take the ‘best’ of capitalism, but reorganize it to go beyond the limits of a system driven by profit. In doing so it appealed, as we will see, to this ‘cavalry-charge method’, precisely to breakthrough to the future and, in doing so, to put human labor in charge.

My focus will be on the Russian Revolution, and the utopian dreams released as a result of that event. It’s a commonplace that the revolution unleashed a new imagination of time and the place of the worker. Susan Buck-Morss remarks that: ‘Machine culture,

2

Soviet style, had its origins as the expression of a lack, so that even its brutality could be seen to possess a utopian quality.’3 In particular, as the later story from the later Cuban revolution illustrates, the factor of human labor was seen as key to accelerating beyond capital by bringing production under rational control.

Of course, this is a story of failure, violence, and brutality. The extreme suffering caused by these attempts to develop and control production is evident, especially for the peasantry. While in no way wishing to minimize or condone this, we should note that ‘capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’.4 The fact that capital’s processes of control and reproduction are often more ‘indirect’ obscures this historical violence from view, as does the fact that the victors write history. It was the desire to interrupt and develop a different form of production that drove the communist experiments.

Marx had explored how labor-power was the only commodity that generated surplus-value, the only commodity that could exceed its own limit due to its labor-power or potential. Capital, as ‘the moving contradiction’, depends on labor-power to generate surplus value but, on the other hand, it constantly tends to replace labor with machinery. The productive forces are the ‘dead labor’ that had become congealed and encrypted into machines and other devices. Lacking these advanced technologies, devastated by civil war, the new communist regime in Russia was forced to rely on labor. It was this use of living labor that seemed to be able to restore control and human will over the despotism of capital. Placing living labor first could be the first step into a new regime of production.

In the Highest Degree Tragic

‘War communism’ was the retrospective name given to the period 1918-1921 in Russia. In the face of civil war, international intervention, and the collapse of production, this was the ‘degree zero’ for the new Soviet society. Trotsky wrote: ‘Russia – looted, weakened, exhausted, falling apart’, and that matters were ‘In the highest degree tragic’.5 Confronting the weakening of the proletariat through civil war, in whose name the revolution had been made, the new Communist state faced a life-or-death crisis. In response, infamously, Trotsky called for the militarization of labor in his Terrorism and Communism (1920). This call for ‘an exceptional wave of labor enthusiasm’,6 is often regarded as a kind of hallucination induced by Bolshevik desperation. The usual argument is that the disastrous conditions of war communism were mistaken by the Bolsheviks for the capacity to give birth to communism immediately. In this case acceleration emerged from zero, from radical destruction.

This view is disputed by Lars T. Lih, who argues that Trotsky’s calls for ‘labor duty’ and ‘shock work’ were not driven by fantasies of production, but rather a response to emergency conditions – what Trotsky described as ‘the regime of a blockaded fortress with a disorganized economy and exhausted resources’.7 That said, some Bolsheviks did see war communism, or would look back on it, as a site on which to radically rearrange capitalism starting from zero. A huge number of experiments and proposals emerged from this period, and continued into the partial restoration of capitalism in the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) (1921-1928). War Communism, during which money ceased to function and production ground to a halt, seemed to demand new utopias to save the revolution.8 The period of NEP, although restoring ‘state capitalism’, as Lenin put it, was also a time of relative intellectual freedom and experimentation. So, while not wanting to reinforce the usual image of the Bolshevik leadership as driven by a crazy ‘euphoria’, I do want to trace some of the debates and proposals that tried to restart devastated production in this period and aimed to fulfil the communist dream of offering a superior mode of production to capital.

One of the central points of this debate was the work on ‘scientific management’ of the American Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856- 1915), who introduced techniques of breaking down tasks into discrete units to improve efficiency and extract more labor. Writing in 1913 Lenin spoke of Taylorism as ‘man’s enslavement by the machine’.9 In 1918, however, Lenin suggested that adopting Taylorism, under socialist organization, might offer a progressive measure. This dream of ‘proletarian Taylorism’ was aimed at minimising work by increasing its productivity so Soviet workers could have time to participate in the life of the new regime. The difficulty was that the management required to ensure this ‘scientific work’ would itself become dominant in the Soviet State.10 The dream of ‘proletarian Taylorism’ remained a dream, but an influential dream.

The lag between the reality of devastation and the desire to embrace new capitalist technologies as the means to create a new communist society produced a contradiction. This contradiction would only become more acute as the European revolutions, especially in Germany and Hungary, were crushed, or failed to materialize. Susan Buck-Morss has argued that the Soviet avantgarde sacrificed the time of the avant-garde experiment, which is a ‘lived temporality of interruption, estrangement, arrest’,11 for the vanguard time of progress to resolve this contradiction. While this difference between art and politics remained, especially in the dreams of new forms of production, the subordination of experimentation would eventually be completed under Stalinism. I want to suggest something a little different, and rather more disturbing. The time of certain elements of the avant-garde was a time of acceleration, which found itself in congruence with the vanguard desire for the future. While a gap between dream and reality remained, the avant-garde wanted not only to stop or interrupt time, but to force time into the future. So, this was active cooperation, rather than a chosen subordination. In the words of Vsevelod Meyerhold, theatre director and prophet of biomechanics, it was the time to create a ‘new high-velocity man’.12

Iron Man

We can trace this desire to close the gap between present and future through the career of the proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev (1882-

1939). His work takes the tension of harnessing communism to acceleration to an extreme. It seems to embrace the worst of regulated capitalist work and the alternative utopian re-imagination of work as strange site of freedom at the same time. Son of a school teacher, Gastev had a career as a latheoperator, skilled metal worker, and tram repairman, as well as being a poet.13 His 1913 ‘Factory Whistles’ is characteristic:

The crowd steps in a new march, their feet have caught the iron tempo.

Hands are burning, they cannot stand idleness ….

To the machines!

We are their lever, we are their breathing, their impulse.14

We already have a sense of new speed – the ‘iron tempo’ – and of the integration of the animal body with the machine – ‘we are their breathing’.

This vision of the transformative power of technology explored in his work ‘Express – a Siberian Fantasy’, written while in exile before the revolution. It presents a utopia of Siberia as a machine paradise viewed through the voyage of the express train ‘Panorama’. This is a vision of Siberia laced with factories and roads, of the train ‘drown[ing] man in metal’, which violently reworks nature to human will. It is a world in which Russia will join-up with America to form a technological utopia and the Arctic ice-cap will be melted.15 A reworking we would now contemplate with horror, thanks to global warming, carried then a dream of peace and plenty, of synthesis between later antagonists.

Gastev was shocked by the backwardness of Russian labor during the Civil War. Yet, he saw the destruction he witnessed as the possibility of a new beginning. In his theoretical text How to Work (1923) he wrote:

Too much is destroyed, much destroyed to the point of madness, to the point that chronology is wiped out, but even more is begun, begun with open naiveté and faith. We have to accept all that, accept it without conditions, accept it as the emotionalpolitical manifesto of the times and give ourselves up to the whirlpool of the new epoch, where the general platform must be bold rationalism.16

The end of chronology must be welcomed as the condition to plunge into the ‘whirlpool’ of a new epoch – a new time in which we can rationally grasp and control production. Already, on August 12 1920, Gastev had founded the Central Institute of Labor (1920- 1938), and given up his role as poet and as Commissar of the Arts in Kharkhov.

Gastev’s poetic utopian fantasies of ‘machinism’ and the engineering of souls would now be put into practice. The twin prophets for Gastev were Frederick Taylor, with his techniques of scientific management, and Henry Ford, for his creation of mass production lines. These capitalist heroes would become models for a new communist way of working. Gastev’s vision was profoundly anti-humanist:

Soulless and devoid of personality, emotion, and lyricism – no longer expressing himself through screams of pain or joyful laughter, but rather through a manometer or taximeter. Mass engineering will make man a social automation.17

It was Gastev’s vision of a mechanized society that would draw the ironic ire of Yvgeny Zamyatin, in his novel We (1921).18 Zamyatin’s hero D-503 would worship Taylor, like Gastev, as well as incarnating Gastev’s dream of numeric designation for people (Gastev had remarked that mechanization ‘permits the qualification of separate proletarian units as A, B, C, or as 325, 075, or as 0’). Zamyatin would cast as dystopia what for Gastev was utopian promise.

Gastev was not alone. He cited a speech from 1923 by the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin to the Komsomol (the ‘All-Union

Leninist Young Communist League’), which declared: ‘We must direct our efforts at creating in the shortest possible time the greatest number of specialized living machines that will be ready to enter into circulation.’19 The ‘living machine’ is the dream of the rupture of existing production relations and acceleration beyond the limits of capital. The test of communism, in this view, is its ability to transcend and out-produce capitalism. Of course, this seemed to lead to the worst of both worlds: the adoption of the most dehumanizing capitalist techniques of management and the implementation of them in dictatorial and authoritarian form.

Gastev was not simply a prophet of the later Stalinist subordination of humans to production. His work, rather, is poised uncomfortably in the space of the transformation of both machines and labor, as Rosa Ferré suggests:

Gastev’s technical utopia is both an aesthetic concept with connotations of fantasy and sensuality in its praise of the machine, clean glass and steel, and a practical way of thinking aimed at improving workers’ conditions: now to best avoid accidents, economise on labor and improve performance.20

His utopia is not predicated on the mobilization and brutalization of labor, such as that found in the use of slave labor under Stalinism. Instead, far from being a machine, animal, or robot, Gastev’s worker is ‘an active, sentient, and creative part of the productive process’.21 In the spirit of Lenin’s hopes for proletarian Taylorism the total subordination of the worker to work aims to free the worker to dream on the job and to escape the rigours of work as quickly as possible for an active life. The incompatibility of Gastev’s vision with Stalinism would soon become brutally apparent.

Tempos Decide Everything

Stalin engineered his rise to power after Lenin’s death. In 1928 he launched the first five-year plan, which ended NEP and recaptured the utopian energies of War Communism in the cause of a violently rapid process of industrialization and a catastrophic war on the peasantry. The ‘accelerationism’ of this first five-year plan is evident in that it was completed in four years. The result was a far more radical and destructive reworking of society than had been undertaken between 1917 and 1928, but also ‘the abandonment of all the varied, autonomous revolutionary utopian strivings in favour of the single utopia of Stalinism.’22 The historical irony was that Stalin, the ‘conservative’, used utopian tropes against the utopians, insisting on discipline, obedience and conformity to achieve the necessary historical ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie), and ‘slowing the tempo’ (gromozhenie) would become a counterrevolutionary act. This ‘Stalinist jouissance’ offers the masochistic sacrificial ‘pleasure’ of acceleration through submission to labor.23