The Eclectics on Hyperstition. Collation Archives.

As Nick Land explains in the Catacomic, a hyperstition has four characteristics: They function as (1) an “element of effective culture that makes itself real,” (2) as a “fictional quality functional as a time-travelling device,” (3) as “coincidence intensifiers,” and (4) as a “call to the Old Ones”. The first three characteristics describe how hyperstions like the ‘ideology of progress’ or the religious conception of apocalypse enact their subversive influences in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived ‘truths,’ that influence the outcome of history. Finally, as Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous ‘other’ into the cultural arena. From the perspective of hyperstition, history is presided over by Cthonic ‘polytendriled abominations’ – the “Unuttera” that await us at history’s closure. The tendrils of these hyperstitional abominations reach back through time into the present, manifesting as the ‘dark will’ of progress that rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities. “The [hu]man,” from the perspective of the Unuttera “is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag,” writes Land in Meltdown.

Exulting in capitalism’s permanent ‘crisis mode,’ hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution by invoking irrational and monstrous forces – the Cthonic Old Ones. As Land explains, these forces move through history, planting the seeds of hyperstition:

John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: “I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.” ‘They’ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

The ‘Old Ones’ can either be read as (hyper)real Lovecraftian entities – as myth made flesh – or as monstrous avatars representing that which is most uncontainable and unfathomable; the inevitable annihilation that awaits all things when (their) historical time runs out. “Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures,” explains Simon Reynolds. “What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but the future coming together”.

Whatever its specific variants, the practice of hyperstition necessarily involves three irreducible ingredients, interlocked in a productive circuit of simultaneous, mutually stimulating tasks.

1. N u m o g r a m 
Rigorous systematic unfolding of the Decimal Labyrinth and all its implexes (Zones, Currents, Gates, Lemurs, Pandemonium Matrix, Book of Paths …) and echoes (Atlantean Cross, Decadology …). 

The methodical excavation of the occult abstract cartography intrinsic to decimal numeracy (and thus globally ‘oecumenic’) constitutes the first great task of hyperstition.

2. M y t h o s
Comprehensive attribution of all signal (discoveries, theories, problems and approaches) to artificial agencies, allegiances, cultures and continentities. 

The proliferation of ‘carriers’ (“Who says this?”) – multiplying perspectives and narrative fragments – produces a coherent but inherently disintegrated hyperstitional mythos while effecting a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility. 

3. U n b e l i e f 
Pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …). 
Each vortical sub-cycle of hyperstitional production announces itself through a communion with ‘the Thing’ coinciding with a “mystical consummation of uncertainty” or “attainment of positive unbelief.”

Techno-Commercial Singularity: Decelerator / Diagram.

H/T Antinomia Imediata

If the Cathedral is actually efficient, the more it happens, the less it happens. Decelerator.

1. taxation: this deviates resources from capital and buries them into the consumption of the tax-receivers (namely the Cathedral bureaucracy). trash and shit.
2. regulation: there are various ways this could work, insofar as regulation is very inventive. but the main pattern has to do with deviating capital from the most rentable (i.e., (self-re)productive) investments, into those that are most likely to become un-recyclable trash, at least in the long run.
3. politicization: this deviates brain-power from technological producing theories into, well, bullshit research departments, especially through politicization of academic funding of hard sciences.
4. protectionism: since this protects technical developments from properly feeding back into the commercial cycle, it breaks the link between technical advantage and capital accumulation, leading lots of resources into stupid gadgetry.

all these being forms of fucking up the incentive structures that allow the accelerative cycle to be. in diagram form:

 

 

Capitalism’s Triumph or Commoditizing Communism

Why is revolution not possible? This is an old debate.

Terms like “socialist” and “revolution”, and “right-wing groups” tend to mean different things to different people, according to their perspectives. which can be quite contradictory, in many regards. Revolutions don’t tend to resolve such contradictions as absolutely as idealists and ideologues tend to imagine. Counter-revolutionary tendencies persist in the society, and even among the revolutionaries, such that it’s never really “over”, and the struggle continues.

Technically, “socialism” is a theoretically “necessary” supposedly “interim” period, during which an elite vanguard seizes political power, “on behalf of” the proletariat, and struggles to transform society, toward the eventual emergence of communism, which is to say, democracy, the ultimate utopian communist dream. That transformation is essentially the suppression of counter-revolutionary (anti-democratic) tendencies, and inculcation and cultivation of revolutionary (democratic) tendencies among the masses.

Marxian concentration on capitalism was all about demonstrating how undemocratic, and thus unjust, irrational and inefficient capitalism tends to be, despite it’s claim to be, relatively speaking, “more democratic” than monarchy, say, or feudalism. He merely sought to show that it is not the ultimate, final stage of that evolution, as it’s proponents tend to assert, but that, like the “socialism” he proposed to supplant it with, an interim stage, which would, in fact, sow the seeds of it’s own destruction, even as previous socio-economic paradigms had done before them.

At the time he was doing all this theorizing, a hundred years ago, his premise of an educated working class, capable of democracy, seemed a virtually impossible utopian dream, considering conditions in the masses, steeped in centuries of ignorance, illiteracy, grinding poverty and religious indoctrination. Rather than second guess his conclusion, then, that further resort to elitism was “necessary” to change those conditions, I’d prefer to just point out that, in fact, those conditions have changed, profoundly, since then, such that the prospect of democracy is no longer such a distant utopian dream, but more feasible and viable a prospect than ever before in human history.

Technology, the engine of all socio-economic relations, has evolved, especially in terms of communications. Here and now, into the 21st Century, both capitalist and “socialist” elitism have become outmoded, I think, and need to “wither away” with the whole concept of the “State” as we now know it, as an externally imposed governor…as Marx predicted would some day be possible. Anymore, most of us aspire to democracy, and we realise that we aren’t there, yet. The issue is not whether anti-democratic rightwing reactionary conservative and fundamentalist counter-revolutionary elements of our society, will, or can, prevent democracy from ensuing. The issue is whether those, who tend to be staunchly opposed to racism, sexism, cultural chauvinism, eco-rape, murderous monopoly corporate fascist ripoffs, and imperialist warmongering, will call off the demoralized cynical defeatism of electoral boycott and excessive splitting, and will step up to actually seize the power, for a change…democratically, electorally…and then proceed to suppress counter-revolutionary anti-democratic tendencies legislatively and judicially, from now on…explicitly for justice and peace, to save the planet. Which, of course, is why the right is freaking out like they are, even now waging “low intensity” civil war, desperately trying to prevent that from happening. For Revolution to be at hand, we must not try and smash capitalism, or even right-wing resistance at that, as democracy is invested in and of itself with enough potency to destroy capitalism and its moribund form, fascism. But, the authorial point of exploiting freedom as against suppressing it is the Negri’s position on the corollaries of reaction to right-wing accelerationsim. So, whatever be the seductive power of neoliberalism, which indeed is undeniable, banking on the track record of proletariat would be stuck in the molasses of the past, or even getting to dynamically shift the agency to cognitariat be akin to letting the seduction of neoliberalism suck the agency in. The alternative is agency/ies, which someone like the obscure Agamben would call “Whatever Singularity” (even Gayatri Spivak flirts with the idea), or precariat, which is the umbrella term for the ones stripped of or dehumanised by the forces of neoliberalism. Unless, the left has this in vision, left is a position best avoided for excepting archival purposes. Yes, commoditising communism spells doom, and we are ideologically headed towards it.

Bataille and Solar Anus Economy/Capitalism: Note Quote

Focusing on Bataille as a pivotal point, his take on Solar Economy is a bit weird to begin with, but, then I do see its relevance to accelerationism. The take on political economy is driven by excess, rather than scarcity, a plethora of energy (like that from the sun) that would not just facilitate growth, but would be vulnerable to expenditure in a purely apathetic manner as well. That is how he differentiates the general from the restricted economy. I am keen to note how accelerationism, if guarded by the normative (I understand the term to carry a baggage of strictures) dromos (dromocracy), would shift the balance of the economic towards the general rather than the restricted. I think, if capitalism gets overridden by the belief in this economic, a probable fracture within it could be affected. Bataille, then would make his presence felt even more crucially for the ultimate eschatology of capitalism.

Bataille provides a premonitory text relating the energy of the sun, the sexual movements and excitements of the cosmos and of terrestrial life, and the anus of an eighteen-year-old girl. Operating at the intersection between his sexually explicit literary works – think here especially of Madame Edwarda, whose eponymous hero demonstrates that her labia are the copula of God: “Madame Edwarda’s old rag and ruin leered at me, hairy and pink, just as full of life as some loathsome squid. […] “You can see for yourself,” she said, “I am GOD.” – and his later development of a theory of a general economy of expenditure in La part maudite, “The Solar Anus” provides a rich but conceptually underdeveloped reading of the cosmic and terrestrial with regard to their potency, fertility, and fundamental antagonism.  Bataille writes,

Disasters, revolutions, and volcanoes do not make love with the stars. The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens. As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond fecundity. In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror. […] The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but it finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

In La part maudite, Bataille goes on to develop his argument against scarcity, which contends that, from the point of view of a general economy, the key problem on the tellurian surface is not the conservation of energy, but its expenditure [depenser].  Bataille offers the following reversal of the political economy of scarcity:

I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically. (The Accursed Share)

The “curse” of the accursed share is disturbingly simple: the earth is bombarded with so much energy from the sun that it simply cannot spend it all without disaster. Over the course of millions of years of solar bombardment, the creatures enslaved to this “celestial fertility” by way of photosynthetic-reliant metabolic systems are forced to become increasingly burdensome forms of life. By the end of the Ediacaran period, we find the emergence of animals with bones, teeth, and claws, and eventually even more flamboyant expenditures like tigers and peacocks, and later still, tall buildings. Or, as Bataille suggests in his short text “Architecture,” for the surrealist Critical Dictionary: “Man would seem to represent merely an intermediate stage within the morphological development between monkey and building.” With this morphology of expenditure in mind, let us now return to the anal image of thought.

What the theory of expenditure calls into question in its most precise philosophical reading is the division between useful and wasteful (flamboyant) practices; this is because in order for any theory of use value to be coherent, it must first restrict the economy, or field of operations, within which it is operating. The restriction of this field of energy exchange is a moral action inasmuch as it sets up the conditions for any action in the field to be read as either productive or wasteful. For Bataille, the general economy permits us to evaluate the terms of restriction as a means to call into question the cultural values and forms of social organization they engender. Because of this, the “anus of her body at eighteen years old” must be intact: as a potential for pure loss, pure expenditure of energy without reserve and without reproduction, Bataille is transfixed by the analogy of glorious or catastrophic expenditure in relation to the energy of the sun and the potential for escaping this curse as much as the curse of the intact anus.

 

Foucault, Noys, Grammar of Neoliberalism and the Bizarre Concessions to Market Resiliency

According to Foucault, the state intervention of neoliberalism is Kantian; it is designed to act on the conditions of the social to create the possibility of competition and enterprise. Neo-liberalism is opposed to the specter of the passive consumer just as much as various forms of leftism and anarchism. Second, the philosophical roots of neoliberal intervention can be traced back to the roots of German neoliberalism in the philosophy of Husserl. In this case, competition does not arise naturally but only as an essence that has to be constructed and formalized; neoliberalism is Husserlian. Foucault remarks that according to Marxism, there can be only one capitalism with one logic, contrasting this with the historical institutional argument that capitalism is a singularity with different possibilities. Neoliberals then try to invent a new logic for capitalism.

If we accept that we are not dealing with an essential capitalism deriving from the logic of capital, but rather with a singular capitalism formed by an economic-institutional ensemble, then we must be able to act on this ensemble and intervene in such a way as to invent a different capitalism.

For Benjamin Noys, the neoliberal government intervention is no less dense, active, frequent and continuous than in any other system. The difference is rather the point of application. It intervenes on society so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulative role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way, its objective will become possible, that is to say a general regulation of the society by market. The necessity is to analyze how neoliberalism creates a new form of government in which state performs a different function, permeating society to subject it to the economic.

Despite the aggressive role the state plays, Noys tells us it misses the point to identify neoliberalism as another form of statism, rather the state subjects society to the economic. Now which “economic” would that be? The only “economic” Noys mentions are competition and the market. To this point in his 2010 paper, Noys has not even discussed capital the social relation itself. The single social relation that connects classical liberalism to fascism to neoliberalism is itself never discussed by Noys.

How the fuck does this happen?

Noys explains, “the state constantly intervenes to construct competition at all levels, so that the market economy is the ‘general index’ for all governmental action”, but Noys never explains that this construction is not ideology driven but aimed at the production of surplus value. What Noys never mentions is that the state itself is acting as the social capitalist and is imposing a capitalist regime on all of society. This is important for Noys to ignore because, despite his actual narrative that this is the action of the fascist state, the real problem identified by Noys is the market. It is not that the state is functioning as society’s capitalist, but that it is doing this by imposing the market on society.

Clever money versus the accelerationists reaches its crescendo here: The real poverty in Noys’ paper on grammar of neoliberalism is in his embarrassingly piss poor grasp of labor theory, and his obsession with the ideology of neoliberalism, rather than real relations of production. Icing on the cake happens with the #accelerate club seeming to be a variation of the post-humanist desire-assemblage forming among the 25-35 year old Caucasianistas that wants us to get our Übermensch on without giving up Xboxes and smartphones…..

Kordela’s Surplus and Ballardian Fiction of the Political Ambiguity Within Accelerationism: Note Quote

Kiorana Kordela in Surplus makes a point that resonates accelerationism, albeit in a narrower sense. She critiques post-modern ‘neo-Spinozism’, notably Negri and Hardt’s Empire for the assumption that replicating and reinforcing the structures of capital, far from supporting it, amounts to accelerating the advent of its end as an exploitative and an oppressive system. This is the Ballardian fictional political ambiguity treading an uneasy line between the critique and an ecstatic celebration of the liberating power of capitalism. In trying to exceed reality along Deleuzean lines of flight, his extra-wordly dematerialization of crime becomes an all-too material replication of the tendencies of capitalism itself. The point is to distinguish the strategy of subtraction from the strategy of transgression, for only then there is a strategy towards accelerationism, a higher-level recuperation at that.

Embedding Complexity within Accelerationism: drunken risibility

I am yet to use Deleuzean ideas in activism, but I do use him in building up discursive notes that find difficulty in manifesting and/or realizing within the vocabulary of/on field of activism. That is the reason for my ‘yet to use’ his ideas. There is no doubting the alignment to be effected between theory and practice, but working towards such coming together is what my intention has always been. To be honest, I have always had this difficulty of retaining the alignment, since practice takes precedence sublating theory in the process. Deleuzean ontology is emancipatory for thought from commonsense thinking, but the loss is incurred many a times when practice is seemingly cohesive with commonsense thinking. This aporia should be the launch pad for the project , for the intention is to smash whatever traces of postmodern thinking/thought are still tangible, and replace them with the trajectory of being within ‘capitalism’ as a structure continuously in flux. The complexity is therefore heightened when one stops to take a synchronic snapshot only to find oneself totally overwhelmed by the diachronicity in which embeddedness takes place. And here, if one makes the ontological situatedness of being coplanar with ‘capitalism’, a take on accelerationism should have critical/constructive applications in ‘nouveau’ capitalism. Enough drinking for now!!!

NeoCameralism? Shunting it Mainline….Exitocracy or Otherwise?

You cannot own it, if you cannot control it.

Corollary

You own something, if you alone control it.

This control is assumed assurance by powers of overt or covert violence, or assumed assurance of similar violence delegated by higher forms of authority. The twist is that if it is the former, it is secondary power, whereas, if it is the latter, it is primary a.k.a sovereign property.

As you’d probably guessed it by now, I am hinting at NeoCameralism. The sovereign power, or sovereign corporation (there is hardly any harm in arriving at this complicit identity) is alone able to ensure its own property rights. Another complicit identity would lie in sovereign’s might and rights. This is absolute, in so far as it is primary, and subordinate rights or secondary properties cascade down the social hierarchies. NC is nothing but a systemic and systematic realization of this reality. Or, as someone, somewhere might have it’. The most compelling idea in the sprawling Moldbuggian corpus is “NeoCameralism”. NeoCameralism is a close relative to Patri’s theory of Dynamic Geography in that both are forms of practical market anarchism. Its reasoning is straightforward: If you believe that government should be given incentive to govern well, then modern democracy must be thrown out. Simply trying harder to elect better candidates will not fix the familiar structural problems of democracy, such as plundering special interest groups, ever-expanding bureaucracy, and election contests with the intellectual content of an American Idol finale. However, if you think that security service providers (AKA “governments”) form geographic monopolies (500,000 years of human history provides good evidence for this), then the Rothbard/Hoppe/Friedman vision of anarcho-capitalism with a competitive market in security must also be set aside as a pipe dream.

NeoCameralism is the idea that a sovereign state or primary corporation is not organizationally distinct from a secondary or private corporation. Thus we can achieve good management, and thus libertarian government, by converting sovereign corporations to the same management design that works well in today’s private sector – the joint-stock corporation.

One way to approach NeoCameralism is to see it as a refinement of royalism, an ancient system in which the sovereign corporation is a sort of family business. Under NeoCameralism, the biological quirks of royalism are eliminated and the State “goes public,” hiring the best executives regardless of their bloodline or even nationality.

Or you can just see NeoCameralism as part of the usual capitalist pattern in which services are optimized by aligning the interests of the service provider and the service consumer. If this works for groceries, why shouldn’t it work for government? Who doesn’t in the right mind have a hard time in accepting the possibility that democratic constitutionalism would generate either lower prices or better produce at Safeway …

I am fully aware of nuances mushrooming at the tiniest crack in using the words control, might, and rights. And, why would I mind it? I wouldn’t, since to parenthesize these words into isolation would beg the question of why NeoCameralism?, and eventually, why this exercise? I shouldn’t be held culpable of insouciance. And I am not, I am acquitted, since in moving on, the plausible way to alienate ownership, which is no doubt a legal contract, is by entering into negotiations, trading away. A possibility of non-alienable political responsibility just has no scope of space, has nothing to offer substantially in terms of rights on property, whether primary, or secondary. If, I cannot legislate, I cannot take a free exit, and if I cannot take a free exit, I, in no way can escape the despotism of NeoCameralism. I only commercialize sovereignty, and in turn my very belongingness in this relationship with the despot.

Free markets are better than communism, but owned markets are better than free markets. Free markets are only good compared to communism, which is the dichotomy that’s been set up by our elites in order to guide us slowly towards communism. I mean socialism.It all comes back to sovereignty. Capitalism is only good insofar as it makes people responsible for their own property and profits i.e. insofar as it makes them responsible and provides an incentive to virtue. But then it is not the only way to do so, and the reason it is good is incidental, not central. NeoCameralism is a thought experiment that is useful for explaining NRx ideas. Especially useful as a crutch between techno-libertarian Alzheimer’s disease and normal, sane reactionary thinking. Moldbug today would not endorse it, nor would the Moldbug that was reading Carlyle studiously a few years back. There are certainly difficulties with NeoVameralism. Transitioning to a neocameralist world is the first hurdle that springs to mind. Moldbug never clearly spells out a plausible strategy for getting from here to there. Then there is the minor matter of how shareholders in the government will keep the management under control when management presumably has all the guns. After all, in a democracy corporate shareholders can ask the government to enforce contractual obligations when management shirks its duties. Hopefully you see the problem that occurs with this model when management runs the government. Moldbug offers some technological solutions to this problem that are interesting but unsatisfying……but, but, accelerate liberty via technology.

Phaneroscopy/Phanerology de-agentify

Yes, it is a limitation to break the world/universe, or what have you into the binaries. A resolution of the same ain’t possible, until one either exercises an asymptotic progression/regression machine on it, and thus relegating the whole into an aporetic point of philosophical frustration that goes by the name of dialectics, or, one somehow experiences an event of binaries morphing into one another. Such a collapse of the one into the other gravitates the defining points of differences into identities, and this goes by the name of Laruellean “decisionism-in-the-last-instance”. So, dialectics with the second method goes on a honeymoon where minds of the left spend countless nights trying to get it back to the realistic domain (pun intended!!!).

I’d be sorry to be getting into territories that speak the language of failed poets/prose writers, for otherwise, I’d not be able to justify how bad a writer I really am!!! The lightened poetry of non-sense and/of Being: Even if such a poetry did exist (for me, at least it never did), then it was probably the romantic ideal of the by-gone philosophical ages, and we seem to have come a long way out of it, but still cling on to the symptoms of such an era. Pity!! It is not conjoining the obscure with the nothingness, or the Other World. It is rather the tunnelling of the lyrical aspect with the nothingness, a Schellingian approach to when he says that without confrontation, there is nothing of the creation possible. Dialectical, yes, in a way, but also the underside of it, which is considered a pariah, an outcast, an avoided and avoidable theory of creativity, or what I understand as Leper Creativity. Yes, losing identity could be viewed as relative here. But as I said, “could be”, and I refuse to truck with it imposed-consciously. And hereby, I also answer a subsequent point: “it” is uncharacteristic of holding true to the pillars of what constitutes it. Far-fetchedly, “it” is like what Wittgenstein would say: rise up the rung of the ladder and then discard it. But, a difference is to be spotted here. For Wittgenstein, the climber discards the ladder, whereas in this the present context, with each rising up on the rung of the ladder, a sort of dehumanization takes place in terms of awe/sublime/incapacitation. In other words, a sense of belonging to the “it” is bred in the “we” (agents/agencies) undoubtedly, but is lost sight of due to the intense flows of the “it” in time. A sort of exponential hypertrophy of the “it” due to “we”, or loosely saying emergentism in which node/nodes of “we” are simply sucked in. So, “we” build up the “it”, and lose it identity-wise in the process.

On similar lines, the knowledge of surplus is bluntly replaced by the awareness of it, an excess that is wasted more than it is used, and a kind of “solar anus” in the Bataillean sense, truly. Philosophical aesthetics falling in the hands of terrorizing hermeneutics: yes, I concur on this. This is one of the reasons, why I have started advocating phaneroscopy/phanerology over phenomenology, and it comes close to your recent studies on the quantum physics. But, then do we have a choice? We are yet to be defeated by the exploding solar anus, even though we are well on our way to a crushing defeat. Analogically, when someone says that “a world without capitalism is possible”, I tell of such Occupy/World Social Forum pundits that it is, but in a way that is stripped of agencies, and not otherwise. Sorry for the hubris here on my part, but my way of looking into these aspects could either mean that I am going a bit too far in my analysis, or getting really cracked brain now. On the point of polarity between order and disorder becomes unidentifiable when I say of lemniscate obscuring the horizon. Why do I say this? For me, order is nothing but an echo of a disordered anarchy that still reverberates. With this, I quash ethics, and I have no qualms in doing so, for a whole new set of rules need to be rewritten/rethought in this very darkness, which incidentally is on the avoidable radar still, but is making a stealthy invasion upon us, and before time will annihilate us, and de-anthropocentrize. Can’t help feeling sorry for Kant now for sure.

“It” is the cosmic “capitalism”.

An Addendum to Capitalism Without Being…..Smuggling in Postone

Just a brief addendum to the previous post, and obviously the thinkers to be involved are Marx, and most crucially the more oblivious Moishe Postone. The former’s work is the decisive reference point for all the other theorists of accelerationism, insofar as the latter remains in many ways an ultra-Marxist heresy developing from a critical appropriation of certain key Marxist insights, and consequently deemed a place intended to venture into the hypothesis of a “capitalism in-itself”. It’s not clear if such a concept can be cogently articulated. Unless the scope and depth of this critique is clearly laid out, any subsequent extrapolation risks falling flat cannot be ruled out. One particular Marxist text seems particularly apt in this context: Moishe Postone’s “Time, Labour, and Social Domination”, (the review of it could be read here), which is perhaps the most interesting corrective to orthodox Marxian critical theory. Postone argues that for Marx it is capital, not labour, that is the subject, so that the key to the supersession of exploitation, expropriation lies not in the liberation of labour but in a transformation of the capitalist mode of production that will release alienated social labor. This is a controversial analysis within Marxist circles, and Postone remains conventionally humanist at bottom, but his account provides a rather useful traction for the confrontation between Marxism and accelerationism.