Socialist Acceleration vs Socialist Deceleration

Discussion

Jamie Ranger:

"As many readers will be familiar with theories on the contemporary left, it is here where the difference between Rosa’s account of acceleration and the accounts of left-accelerationism as a political stance become more explicit. When Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2013) refer to "accelerationist” politics, they are referring to the notion that capitalism, and its associated productive and distributive processes, should be accelerated instead of overcome, in order to reach socialist ends. In this sense, acceleration is posited as the harnessing of technological capacities that are limited by the capitalist paradigm, rather than being linked to more general understandings of social and cultural change. By characterising technological acceleration in its contemporary form as distinctively neoliberal, they are ostensibly politicising the very framework used in the sociology literature, and ironically, policies that I term “digital decelerationist” for the purposes of thinking within the framework could well be considered accelerationism in the context in which Srnicek and Williams use the term.

Both Rosa and left-accelerationists agree that capitalism alone is not responsible for our contemporary situation: “left-accelerationism begins with the premise that the deterritorializing force is not capitalism itself, but the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the expression of an emancipatory drive that capitalism’s reterritorialising dynamics has systematically (but never wholly) suppressed” (Wolfendale 2019). However, where they separate from each other is in political praxis: where Rosa and others see an unstoppable problem that inevitably unfolds from modern life, Srnicek, Williams and other left-accelerationists see an opportunity: but why? The key difference between the sociology literature and the left-accelerationist position is that the latter do not perceive the process of techno-social acceleration as a continuous path through modernity, but rather characterise our contemporary situation as approaching a crisis-point, a rupture, a disruption: for example, Aaron Bastani (2019) argues that we are approaching the third disruption of capitalism (where the first was the agricultural revolution and the second was the industrial revolution) and that our world must confront the following five crises and its consequence: "climate change, resource scarcity, ever-larger surplus populations, ageing and technological unemployment as a result of automation – are set to undermine capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself” (Bastani 2019, 48). In other words, whereas Rosa sees a world that may collapse because of its commitment to acceleration, left-accelerationism is more cynical (of capitalism) and less pessimistic (about prospects for the future):

Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena that point to both capital’s need to move beyond competition, and capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology. The properly accelerative gains of neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress (Williams and Srnicek 2013).

Left-accelerationists want to push techno-social acceleration further because they perceive capitalism as a limiting, binding agent that is restricting our technological capacities. The existing infrastructure of the global economy ought not to be destroyed, rather harnessed for the purpose of meeting human needs and launching us towards a post-capitalist future. However, given the previously described account of hypermodulation as the subjectivity produced by our contemporary social media systems, I believe that a digital socialist approach must be decelerationist in nature to counteract such tendencies. As shall be demonstrated in the conclusion, the digital decelerationist policies that I conclude by advocating are plausibly compatible with broader left-accelerationist projects in other sectors, although locating compromise between these positions and these different interpretations of “acceleration” as a concept was not an explicit aim of the paper. Given the recent prominent of accelerationism as an in-vogue concept on the both the contemporary left and right, and its specific prominence amongst political circles on the Internet, I believe there is value in distinguishing between Rosa’s account of social acceleration and the implications that emerge from his framework, and the way “accelerationism” is interpreted as a process by a distinct, if occasionally overlapping, literature." (https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1127/1334)