Alex, this might not be a problem but... It probably is. Okay. There's sort of two things to be done that I'm worried about the conflict. One is this idea of accelerating commodification, putting a value on everything. On the other hand, the sort of elimination of agency. I'm sort of wondering, is valuation actually possible without agency? I mean, is valuation possible without practical rationality, which is necessarily focused upon agencies? Yeah, I mean, I can say, well, this is our goal and we want that more than this. Yeah, I mean, I guess the whole difficulty here is that the current way that we think
about trading of commodities is largely via notions of agency, right, people making decisions. I guess the gambit would be that the very conditions that arrest processes which undo individualistic subjectivity are based upon the economic system and the social system from which they emerge and that by rendering more and more of reality amenable to the kind of processes which can be accelerated would at least open the possibility under which the
kind of acceleration which Lan talks about, which I think is specifically a kind of financial in its nature or a kind of a fantastical representation of finance. It doesn't really answer your question. Yeah, I was just wondering if you're not sort of operating with some rather ahistorical and static opponents here, like, you know, you talk about humanity and anthropology and subject and so on, and this kind of hegemony of some post-Satrian subject. I mean, I wish that were true, but it's not. And I think this idea that commodification is to be the thing that is to be accelerated as well, in a way, you know, step out of the way because that's exactly what's happening.
No, no, no. I think this is an important point to make that the kinds of commodification which are occurring now, whilst they do in many senses appear to be pushing ever further into things which we might have previously considered to be sacrosanct, DNA various things which we previously would think would be completely impossible to price or trade. It always occurs on a strategic basis which is based around the class interests of those that are essentially directing these processes. So it's always on the basis of a degree of affordability. It's always on the basis of being able to do it
asymmetrically. Yeah, value in exchange. So which elements of commodification do you want to accelerate, you know, in a positive way? Well, what I would want to accelerate is the ability of everything to, or as much as possible, to be priced. Without profit, exploitation or power? I mean, that just seems kind of, then it's not commodification. Absolutely commodification. I mean, then it's not a different term or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, okay, environmental damage. Carbon trading. Yeah. A huge industry. Okay, well, that's good. Do you think carbon trading is bad? Yes. Yes. No, no, no. No, no. Why is it bad?
Not because corporations are made accountable and having to pay for the damage they do, surely. Only because it's a pathetic, a halfway house that doesn't really cost them enough. You know, if they really cost for like, Like, Alex, mental damage caused to workers. Right. So instead of commodify that. It already is commodified. That's your insurance. Medical insurance. It's not commodified. The damage you've done is one damage. The other is. I've got to say, I'm not wanting to stand around other Alex and kick him. There's actually a good chance book, Philodewed Money, it suggests actually quite a similar thing. but what he says is the whole if you're going to do this if you're going to put a price on thing and value i see what you're trying to say you say the reason why you make commodities you're not
making a capitalist commodity i'm not really sure if that's possible but you're making things have value you're saying these things have value therefore they are kind of out of out of play and what he says is the only way you're going to do that is change the entire system of money and have some kind of like ethical value put in money so what um for example if a company wants to set up and be hugely prolytic, then it will cost them loads in this view of currency. I mean, I don't think it's entirely coherent, but he does talk about this kind of... And what is... why does that necessarily imply a change in currency? Because, I mean, in his thought, because the very nature of currency right now always requires endless illumination and endless creation of more and more currency by the way that
money is structured in a kind of similean kind of way. So you would change the currency to integrate. I mean, I know what Mark's saying, like, you know, corporations now have to pay for doing, the problem is with that, I mean, they have to pay, they can still do it. But they wouldn't be able to do it because it would cost too much. Right. Or something like that. I mean, I've got a sense of... But then I think it does bring the question of agencies back, but who's gonna price it so high that they can't do it, which is what we need. Exactly, I mean, yeah. You're talking about very different things because you're talking about a mechanism for social regulation and you're talking about a mechanism for social deregulation. No, no, no, because what I'm talking about... Because the rest is not common allegations. No, no, no. Nathan wants to go on that, yeah.
Okay, sure, coming on. I just want to talk about what Nick said. I don't want to perpetuate these endless arguments we've already had. Yeah, I'm going to go back to it, sorry. to be a boring old whatever. But basically what I see you moving towards is kind of basically a neo-Ricardian position and maybe with a few other things kind of thrown in the works there to add a bit of intellectual spice to it. But in your move away from kind of the Marxian labour theory of value which is fundamentally you're going towards looking at more what would be considered the sphere of exchange rather than production. It's into a sort of basic epistemological shift there in the way you're thinking. and finance seems to play a critical role there because I mean looking at finance is what allows you to differentiate yourself from kind of maybe like more classical Marxist views
towards something that you're advocating but I mean I just want to point out a few problems of how you presented finance like firstly you compared quantitative values so you looked at how much money is being made from production versus how much money is going on in finance and you're showing this kind of increasing discrepancy between the two But you have a big kind of accounting problem with that because finance by its very nature by being exchange how do you account for it? I mean because you have a velocity of money production doesn't have a velocity that finance works off velocity So if you account a maximum velocity of course it's going to appear enormous But then as we've seen in the recent financial crisis that doesn't necessarily mean your actual cash flow in a bank Even though they're passing through a trillion dollars or whatever actually adds up to anything so I just want to make a kind of basic methodological point about how you
compare quantitative values it's very difficult when it comes to that counter poisoning of production versus finance number two I mean there's also the potential to be a little bit provincial about this so like okay now in the UK we have a big financial industry and it does play a large role no one's going to deny that but I mean that was specific political decisions that led towards that. And I mean, that has happened in parallel to a large kind of outsourcing of traditional manufacturing work to China. And I mean, a typical Marxist response to what you'd be saying is the massive growth in organic labour in places like China and elsewhere and Africa, that's what's leading to this growth in value, which is part and parcel of a growth in overall profit. That thing gets recirculated back to the West in the form of buying bonds
and so forth. So in fact, although it appears like finances have taken flight, left behind all kind of reality, taken on an entirely independent dynamic of its own, divorced from any kind of value creation under typical notions of capitalism, I think in order to claim that, you'd have to go through a very rigorous process of internationalising perspective. And three, my final point would be, sorry to be so critical without adding too much here, is that you do sort of present things that kind of the current economy has been one that's almost rigged from the start, where competition is kind of a fake, you know, everyone is kind of just power dynamics rigging all kind of transactions and exchange, which is how, I think that's partly how you posit finance and these sort of things of taking on their autonomous dynamic.
But I mean, look at recent history, like Enron would be kind of the perfect example of a company that wanted to purely financialise. And I mean, these were the kind of discourses around Enron. They found a way to create money out of a purely financialized process, you know, trading, electricity, telecoms, everything. Just a purely financial, non-productive process. But I mean, it collapsed spectacularly. And yeah, I mean, the same you can say about a lot of the recent banks. So, I mean, those would be much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely good questions. So the discrepancies between sort of financial and productive values. To me, it's more a matter of, I use that purely as a sort of example. I'm not trying to suggest anything too substantial by pointing to these, you know, $683 trillion. So is this more suggesting like, okay, financial derivatives are worth 11 times global output.
This is something significant in itself, but it's not necessarily on some sort of, you know, comparing apples and oranges. In some degree, yes, but there's 11 times more apples. It still says something, I think. Basically, it's a very minor point of my argument, I think. The outsourcing and manufacturing and the need for a sort of global perspective, absolutely. That would be something I would need to do if I want to extend this project any further. I would just say, though, I mean, China, obviously, $2 trillion in American reserves, in reserves in American treasury bonds and bills. So even a global perspective says that finance in developing countries is a sort of major
thing. Yeah, but where does that money come from? That's what I'm trying to say. How is trying to have so much money to buy? I know, we've had this argument before. So the issue of fractional reserve banking, the ability of a bank to use leverage and to create money basically out of nothing. They have to maintain a certain amount of money on balance, but otherwise they can just create money and lend it out. The hopes that, no? But no, no, no, I mean, so you lend out money in the hopes that it gets returned. But obviously, this financial value in a certain sense sort of carves out a path ahead of the productive sector itself. So the financial sector is the sort of leading edge that allows the productive sector to then move into it. So a company finances itself through, say, corporate bonds,
allows itself to get enough money to finance a massive project, then builds this project. First thing is finance. Finance creates the space for it. And then the product sector sort of comes in and fills it in afterwards. Profits hopefully repay back the debt afterwards, but not necessarily. So there is a sort of productive aspect of financial capital in a different sense than the production of values, but there is a productive aspect to it. So competition is fake and illusory. I'm not trying to argue, I guess, that there's no such thing as competition anymore. It's more a tendency towards monopolies. There are certain aspects of, say, Walmart, for example, where you can actually point and say there is no competition here. There's literally, Walmart dictates to suppliers, you put this ingredient in your food,
you sell it to us for this price. If you can't sell it to us for this price, who cares? It doesn't matter. Walmart, quite literally, is not a competitive type of firm. It doesn't operate in a competitive industry. But obviously there's still competition involved in some aspects. So it's more a tendency rather than anything else. I just want to make a conceptual point. If capitalism is kind of stasis, non-competition, then it's no basis for acceleration. So why accelerate? There's nothing that doesn't become a problem if acceleration was kind of gripped to something in the real. doesn't your absolute accelerationism become, A, detached and abstract, not using that necessarily
in a bad way, but it becomes detached from existing social reality. And then B, couldn't one argue, well, if it's completely detached from existing forms of capitalist acceleration, why not accelerating, I don't know, people's lifespans or, you know, the range of their diet or you know I mean why would it have to be any kind of extension of any existing capitalist process and in fact you know an account of you know as far as I understand it I you know an affordance of absolute exteriority would seem to imply nothing to do with the capital so is there a conceptual tension I don't think so because capitalism is historical thing monopoly capitalism is
sort of certain mode of capitalism. In this present time, and this is why acceleration is not always useful, in this present time we do have monopoly capitalism despite what neoliberalism says. So I mean Deleuze and Gaetheri when they say they look at the sort of productive aspects, the positive aspects of capitalism, it's a matter of a de-stratified society. It opens up new opportunities that have never existed before, new possibilities. This is the productive aspect of capitalism, and this is why capitalism can still be tied to accelerationism. Whereas monopoly capitalism is a sort of betrayal of all that aspect and the turning of that sort of, I mean, yeah, properly inhuman process into a very political, human-oriented project. That's what I would say, I would suggest. So which particular historical configuration of capitalism
do you want to get back to? Maritime, you know, and Islamic banking systems. Yeah, I mean, that's our point, but I'm kind of interested in, because that still implies a detachment, because you can make the kind of Marxist argument as Marx would make against feudal socialists, or, you know, if you're wanting to go back to some kind of configuration, aren't you again detaching yourself from the tendencies of the present, and as an again, your kind of model of accelerationism starts to become... But I don't think it's a matter of going back to a specific state, historical state, as much as it is a matter of unleashing tendencies that did operate at one time and nowadays are sort of frozen, solidified. So in that sense, it's not a matter of like, well, let's go back to the 18th century or 16th century or anything.
It's just a matter of letting them free. How about that? Yeah, I mean, about the unleashing, I was wondering, in a way, whether certain historical experiences that have to do with, you know, the, well, moments of particularly accelerated or deregulated or liberated capitalism. I mean, the sort of Polanian point, which is in a way a very broad one, a kind of schematic one, but the argument about the, you know, double movement that he talks about in the Great Transformation is not entirely irrelevant. That is to say that the utter fragmentation of social life generally leads to various forms of incredibly regressive, to use the Deleuzean parlance, molar, or indeed fascistic reactions.
I mean, that's just the case. You don't magically fragment, destroy all forms of pre-existing traditional and or biological life without, alas, given certain tendencies and certain affects of security and fear and indeed survival for certain groups. you know this this kind of fairly unsurprisingly and this might be anthropocentric apparently as surprising amongst humans leads to certain responses some more progressive than others but ultimately you know that the polarization of social bonds by economic forces I really don't quite see what the you know progressive upshot of that but then there's a second point which is I
I don't, I see a kind of, in the sort of left or political acceleration, I don't really see the compatibility of what it means to valorize a set of fairly abstract terms, multiplicity, fragmentation, inhumanity, etc. and then wanting which of course won't be experienced by you so it's kind of irrelevant and then wanting to maintain the idea of something being progressive which seems kind of not in keeping with the sort of Nietzschean desideratum broadly speaking of the multiple the fragment and the human I just don't see how these two things can be brought together in the way
that in different ways you two present it. Yeah, I mean, for me that's the obvious problem with an absolute acceleration because of the fact that you can't deploy it strategically for human ends, which is what... We just can't deploy it. No, no, no. It's not that you can't deploy it strategically for human ends. No, no, it's literally you. But I think what Nick refers to is this more sort of limited conception, perhaps. Could be. but I'd like to ask what you're saying about an argument for social democracy and you know how can you have a revolutionary politics that isn't about pulverising existing forms of social you know revolutionary politics is that politics
I would say is about pulverising existing forms of dominance and power and particularly despotism and capital, it's not about pulverising all social relations on the grounds that will catch capitalist despotism and the state racism by smashing everything will guarantee that's a kind of burn down everything. No one's saying that, haven't they? No, I mean, I think the implication is that you can destroy everything. But it's not a matter of the absolute acceleration. It's a matter of choosing your political rules very specifically. Looking at situations. It doesn't work like that. Sorry.
Sorry. We decimated social relations. It didn't turn out very well. I just wanted to make two points. First was about the intensification of commodification. That's happening, yes. If you've ever flown EasyJet, you could have the option of paying for your carbon trading costs, right? But the costs are always passed on. So they are paying, but they're not really paying, you're paying. And I think that's one of the problems. The second point is actually a question to Nick. Are you making a distinction between capitalization and commodification? And if you are, what is it exactly? And does that not lead you to certain problems with your neighbor in terms of what he wants to do? Yeah, yeah. This is sort of a distinction that I just came up with as I was writing this thing.
I don't have it fleshed out yet fully. but it seems to me that there is sort of important distinction between the commodity form and the capitalization form I have to go back to Marx and reread and fully explicate exactly what he means by commodity form and then distinguish what I mean by capitalization but what are you thinking that capitalization is like a necessary precursor to a kind of more expansive yeah yeah it is more expansive and I tried to point that out in the paper the fact that things that are clearly not commodities still can be capitalized. You can still put a price on the risk of civil war breaking out in Sudan, for example. You can't commodify that, obviously. But this seems to me to be the new way that capitalism is starting to price things
and to quantify them in a particular way, incorporate them into the system. If we want to talk about the real subsumption of capital, then this seems to be the way. I don't know the consequences yet, but it seems suggested. Thanks for your talk. I just – it's at the end of the conference, so I'll just put out there. This is a bit crazy. But yeah, I find it interesting with capitalism and – I mean, for me, the biggest thing of acceleration within capitalism is the fact that it's been exported to Asia now, particularly India and China, where you've got a massive bulk of the world's population. And if you go to those places, as you were saying, people aren't against capitalism. Most of them want those jobs in factories. They want to buy consumer goods.
If you're rich up the ladder, you want to buy an SUV or a big Jeep or something so you can... They all want the very same things that people in America and here probably already have. And if that acceleration continues over a vast... It seems to me that this weighed up against the environmental problems that we're facing. This seems like a great way in which capitalism will destroy itself through acceleration. It won't lead to anything liberated, but it will certainly end it like it'll self-destruct or something like that because it'll wipe out a large part of the human species. Anyway, I'll just put that out there. Yeah, I mean, just about the commoditization thing. It seems to me that what you're talking about is putting a price on something.
And combining this with the notion of capitalism seems really kind of strange to me because Maybe, on my reading of at least capital, according to Marx, it's called the commodity form. And the idea needs to be someone wants to buy the commodity. And if you're putting a price on pollution, no one actually wants to buy that. Pollution is more or less, in itself, worthless. But it can take on some sort of value if the government steps in and regulates it and enforces hierarchy. So it seems to me you're asking to commodify things, but you can only commodify them by introducing the hierarchy and the power and the regulation that you kind of seem to be saying that you're opposed to when you have a hand. Well, I wouldn't confuse our two positions. No, I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm opposed to hierarchy.
I just want to say, on the same logic as the terminators, I did like the idea of being on the side of the vampire. And I seriously ask what would that mean? I mean, because Marx always uses that personification or as a person, I don't know. but I think this idea of what it would mean actually to tap into the flow of the system, that for me is a more interesting prospect than this kind of depersonalised accelerationism, which sounds to me like gravity. Gravity. I just think that's not forced to make things go wrong. Do you want to say something? No, not necessarily. I mean, I think what you were saying earlier
in one of your comments about this almost a kind of a strategic deployment of accelerationism as a kind of almost as a sort of satirical technique by which you can parody the excesses of the system is certainly something which by a kind of extreme compliance with its most absurd rules. I mean it's certainly something which is very interesting and I enjoy that point a lot. I just want to clarify what Nick's going at a little bit, which is basically your relative accelerationism is this attempt to redeploy markets against sort of anti-market monopolistic things.
What I want to know is, is it an accelerationist in so far as it's a kind of bottom-up approach to this kind of remarketization, or would just like an attempt to kind of reinstitute proper antitrust laws constitute acceleration? I mean, if we all took a kind of classical democratic approach to re-regulating... Yeah, I mean the idea that accelerationism is just sort of a natural thing and that if we get rid of political regulations it'll be fine, I think that's absolutely wrong. It has to be constructed, accelerationism is a political project. No, no, no, it's obviously a political project, but all I know is, does it have to be a kind of a decentralized political project?
Is it all about us setting up food co-ops or is it about... I mean it can take a variety of different modes, but yeah, it can be decentralized, it could be centralized. I mean, yeah, Reagan stops enforcing antitrust laws, suddenly monopolies start rising up. If they were to start enforcing them again, that would be a significant shift towards sort of the introduction of competition, the introduction of markets again. So, I mean, the interesting aspect about monopolies is that they really are non-state governance systems. They command an economy, they control it, and it's for private gain rather than public goods. So to use antitrust laws against that seems pretty progressive to me. Since we're talking about acceleration, I thought I'd have to mention Paul Virillo before the end of the session,
because after all, he proposes a dramology, a science of speed, and he suggests that, he's not very optimistic about this, but he suggests that speed leads to the accident or the integral accident ultimately. So is that something productive for acceleration, this notion that we push the system to its breaking point to the absolute accident and what happens after that, I don't know. But is the notion of the accident something that might be useful? Is that what it leads to? Is that what it leads to? I'm very hesitant to say yes. I mean, any sort of massive social change is obviously going to have unintended consequences. there's always accidents that are going to occur. The best of the tensions, I mean, they're going to be way later. So I don't think it's essential, but well, maybe it is.
Not that it should be aimed at, but it's going to happen if any massive social change is going to occur. Really, I also have this weird, let's say Catholic, religious moment where he's sort of violently opposed to you know, the terror of modern art, any kind of tearing down. So it's kind of weird the status of his early books and later books, you know. It's not particularly helpful to the apocalypse. No. There is no redemption. Right. Sorry, who are we talking about? Paul Brilliant. Who? Paul Brilliant. Okay. French. I don't know if this question is it's actually a really general question
so is it like is there time for a kind of I guess if there was a time for a general question it applies to kind of Ben and Alex's papers earlier and it's about kind of in Alex's account really kind of illuminating account of how these neoliberal ideologues kind of model the social and social processes using these resources provided by cybernetics and evolutionary theory, using a kind of metaphysical naturalism, which is deemed to be inappropriate to understanding social reality. Nevertheless, it allowed them to succeed. They won. They have this illegitimate model of the real movements of social reality, but they've now practically succeeded and they've won.
Whereas it seems that the alternative Marxist account which is in a position to diagnose the inadequacy of their modeling is kind of not you know there seems to be a problem here if they're so wrong why are they in charge it's the second problem is about agency is in other words that this representation of social reality has allowed them to do something to kind of take charge the second question is it's really a debate about if acceleration is is a Marxist heresy as Ben said, it's a symptom of failure. It's a question about where is revolutionary agency? Where do we situate it now in the contemporary capitalist system? And it seems to me that this is a real quandary. I mean, this is not a trivial question to kind of
ask about this question because the whole problem is that there's, even if you abjure metaphysics and a metaphysics of the social, it's very difficult to kind of, there's always a kind of metaphysics that kind of reemerges, and the status of agency, agency is a metaphysical category, and it seems to me that part of the problems about situating revolutionary agency or political agency in contemporary kind of social systems has to do with this, well, we're not clear what exactly is it we're talking about. And the problem is that, and the problem is particularly acute because it looks as if these the kind of technological and cybernetic the brand of cybernetic naturalism that have developed you know hand in glove with
kind of techno capitalism are if not in a position to manufacture kind of sapience at least beginning to kind of envision the possibility of manufacturing sentience and this is one of the you know the really interesting things discussed by someone like Thomas Metzinger. Now even if you reduce even even if you say you insist well you can't reduce mind to to any kind of you know information for it in other words there's still no kind of viable naturalistic on the conception of what a mind is which I happen to agree with nevertheless you can if you can artificially manufacture the substrate for minds in other words you can at least artificially engineer the conditions for
consciousness and so in other words the question is going to become even more acute because you're going to be I mean the ominous kind of horizon technological possibilities is a manufacturing of sapience okay you can artificially engineer sentient states okay and obviously this is going to be deployed for you know extremely unpleasant you know political and socio-economic consequences so it seems to me it's not simply enough to kind of I see two things is one is that you need to whatever it is acceleration is a symptom of there's something that needs to be explained and there's something you need to kind of say it seems to me that there is a real problem it's a kind of pinpoints a real problem which is either the status of what political agency is
what kind of model or conception of agency we need the relationship between social systems and subjectivation and I'm not saying that people don't talk about this a lot but it's not clear that you know whatever been conceptual inconveniences vitiates you know especially kind of strong acceleration ism or the metaphysical acceleration which I don't happen to think is plausible it's not clear that you know still a problem with this the proletariat has not risen up and it does not seem to be about to rise up and destroy capitalism so where where is the political legions I mean that's come in just because I
mean I think that's the way I use acceleration and the acceleration is a visit in part in the book as a diagnostic is about that problem I'm not saying it's not pointing to a real problem I'm not saying I mean I think actually in a weird way could argue that Marxism is the weaker theoretical paradigm in this contest if it is a contest because I think accelerationism at least in some forms and I think we've been trying to tease out different possible forms which are not a thirst to at all I think it's very interesting completely changed my ways I'm glad that that's that shift has taken place but acceleration is congruent with existing social trends, you know, so it is more power, you know, if we take Marx's entire point about power is, you know, or theory or philosophy
has to be realised in some kind of social form of rationality. So I don't think it's about saying, you know, we have the more powerful position, you know, and come along and easily swipe out of the way accelerationism. It's about seeing accelerationism as a problem of agency and that's why people like Liatar and Dillard and Guattari and Baudrillard I think were into it. Unless you see it's just pure bad faith. But I think they were recognizing a particular problem. And obviously I don't think, well, Marxism hasn't solved that problem certainly in reality and I still think it's a struggle theoretically to solve that problem. I mean if I were personally to offer any kind of rough sketch, I was talking
about with Nina earlier, I still think the problem of agency in the way capitalism as a social form operates has to be posed around labour, the extraction of relative and absolute surplus value and the kind of antagonisms that can be generated through that process. But you are right to say there is no existing really substantial sign of that. And that's I mean I think that's a general problem. And not only for Marxism really but for lots of other kind of political projects and formations because Marxism seems to fight together. Can we just come back to the first point which is that weirdly then Nick Land's response to the conversation you referred to right at the start, isn't it, about neoliberalism
can just turn around and say it doesn't matter if it's true or not, we've imposed it. The philosophical understanding of that implies some sort of Latourian Nietzscheanism, I guess. And there's some overlap, I guess, with Landianism and that. There's a part of what Alex was talking about by diagramming the global nature of the Mont Pelerin society, its ability to organise itself. And doesn't that explain, at least in terms of a particular swirling set of economic discourse? I didn't draw those diagrams. but I mean isn't again also this weird thing about them being more Leninist and Leninist and all of that and also you know philosophers have interpreted the world they have changed it
in a way that Alex is really quite right about that this thing about if we want to look at a model of you know how to change everyday social reality neoliberalism did that you know such that The example that Alex gave earlier on about Ed Miliband saying something against markets. There's no controversy at all for a Labour politician to make that claim in the 70s. Now it is, because they have shifted things. Surely you have to learn something from that. I mean, that's what Jamie Peck is a geographer. He says exactly that. Learning from this, A, we learn how it works. and B, we learn an incredibly effective ideology.
So I guess, I mean, to come... So partly, the strategic accelerationist, you know, in terms of capitalist realism, as in my book and the concepts of it, is really a part of the strategic accelerationism. It's a critique of capitalism for not living up to the accelerationist story, isn't it? Because instead of... Capitalism is not like, actually existing capitalism, which I think we need as a term, is nothing like the neoliberal story about what it is really like. So there is then this disjump between accelerationism and, as Nick was pointing to, and actually existing capitalism. And that disjump is something that is strategically useful.
I mean, given that neoliberalism, jujitsu lots of leftist ideas and turn them against the left since we're embedded now in that neoliberal reality system albeit it's struggling and creaking we have to at least start from there because that's where we are there's no pure exteriority beyond that which we can appeal to it. Yes. Nathan, do you want to come back? No, I mean, I just think it's just a very, just a point. I think, I mean, in terms of where to start
from, I mean, my personal view is, I mean, I just think we need to start from knowing what capitalism is and get down to the very core of it. I mean, I think the problem can be when you start talking about neoliberalism, you're talking about a certain political contingent social formation. and for me, I would go with someone like Clement, right now that's where I'm attending no, we need to go back to understanding what is the ultimate core of how capitalism works, where money comes from where all of these flow from because I think unless you have that fundamental understanding of the mode of production you're just going to be all over the place everyone's going to have a million different ideas and never narrow it down I think we need a specific event on this whole question don't you? Because I do think the whole issue of Labour theory
about if you junk it, then I can accept there's a negative argument against it. Then what is the... If you're still left with this vacuum about, then what is the case against capitalism? I had this argument with Nick on the train. I argue with Nathan all the time. The arguments are there because the situation is not resolved yet and work needs to be done to get it out of the 9th century if I'm not well thanks everybody for coming