Malign Velocities Accelerationism and Capitalism

Apocalyptic Acceleration

In a time of crisis, apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real. Norman Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) offered a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease, and war.1 Responding to crisis these dreamers dared to imagine an apocalypse that would turn the world upside down, and create a new heaven on earth in which Princes would bow to peasants. The apocalypse that became real was the apocalypse of repression. During the Peasants’ War in Germany (1524-26) over one hundred thousand peasants were killed and Thomas Müntzer, one of the leaders who, under torture, proclaimed ‘Omnia sunt communia’ (‘All things are to be held in common’), executed. Cohn, an anti-communist liberal, regarded these millenarians as dangerous forerunners of the ‘totalitarian’ movements of the twentieth century and, in the 1970 edition, extended this to condemn ’60s counter culture by linking these medieval protoanarchists to Charles Manson’s death cult. Guy Debord and the Situationists would deliberately re-purpose Cohn, reclaiming these rebels not as symptoms of irrationalism but as forerunners of modern revolution.2 Apocalyptic desires are ambiguous: at once consolatory fantasies, deferred hopes, and, potentially, spurs to radical re-orderings.

We are living in a time of crisis and potential apocalypse, with the overlapping of the financial crisis, ecological crisis, and the crisis of movements of resistance. This rupture of the capitalist continuum results in an apocalyptic imagination that produces dreams or nightmares of a world ‘cleansed’ of humanity, from 2012 to the History Channel’s Life After People. These fundamentally reactionary fantasies can only imagine redemption of our fallen world on the condition that humanity ceases to exist, or is reduced to the ‘right’ number of the ‘saved’. There is, however, another apocalyptic tone that also runs through radical and revolutionary thought in the present moment: apocalyptic accelerationism.

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If the current conjuncture of overlapping crises – financial, ecological, and political – figures the bad side of history at its worst, then apocalyptic accelerationism tries to radicalize the worst. To choose some examples, we have Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s contention that the current crisis is actually the sign of the demise of capitalism under the pressure ‘of the potency of productive forces (cognitive labor in the global network)’;3 the claim by Angela Mitropolous and Melinda Cooper that the crisis is generated by ‘usury from below … that extended beyond the limits which were tolerable to capital’;4 and Antonio Negri’s argument that ‘no New Deal is possible’, and so we must go on to more radical demands.5

All these thinkers are trying to call for a new inventiveness in the face of crisis and resisting, rightly I think, the usual calls for sacrifice and austerity – calls which usually fall on the victims of the crisis rather than those who caused it. That said, they also imply that by a kind of radical or quasi-Marxist ‘cunning of reason’ the very worst will produce the ‘good’ and remain within the ambit of Marx at his most accelerationist. The desire is, again, to immerse in the destructive element to extract a power that can shatter capitalism. Apocalyptic accelerationism tries to speed the rupture of the capitalist continuum by fusing with it, trying to integrate with forces that exceed control. It is this immanent apocalypse that I will dispute.

Immanent Tendencies

We can track the problem of immanence and acceleration through exploring the multiple uses of Marx’s concept of the tendency. This concept makes a key appearance in volume three of Capital, with what Gopal Balakrishnan calls Marx’s ‘notoriously unclear’ reflections on ‘the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’.6 Marx’s assertion is that this tendency will result, subject to countertendencies, in the long-term crisis of capitalism. It has led to a lengthy and vituperative debate, which continues today.7 I will not address this debate, but instead focus on how Marx’s remarks on the tendency became re-worked into a method of analysis. It is the tendency that is seen as the key to unlock the possibilities of crisis and rupture.

Crucial here is Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) and his argument, in the central essay on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, that the tendency is the key tool in allowing us to grasp the historical process by dissolving the reified appearance of capital. Lukács notes, pertinently to acceleration, that: ‘This image of a frozen reality that nevertheless is caught up in an unremitting, ghostly movement at once becomes meaningful when this reality is dissolved into the process of which man is the driving force.’8 The image of ‘reality’, which is at once frozen and in movement, has to be dissolved to reveal the actions of people that generate the world of capitalism.

The tendency has a particularly tricky form – a dialectical form in fact – in which ‘the objective forms of the objects are themselves transformed into a process, a flux.’ (181) This ‘flux’ is no Bergsonian ‘duration’ (durée réelle), which is merely ‘vacuous’ according to Lukács, but a tracing of the ‘unbroken production and reproduction of … [social] relations’. (181) Of course, the tension is that such a dissolution of the (reified) ‘facts’ can easily be regarded as mere speculation detached from reality, which is often the way in which the dialectic has been taken by bourgeois thought, and even by certain forms of Marxism. Lukács recognises that this is a ‘theory of reality which allots a higher place to the prevailing trends of the total development than to the facts of the empirical world’. (183). It is the very immediacy of ‘facts’ which is the sign of their reification, and instead the tendency returns reality to its mediation, to the complex totality that can only be truly registered, and so given ‘empirical’ confirmation, from the standpoint of the proletariat. The method of the tendency is therefore constitutively ambiguous because, necessarily departing from the ‘facts’, it can only be successful if confirmed in and by revolutionary practice.

Of course my brief overview of the contemporary apocalyptic tone would suggest that Lukács is not at all the key reference point. If the current financial crisis has its roots in the breakdown of the Fordist compact in the 1970s and the switch to financialization to deal with dropping corporate profits, then it may not be surprising to find that the contemporary apocalyptic tone is also rooted in that moment. These examples of contemporary post-autonomist thought all take off from the fusion of the work of Negri with that of Deleuze and Guattari. In particular they draw on Negri and Deleuze and Guattari’s re-imagining of the concept of the tendency in the early 1970s. I am not suggesting a simple isomorphism between capitalist base and theoretical superstructure; after all this retooling of the tendency was precisely an attempt to articulate a theoretical means to grasp the precise effects of the economic ‘base’. I am, however, suggesting that we do not simply regard theory as a hermeticallysealed realm that has no relation to economic, political, and social forms. In fact, as will become clear, this is a moment of theoretical reaction and response to the crisis of Fordism.

In the case of Negri, his canonical statement of the method of the tendency is given in his 1971 work ‘Crisis of the Planner-State’. At this point Negri remains within remarkably classical and dialectical terms, arguing that: ‘[t]he tendency gives us a determinate forecast, specified by the material dialectic that develops the factors comprising it.’9 In a similar fashion to Lukács Negri correlated the tendency with the viewpoint of the workers and also stressed that:

the procedure of the tendency is far from being rigid or deterministic. Instead, it represents an adventure of reason as it comes to encounter the complexities of reality, an adventure of reason that is prepared to accept risks: in fact, the truth of the tendency lies in its verification.10

As in Lukács the tendency is here deliberately pitched between the necessity of departing from the ‘facts’; it is ‘an adventure of reason’, but also returning to a newly re-ordered world through the mechanism of revolutionary verification.

Negri’s practising of this method in the 1970s was predicated on accepting and radicalising the crisis of the Fordist social compact to license a thinking of the imminent and immanent apocalypse of capitalist relations. If capitalism started to rupture the structure of the factory and guaranteed employment then one should not regret this and go backwards to some lost world of social democracy, but push the tendency further into exodus, sabotage, and destruction of the ‘fetters’ of the remnants of Fordism. This is a form of the accelerationism of struggles.

The implication of his work, reflecting on the crisis of Fordism and its ‘planner-state’, was that communism had already arrived and would need to simply be realized. Negri was obviously ‘prepared to accept risks’, and the uncharitable could say that his own reading of the tendency fell victim to the failure of verification, with the defeat of the movement of autonomy and Negri’s imprisonment. This failure did not, however, lead to a further nuancing of the method of the trajectory in his work. In Empire (2000), co-written with Michael Hardt, Negri would exchange the ‘encounter with the complexities of reality’ for an ‘adventure of reason’ in which the tendency was flattened further into the pure immanence and positivity of communism.11

Deviations of the Tendency

In a case of unlikely bedfellows, Alain Badiou, in his 1982 work Theory of the Subject, also makes recourse to the method of the tendency:

To the logic of the trajectory, which the structural dialectic comes up against and which announces the new only in the retroactive operation of its mise-en-scène, we oppose the logic of tendencies, of currents, of vanguards, wherein that which is barely at its birth, though placed and subjected, links up with the most terrible force of the future.12

Badiou’s presentation of a contrast between the ‘logic of tendencies’ and a quasi-structuralist ‘logic of the trajectory’ is cast in surprisingly Lukácsian terms – considering that they are not usually seen as compatible figures. Badiou’s comment that in the logic of the trajectory ‘[t]ime is extinguished by space’ (108), could easily be mistaken for a quotation from Lukács.

Badiou identifies a deviation intrinsic to the logic of tendencies, which is that practised by ‘the dynamicists’ who ‘posit … the multiplicity of variable intensities’ and ‘who believe in the insoluble tendency.’ (209) These thinkers, and Badiou obviously has in mind Deleuze and Guattari, emphasize the priority of the flowing tendency over any objective moment. In Badiou’s brilliant piece of diagnostics: ‘[t]he asymptotic perspective of flight makes of the empiricist a wandering materialist, a vagabond philosopher of natural substances. Ignorance of the mirror turns the empiricist into the mirror of the world.’ (209) Badiou’s contention is that in their haste to depart from the ‘static’ or reified forms of capital’s logic of economic and political places the dynamicists, ironically, end up reflecting the accumulatory and accelerative logic of capital.

In this way Badiou produces a critique of accelerationism, as a ‘vagabond’ method that tries to accelerate and rupture with the capitalist world, while falling back into it. The accelerationist believes in a possible fusion with ‘the insoluble tendency’ to produce a new immanent rupture. Badiou’s answer to this problem is that we have to zigzag between the logic of trajectories and the logic of tendencies so they each correct the other. Those who emphasize a static logic of the trajectory and the necessity of patient analysis of the world as it is prevent us from rushing into revisions of our method that would leave it detached from reality. At the same time the dynamicists provide a necessary sense that we must take risks with the method and cannot simply follow the contours of reality.

Although not consistently developed in his later work, Badiou’s suggestion provides a useful means for ‘balancing’ between those sorts of pessimistic analyses which suggest an all-encompassing capitalism that always allocates people to their ideological place (as we find in certain moments in Althusser, Adorno, and contemporary value-form theorists like Moishe Postone), and those optimistic analyses that always stress ‘resistance comes first’ and the imminent arrival of a new era of flux and freedom (precisely Negri, Deleuze and Guattari, and even certain moments in Jacques Rancière).

Badiou’s criticism of Deleuze and Guattari and his suggestion that we practice a method of the tendency that does not embrace the perspective of ‘flight’ makes it no surprise that he should later vehemently reject Negri’s own variant of accelerationism:

As is well known, for Negri, the Spinozist, there is only one historic substance, so that the capitalist empire is also the scene of an unprecedented communist deployment. This surely has the advantage of authorizing the belief that the worse it gets, the better it gets; or of getting you to (mis)take those demonstrations – fruitlessly convened to meet wherever the powerful re-unite – for the ‘creation’ and the ‘multiform invention’ of new petitbourgeois proletarians.13

Badiou notes what we earlier gestured towards: the tendency is taken by Negri as the immediate fusion of reason and reality in one Spinozist ‘historic substance’. What is lost is any nuancing of the tendency, any real sense of the tendency as riven by contradictions, tensions, and reversals. The implication of such a reading of the tendency is that crisis is not to be reined in by the rationality of socialist or communist planning, but exacerbated by new forms of flight and flow – truly we haven’t seen anything yet.

Perhaps the best indication of the fatality of Negri’s ‘mirroring’ of capital is his constant stress that the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s were successful. Negri argued that the recuperation of the revolutionary impulses of the 1970s was not a sign of defeat, but of actual communist success lurking beneath the rotted carapace of capital. One more effort and the fetters of capital would be shaken free releasing the communist content within. This perpetual chant can crescendo at the onset of any crisis. Paolo Virno, in contrast, and rightly in my view, argued that the defeat of the revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s led to a ‘communism of capital’; rather than a hyper-capitalism leading to communism, instead capitalism recuperated and redeployed communist elements (abolition of wage labor, extinction of the state and valorization of the individual’s uniqueness) for its own purposes.14 Negri, in contrast, magically parlays defeat into victory.

Through a Glass Darkly

Of course the criticism that Negri’s theorization of the multitude is a ‘mirror of capital’ is not particularly original. My concern is not simply to point out the possible confusion of a supposedly communist apocalypse with an actually capitalist apocalypse. Instead, another, more important, irony is at work in this apocalyptic accelerationism. Gopal Balakrishnan has recently raised the more classical form of the tendency by returning to Marx’s speculations about the tendential limits of capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari had argued that Marx’s contention that ‘[t]he real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself’ did not so much indicate that capitalism was doomed by its own limits of accumulation, but rather that this barrier should be smashed by the radicalization of capitalism’s deterritorializing tendencies. Balakrishnan, instead, returns to the implied meaning of Marx’s barrier metaphor that capitalism actually ‘undermin[es] the original sources of all wealth’.15 He notes that the ‘acceleration’ of capitalism since the 1970s, especially its technological developments of new cybernetic production forces, did not indicate some ‘exhilarating new cultural condition’ but rather ‘[c]apitalism’s culture became an organized semblance of worldhistoric dynamism concealing and counteracting a secular deceleration in “the real economy”.’16

Contemporary accelerationism is predicated on economic deceleration – there is a disjuncture, or even inversion, between the superstructure and the base. The ‘mirror’ of accelerationism is, as in Marx’s (1845) famous metaphor of ideology as camera obscura, in fact an ‘upside-down’ image of ‘historical life-processes.’17 Although claiming to track the tendencies the analyses of the accelerationists took appearance for reality, or to put it in more precise Marxist terms could only grasp the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist form of value. While these ‘real abstractions’ truly are real, they shape and determine the forms of value, they lack the dynamism that accelerationists detected, and which such forms had, of necessity, to project. This is what makes Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capital as an axiomatic machine or virus of deterritorialization at once so resonant and so problematic.

Balakrishnan is amusingly scathing about the supposed technological and economic achievements which might be thought to give material substance to these speculative flights:

the innovations of this period of capitalism have powered transformations in the Lebenswelt of diversion and sociability, an expansion of discount and luxury shopping, but above all a heroic age of what was until recently called ‘financial technology’. Internet and mobile phones, Walmart and Prada, Black-Scholes and subprime – such are the technological landmarks of the period.18

Certainly Balakrishnan indicates the danger of a tendential accelerationism taking a particular projected tendency of capital, or even the fantasmatic self-image of capital, for its reality. Of course, part of the ‘drive’ of contemporary accelerationism is to overcome this inertia in the name of Real forces of acceleration.

It is this fact that accounts for the persistence of accelerationism and its hyperbolic verve. Against ‘Walmart and Prada, Black-Scholes and subprime’ it restates the promise of the ‘insoluble tendency’ of the development of forces, both technological and human. These are melded in the concept of the ‘cognitariat’, the ‘new’ cognitive and affective workers who fuse together the capacities of the human and technological in an immanent matrix. Instead of this fusion I am arguing for a necessary detachment from this image of dynamism in which history is on our side. The method of the tendency needs correction in terms of charting more closely the forms and forces of contemporary labor and modes of struggle, rather than an apocalyptic assertion of some final unveiling of forces (the Greek meaning of the word ‘apocalypse’ is the ‘lifting of the veil’). Apocalyptic accelerationism reverses T.S. Eliot’s assertion that the world will not end in a bang, but a whimper. The promised bang, however, has not materialized in quite the right form.