#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader I (Session 3)

Hello and welcome to the third installment of our course on Accelerate, the Accelerationism Reader. And today we have a special guest, Nick Srinyshek, one of the main articulators of this development in recent critical thought. And so I'm just going to go over a brief outline of what we're going to do in the class today. And then Mohammed's going to give an introduction to Nick. So basically, yeah, actually that's what I would have started with. So basically, Mo is going to give an introduction to Nick Scherzak. Nick will speak for a bit about the accelerationist manifesto and just whatever he wants to speak

about in relation to accelerationism at this point. Then we'll have a brief discussion. and then we'll switch over to I'll do an introduction to the class session as a whole on Diluz and Bukhari and Jacques Montt and their relationship to this discourse and then I'm going to kind of present on the Diluz and Bukhari reading from Antioedipus to some extent but I want to make it you know pretty conversational because I mean really what we've been doing so far is we've been having students present some of the things and then you know the person who the instructor is then giving feedback and kind of Oxford tutorial style so it doesn't really make sense for it to just be me unless unless Mo wants to

process them. You're the seminar leader today Jason so I'm just going to leave to you how you want to like proceed. I guess I'm a little bit more. I'm happy to present on it, but I'd like to do it in kind of a conversational way. What's going to facilitate your conversational choice is the fact that we have Nick in the house, and he might want to also be a little bit conversational with people, and people feel free to sort of like turn their microphones on and just be conversational with Nick and kind of like have a discussion about things they want to talk about. I saw Morgan was posting questions. So Nick Morgan, who asked about complexity theory and about sort of like computational

complexity. So here it is, Nick Morgan, Morgan Nick. Yeah, so basically... Well, let me just say the very last part of the class. So the very last part of the class will be Mohamed on Pramat, and then we'll just give a brief preview of what we're going to do in the final class. Go ahead. Also, we also thought maybe it's good to end the class a little bit earlier because next session is going to be very long with very important presentations and a long discussion with Benjamin Noyes. So if you guys consent to that, we will just basically save the half an hour we lost today and save it for next class, which is on Wednesday. Now, we can think and talk about that later. The bio I have for Nick is actually the bio I collected for the Incredible Machines Conference.

Nick since then has, I think, completed teaching his fellowship at the geopolitics and globalization at University College of London. He also has a PhD in international relations from London School of Economics. He was the co-editor of The Speculative Turn, which was a compilation of text on speculative realism with great pieces by so many writers, including Zizek and Reza Nagaristani, 2011, by Repress, and is currently, or actually the book is finished, he's ready to publish Reinventing the Future, formerly known as Fork Politics, with Alex Williams, published

by Verso. So here we are here, Nick, I'll pass it on to you. Okay, so thank you for inviting me and everything. And I'll just, I guess, sort of mention about the book, the title is still actually up in the air. I'm not sure whether it's going to be called Inventing the Future or something else. We sort of have to have discussions in the reverse, I think, to figure out what the best name for it is. Folk Politics was a great name, but it's a bit too critical for what we're actually doing in the book. So the book ends up being a much more sort of positive project, a positive articulation of where the left can go right now. Folk Politics is sort of a critical moment in the book, but it's only, I'd say, about a third of the book right now.

So we're still looking for a name. which is to say that if any of you have a great name, I'd be more than happy to take suggestions. So what I was sort of thinking about doing today, though, very much having a sort of more open conversational style, quite happy to answer any questions or anything. But I'll sort of start off, I guess, with some reflections on the manifesto. So I think the manifesto went online about a year and a half ago, something along those lines. So it's been quite a while now and it's sort of been way more successful than I ever could have imagined. But it's also got a lot of criticism, obviously. So I sort of wanted to look at some reasons why I think it's mobilized both a lot of

support but also a lot of criticism as well. It seems to me that these actually link up very well to the motivations behind writing the Manifesto in the first place. So these problems which I think occur in the left today, which spur on my work and spur on the Manifesto, which are also points of a lot of contention from the left. So the main things, one of the main spurs for writing the Manifesto is the absolute sort of failure of the left. So we have the failures of the anti-globalization movement in the sort of early 2000s. I always think it's quite funny that, well, WTO for instance hasn't been doing any trade deals for quite a while now. But the reason why they're not

doing any trade deals isn't because of social movement pressure or anything, it's because countries themselves aren't able to negotiate something that's mutually beneficial for So they are able to come to an agreement on their own terms, it has nothing to do with the anti-globalization movement. So there's sort of this failure of the anti-globalization movement. There's also this failure of the anti-war movement. So this is most obvious in the case of the Iraq war, where you had an historically unprecedented amount of people mobilized against the war, protesting around the world to try and stop America from attacking Iraq. And obviously that was a failure. And then more recently of course you have the 2008 crisis and you have the Occupy movement

that arises out of that. And again it seems like there's a lot of hope and there's a lot of potential for change here, but in the end nothing really changes. Austerity is still the dominant policy now and Occupy itself has sort of died down and sort of splintered off into a number of different smaller groups. So one of the questions I guess Alex and I asked ourselves was, why is the left failing? What is it about these movements that, despite the quite clear quantitative support in terms of millions of people coming out, despite that support, why are they failing? So one of the first spurs for us was that the left has failed. This is one of the axiomatic positions for the manifesto and oral writing. Now another aspect we sort of think is problematic about the left.

of the death of ambition amongst the left. And I think these two are related. So the fact that as a result of all these repeated failures, there's been a real diminishment of the ideas that we could transform the world. Sort of most notably in giving up any idea of state takers or anything like that. But instead, it's just a lot of piecemeal resistances at the margins of society and that's about it. So there's not really any idea that we could actually transform the globe beyond just sort of magical invocations of the idea of revolution. So there's no transformative project and there's no Promethean ambition amongst the left today. Now that being said, there is a sort of obvious problem with leaping too quickly into sort

of a Promethean ambition, but I think that ceding the world transforming ground to the forces of reaction, it means that the left will forever be in a marginal defensive position, which is to say that it would be in a folk political position. So one of the basic points, again, of the manifesto and of the sort of Alex and I's work is the need to recuperate an ambitious left. And then a third sort of aspect we try to do in our work is to critique the sort of anti-intellectualism that is emerging among certain parts of the left. I wouldn't say the dominant tendency yet, but you do see this sort of real resistance to the idea of knowledge and reason and abstraction, conceptual abstraction, all these sorts of

things, quantified models, anything like this, there's a real sort of fear about these things amongst certain parts of the left. And instead you get this sort of reliance upon affect and personal testimony as sort of indicators of success. So it leaves the left, I think, in a position where its capacities to produce knowledge are continually rimmed down. And I think this is really important because I don't think we actually have a very good idea of how capitalism operates. We don't really understand where its tendencies are headed. Just to say that capitalism is part of a crisis, well, yeah, okay, that's pretty generic. That means nothing in terms of where do we go from there. So I think that actually the left really needs to take on board the criticisms of science and knowledge that have been sort of marching over the past 40 years,

but also needs to build a new sort of rationalism as well. And sort of related to that is also us being critical of the sort of approach to technology which is dominant amongst the left. So there's a lot of criticism of technology itself, the built environment and individual technologies, this idea that they're sort of functionally capitalist, this is essentially all they can do is exploit workers, increase absolute surplus value, relative surplus value, and technology is just purely a capitalist tool and that's all it can be used for. Or in another sense, maybe technology is leading to increasing attraction, the dimension of the community, and it's sort of rendering us as mindless consumers.

So there's a real sort of neo-Luddite trend, and that's partially left, and actually there's a broader trend as well. I think it's only likely to grow in the coming years, but I think it's a very detrimental trend, this new algorithm. Because I think Marx recognized quite well that anything beyond capitalism is going to require all the productive forces of capitalism as well. The idea is that these institutions march up towards different ends. So I think we have to start thinking about how we can build post-capitalist technologies and how we can take advantage of existing technologies to leverage power to get beyond capitalism. So just to give one example here, a favorite recent example is automation. Automation not just of the production process, but also of the distribution process,

the logistics process, all of these sorts of things. These things do two things simultaneously. One is that they do inject certain groups of workers outside of employment, so you have an increase on one hand in unemployment, but at the same time you're reducing the amount of work that society needs to do. So exactly how these technologies get played out, whether they just increase surplus populations or whether they increase surplus time, is really dependent upon the political forces in play. So basically the manifesto in Alex and I's work really argues for this idea of thinking about repurposing technology. And finally I think one of the other aspects we try to focus on in the manifesto and in

the book is about the need to think about using power. So a popular position, John Holloway's work for instance is sort of the archetype of this is how to change the world without taking power. And there's a real sense that you can just do this. If we just change social relations somehow, everything else will fall into place. And I think it's a difficult thing. And it is a problem for the left. It's a problem for any political movement. A problem particularly for the left who's trying to get away from the use of power is the fact that politics is about using power. You have to exercise power over others. you have to exercise power in the world in order to bring about a sort of change. So we have to think about this as a problem to be faced up to

and not something to be just sort of tossed aside. Now this doesn't mean that we have to take over the state, but it does mean that we can't shirk the use of power, which leads to a sort of beautiful soul problem, all the messiness and sort of riskiness and uncertainty involved in making the decision, involved in exercising power. These things have to be faced up to. So that's another aspect that we've tried to pick up in our work. Now finally, I think one of the main themes, which I've started to see things changing, so it's this theme that actually the future has been given up on. And you can see this most notably in the idea of utopian narratives, which have tended to

to have disappeared, whether it be academic literature or pop culture. We don't have these utopian ideas of the future anymore. This index is a real loss of belief in the future. I think this is one of the more important things that we're trying to point towards, is that we do need to really rethink the future, recruit the future, and start to bring back that idea. You can't just have nostalgia, for instance, for, say, social democracy in the 1960s. You can't have nostalgia for a sort of free capitalist era, you know, communities just living in harmony, which, of course, isn't actually true. So we really need to think about, this is, you know, I hate the term accelerations now because it's been picked up and used in so many different ways.

But if it means anything, it means that we have to go through capitalism. It means that we can't just escape from it. We can't just withdraw from it. we can't hope to go back to the past. It means that we have to go through capitalism, we have to go into a future that's more modern than capitalism will actually live. So I think all of these sorts of themes are sort of the spur of writing the manifesto. There's stuff that Alex and I have tried to pick up on in the manifesto, but also in the book. But I think a lot of these things, you can sort of see why people would be quite critical of a lot of these things. So I'll leave it at that. I'm quite happy now to sort of just open it up to the floor, and if there's any questions about the manifesto, about the course more generally, or anything,

I'd be happy to take it. I want to be the first, I always love to be to ask the first question. My first question is, and this is the first question of a lot of artists and people who first encounter the concept, is what are the like specifically they want to know I mean is a these are like could actually come across as like dumb questions but sometimes dumb questions are good what are the differences between acceleration and futurism but also in general what are the differences between thinking about future and utopian thought that always has been part and parcel of sort of like Marxist leftist sort of like history or legacy, where do they overlap and where do they diverge?

Yeah, so I mean the relationship to futurism is a sort of simple one to make but it's wrong in certain ways. I mean there is very much a privileging, a valorisation just of pure speed within futurism. So this idea of driving a car as fast as possible, crashing it, inciting violence wherever possible, all these sorts of things which are very destructive and very much just about the sort of destructive power of technology itself. And I think accelerationism is quite different from that. So we make a sort of rough distinction in the manifesto between speed and acceleration. And I don't think we're particularly clear on what exactly it means in the manifesto. But it has to do with this basic idea, which you can find in a number of different writers.

It's the basic idea, you can ask the question, despite seeming to move so fast, why is nothing changing? This is a basic idea that yes, we're moving very, very fast, society is speeding up in numerous ways, yet the fundamental parameters of society are maintaining, are still the same. This is very much a sort of Marxist, a losing argument. The point about capitalism being that it de-territorializes, de-territorializes feudal structures, but then it re-territorializes it on the basis of the profit mode and on the basis of proletarianization. And this is fundamentally what you have. Despite all the speed, despite all the seeming superficial change that goes on in the world today, we still have the profit mode. We're still dominated by capitalist accumulation. We're still dominated by proletarianization and vast majority of the population.

And so there's a real sense here in which we're actually not changing and moving at all. And this is what we tried to index with the term distinction between speed and acceleration, that acceleration would involve a proper sort of qualitative change. I forget you have a question. The utopian thought and the rigorous thinking of the future. Can I just ask a question? Could you also say like virtual speed versus actual speed? Would that be another way to put it? Like acceleration is basically virtual speed. It's like the potential that is unrealized, whereas actual speed is just sort of what we're subjected to, you know, as opposed to what could happen. Yeah, I do think that's fair. I mean, Alex and I are fairly resistant

to sort of putting these things in philosophical terms. Okay. At least in the manifesto and in the book, not out of any sort of like principled stand against philosophy, but because we want these things to actually be sort of political interventions, which is to say we want these things to speak to an audience much broader than people who typically read into it. So, that distinction, yeah, I think it is right. What was the question again? About the similarities and differences between the utopian thought and thinking rigorously about the future. Yeah, so there's sort of, Ernst Bloch's basic distinction between, say, concrete utopias and abstract utopias.

So abstract utopias are just fictions of the imagination with no sort of relationship to the real world. Whereas a concrete utopia is utterly Marxist, and it takes the real existing tendencies of the world, projects these out into a regimented idea of the future, and sort of imagines what could be possible within the future. And I think this concrete utopia has a real powerful political potency to it, whereas I think abstract utopias don't. But what we need nowadays is again a return to those concrete utopias. You see this in some areas, but it tends to be quite boring. So I'm thinking of people who have actually given some real thought

to what a post-capitalist economy would look like. It tends to be anarchists, and it tends to be people who are heavily invested in participatory sort of economics, participatory democracy. And these ideas, when you read them, they're quite boring. They sound like a horrible society to live in. So yeah, we need utopias that are actually sort of affectively compelling as well. It can't just be a sort of simple outlining of, you know, how you're going to run neighborhood meetings sort of thing, which is where I think popular culture has a lot to add to a sort of, broadly speaking, acceleration of project, is to actually recuperate again this idea that we can imagine a better world

and start thinking about these sorts of things and give hope to it and give rise to it again. I've been wanting to ask this question for a while because obviously with any new movement like this or theoretical movement or whatever you want to call it, there's always like spinoffs and things go in multiple directions and they also have multiple origins. And one of those directions is what has been called right accelerationism. And I'm curious if you yourself or you and Alex, however you want to frame it, is there really such a thing as right accelerationism? And from your perspective, you know, other people have to help define discourses, of course, but I mean, one thing I find kind of strange about, say, Nick Land and his current formation is this idea of near reaction, which to me sounds like the precise opposite of anything that would be accelerating.

You know, talking about returning to monarchical forms of government, I mean, really like a Promethean right-wing politics would be much more akin to, you know, some sort of global dictatorship, I would think, you know, combined with, you know, kind of right-wing elements. But that's not what I hear coming out of Neo Reaction. So I'm just curious, is there such a thing as right-wing accelerations in your view? Well, I think the term is really quite problematic because it's just acceleration in general because it links together so many things which I think are just really disparate. You see this in sort of people who come along reading it, whether they be supporters or

critics, and trying to sort of understand how all these things fit together. And I think the simple fact of the matter is that there's consistencies between, say, project, Reza's project, Ray Brassier's project, Benedict Singleton's project, Luca Frazier's project, there's consistencies but they're very divergent projects at the same time. And so the term accelerationism I think is quite problematic. As for whether there's a right accelerationism, I'll take Nick Land as a figurehead for that. I think that, yeah, There is... I'll say this about his project, and I haven't read much of his recent stuff,

just because the very little I know of it, it sounds quite abysmal, and I have better things to read. But it seems from what I have heard about it, it's a continuation of his old project, which is properly accelerationist, if we're using this broad sort of term. It It is proper accelerationism, but it's filtered through, I think, the sort of failures of his own project. So very much in the way that Marx predicted the imminent revolution, the sort of polarization of the classes, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and the overthrowing of capitalism. When that prediction didn't come through, Marxists then had to ask themselves, why didn't it come through? you know almost the entire 20th century Marxism trying to deal with that sort of question.

The same thing I think happens with Nick Land and I'm sort of borrowing this interpretation from people like Amy Ireland and Benedict Singleton with this idea that Nick Land had sort of predicted the acceleration of intelligence, massive super AI emerging and just completely overthrowing the need for humanity in a fundamental way. And then when that didn't happen in the past 15 years, 20 years, he sort of has to go through a question of, well, what was it that stopped it? And I think there's maybe a possible explanation for him at least that his politics which has stopped it. And this is why he has to sort of make an intervention. And I think you can maybe think about the continuation of his project in those terms.

But again, I haven't read much of his new stuff, so I don't really know how much his commentary on the manifesto. I haven't read the full commentary. He started paragraph by paragraph. And I like his really other writings. His Bang Neumann book is fantastic from a philosophical perspective. But this latest, or not latest, it's not too new, but his particular, the manifesto, I I couldn't really find a sharp critique besides him not liking the term neoliberalism or him vaguely stating that the forces of re-territorialisation are the left and the left sort of, you know, the critique you've been saying currently of the left, but the left to me doesn't seem

to have that power today to actually perform that re-territorialising. So he's almost attacking a straw dog, he's attacking something that's never really had much power and it's quite obvious it seems to me that instead it is capital that re-territorializes and blocks any radical change and from the math reading you have today and even that film Transcendence with Johnny Depp which is a deeply flawed film but it's very clear how technology is good until it threatens the status quo. So when there's a risk that technology is about to destroy the current business model or create perspicacity, then there is immediately Morgan Freeman and his nice cute paternal defending of the status

quo and it's almost comical to an extent but that is the case. So I don't really find this critique of your Acceleration Project really all that cutting like he's at the place of his work. Yeah, I think I read the first part of his critique and then I sort of got bored. Yeah, me too. But again, the issue is the manifesto was written very much as a sort of political intervention. It was designed to do something, which means that he's not the intended audience. And sort of a lot of people aren't the intended audience. Yeah. One thing I haven't really got much into on the New Reaction Movement, because like you say they use all these terms, I just have a better time than getting into that quite

disgusting sexist racist stuff. But one blog post I read and one thing is good, they do talk about geography. So if you're talking about the new universalism, there will be elements that refuse it. And to avoid a sort of American imperialism like say ISIS for example, they have horrid views but what are you going to do to impose a sort of universalism without becoming imperialist yourself and saying we have to protect you from yourself. You know, even kitchen style atheism where because of their beliefs they don't have a right to freedom. They do talk about this fragmentation, they look at sci-fi like Snow Crash where there's all these little fragments and different value systems. And that is useful to think that's a good, realistically we're going to promote a new

sort of enlightenment project like Reza's project with universal values. There will be elements that will have refused them, fundamentalists. So it's also useful to think, I think that's a good aspect they have of how a future world will be divided against various factions, all the insane libertarianism of these people. What do you think of that? I know the nation states are strong, we can't think of overcoming the nation state yet. However, we need to engage with it. probably the biggest defender of capital. What's your view on it? Yeah, sorry, you cut out a bit there. What was the proper question there? Oh, the question was, I posted this briefly

about the role of the U.S. government. Leo Panitch is saying we have to remember that it's actually the nation states are more powerful than they ever were before. The neo-reactionaries already, to an extent, from what a little I've read, they envisage these kind of new geographies, new political division lines where everyone's free to have their own new reactionary fantasies to an extent. And how do we, what's your view on what, you know, Nation State 2.0 would be and if we're promoting new enlightenment based universal values, there will be elements that will completely reject them and we'll do things which will be against our values, how will that go forward with that, you know, how will that sort of form a sort of alliance or uneasy truce between

these elements? More concretely, what's going to come after the nation state? How can we have a sort of political organization that is global that's, you know, which is the basis for a new economy? Yeah, yeah, it's a massive question. I can say, I think actually I can probably say more about what is likely to come about rather than what maybe should come about. In part because I think most sort of existing alternatives to what we should have besides the nation state are actually quite problematic. You need to sort of recognize the nation state

as being a functional organization which achieves certain things. So it's, you know, one of my favorite things is, you know, going out of March to save healthcare here in the UK and a bunch of my anarchist, you know, non-state friends coming out to march as well. And it's a question of, well, why are you marching to save the state? And we see the real sort of contradictions of their position, I think, at that point. The nation state does serve certain functions and you have to recognize that. Doesn't mean it has to be with... Oh yeah, I wasn't interested in the speculation more on what you see as a political economist in your international relations work, what you see as emerging as a... We're not going to get rid of it and it's a lot stronger than people would like to admit and it actually is a real defender of capital. It's the armed division of capital.

What would you see is how this is changing. However, it's unable to tackle global issues like climate change. They're really unable to... I'd like to throw in something there, too, just to, like, add to it just a little bit. Because to me, what I would imagine, like, dealing with things like very serious climate change and really large global-scale problems, you know, this is the part where I start imagining exactly what the libertarians are afraid of, which is, like, you know, a very well-stocked United Nations where the role of the U.S. is no more important than that of Malaysia or something like that. But you know what I mean, like a democratized U.N. That would really have enforcement power.

I mean, what do you see happening? The democracy of bandits that you are going to end up having. because, I mean, you think, like, the alternative to U.S. are all these, like, beautiful little nation states that are just so great and are not corrupt, and what kind of a U.N. is it going to be? But, like, I mean, it's great to think of that as an ideal, but, like, let's not forget that smaller governments, just because in scale are smaller than the U.S. or U.S. or the Western governments are no more equipment. No, no, yeah, yeah. No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, like, a really truly empowered U.N., Like one that could dismantle every military on Earth other than its own military. That's what I'm talking about.

I mean, I think the more likely situation, and you already see this happening in many ways, is actually a proper sort of regionalization of the world, of the globe. So you see this in North America, and it's obviously America. But you also see it in South America, Brazil sort of taking on a member of different sort of imperious lanes towards the rest of South America. China most obviously in Southeast Asia although China versus India is going to be a contentious issue to come and then Russia reasserting itself as well and I don't think this is any real surprise I think what you have is the sort of downfall of American massive superiority of America and not just massive superiority

in terms of weapons and stuff but also willingness to do these sorts of things which is good because that means that America isn't intervening in every single conflict but it does have the repercussions that a country like Russia, a country like China feels much more involved in to start taking and building regional power and I think this is the most likely outcome is a much more multi-polar world centered upon different regions Nigeria as well in Africa Nigeria is going to be one of the most populous countries is already one of the most populous countries but it's just surging both economically and demographically. It's going to become a real powerhouse as well. So I mean the nuclear state is still going to exist but it's going to become sort of a number of different partial imperialisms.

Let's open up and see if other people in the Hangout have anything to ask or add. Laura, do you like to speak or you have something to put on the table? Not really, I think, in relation to this, though it was really interesting, this idea of a nation state 2.0, which I think is perhaps the... I don't know, I read a bit of the bit of the Nickland critique as well and I think it's coming from these libertarians at the very end. Although I think from my own reading on the Friends of Mises, on Schumpeter,

there are a bit of misunderstanding in what actually these people were promoting, I think, promoting I think from the early writing writing at least. But yeah I see I don't know I think the nation state is perhaps I don't know I see it more as like a hindrance to like towards the development of an accelerationist project perhaps because there is also I think the issue there for instance nation states, the US are so powerful also for connections with financial markets. If they didn't make up financial markets the way that they do, they wouldn't have all the

power, basically. So I think, I don't know, I see kind of a bit of a, I don't know, a I don't know, a problematic thing, like the state. So perhaps I do see kind of a, perhaps empowering technique, I don't know, or like cryptocurrencies and all these things that can do without, can bypass the state, and that state control. I see them as perhaps like a kind of, I don't know, I don't know, I don't really know how to put it, but I kind of do see the state as like a bit of a problem, a bit of a hindrance, or an obstacle to overcome for

the development of like an accelerationist project. So I don't know, perhaps this could be a question for you, I think you probably answered already in what you just said. Yeah, I don't know if you have any opinion about it. Yeah, I mean part of it is yes, in an ideal world if we're going to imagine an abstract utopia, let's imagine no nation states, particularly no nations. I saw somebody posted states without nations which, yeah, is exactly the sort of idea. I don't think that's a realistic possibility in the near term future. I think in cases where the sort of end of the state does occur in the near term future,

you're more likely to collapse into chaos. So it's more likely to be hysteria than utopia. So I think it's a bit problematic and it's a bit sort of jumping the gun to start thinking about what will be beyond the state, because I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. That being said, I do think actually the state can serve certain accelerations purpose. So in the book, one of the main arguments we make is this idea that what the left should be oriented towards is towards a post-work society. So this means a number of different things. It means as much automation as possible, so let's get rid of all the drudgery of work as much as possible. But then we also need to do things like shorten the working week, which is a legal matter,

And then also provide something like a universal basic income, which is again a redistribution mechanism by the state. Now these sorts of things all combined together build up a post-work society and allow the development of much further things, many, many other things. And crucially I think, crucially this also allows the development of class power as well. So one of the sort of neglected aspects of universal basic income, and for anybody who is a universal basic income. It's a basic idea of giving everybody a minimum amount of money, no questions asked, doesn't matter if you're working, doesn't matter if you're searching for a job, doesn't matter if you're taking drugs all day, it just doesn't matter you get a lump sum of money which you can do whatever you want. And it's enough to survive now. Now the really sort of I think important issue about this is a lot of certain Marxist

criticisms which say, well this is just redistribution, this is just not any different from say taxing the rich and giving it to the poor, which fundamentally doesn't change all that much. I don't think it's actually limited to that though, because what the universe of basic income does is it actually changes the political relationship between workers and between capitalists. So think about, for instance, if you want to take a strike, as it stands right now, you have to take a pay cut, you can't do it. You know, I had to do two days of strike last year, and I really struggled to pay rent, pay for food, all these sorts of things. And so it puts a fundamental limit on how long you can strike for. Now with the universal basic income, that limit is no longer in place. You can strike for

as long as you want because you always have the safety net to back you up. And I think this really gives a lot more power to workers than it exists right now. So it's not just a redistribution mechanism because the universal basic income does change political relationships as well. So all these things I think build up a post-work society which would be a place where we can start building something further. We can start thinking about how to really properly change the nation state and start thinking about how, because inevitably it's going to start in one nation, how do we expand this, how do we get this expanded to internationally. So I think the state still does have certain purposes and given that it's going to exist for the foreseeable future. We have to figure out how to make use of it, rather than pretend that it just doesn't exist.

I completely agree with you on the universal basic income. I really like it as a starting concrete strategy to work towards. I think, as you say, it will have such a radical effect on everyone, just even the fact that people will have some time on their hands. It will really radically be a real starting point for a lot of other things. I think it would possibly encounter the biggest struggle of political resistance because I think those in power do know that having people with time to think and removing that stigma of the non-worker, if there's jobs are reducing the transformation but there still is this narrative that people on the dole are lazy. However it's actually there isn't a big enough pool of jobs for everyone so them allowing

universal basic income would almost be like you should be, they're worried that the flood gets open. But however, I really think it's a fantastic objective on the whole. Yeah, I think the issue of increasing free time and allowing people to just step back from their lives and actually self-reflect upon what they want to do is another one of the major things of the basic income. It allows people to build up communities. The experience they've done with it in Canada and the US back in the 1970s, they actually found a number of different sort of interesting benefits from it. So one of them was the fact that healthcare costs went down because people could stay

home from work. They could take care of sick children, these sorts of things. Graduation rates from high school and things like this went up because parents were around to raise their kids. And also one of the most interesting ones was the divorce rate went up. These cities where they tried out the universal basic income. Conservatives sort of jump on us and say, well, see, it just leads to immorality and all these things, the undermining of family values, yada, yada, yada. And then you sort of started looking at the data and you realize actually what happened was that for the first time, the women in these relationships had financial independence. They were able to leave relationships which were obviously quite horrible for them. So it's really sort of, you know, it's just a great idea, the universal basic income.

I mean, there's so many benefits from it. And I noticed somebody on the side, Ivan, yeah, you pointed out, libertarians are on board with it as well, right-wing people. You see it being discussed by centrists in the New York Times and the Financial Times. I think this is both a risk and an opportunity. It's a risk because if the universal basic income is implemented, how it's designed, it could be designed in a really shitty way, which is sort of a Milton Friedman type way. Yeah, like cutting services as well. What's that, sorry? Like cutting, you know, welfare and education. Exactly. Like a voucher based school systems. Yeah, exactly. So I mean Friedman's sort of utopia where we give everybody a lump sum of money, but

then we turn everything else into a market. And that's sort of the libertarian idea. But at the same time there's that risk of it being designed like that, but we can also mobilise these people to really push forward and have it as a discussion. So sort of putting in the clouds terms, it's an empty signifier that can be hegeminised, that can be contested, all these sorts of things. This is why I think it's sort of crucial to put forth as a medium term goal for the left. And even incentives, like free education, yes, you have to maybe do jobs people don't want to do, like two days a week garbage collecting, then yes, you can get free education. So everyone's happy, you know, the right-wingers don't feel that they're giving a free ride

to anyone, but they're still a basic. Morgan, would you like to join the conversation? Sure. I have two kind of reflections from the outside or maybe a reflection and a question the question I have is sort of I feel in a way like listening to the you now and then also the the conference earlier I have like I don't come from the left so to speak or from theory and so it's kind of curious like it seems to me that accelerationism as put forth in the

manifesto is a kind of like it's like a kind of call or a call to the left or like a it's kind of it's kind of a I guess it's principally it seems to be a reaction but like personally coming from other other domains the reason that I'm interested in acceleration personally is because it seems to me a bridge between the kind of technology worlds that I participate in and leftist politics which are appealing to me. But sort of something that comes up for me is that it seems that a lot of the things that you claim or a lot of things that you, like ideas that you propose are sort of

it seems like, it seems in a way like people are, like in other communities are already or have always been doing these things. And it's sort of like, it's addressed at the left, but once you sort of make this claim, it's sort of like now you can just rejoin everyone else who wasn't leftist already. But then again, I think it does lend a new perspective. But I guess maybe to turn it into a more productive question, I guess, where do you see it, like after you kind of make the point that the left has failed as a project and that there's a way forward, here it is, et cetera, like what's next after you leave the left behind? Yeah, it's interesting. I'm always curious to sort of hear how like the tech community has picked up on these ideas.

We can talk more about that too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it's a, I think there is a sort of battle being waged, maybe not explicitly yet, but a battle being waged on tech workers between left and right accelerations and for lack of a better word I mean it's sort of Silicon Valley dominated by people like Peter Thiel and reading Nick Land and thinking yeah actually this is a great idea let's exit from society build sort of utopias on cruise ships and the left has sort of given up on it in many ways like the tech sector and tech workers sort of talks about them as cognitive workers and these sorts of things,

but I don't think really gives enough credence to what exactly is going on in those sectors. So I'm always quite curious to hear how the manifesto gets picked up there. As far as sort of the proposals that are being made, I think part of this is because we're speaking to the dominant ideas on the left as we see them. which is what we call folk politics, sort of, you know, the paradigm being Occupy, and all the problems with Occupy. Can I ask the word that you've said it a number of times, and I think it was the proposed title for your book too, but I just can't hear it. It sounds to me like you're saying food politics. Folk!

Folk politics. Folk politics. Can someone just write it? I just can't. I just can't hear it. Like, phone and phone music. Okay, okay, cool. Okay, cool. So it plays upon this idea of, essentially argues that the left in its dominant strands has been valorizing immediacy in a number of different ways. So it valorizes temporal immediacy, so we can think about sort of spontaneous movements, riots, uprisings, insurrections, as opposed to building permanent organization. There's also spatial immediacy, so the idea of local foods, of small communities, of direct democracy which involves, requires a small community.

All of these things, what politics suggests are the solutions to global problems. And then finally, conceptual immediacy. So this idea again of affect and personal testimony and personal experience are more important than say abstract models, formalizations, quantification, all of this sort of stuff. So folk politics sort of enames this turn towards immediacy. And I think you can see it in a lot of different movements amongst the left. So we say well fundamentally the problem with all of this stuff is that it then can't expand, extend itself and sort of universalize itself to move beyond particular. And so these become problematic because what you're left with is a left that just sort

of gets hold up in little bunkers of resistance. It ends up valorizing resistance as, you know, sort of gold and solid. Just like, well, we're not changing things, but at least we're, you know, resisting really well. And it's quite problematic because it's not going to transform things. So we're speaking to that audience. And for that audience to even set demands is for someone pretty contentious. But we're trying to orient them towards the future which is to say that we don't want to go back to social democracy. Social democracy has tons of problems in itself. We don't want neoliberalism, obviously not. But we don't also want to go back to some pre-capitalist age. So how do we go forward? How do we go into the future? And like I said earlier, the vast majority of the left sort of thinks of these in terms

of participatory economics and those sorts of things. we're trying to argue well actually with all this technology we can really make good on a lot of Marxist ideas. I sort of like framing it in the sense that actually communism is a 21st century idea that was enacted in the 20th century by a 19th century economy. You can see why it didn't work out the first time. You need a certain material infrastructure in order to build something beyond populism and I think that we're actually getting to stage where we can do that. I don't have all the answers, but I think that this is where we can start to sort of organize our thoughts and our research and our efforts. Could you articulate just a little bit of what the critique of social democracy would

be? Because some things like a guaranteed basic income sound relatively similar to a very robust social democracy, which I'm in favor of, but maybe I'd be more in favor of whatever it is that you're positing. Can I answer? Can I answer? Can I answer? I'm kidding. Can I answer? No, I'm kidding. Go ahead. Go ahead, Nick. I mean, the first thing that made a difference between universal basic income and sort of classic social democracy is the fact that you don't have these disciplinary mechanisms in place in order to manage populations in return to the welfare. So there's, you know, classic sort of Kucadian critique of the welfare state being that, yes, you get benefits, but we're also going to manage populations at the same time. Universal income, because it doesn't have those measures, gets away from that.

Because it's guaranteed. It's guaranteed. It's guaranteed. It's not means tested or anything. You don't have to show that you're searching for your job. Nothing like that. And you don't even have to show that you're poor. In fact, you don't even have to be even a little bit poor, which I think is probably a good thing, I guess. In addition to that, and I hope that Nick would agree with me, I think it has to do with the fundamental question of its political economy. We have to remember that the actual social democracy was kind of more or less usually based on a kind of Keynesian economy which was about running deficits, borrowing from central banks which are normally privatized, and running deficit budgets, borrowing money

from the private sector and then financing, intervening in the economy that way. And I'm hoping that universal basic income comes in its own fundamentally different political economy, one in which using technology, a state has other mechanisms in order to finance this rather than running deficits in a Keynesian model. To me, that also could be one way to differentiate between an accelerationist politics than social democracy or Habermasian kind of project. I don't know if it's a, you know what I mean, all the stuff you were talking about earlier on in the other conversation, you know what I mean? Like how can we intervene in the market? How can we learn from capitalism's way of

sort of like planning the future in ways completely different than subjugating social democracy to the banking system which happened in sort of like America and the rest of the world after the depression and these social programs came out of. Yeah, absolutely. It's a huge project to try and control global finance and I mean if you look at the history of sort of the 1970s crisis, you see in the decade beforehand, the 1960s, you see global finance starting to burst at the seams of the sort of Bretton Woods controls that have been placed on it and eventually burst loose. You have the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, you have spikes in commodity prices and subsequent inflation and then stagflation of course.

So there's a real problem, I think it's a real difficulty in trying to control global finance but it is necessary. But in terms of financing universal based income, it's actually relatively easy. From all the sort of studies I've looked at, nobody seems to think that actually there's a fundamental problem with financing it. the rich slightly more, cut back on military spending a bit more. Or my favorite one, which is to have a carbon tax and then use those revenues to fund the universal basic income, which is, you know, sort of kill two birds with one stone. Certainly less need for commuting with that. Yes, yes. These things are also sort of post-work society. Also plays into sort of environmental So there was a study done on the United States that asked what would their energy consumption

be like if they decrease the working week from 40 hours to 35 hours. So very minimal reduction and they found it was about 15 to 20% deduction in energy consumption just because you didn't have workers coming in for one day. Factors didn't need to be on, office lights didn't need to be on, computers didn't need to be on. save massively on energy consumption. So it plays into also this environmental issue as well. Sean, do you have a question? Do you want to join the conversation? Yeah, I'm just, I don't know, maybe not at the second.

I guess I'm a little curious to wonder a bit more about how this kind of thing would have come out of speculative realism at all? I mean, I guess that's a bit for the shifting years, but… Good question. Nick loves that question. No, he hates it. I think it's sort of an interesting question because my personal trajectory has been from pure philosophy and then increasingly into politics. And I think speculative realism for me was massively interesting because in a period where Derrida was dominant and Deleuze was still seen as a bit of a weirdo, at least when I was doing my studies, everything was textual. As a speculative realism comes along and basically says no, that's completely wrong.

For me as a grad student I was hugely invigorated just to think that, oh yeah, I could actually think about the real world and all these sorts of things. So I really got taken under by And I think, if nothing else, it's good for the themes that's raised. And I think Ray Brassier's work is exemplary in terms of what can be done when you follow these themes quite rigorously. But then how does that lead to sort of accelerations? Well, I think one aspect is the emphasis on the material world, and then it leads to an emphasis on the material world of capitalism. So the sort of infrastructure of capitalism, the basic geography of capitalism, the basic technologies that we use every day, and how can these things be repurposed? So how do they construct new possible communities, new possible political formations, new ways

of being in progress? So I think that that's one of the major influences from speculative realism onto the sort of accelerations and stuff. But to be honest, I mean, I think philosophy has less and less use for politics. I think most philosophy is a bit off in its own world, and it's not really very useful for thinking about the contemporary world in terms of politics. And this is exactly what happened to me, was the 2008 crisis occurred, and I went and read you know, Badiou and Zizek, and I read their takes on it all, and I read Deleuze trying to think about, well, how do we use, you know, nomadic thought to think about the crisis?

I just couldn't do anything with it. It didn't make sense as subprime mortgages. It didn't make sense of why, you know, a collapse in Florida was causing Greece to collapse as well. It just didn't make any sense to me. So I turned away from philosophy pretty heavily, more towards political economy. Did your writing style change a lot in that period? I don't think so. So my writing style, there's a Zizek quote which I love. It's always sort of, I think, described my writing style, which is he says, the idiot that I write for is myself. I've always quite liked that. I think that if I don't write things in a very simple way, whether it be, you know, LaRuel or Deleuze or

or econometrics or something. If I don't write it as simply as possible, I just don't understand it. So I've tried to write things, I've always tried to write things similar. I think maybe there's a bit more of a rhetorical edge in the politics stuff, particularly the manifesto quite obviously. There's less concern for sort of, I don't want to say less concern for accurate representation, but we're not trying to write an academic article here. we're trying to rhetorically motivate and do a certain thing with these texts. It's quite machine-like in that sense, if you want to put it in Deleuzean terms. I guess I'm curious to know what you see basically an accelerationist politics

looking like. Like, if you make a call towards, you know, sort of not, It's like a kind of different temporality than not being an activist myself. I'm just kind of curious what that might look like. I mean, in a way, it's like, are we asking activists to form corporations? Well, you know, I was going to also add this, Morgan. The minute you're talking about what something looks like, you're almost asking what are the aesthetics of accelerationism because, you know, or it's political aesthetics or yeah, basically I guess to rephrase it, what are the political

aesthetics of accelerationism? I mean, I'm asking just straight up what should you do, but that would be interesting. That's a good question. So there's a few different aspects of this. I mean any sort of leftist project today has to, to my mind, answer three questions. One is, where do you want to go towards? What does the future society want to see? And so our answer is, you know, broadly, a post-work society. The second question is, who acts? Who is the subject? Who is the agent of change? I think this is less of an issue than it's typically posed as, in part because things like Occupy do show there's a massive amount of people who recognize that they have an interest in moving out of this current system.

And what they need is some sort of... They need to be reasoned with and have ideas about where we should head towards. So this is, you know, the sort of active engagement with activists to try to convince them that this is a good idea. But I think the actual agent of change is not that problematic. I think it will come about in time. The real problematic aspect for now is how to bring about change. It's not just who you act and what you're acting for, but how to actually act. And I'm doing some research on this right now in terms of urban spaces. So I'm really quite interested, again, in the materiality of urban spaces and think about how the potentials for struggle have been made broadly much more difficult

by sort of alterations that have been made to urban spaces. So to give one example, the classic sort of tool of protest tactics was a barricade. You would pick up nearby benches, nearby whatever, throw them in the middle of the street, barricade it off the police, and not have to worry about the state getting through those physical means. What's actually happened now, though, is that in New York, for instance, and in London, and I'm sure in numerous other big cities, they now tie down all these heavy bins, weld them to the ground so you can't use them as barricades anymore. There's a very self-conscious effort on their part to try and make barricading and the protests that go along with it increasingly difficult. And that's just one example, there's multiple examples, but the materiality of

struggle has really changed. And so thinking for instance of offshoring, outsourcing, all of these sorts of things has also made it much more difficult to gain levers of power over capitalism and over the state. So if you look back at the early 19th century, early 20th century rather, when workers were able to gain significant concessions from the governments, it was because they had control over the coal infrastructure. They had control over these key aspects of the energy infrastructure which was fundamental to the rest of society being organized. So when you have general strikes from the 1900s to the 1920s, it was typically around

the coal industry and this sort of entire infrastructure of railroads, coal miners, warehouses, all these sorts of things, which allowed them to then take over and really force in their demands. What's missing today is that sort of lever point, or at least what appears to be missing today is that lever point. I'm trying to argue and I don't know whether it's the case or not, I'm still sort of doing research on this, but I think that sort of circuits of capital circulation do hold potential to be that sort of leverage point as well. So you can think about sort of docks in Oakland, docks around the world, dock workers and all these sorts of things are a key point of circulation in the capitalist economy and they are points

where a significant amount of workers could take control of these things, could go on strike and literally bring the American economy down to its knees. So thinking about these sort of choke points, about where there is material strength for class, for the working class, I think is one thing that needs a lot more research, and I'm trying to do that at the moment. But I think it is, I think that's the biggest problem we're left today, is where Where do you find the sort of material forms of power? It's difficult. Cool, that's really interesting. I just wanted to say quickly, that's really interesting, and I guess from my perspective,

just sort of as someone who's building a web platform, this work is interesting to me. I do my best, I don't know what I can do exactly, but like, you know, like, exploration for me has been a way to say, like, how can I connect a leftist politics to my, like, pretty practical technological practice. So, you know, that means something goes somewhere, but it's actually really quite difficult to kind of subvert the way that technology works at all, or to kind of do anything kind of interesting. Morgan, I agree. As a technology worker, I agree with you on that. I really try and look in my day-to-day practice how I can connect the two worlds. And yeah, it's

a good question. I try to get people on board by say, sci-fi, works of like Kim Stanley Robinson. I mean, trying to say to people, look, there's so much more, you know, try to get their geek on, you might get it. But yeah, I do also wonder where my dreary day job in the corporate world can then somehow be subverted. And what's the skills that you can bring from that into the next organization? Yeah, I mean, I wish I had an easy answer for tech workers to sort of take up these ideas. I think it's a crucial area to be thinking about, but I don't have the experience to do it. But yeah, it would be great for this sort of stuff to be taken up and really thought about.

Maybe engage the whole discourse of creative destruction, disruptive technologies somehow. Or Jason, it's time for some self-promotion. We are people who are not developing social networks, but the new center, we are using consumer technology and whatever is at the disposal, we do something that is sort of like we considered what we're doing a form of accelerationism. I'm just a fact that like, so this is a sort of like high tech workers, we are high tech workers in a way. Even though I'm not building a platform myself with code, but sort of like we might be because there's like Tony and Tony could not be with us tonight because he's going to Glasgow

to start a PhD program in Glasgow. But Tony's ambition is to actually develop our website and turn it into a full-on, some form of pedagogical social network. So, yeah. I would like to think of something like this as creative creation, or creative constructivism or something, other than creative destruction, the idea of the kind of neoliberal version of that. I mean, my question would be, what would a left version of creative destruction look like, I guess? Well, so I was thinking about this just now. It has to go actually against sort of Nick Land's ideas as well. So it's a fundamental project to accelerate technology

so it gets to some sort of singularity-like formation. And the sort of idea is that if we just unleash the forces of capitalism, capitalism, this will happen, that capitalism is the fundamental driver of technological development. And I think actually he's quite mistaken about that. So there's a book by Mariana Mazzucato, I'll type that in the box in a second, but it's a book called The Entrepreneurial State, and basically takes apart in intense detail this idea that the private sector is actually responsible for technological innovation and development. There's an entire chapter for instance devoted to each component of the iPhone and showing how it was reliant upon not just state funding but actually state directed investment, the

state telling you to design this sort of thing in order to further research and further technological development. And so I think that again there is a real use here for the state in the sense that if we want to start thinking about building technologies that liberate us, building sort of properly post-capitalist technologies. The state is by far the sort of biggest source of all of that. In terms of just everything. R&D. But most R&D has been so bound up in militarism. But it ends up helping the consumer later on or not. But it's true. It sort of begins there. We all know about the internet and we all know about the Rand Corporation

and all that? I think, I mean, a lot of my past research was on Paul Virilio, and the one question he always asked, you know, he's actually not anti-technology at all. In my opinion, that's how I read him. Other people read him as anti-technology, but really what I think he's really saying is, what would R&D look like if we had a non-militarist version of it? What would non-militarist R&D look like? That leads into a question I posted in the chat, but what do you think of Jacobin Mag's kind of market socialism? Because the driver in today's world for R&D is either profit or militarism. What would it look like and what would it look like if you have market socialism, socializing the markets? Do you

think that's... There's lots of people who don't like that Jacobin Mag view. However, it's a good question, what would be the other driver of Prometheanism and of R&D that's not... Yeah, well I love Jacob and Mag, I think it's terrific and I think it's hitting all the right themes that need to be raised right now. I know that particular article but I haven't actually read it, and I have to admit I don't know enough about market socialism to say anything definitive on it, so I won't say too much about that. But I think the driver of R&D and tech development and these sorts of things, I think you can broadly draw a distinction between feudalism, where it was

fundamentally based upon military at that point. So the classic work by, say, Charles Tilly on the nature of the state and the evolution of the state being fundamentally state makes war and war makes the state. They are tightly intertwined in his work. I think that's the primary driver in feudalism of tech development. Under capitalism, that still resides. So we still have states making war and war making states and tech development getting intertwined with that. But we also then have the profit motive as well, which is the explosion of consumer goods that we have, which is problematic in certain regards. But there is a certain aspect about consumer goods and consumer society which is good,

which is that we don't all have to wear the same things, eat the same food, enjoy the same cultural products. We do have a lot of choice about this. I think that any sort of post-capitalism has to really think about what does it mean to actually still have a sort of consumer society that isn't profit-driven anymore and that isn't sort of homogenizing the sort of classic Adornian critique. But here's something in a nice big consumer society. In a post-capitalist society, what drives tech development? Well fundamentally and ideally it would be something along the lines of collectively determining exactly where we want to invest our resources. As it's easier said than done, but this is sort of the basic principle of what should be done. So maybe the cure for some particular disease isn't very profitable, but it saves millions

of lives, and so we decide to invest our money in that. Right. So yeah, it's a sort of simple gesture, but I think it gets at the fact that the technology isn't just driven by profits or by war. No, no, and even if it starts there, it certainly doesn't end there. Well, guys, Nick has been with us for a long time, and I think he deserves a break. He's been talking to either Fix in the Future or us since, I don't know, it was like what time? It was 2 o'clock? No, no, no. It was 6 hours ago. Yeah, so if you guys don't have any other questions, he's been definitely with us for an hour and 10 minutes, much longer than our previous guests

and probably future guests. So, Nick, thank you so much for your generous participation in the seminar. Thank you. We're all looking forward to reading whatever the book is going to be called. whether it's going to be called For Politics or Re-Inventing Future or whatever else's name. And, you know, it would be great for us to think of the name and pass it along because Nick invited us to kind of like think of a name for the book. Well, Fixing the Future was a good name, but somebody took that. Yeah, Fixing the Future, sorry, we took that. And, you know, I came up with that name, and everybody loved it, meaning like Joshua and and so hail on everyone. But I don't know how that it came about, but it just came out of my mouth and everybody just jumped on it. But anyways, thank you so much for your time

and have a good sleep. Thank you. Have a good night. We're going to continue on with our presentations and stuff. Thank you, Nick. Cool. OK, now we're. That was a really good time. Yeah. Weird. All the cameras look different now somehow. It's very true. Some of the stuff that came up here has not come up in any other kind of conversation before. So it was a very useful one. Hopefully it will become even more useful for other people. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, like they've never, they've never so like, he's never emphasized this post work thing as so important. Because I guess it comes out in a book, in the manifesto.

and nowhere else you really hear this post work. Which is, you guys never watched that video that Ivan posted. Ivan's video was kind of like dealing with like surplus population, but not really, right Ivan? You posted that video, right? Or was it like Carlos? I think it was you. I posted it, yeah. Yeah, it was like video, it's like, if you go back, I reposted it after I recreated the class. It kind of deals with, yeah, thank you Morgan. It deals with the fact that people have nothing to do, what are they going to do? And it's like, yeah, we're going to give them all money hopefully. So Jason, you want to take over? It's you now. Okay. So just a reminder, for some reason my video looks like I'm on old television or something.

So just a reminder about the order of things for today. So what we have left is intro to class session. Sorry, the intro to the class session, and then I'll talk about Luz and Guattari. Mo will talk about Kamat. And all throughout that, you know, we're gonna try to make this more conversational than usual. So basically today we're looking at Deleuze and Guattari and Jacques Camat. Does anybody here have any background in anarchist or kind of eco-oriented radical theory?

Just vaguely. A little bit? Okay. because Jacques Camat was... I'm just going to say just a little bit about Jacques Camat and then come back to the losing Qatari. Jacques Camat was pretty influential on the development of quite a bit of anarcho-primitivist and kind of anti-technology, anti-civilization forms of anarchism. If you've ever heard of the activist group Earth First or the Earth Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front, all of those groups have been influenced by this idea of primitivism. And it's kind of fundamentally what Kamat ends up arguing for.

And basically what he looks at is the history of the Russian Revolution and what's that? Wandering abstraction. Yeah, but basically the history of the Russian Revolution and kind of people who felt that which Kamat was affiliated with certain versions of Marxism that felt that the Russian Revolution actually betrayed a lot of the central ideas behind it. a lot of the people who Lenin referred to as infantile leftists would be categorized under that category. Kamat's kind of approach was just really appealing to a lot of anarchists

who were attracted to the far left wing anti-state version of Marxism. But Kamat just kept going just kept going further and further with it, and this became influential both within some Marxist and as well as anarchist circles, the idea that actually what we really need to leave, he called it this world we must leave, that what really needs to be left behind is kind of the entire world of high technology and as Nick was saying, of abstraction, of kind of anything beyond the local and certainly cities and things like that.

So kind of a return to a kind of neo-tribal primitive kind of life that would be somewhat akin to what Marx called primitive communism, except it would be like future primitive communism. So this is probably the most, by far, the most anti-accelerationist text in the book. I am and so what we'll get into that in a little bit in and most gonna be talking about that one I the one that I'll be talking about I and people can feel free to intervene whenever you want I'm I'll be talking about do losing which are a which is the the portion of anti-edipus that was really focused on I'm it was centrally focused on the ideas

the idea of accelerating and actually use this word accelerate according to Matteo Pasquinelli, Deleuze and Guattari actually misquoted Nietzsche, but this is where the word accelerate comes up in the precise way that it was later used by Nick Land, or not I'm not sure Nick Land himself even ever used that term. He probably did, I don't recall. But certainly Nick Chernyshek and Alex Williams and others who, Benjamin Noyes, of course, and others who have kind of critiqued this kind of approach. So, and I'll just go a little bit into the reading.

One thing, I just want to frame this just a little bit. I posted something about this on my Facebook a while back, but I think it's kind of relevant just to sort of think about the place of this text in the emergence of what is now called accelerationism. Because if you go back and you look at Nick Land's early essays where he talks about Deleuze and Guattari, he also invokes Paul Virilio, and basically what he says is that the version of Deleuze and Guattari that we find in Antioedifice, which we see in this reading,

That version is essentially the one that he wants to promote, the one that he thinks is more kind of radically open and open in a somewhat nihilist kind of way, like radically open to all kinds of different possible futures and really into this idea of deterritorialization at the most accelerated speeds possible and kind of no matter where it may lead sort of thing. but in in the footnotes of Nickland he also talks about that there's a later version that there's a later version of to lose in guitar in a thousand plateaus I'm and that in a thousand plateaus they are constantly sort of you they're embracing this idea of acceleration but

there but they're no longer embracing this idea kind of accelerating in any direction whatsoever there is much more you know being a lot more in the way that like Shrinashak and Williams refer to as as navigational and that word coming originally out of according to what I've learned from Mohammed and and and some other people well including the book itself this concept navigation coming out of I raise a nigger astani so it's not just accelerating anywhere it's it's it's accelerating you know with a compass and with a you know if you're thinking using a boat metaphor accelerating with a rudder not without a rudder so that you're actually going in some sort of direction

you have some sense of how to navigate as you're accelerating and you can actually find this in 1000 plateaus in the version of acceleration that they articulate in that second volume up capitalism and schizophrenia anti-edipus being the first volume I'm in in this they they introduced this concept a revolutionary speed now of course we just heard Nick say that Sweden acceleration is a were not the same thing I'm but I mean it kinda depends if you if you're talking about virtual speed I this this more kind of ambiguous concept of speed that isn't purely about I'm just simple movement

but is what is more about potentiality and and I kinda expanding expanding new possibilities in the process love of acceleration I'm the nav version I think it is in fact what they mean by revolutionary speed in a thousand plateaus but in this earlier version that we that we see in there in the reader I'm so I I just mentioned that to kind of to kind of point out that this later version of Deleuze and Guattari and a Thousand Plateaus as they introduce this much more specific concept of speed, of revolutionary speed this version to me is very similar to the way that Chernyshek and Williams introduced the idea of

navigational accelerationism like a form of accelerationism that actually has you know that can actually talk about some kind of alternative to the present the way that we hear Nick land talking about you know a universal basic income I'm really practical you know real alternatives are for things that could be real alternatives I'm and you can kinda see a a parallel there I think I especially compared to Nick lands kinda original versions which were for sure I much more kinda nihilist and and in open and that kind of explains why the version that we find in anti-edifice is the one that Nick Land felt closer to so I'm I'll just say just a few things about

the reading and then we can just open it up to to discussion I'm they start off by saying that money is always dualist there's no common measure between wages and profits and that capitalism involves a kind of displacement and its fundamental role is de-territorialization so it's decoding all of the previous economic systems that have existed such as feudalism and creating in the process of decoding it's creating what they call flows of flux rather than flows of code and flows of flux are supposed to be more open

on but the one thing the one thing about the concept of the territorialization in the losing guitar is that there's nothing that's the territorialized that is not later then also reach re territorialize so if you think of this in if if people have read you know get a board or some other situations theory you'll hear this term on recuperation in recuperation refers to say you introduce some radical new radical new kind of art practice or activist practice or whatever it is I'm eventually eventually the spectacle I will find a way to to spectacular eyes your I kind of revolutionary practice or radical practice or whatever it is

will find a way to to recuperate it I'm and that's that's what do losing the Terry mean when they're talking about re-territorialization it's a way of talking about how every time that something is de-territorialized it always becomes re-territorialized in some way so you could say that the same way that capitalism de-territorializes feudalism it also re-territorializes certain aspects of feudalism you know we end up with certain kind of feudal structures even within the supposedly pure capitalism So one way to think about what they're saying here is that when they're saying, when they're kind of suggesting that we're not yet capitalist enough, one way to read that would be, in

my opinion, one way to read that would be to say that they're saying that yes, capitalism or the current version of capitalism de-territorialized previous versions of capitalism. But in other words, they opened them up to new possibilities. They became no longer just flows of code, but now also flows of flux. And so I think one way to think about it is that the possibilities of this movement, which could have also gone in much more left-wing directions, you know including directions that would have

that could have truly overthrown capitalism as a system and instituted new one well that's not going to happen because there is no de-territorialization that is not then responded to with a re-territorialization there's always something that comes back to recuperate anything new that's introduced and so from that perspective you could say that when they're saying that we haven't yet gone far enough in the direction of the market, it's not necessarily at all saying that we should just embrace kind of market economics or even market socialism. It's just, I think what it's really saying there is that the kind of positive potentialities

or the virtual within that shift, within that de-territorialization, has been restrained in a way that is preventing further and deeper change from being allowed to occur. So in this last passage here, which is really the really crucial one, there's a lot more in there that we could talk about but but I mean obviously the one that is quoted over and over are these two sentences so I just want to quote these maybe say just a little bit about them and then open it up for discussion so they say which is the revolutionary path is there one is it to withdraw from the

world market and here they invoke Samir Amin who is a world systems theorist kind of somewhat of a third world is to kind of are use that you know if if the third world is is kind of controlled through I can a global global kind of neo-colonial on economic frameworks then the proper responses to withdraw from the world market and to return to some kind of previous social structure I and and the kind of I'm a tarp or I'm you know I self-enclosed type the economy so they say which is the revolutionary path is there one is it to withdraw from the world

market as a mirror means suggests or to go still further in the movement of the market a decoding and the territorialization perhaps the flows are not yet the territorialized enough So this is where this like kind of dialectical moment, although they critique the idea of dialectics pretty heavily, but I mean it is essentially that in my opinion. But this kind of dialectical motion between deterritorialization and re-territorialization, I think what they're saying here is that certain things were opened up actually by the expansion of the world market. but then they became restrained by the fact that that that one nation state

primarily the United States in the current period kind of ended up re-territorializing all of that potential within its framework if earlier I mentioned the United Nations right so you could say that the United Nations because it's dominated by the US and has been ever since you know ever since it was founded pretty much because it's because it is dominated by the US and by large economies, that really restrains what the UN even can be in the first place. What does that do to our imagination? It makes us think politically our first thought is, well, yeah, but the UN is basically a puppet for the US. Does it really have to be?

By the same token, does a global economy have to be simply a capitalist economy that's controlled by massive you know transnational corporations not necessarily I mean you know there are lots of different possibilities and they could even be a 100% communist possibilities you know but they could still be global or they could be you know mixed economies somebody posted the market socialism argument so then here's here's the the last part of that section that I think is relevant not to withdraw from the process but to go further to accelerate the process as neat as Nietzsche put it so not to withdraw not to go back into

you know the comfortable kind of old social structures and folk politics as as Nick might put it, but to accelerate this de-territorializing process, go even further until we're maybe at a level of what Nietzsche would call the superman or the ubermensch. But I think in Deleuze and Guattari's version that would be a left version of that. So yeah, we can open it up for discussion. Jason, if you don't mind, give us a little bit of a biography of the book. What year was this book written? And when was it first published? And also, is it a Brian Masumi translation?

Yeah, I think it is a Brian Masumi translation. Yeah, I think they both are, I'm pretty sure. Both volumes of Capitalism, Schizophrenia, I believe, I don't have my copy in front of me now, were translated by... Masumi. Brian Misumi, who is a really great theorist who everybody should read. I highly recommend his book, Parables of the Virtual. It's very, very good. So the book came out in... 73, I think. Yeah, early 70s, right? Yeah, I think it's like 73. And, you know, it's really kind of a response to kind of Freud and Lacan, and it was intended to be... I mean, I'll be honest. This book, I got very, very much into Deleuze and Guattari, and especially Deleuze, unlike

a lot of people who get really into Deleuze and Guattari. I was really into Deleuze himself and Deleuze and Guattari. But this book, for whatever reason, I always avoided this book because I just hate psychoanalysis. And they hate psychoanalysis, too, but their version of hating psychoanalysis means that you have to constantly hear this psychoanalytic language and Freudian and Lacanian references that just make my skin crawl. To be honest, I just can't stand it. But I do recognize that this book is very foundational, and it's very odd to come across a Deleuzian who has not become totally absorbed by this book. I got absorbed by literally every other book except for this one.

I hear you on that, I like different than reputation or logic itself. Yeah, yeah exactly. Well for me it was a thousand plateaus because in grad school that was the Deleuze book that every person who I was around was reading, not anti-edipus. I wanted to mention about the psychoanalysis and the issue with it. their purpose to kind of mix an economic structural view, like a Marxist view, along with a personal and a subjectivizing view of desire, and I think isn't that why they're using psychoanalysis? Because psychoanalysis is one of those things that really attempts to understand libido or libido processes, and how the personal gets attracted

to the structure of capitalism. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to recommend it. It's just, actually the whole idea of anti-edifice is really interesting because basically what they're arguing in this book is it is a critique of Freud and Lacan and basically what they say is that their approach to psychoanalysis, you know, what's needed is a schizoanalysis because if you think of psychoanalysis, it's almost always based in this idea of a universal family structure that supposedly everybody experiences, and we know that's not true just by looking, they mention this in the book Anti-Oedipus, we know it's not true that everybody experiences this desire

to sleep with their mother and kill their father or the opposite, because for one thing, not everybody is straight. So Anti-Oedipus has been a very important book in queer theory, and the critique of psychoanalysis has been a very important part of the development of queer theory, much of which is indebted to anti-edifice. But the other part of it is that just obviously there are so many different family structures. Like in Hawaii, there's the Punaluan family where there are, you know, where there's like 10 potential fathers, but nobody knows exactly who the father is. And then there's one mother. But all of the men, you know, actually do

stick around and take care of raising the child. I mean, historically, there was that family structure. I want to mention as well, a quote from Levi Bryant. He does a good connection of the LeChanian and Freudian thing. I think as well, LeChan in many aspects is the same as them. He just uses different terms. that is he de-audipolizes Freud structures, however they face like the grids and it's actually Lacan symbolic as sort of the structure of language and we have to enter into that and yeah I'm not a big psychoanalysis fan myself but it's great

If there's anyone's Lacan who I like a lot it's Levi Bryant because Levi Bryant he really knows how to bring together the very best of Deleuze and Guattari and the very best of Lacan I just, I just, yeah, I don't know, for whatever reason, I just have like an aversion to it. No, I agree. It's very, very, very stuff to an extent. Yeah. Can we just maybe try to return to the question of autark or countries that ultimately in their third world kind of poverty are often seen as existing in third world poverty because they're not really willing or they're not part of global capitalism? I mean like how are those countries supposed to have some kind of policy of universal global

income or how are they supposed to economically participate in a way that is actually beneficial to the people. That's a really great question. I asked this question from Nick and Alex in a Philip interview. Very similar question. Usually the answer is, well, we're either going to have to argue for a muscular UN that would be a type of, yes, world government, a conspiracy theorist like fetish, you know, of this world government, or it's going to be shown to them, or they actually will initiate

it and show the more advanced world that there's a lot of benefits to it. So somebody will start and it will like catch on like a wildfire hopefully. So it's either will be like centralized and it will be enforced by through international force and national regulation or it will be something that will begin either in more industrialized countries and it will spread slowly to other nations or actually will start in countries that are still in their sort of like developing countries like somewhere like India or some of the countries like India because by then India is probably a developed country. And then they'll start experimenting with it and then other countries will go like, wow, that's a great idea and they catch on.

So actually they disagree that it necessarily have to come from an advanced country and then move to a sort of quote unquote third world country. It might begin there. I don't know if that was a good answer or not. My thing with the Deleuze and Guattari text is has to do more with how what we ended up with in the late 70s was a combination of both.

Which is like, and I'm being specific here, right? I don't want to like generalize. And what I read this again is a case of Afghanistan. So what you have in Afghanistan is like this nation state that's been sort of like not Not really modernized throughout the early 20th century, but because of being abandoned by the Western powers and being insignificant, really. The most insignificant nation in the 70s was Afghanistan. Nobody cared for Afghanistan. It was taken up by Russia, by the then Soviet Union and its intelligentsia, who under some deal with the king of Afghanistan were being sent to— Is that me?

Is that me? I think Jason, you're echoing. It can be Jason. Okay, let's put, I think it could be, okay, the echo stops, so who cares. And because of some form of like a specificity, a regional specificity and a proximity of Afghanistan and its close, and its proximity to some of the former Soviet, Soviet republics, professionals ended up traveling back and forth and they brought some form of Prometheanism with them to Afghanistan and the coup d'etat that basically like accelerated the progress in Afghanistan and caused the kind of like geopolitical project in the form of the Mujahideen

fighting the communists which was basically sort of globally supported and funded by the West. As we all know, even Hillary Clinton knows that and talked about it, right? So you have this type of isolationism that's followed by Taliban, was totally built into the globalized political economy and promoted by the Western world against another type of globalization which was more straightforward 20th century, authoritarian, pro-Soviet style of development in the region which countries like Egypt, Syria, Libya, and other countries who were pro-Soviet in the 70s had followed. So that type of internationalization was stopped and a form of localist fascism that Duluth

talks about here was almost encouraged and promoted by the West in a larger global scheme to fight Soviet Union and we all know what happens after that, right? So it's interesting that this dichotomy always doesn't work as clear cut as that, you know what I mean? You're either going to accelerate and go with internationalism or with some form of global deterritorizing force or you take the third world side. And you know the same similar stuff was happening in Iran after the revolution which set Iran as another one of these quote unquote third world countries. Iranian government before the revolution was a pro-Western government embedded in Western technology and military and all sorts of other stuff including culture.

And then it apparently went into one of these third world proto-fascist isolationism, but it really wasn't that. It only looked like that on the surface. On the other side, Iran was rapidly globalizing. first of all, through Soviet Union, which supported the Iranian government, but then through its own regional network through Shia religion, it was doing another form of the territorialization of its own. So we've got to keep that in mind when we read some kind of like naive, Deleuzean idea of the divide between the two. Mo, are you going to write something on this? On accelerationism and like the third world on the West? Yeah, it needs to be discussed. My interests are always sort of like historical and geopolitical,

but we look to the future because... Yes, sure. Because... So now... Oh, I want to... Okay, I think it is you. If Ivan can put your headphones on, that would be lovely. Yes, thank you. I'm the echo napsing. Echo napsing. Go ahead. On your thing about the way he sets up these regimes which don't actually correspond to how things pan out, I agree with you on that. And in Thousand Propos, he then specifies, for example, he has the pre-signifying regime, the post-signifying machine, the global war nomads.

and what they do mention is they never want to say that these regimes are like either or, they're always talking about there's a big mingling of free state, post state, anti state regimes of coding and coding regimes. What book is that? It's Thousand to Toes when they further elaborate their vision of these kind of different regimes of coding, like there's the coding regime of the initial primitive state and the overcoding of capital and there's states like nomads, they say, which are explicitly anti-capital and they call them the nomad war machine. However, then the first thing you say is, wait, that's never clear cut. And then they say, yes, it isn't really clear cut and a state will have bits of this and bits of that,

which to me is a little bit of a cop-out. I agree with you because it just, it becomes too indeterminate to an extent. Like, yeah. Yeah, so... but but you're right they do I don't know I'm gonna go ahead Jason and and then there's also this concept of the a of the of the urshtat which which I think is a real challenge to any I attempt to read the losing gotari through through an anarchist lens because they're basically saying that there is always matter what form it like it may take a million different forms but there is always the kind of eternal state there's always a state going all the way back and probably always will be I'm

but then there's there's this tension between the state and and what you were saying that nomadic war machine which is constantly kinda taking lines of flight from the state or or maybe transforming the state in in a short a check and Williams kinda way I'm yeah and So, yeah, it's funny. I mean, there have been a lot of sort of utopian anarchist readings of Deleuze and Guattari, but they're usually pretty shallow readings of them, because for Deleuze and Guattari, there is always a state, and that's what the Ershtad is, just like there's always a re-territorialization of anything that de-territorializes. I had another question relating specifically to their critique which is taken up by

accelerationism on Marx and the famous phrase, nothing ever died of contradictions, which is a direct attack on Marxist materialist dialectics, the sense that the conflict between workhorse or capitalist will lead to its destruction. And in the very first page of that chapter, I posted the full sentence and that's key to kind of their premise of because capital always exceeds its limits it will never die with some contradictions because it will keep expanding. However, I just don't understand the wording of the sentence. A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of full output. You can read it there, it's probably easier to read it directly. But they first state there's no comparison on a level of scale of capital as a global

capital and workers' wages. Yeah, that makes sense. Then they have that second sentence, which I just don't get why. I don't understand the structure of it. Is this on the very first page of that section? Yeah, and I've copied and pasted it in the chat. Oh, you did? Okay, sorry. I missed that. It's the very first page, yeah. How did you do that, by the way? Did you do that? I got a PDF. Oh, okay. Of antidepressants. Oh, right, right. There's no common measure of value. I get that bit, and then there's a second sentence, which is the quotient of differentials.

I'm not sure what... I think he's saying like okay from the viewpoint of a full output you could you could make a common measure between between both profit and wages but that's only if you're that's It's only if you're trying to make an overall model. If you get into the quote unquote micro politics of production from the wage earners, I think they're kind of just making a common kind of Marxist argument that if you get into the

micro politics of production and you don't look at it from the quote unquote full output view, you know, wages are a fundamentally, just a fundamentally different phenomena than profit is. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's just a reiterating of the previous sentence, which is a very pointed Marxist critique. Yeah. A critique of Marxism. I think so. That's how I would read it. If Jason, if you agree that we will break at 9, I think it's time to move into Kamat. I mean you did the biography and thank you very much for that and everybody now knows where Kermat come from. Kermat was also involved with the Italian Communist Party and so the Communist Party of Italy

that stood up to Stalinism, not the Stalinist Communist Party, right? And he exited the party and the whole nine yards but to me who was familiar with his other work that Ray Bracier has used and quoted. What's interesting in this piece is it's kind of like an anti-accelerationist acceleration text, right? So it's value to the whole project and the book is in it so like, and you know what I mean? The sentence I want to start with is in page 145 at the bottom of the vision. And it says, and on this we agree, the human being is dead.

The only possibility for another human being to appear is our struggle against our domestication, our emergence from it. Right there in the second half of the sentence, you hear the echo of what Jason was talking about in terms of sort of like rejecting technology and wanted to return to some form of pre-domestication humanity. But the first part is what is acceleration is there, which he agrees that the human being is dead. Or like above it, it says, and he's saying it in a snarky and negative way, but actually that really makes sense because he says that science is possible only after the destruction of the human beings. We learned that last week in my summarization of the scientific image,

sellers is that what is different between scientific image and manifest image is the manifest image is always implicating the humans. It's always what humans think and things from the point of view of humans, whereas scientific image is sort of like how things are prior to humans. So science is possible only after the destruction of human beings. It is a discourse on the pathology of the human being, sort of like on the limitations of the human So it is insane to ground the hope of the rest. The dust part shows his allegiance to some form of authentic human that existed prior to capitalism, right? But the first part is what really reads us as what?

Like an accelerationist statement. What is also interesting on the same page, 145, basically it's kind of like what the whole essay is about and is his critique of Marx, is that the revolutionary solution cannot be found in the context of a dialectic of productive forces where the individual would be an element of the contradiction. So basically, he's like many other people, including Cornelius Castoriales, who was probably like the first person who stood up against the basic Marxian dialectic between relations of production and forces of production. He also talks about how this revolution cannot be established in the context of a dialectic

between these two, the productive forces and the relations of production. Now this is kind of important. Why? look earlier, he basically thinks that, let's go back to page 139, in the last paragraph of the page, somewhere in the line 4, he says, the capitalist mode of production is revolutionary in relation to the destruction of the ancient social relations, and that the proletariat is defined as a revolutionary in relation to capital. So he sees a contradiction there because for him capitalism is only revolutionary when it comes to feudalism.

But that doesn't mean that how Marx assumes this revolutionariness or what Jason talked about in terms of re-territorialization, this revolutionary aspect of capitalism will just keep continuing on until capitalism overthrows itself. But it is at this point that the problem begins. Capitalism is revolutionary because it develops the productive forces. The proletariat cannot be revolutionary if after its revolution it develops or allows a different development of the productive forces. If the productive forces do not exist for human beings but for capital, and if they conflict with the production relations, then this means that these relations do not provide

the proper structure to capitalist mode of production. And therefore, there can be revolution which is not for human beings. So basically for him, there is a revolution after capitalism. But that revolution is not necessarily a proletarian revolution, but it's a revolution of capital for the capital's sake, which actually even further diminishes the role of relations of production in any kind of like future project. So basically, again, this is sort of like how incredibly accelerationist he is in the way he thinks about the future, but of course in a negative term that for him, capital is moving towards sort of like autonomy from humans, autonomy from not only from feudalism,

but from human and worker itself, which made capitalism possible through sort of like the bourgeoisie revolution and through struggling with capitalism and making it smarter and making it kind of like be able to win the battle with the workers. Now, I'm reading the test backward because I really thought this was a good way of doing it. On page 138, just before he gets into that long Marx Grundyries quote, he talks about But previously, the development of human beings or of their community was opposed to the development of wealth, meaning there was a contradiction or opposition between wealth development and

community building. Wealth would destroy communities, it's about collectivity, and sort of like diminishes the possibility of wealth. Now there is a, now meaning under late capitalism, 1970s capitalism that he's writing about, now there's something like symbiosis between them. For this to happen, a certain mutation was necessary. Capital had to destroy the limited character of the individual. This is another aspect of its revolutionary character. And that is totally like the labor of, Reza's labor of inhuman, right? This is what's revolutionary about capitalism because it shatters the boundaries of what an individual is and liberates it from that kind of old school way of identifying with

the community and being against the production or proliferation or accumulation of wealth. to sort of like go further back. If you go to page 135. Sorry, I don't have the page numbers clearly, Mark, but you see how there's all the footnotes, like the bracketing numbers? Yes. This is the four, yeah, this is the four, I'm at four EBIT now. Just above where it says four EBIT, right? Okay, okay. The quote from the Grandesa? Yeah, but basically the whole thing is that this superior form that Marx talks about,

it could be an inferior form. And in fact for him, it is an inferior form. So it's a zigzag. From where he looks at it, I mean, we can still argue that Marx was right and movement was progressive and movement within capitalism is still progressive. But what places him in this book is his recognition. And you know, as you guys know, I really wasn't meant to sort of like close my remarks and maybe open up for discussion with you guys. I just have a question. If anybody knows anything, I don't know enough about it, but on Marx's... I know that he was immensely nostalgic for the Majors.

Who is that, Marx or Kamath? Marx. And I've always kind of wondered why. So if you know anything about that, I don't know, it'd probably be somewhat interesting to see about ways that labor is organized in those kinds of relationships. In what way you mean? Because the Marx that we know, go ahead, but in what way? Maybe Ivan wants to say something, because I saw his microphone go off. It wasn't about Marx being nostalgic about medieval times, because I'm not too aware of that either. But it was about Khmat's critique of Marx. I think it's just he's placing the dialectical contradiction in another register, in another area.

So, yeah, I'm just agreeing with you pretty much on Khamat. And, yeah, he's pretty much, he says it's a bad thing, but I completely agree with you on, actually, the human being does need to get transcended, and that does lead to, there's nothing necessarily wrong with Nicaragostanis and humanism, because we can't all go back to community-based life. There just is too much complexity in the world already that we have to deal with. So, yeah, reading his text, the tone, it's almost a typical critique, similar to Deleuze and Gaffari's critique of it, but I guess he thinks it's a bad thing to an extent. it's such a weird convergence between

post-humanism and like I would call this kind of like pre-humanism in a way because it's you know they're trying to say that I think what this sort of direction is trying to do is to try to blur the distinctions between humans and animals humans and nature but nature in a very precise sense that would that would be anti-technology whereas like I guess an accelerationist post-humanism would also be trying to blur the distinctions in addition to those things also blurring the distinctions between humans and technology doesn't it speak to to do that, that human versus nature starts with a premise that is that humans

there is an unsoiled human which is part of nature and then there is this soil But the thing is, I think that we have to go back to, unfortunately, to psychoanalysis to an extent, and to Lyotard, who views humans as inerrantly, and even Deliz and Gattari, who view desire and disclose of desire as inerrantly. They are pre-human, they're pre-individualist, and they've always existed in us. As Mark Fisher says, the libido is inorganic. The libido itself is unnatural. And we as the humans with our sentience, with our reason, and our libidinal urges are already unnatural. So I think that's what marks the distinction in Acceleration's thought,

is that there is no pure human that we can revert to. We were from day dot, we were already unnatural beings, we could say. We don't know how we got here, we don't know. but unfortunate not unfortunate, we are what we are so we can't really hope to go back to being gorillas and trees I think this is the main sort of starting point of that contention isn't that true or not? yeah, that makes sense to me it's interesting too and Mark is one of the few who, at least in his time, who was so vehemently against the idea that there is any steady human nature You know, human nature is like that there's it's basically a product of the mode of production of a given

period, you know There's no steady human nature So therefore there's no steady human either and that's why it's so important. I think this work of Reza and Brazier because Brazier is really great essay on that video you posted on Prometheanism and also starts on that premise that the more scientific discovery has started, the less we've been able to attribute a special status to the human. It's not God given, we're not a center of the universe, and with cognitive science, even what we think is the sacred experience, like the existential experience, can also be hacked to an extent. Yeah. So that's why I find that's the connection between these two, between the Brazier and

the Reza stuff and Marx's unmutable nature of man. I also, just before we break, or I don't know, maybe Morgan or Laura wanted to also to join, but I posted a quote on the side, and that is my Castoriadis quote, and it's from their famous book called, what is the book called, it's called The Imaginary Institution of society in which they sort of like come out against Marxist dialectics and this main

dialectic between productive forces and relations of production. And the reason why I think adding this rather medium-sized quote is important is because we're shifting a few words there or like replacing the human with inhuman and replacing a few things you see how their critique almost sounds like a better version of Kamat's critique of that contradiction and I'm gonna I'm gonna like just read it it says ratification the essential tendency of capitalism can never be wholly realized basically this re-territorialization that Jason was talking about that comes from Deleuze and Guattari cannot it looks at it from the other side rather than it being select always filling up the de-territorialization, it can never be fully, wholly realized.

If it were, if the system were actually able to change individuals into things moved only by economic forces, it would collapse, not in the long run, but immediately. The struggle of people against reification is just as much as the tendency toward reification, the condition for the functioning of capitalism. The factory in which the workers were really and totally mere cogs in the machine, blindly executing the orders of management, would come to a stop in a quarter of an hour. Capitalism can function only by continually drawing upon the genuinely human activity of those subject to it, while at the same time trying to level and dehumanize them as

much as possible. You can continue to function only to the extent that its profound tendency, which actually is reification, is not realized. To the extent that its norms are continually countered in the application. So basically the argument here is that it's not even to the interest of the capital to re-territorialize fully. It always has to sort of like leave room, not go all the way, don't close all the holes, leave something open. Not because they want to like, they're afraid of a revolution because they're afraid of like the whole thing falling apart out of like rigidity. And there lies, right there lies the possibility of change in sort of like realizing that at

some point the struggle and capital have some form of overlap or interest. And that's something that's completely lost on command. is not lost on early Marx that we read with the fragment on the machine because I think this is kind of a challenge to the Marx is actually kind of a return to the Grundris Marx that Castoriadis is not aware of. And I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with Castoriadis but he was a Greek philosopher who lived in France and he was very influential on the situationist movement. He was also one of the main people behind socialism or barbarism. Yeah, he basically was the editor of the journal. Also friend of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and the whole nine yards. Anyways, any kind of comments or questions? I'm kind

of like, you guys are behind in the assignments, but I'm not going to like, I mean Ivan has been great. Ivan provided us with a great, great text which I still have not had a chance because of like being part of the Fixing the Future thing. I thought I would be able to read it by Sunday and comment but I will do that by tomorrow so you have some kind of like feedback before you want to get into writing the last two pieces. But I would totally encourage you guys to post whatever you have up, whatever, even some notes because they That could be the basis of some other text coming out of what we're doing together here. So if you guys want to talk about that, we can talk about it. Anybody wants to talk about their writing and what they're doing?

Yeah, just a quick one for me is be a bit flexible with dates because I have full-time work. So I posted a draft of the second assignment, which it's, like I mentioned, the Transcendence film. It's still very rough. So feel free to read it, but I have a lot more editing to be done on the second one. I will read them today or first thing tomorrow morning, and you will have some response tomorrow, so you can somehow come to the class Wednesday with some useful feedback. Okay. What about Laura, and what about others? I posted one, I think. I don't know if you've seen it last night, And second assignment should come soon, like today.

I will also read and respond to yours by early tomorrow morning, so you have some things to work with. And Jason probably will do the same. I hope Jason can permit some time to deal with him tonight and tomorrow. Laura, are you interested in presenting on one of the last readings? Yeah, I think I volunteered to present Leo Tad. Yeah, I've already booked her in, right? Okay, great. Yes. The one thing I want to say is because I haven't received the reader yet, is it but I have Libidional Economy, the book by Leo Tad, is that the part in the book?

Every political economy is a libidional economy? Is it the Ian Hamilton Grant translation? Let me check. It's very easy for me to make it into a PDF and make it available to you. Yeah, that has to be better. Thank you. So why don't I do that first thing? That will be my first task. I'll get that to you right away after class. Oh, great, thanks. Yeah, because you need to spend time with it if you want to be pre-curent Wednesday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read it on the book, on your taskbook, but I'm not sure it's the same translation. do this and send it to you and others can also like pick it up, lift it It actually is, if you can just let me know what the page is maybe I have the PDF of the You want to email me

the PDF so I look for it and mark the section and if not I will respond to you back with the other PDF which will be from the book Okay, thank you And who's doing the other Leotard piece tomorrow? It's Carlos Carlos, yeah Okay. I'll get in touch with him and make sure he's still able to do it because he's been kind of slammed. Okay, so any questions? So we basically are going to, it would be nice if you can check your email and we all, we will start, we will start a hangout on Wednesday right at 6 again to just get everybody into the room between 6 and 6.30. So if you can come in early, that would be lovely because Benjamin is also joining us

from London and he's quite late over there. And he would like to do his presentation early and then we'll continue on. So if we can also meet around 6, 6, 10 to get into the room, then we don't have that lag and then we can stay longer to do the proper ending of the class. And maybe spend some time commenting actually on some of the assignments that have been post it. And that's hence the half an hour extra. So basically we're asking you to be committed to a 9.30 class tomorrow, Wednesday. Like 6.30 to 9.30 for the half an hour that we kind of like saved today, which doesn't seem to be even any saving anymore, but that's okay. We'll still do till 9.30. So we'll actually start at 6.30. No, we start at 6.30, but actually the hangout will begin at 6.00.

Come in earlier, yeah. Yeah, just come in early to just come in and say hi, and like we just joke around until everybody gets in and then we start. Okay. Okay. Thanks so much, guys. I've got to run. Thank you so much. Thank you. And then the videos available if you want to go back and listen to Nick and all that is all on the website. It's already posted there. Enjoy it. I'm going to also grab the text from the side and post it to the classroom, the sidebar text. Great. What about Ray's thing? What about that? because I wasn't able to catch that. Okay. Ray's thing is, Ray has asked it to be private, but I'm sure... Oh, yeah. This is something.

Who can... Oh, Yvonne is gone. You know, we were also looking for people who would volunteer transcribing it. And we were willing to sort of like... Oh. ...in for some stuff. And anyone who, first of all, anyone who volunteers to transcribe it will obviously have the chance to see the video, but it's a laborious process to sit in. How many hours? I could probably do an hour. You could probably. Okay, you know what? I will give you the, I will add your email to it, so you should be able to go in and do the first hour. When you did that, then maybe somebody else can volunteer for another hour of it, and then they get the video. It's so useful and it's such a great conversation.

Yeah, I can't do it today though. No, no, not today. It's not urgent. Okay. I could probably do some more transcribing on... When would you like to do it? When do you have time to do it? After the class ends, right? Like after Wednesday and all that, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I'm much more interested in you doing your own writing and showing us what you're working on. Okay, so that's what we do. So we start with Sean, and then we go to Laura for transcription. Can I just ask a question? Are you guys, Sean and Laura, you're both on Facebook? No, I left Facebook about three times ago. Oh, you left Facebook. No, Sean is on Facebook. It's C-I-A-N Williams, C-I-A-N. But Laura was really, like, quick with her email,

so she just, like, got into the room again. So I guess email is fine with Laura. yeah okay so before I lose what's in my clipboard I would like to say goodbye and see you guys Wednesday at 6 o'clock and I will get back to you with you email me the leotard piece and I get back to you with a PDF and with the comments on your assignment by tomorrow okay Bye-bye. And I'll upload the other one. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Jason, make sure that this gets recorded well and saved and all that because I'm not in charge of the video. OK. Bye. Wait. What about did you get the text? I copied the text, yeah. OK.

OK. All right. See you all. See you. Bye. Bye.