...of the world. Spurs. Okay, so I'm not suggesting that simply kind of, you know, taking hold, you know, that the solution, you know, the way to kind of overthrow capitalism is by kind of investing in this stuff, or like appropriating, you're just, you know, reading up on this stuff and then kind of, you know, that's the key to revolutionary practice is simply kind of, you know, technological sophistication. That's not what I'm suggesting. And, okay, some, yes. Accelerationism, yes, it's a kind of, it's a problematic term because it's always ambivalent what exactly is being accelerated by whom, you know, to what end. And, you know, it's associated, you know,
well, in its Landian form, it leads to kind of, well, I mean, it's not that the consequences are just kind of morally reprehensible. It's just that they're kind of uninteresting and kind of, you know, I mean, you get, yes, I mean, just kind of a bizarre kind of, you know, really kind of unpleasant dogmatic kind of, you know, the reassertion of kind of atavisms, actually, the reassertion of kind of, you know, political atavisms. So the claim is not the kind of, it's not a straightforward, it's not obviously what to do about capitalism. It's not just by kind of, you know, all becoming, you know, becoming technologically literate and proficient.
It's simply kind of inadequate and insufficient. But, okay, so the question is, like, if you dismantle capitalism, because, you know, so the claim, you know, Marx says, you know, So there must be kind of, it's capitalism itself will generate the resources that will kind of provide us, that will facilitate a transition to a communist world. If you're simply dismantling capitalism, also, well, you know, to what end? And how are you dismantling it? And what are you dismantling it for? You don't want to go back. I mean, presumably no one wants to go back. No one wants to go back to a pre-capitalist feudal or agrarian society. I mean, I don't think that that is...
I mean, I seriously don't think that anyone wants to kind of, you know, return to those kind of conditions. So I agree with you completely that the challenge is to kind of, you know, we want to dismantle the capital, but no one knows how to do it and sabotage and kind of just local kind of, you know, blowing up rail tracks or kind of that kind of stuff, it seems to me of limited, you know, it's just kind of jamming up its gears. It's not a revolutionary praxis. And it's a poor substitute for revolutionary praxis. I'm not saying it's desirable. It's desirable as opposed to kind of, again, simply kind of capitulating and saying there's nothing to be done. But I think the question about what is to be done is, you know, It's still a very serious one.
And I think, look, I completely accept your account of the Prometheanism of rejection, negation. And especially, the struggles of the dispossessed. There's a heroism, actually. There's a genuine heroism in people struggling to overthrow regimes of oppression. that they have with little or not, with their bare hands, often with very limited resources. The point is that if you could marry that kind of political will to the right resources and to some kind of full-blown project or program, then the revolutionary program might be able to scale up again
to a kind of genuine, to an overthrowing of capitalism, which does not entail the reinstauration of pre-capitalist modes of organization. I mean, by that, I mean, I just think, yes, I know that it's kind of, wage labor is profoundly reprehensible. I completely kind of accept the critique of wage labor properly. And I think it must be, no, it should be. It should be possible to come up with the resources to marry this animus, the loathing of capitalism with some kind of positive transformation of human existence.
So my question is how to establish norms or what their condition would be. So just as a recapitulation for the reason of that question, norms would provide the guide to what should be rather than what is. So they kind of provide the ambition or the cause or the injunction against the misery of the present. So your demand is essentially around a deontological dimension, provide a kind of a moral condition towards emancipation. But my question would be, well, why norms rather than some other notion?
Insofar as if your challenge is to say, well, there is no condition of equilibrium in the first place, therefore talk of disequilibrium already concedes too much to theological criteria for what is. Emancipation through reason presumably for you happens through an alienation against the present or against the past in its demeaning, denigrating aspects. But I don't understand how you could establish norms per se, insofar as norms agree to the amount of social conventions which have been established. So what I wonder is, in your demand for what you're calling a normative dimension,
established through reason, whether in calling it normative you concede too much to the enlightenment, we should have assumed social agreement in terms of what reason would have established. And in conceding too much to an enlightenment model of what reason can provide, you don't abjure from a more radical project than the radical enlightenment. Because it seems to me alienation is actually another name for counter-normative injunctions. Okay, yeah. Well, again, I'm not suggesting that... I don't want to... Okay, I mean, part of the account is that, you know, reason has a kind of
normative dimension. So that the word normative as I use it just means anything that is rule governed but rule governed in a way that is that can be adjudicated using other rational resources. So in other words, the claim is that there's ways of thinking, there's ways of discriminating, there's ways of valorizing, but they're not simply kind of handed down or accepted. They've been fashioned and revised and refined over history.
By norms, there are social and cultural norms which are obviously pathological and reprehensible and which need to be repudiated, but you can only repudiate them using by saying they're wrong, okay? So they're wrong, unjust, or whatever. So in other words, in order to revise something, you need some kind of normative resources to denounce or reject practices, oppression, whatever. However, you're right, there's a basic problem in that because they're not fallen from the sky,
so they've been fashioned by human practices, so that they're not pure, They're not pure, they're not uncontaminated by these undesirable kind of oppressive determinants. So, are norms sufficient? No, but first of all, there's no such thing as norms. You have to be careful. Like, I'm not saying that you can... I mean, all I mean is simply kind of conceptual rationality. The ability to criticize, define, analyze, argue. It's a really very formalist, very skeletal. When I talk about normativity, I just mean something extremely attenuated and very formal.
I don't mean social, historical, customs practices or anything like that. All I'm saying is that in order to think critically about anything, and in order to try to align means and ends, and to say this is better than that, you need normative resources in this sense. But they're not sufficient. Look, this account can be criticized for its formalism. Because of this purely formal conception of critical rationality, you could say it's insufficient to be able to generate the kinds of concrete distinctions that you need to be able to do to carry out some kind of emancipatory political.
And that's entirely possible. They might be insufficient, but they're still necessary. I don't think there's anything... In other words, even if they're not... The account is schematic and impoverished, which I don't deny. It is. But I'm still trying to identify what I take to be indispensable. And what needs to be fleshed out or substantiated. So yes, I agree that the account is radically insufficient. but the resource of rationality I think is indispensable and it's not, again, it's a kind of, it's not about opposing theory and practice, realizing that reasoning is something we do
and it's something we can do better or worse and it can allow us to, there's lots of things we can achieve through this kind of practical cognitive rationality, including lots of the achievements of human technological ingenuity, which are really extraordinary when you think about it. I mean, I think it takes a kind of... I mean, we should be more, you know, I think they are kind of, it's astonishing what, you know, human beings have managed to achieve. And now, but you might say that it's kind of, which puts the lie to the claim that they're really no better than ants or roaches.
They are interestingly distinct. And it's sentimental to say that there's no difference, that they're no better than ants. That is a kind of sentimentalism, I think. Since we are better, then why not try and do something about it? Thank you so much for joining us. I also just wanted to make a quick announcement because Ray is going to be speaking tomorrow night with Suhail Malik and Reza Nagaristani. and this is at 88 Eldridge Street on the fourth floor in New York. It starts at 7 o'clock tomorrow. So thanks everyone for coming and thank you especially for being here.