So I guess I'll try to make sort of what appears to be the hard argument for accelerationism. The name of my paper is The Accelerationist Critique of Neoliberalism. So the question of assessing accelerationism, I want to argue, has too often been posed poorly. The typical critique of it has aligned accelerationism with the neoliberal fantasy of a purely deregulated world, and on the basis of this parallel, denounced accelerationism for the sins of neoliberalism. At the heart of this assessment lies two assumptions. First, that accelerationism is largely equivalent to neoliberalism. And second, the assumption that neoliberalism is about deregulation, decentralization, competition, and free and open markets. But what I want to focus on is this second assumption, and in doing so, undermine the first assumption.
The neoliberal image, as I will try to demonstrate here, hides a largely political project that is supposed on every account to accelerationism. So in the final section, I'll return to the question of accelerationism and examine what it might offer in the contemporary situation. So today, I would argue that the most insistent question facing any theorist of capitalism is a question of how to incorporate finance. There are those who argue that the rise of finance is a mere aberration, an ultimately futile deviation from the long-term decline in the rate of profit. Capitalism, in this view, is grounded upon the production of commodities and the exploitation of labor power. On the other hand, there are those who see in finance an entirely new mode of capitalism, a new stage which not only shifts the mode of production, but also shifts the mode of accumulation.
In opposition to the traditionalists, capitalism here is no longer premised solely upon the production of goods and services, and it no longer accumulates surplus value. The choice between these two options is one that has to be reckoned with. So in this paper, I want to take up the latter option. My argument is basically that financial capital is now irreversibly restructured the capitalist system, and that any critical attempt to think it must take into account this shift. Now, this is fairly obvious with the size and scope of the current crisis, yet there is more to the process of financialization than simply the vast amounts of money being tossed around. So as I see it, financial capital is now definitively shifted four separate aspects of our economic system, at least four, which together constitute a qualitative change in how it operates.
So finance has come to dominate the economy first on a personal level, with the emergence of technologies like credit cards and the rise of personal indebtedness. So one of the most notable revelations to emerge from the current crisis was the recognition of just how indebted the American consumer is. A record level of personal indebtedness has acted to maintain aggregate demand, functioning as what has been called privatized Keynesianism. A second, finance has reshaped the economy at the level of the firm, with the creation and newfound dominance of the position of the chief financial officer. So what was once a minor accounting position in the 1960s has now become a crucial determinant in the management structure of firms, often acting as second-in-command to the CEO itself. The result has been a much larger concern within firms for corporate financing and for the judgment of the financial markets.
CFOs now act as managers of market expectations, carefully molding the corporation's image to maximize stock prices. On a third level, financialization has occurred at the national level through what Simon Johnson calls the political capture of the state by the ideology of finance. So in its most basic form, this is comprised of the belief by political elites that what is good for Wall Street is good for America. Consequently, the financial elite managed to shape policy and regulatory frameworks to their own advantage. finally, fourthly, and most obviously finance has altered the economy at the global level with the tremendous size and power of the financial markets now dwarfing the rest of the world economy so by mid-2008 there was an estimated $683 trillion worth of derivatives in the world
or over 11 times of the global productive output similarly in the UK while there were 3 million workers in manufacturing there were 6.5 million working in financial services So these four changes are all important elements of the qualitative shift in capitalism, and deserve a much more detailed analysis of the consequences than I can give here. I raise them, though, in order to highlight the ways in which finance has pervaded every single aspect of our economies. It is not simply a perversion or a mere adjunct to the real economy, nor is it simply a realm of speculation disconnected from the material world. It is a real phenomenon of the economy, and as a result, the nature of capitalist accumulation has to be rethought through, has to be modified, sorry. The accumulation of finance capital cannot be thought of through the lens of the labor theory
of value, which sees finance as at best a redistribution of existing capital. So in this regards, Jonathan Nitsen and Shimshon Bishler's focus on market capitalization is immensely useful for overcoming the inability of traditional theories to recognize the reality of finance. So in Isen and Bishler's work, what is accumulated in capitalist systems is not surplus labor value or quantities of utils. Instead, the measurement of accumulation is the market capitalization of a firm, or in other words, the expected future profit and interest payments of a corporation adjusted for risk and discounted to the present value. So while capitalization as an idea has existed since at least the 14th century, It is only in the second half of the 20th century, with the rise of the CFO and the emergence of mathematical equations to price volatility, the firms became oriented towards maximizing capitalization.
And it's interesting, too, to mention that these are both sort of contingent things that have occurred. There's no necessity that the CFO had to arise and become a powerful actor in the firm. And there's no necessity to these mathematical equations being constructed. To use Deleuze and Gensierie's terms, it's a contingent history. So today, every major firm is oriented towards this goal of maximizing capitalization. The unique form of capitalist valorization is no longer the commodity, but instead capitalization. While things like the environment, international conflict, DNA, and human life have not been put into a commodity form, they have been capitalized. The risk of a civil war or environmental catastrophe is now priced into various formulas. So the theory of capitalization as the measure of accumulation therefore provides us with
three advantages. First, it is how actual practicing capitalists operate, and if we want to understand the dynamics of modern capitalists, we need to be materialist in the proper Marxist sense. Second, it allows us to explain how capitalism can price everything, and this is not through the commodity form, but rather through the capitalization form. Finally, this thesis allows us to unify the various forms of capital, including financial, into a single measure. Capital in general is ultimately accumulated through the investment return reinvestment cycle. The distinction between investment and fixed and variable capital, as opposed to investment and financial capital, is one of degree and not of kind. They vary only in their degree of liquidity, with financial capital acting as the relatively deterritorialized store of value,
while fixed capital acts as the relatively re-territorialized store of value. The major question that needs to be raised now how capital is accumulated in this way. Capitalization is the measure of accumulation, but it in itself says nothing about how it is augmented. So Nitson and Bichler's own answer to this problem is illuminating, but ultimately flawed. Their basic insight, though, is that capitalization is premised upon future earnings, and that future earnings can be manipulated by the use of power today. This manipulation is not possible in a competitive market, though. With too many competitors, individual firms have too small of a market share to make any significant difference. So in order to manipulate the perception of future earnings, firms have a structural incentive to centralize into larger and larger firms. And in fact, this is precisely what has happened.
The most significant economic shift to result from the Reagan years may not be the neoliberal turn, but rather the decision to stop enforcing antitrust laws. So the post-1970s capitalism is characterized as much by increased centralization as it is by increased deregulation. In retail, defense, telecommunications, oil, steel, aluminum, and food, and many other sectors, an overwhelming proportion of the industry has become dominated by a handful of firms. So the neoliberal image of a competitive market is in fact blatantly wrong. Our global economy is largely monopolistic. So in centralizing the organization of an economic sector, today's monopolies have become non-state governance systems. As Barry Lynn has shown, they have the capacity to organize the production, distribution, marketing, and financing of an entire sector.
They can dictate to suppliers what to make and for what price, a situation strikingly similar to the planned economies of communist countries. The result is that the traditional driver of capitalism's constant revolution, namely intercapitalist competition, is no longer operative to the same degree. The aim of corporations is less and less about profit as an index of surplus value extracted, and more and more about controlling economic sectors and maximizing market capitalization. So we've seen then the financialization of the economy, the shift to a new mode of accumulation based upon capitalization, and finally a new mode of operating in the economy through the construction of monopolies. So what then does all this mean for an appraisal of accelerationism? In the first place, it offers a rejoinder to critics who point to today's capitalism as representative of accelerationism.
As we have seen, modern capitalism is precisely a denial of free markets, a denial of deterritorialization, and a denial of decentralized control. Accelerationism, in all its aspects, is opposed to this, and thus opposed to neoliberalism. So in this regard, neoliberalism is far from de Lisingtere's positive valorization of capitalist flows. Rather than unbound vectors of deterritorialization, capitalist flows are instead closely regulated systems of power. So this neoliberal re-territorialization of capitalist flows occurs through at least two primary means. There's many more, I'm sure, but these are two that I've noted. So the first is the suppression of what Eliyash has called the contingency of the market. Price becomes a tightly managed and controlled numerical value, increasingly detached from market dynamics.
the primary communication medium of the market becomes a system of controlled signals rather than a source of contingent eruption. The result is that one of the primary deterritorializing forces of the market becomes re-territorialized by the dictates of monopolistic power. The second, neoliberalism reverses the inhumanism of accelerationism, but not in the name of some universal humanity. Instead, neoliberalism intensifies the subjectivation of profit and power, concentrating these flows to increasingly few individuals. Neoliberalism becomes not a system of inhuman market dynamics, but instead a profoundly human system of power. Even the most inhuman aspects of the economic system, for example, pension funds and other institutional investors using automated algorithms to determine portfolio investment,
even these most inhuman aspects become oriented towards the bonuses and salaries of investment managers. The flows of power throughout society are recoded. A system is established to detach them from their common origins and enclose them within privatized systems. So in both these cases, neoliberalism functions through the construction of vast sociotechnical systems that monitor, regulate, and actively manage flows of material, of capital, of ideas, of affects. While there necessarily remains an outside to these monopolistic systems, as the recent crisis shows. It is nevertheless the case that what Deleuze and Guéthard-E saw as the primary advance of capitalism over all previous societies, namely the decoding of flows and the generalized deterritorialization of every social structure,
has become nothing more than an ideological cover for what is in fact a return to a heavily structured social system. On every level, neoliberalism emerges as a refutation of the accelerationist tendencies of capitalism. So in this situation, accelerationism is politically progressive, insofar as it attacks the organizations of such an economy. Does this mean accelerationism is the route to post-capitalism? Here we think we need to distinguish between relative accelerationism and absolute accelerationism, a sort of idea which is actually brought up earlier today by Mark and Ray. so relative accelerationism or accelerationism as a tactic is a useful means to undermine the rigid territorialized nature of modern capitalism so in this vision however the strategic goal would
be a post-capitalist society that necessarily remains wedded to the to the human condition accelerationism can be used as a weapon employing the reticor of neoliberalism against itself in order to attack the stratifications of society the goal however is not an end is not acceleration as an end in itself. Instead, the aim is to use it as a weapon in order to destroy and lay the conditions for a new stratification of society, one model presumably on more just and egalitarian principles. So absolute accelerationism, on the other hand, is the more radical and speculative vision put forth by people like Nick Land, Rezanegarastani, and Ray to a certain degree, although I think today he showed me why he's not actually this. So in absolute accelerationism,
is not a means to provide human comforts, but instead an opportunity to expand the human beyond itself, a sort of continual and potentially endless project of dissecting and reorganizing man in order to explore what lies beyond our finite instantiation. It is, properly speaking, not a political project at all. Market dynamics, including the contingency of price and the machinic dynamics of constant technological revolution, are unleashed not only against dominant capital, as per the relative accelerationist thesis, they are also unleashed against man itself. So this form of acceleration cannot be carried out by the molar agencies that define the terrain of politics, to use Deleuze and Gaethe-Therese terms. It is necessarily a molecular agency, one that escapes the statistical distribution of attributes
that define a given subjectivity. So radical accelerationism, or absolute accelerationism, is the unbinding of exteriority, as Reza has put it. It is a profoundly anti-political and inhuman thesis, though when recognized as such, its value as a process of thought becomes apparent. So its value lies not in providing a political program for leftists, but instead for providing a non-philosophical perspective whereby the human becomes a simple material for experimentation. So these two types of accelerationism are vastly different. One is political and human-oriented, a weapon wielded to tear down massive systems of centralized control. The other is speculative and inhuman, a process of decomposition undertaken by molecular forces rather than by molar subjects.
So to mistake the former for the latter, or to mistake accelerationism for neoliberalism, is to negate the progressive valence contained within it. In a world of privatized and monopolistic control of the economy, accelerationism can be an important leftist resource. Thank you.