On Accelerationism And Burning Worlds
If we talked about how Doomerism is a poison last week, this week it’s time to talk about how Accelerationism is not the cure it promises to be.
Hello, friends,
Last week, we talked about Doomerism, a principle that things are going so badly as to be ‘doomed’ and that we should just give up - or worse. It’s fair to say that things have not exactly improved with regard to the underlying inspiration of that article, in the sense that the Supreme Court has put the Mountain Valley Project pipeline back into the mix of things while places like Algeria suffer tremendous heat-driven wildfires.
That leads us to asking: “If governmental authority is failing to address crisis situations like decarbonization, what other choice do we have but to tear it all down?” It’s not an unfair question when you’re staring at a burning world that’s being left aflame by political leaders that stand to make personal gains from carbon fuels, such as the man behind the Mountain Valley Project, Senator and Coal Baron Joe Manchin.
But as much fun as ripping apart a broken system might sound, and as much as history says it is not an impossible outcome when juxtaposed to what people are suffering through, I am not convinced that it would succeed at protecting the people that well-meaning revolutionaries are interested in protecting.
Let’s talk about a philosophy called Accelerationism.
What is Accelerationism?
I first heard of the term Accelerationism from a Beau Of The Fifth Column video, “Let’s talk about accelerating and a better use of your time.” I’ve talked about Beau’s videos in this publication before, but for now just pop this one open and pause it for later. We’ll come back to it.
Right now, I want to define and discuss the very concept of Accelerationism, which Wikipedia defines, in a fairly long-winded but detailed way, as: “a range of Marxist ideas in critical theory—and reactionary ideas in right-wing ideology—that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration"”
Let’s break that down a bit.
Accelerationism is a “Marxist” (we’ll push back on that in a bit) theory that if Capitalism is sufficiently pressed and other events take place to destabilize existing systems, it’ll lead to them collapsing, and allow for an opportunity to institute revolutionary change.
In other words: “Push the gas pedal and drive the vehicle into a wall.”
And that might ultimately be the way history plays out, too - it’s not like there haven’t been revolutions before!
But, to start with, I want to push back against the idea that this is strictly a Marxist strategy. Fascism is all about destabilizing systems in order to create opportunities to seize power. I need only point to the notorious Reichstag Fire and the resultant emergency decrees that brought down the Weimar Republic. By the way, this was well after the start of the Great Depression following the stock market crash of 1929, which was a huge episode of global destabilization that led to authoritarian leaders all over.
Therefore, it’s safe to say Accelerationism isn’t owned by any one political allegiance, but rather is a strategy in and of itself. Create or encounter bigger and more complicated problems until the traditional authorities simply can’t or choose not to keep up; eventually, those systems fail so utterly that people rise up in revolt; that revolt then hopefully implements the changes that those who created the dysfunction in the first place want to see.
To tie it to a real-world example: Hey, so, the world is kind of on fire right now. Even in my opinion, our current governments cannot or will not address this sufficiently. I mean, right now they just authorized a brand new gas pipeline! Case closed, right?
Let’s go back to Beau’s video.
Acceleration At What Cost
If Accelerationism is supposed to lead to “The Revolution,” we have to really ask what that revolution looks like. If that revolution involves dissolving the government of the United States, well, it’s going to have to beat the U.S. military. So Beau begins by asking how long your typical insurgency takes to resolve.
Why does how long it takes matter?
Because during the time that this revolution is active, the people caught in the crossfire suffer and die.
I don’t just mean, “Oh, life gets a little harder.” I mean things like electricity gets knocked out so that refrigeration and sanitation no longer exist. Do you depend on refrigerated medications such as insulin to survive? Hell, do you depend on virtually any medication? Well, if you live near the fighting, I guess your death will serve the revolution’s dream, because you aren’t getting that medication.
Do you depend on municipal water? At best, that’s going to be scarce and probably unsafe - and at worst, it’ll disappear. At worst, maybe there is no source of clean water near you that you can just walk to and dip a canteen into, and you have to drink polluted water and hope you don’t get sick.
Do you have to go to the bathroom once in a while? Better dig a hole in the backyard, because that municipal water outage means you probably have no method to flush, and at any rate sanitation systems aren’t up and running even if you do have water. Depend on a cesspool? Who’s coming to drain it when it’s full when there’s little available gasoline? Oh, and that’ll poison your water, too.
So for the entire time that the revolution is in town and unresolved, plus for however many years rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure takes, innocent people caught in the crossfire are going to suffer, be miserable, and die in droves. As the colloquialism goes, these are peoples’ parents, children, brothers and sisters and spouses.
And all that for a revolution which might not even win, and might in fact usher something worse in?
So how do we solve this problem?
Let’s think about the Tea Party.
Incremental Change Is Boring, But We Can Speed It Up Without Crashing
It’s 2008. Barack Obama just won the Presidency. Really Quickly, a group of ‘concerned citizens’ came to power that screamed that they were Taxed Enough Already. They were the new Tea Party, and they weren’t going to pay higher taxes to satisfy some liberal (Black) President’s agenda for giving people things like health care. They were, they assured people, fiscally conservative voters who just wanted to pay our national debt and keep a small government. It surely had nothing to do with the fact a Black man was elected President.
And - wouldn’t you know it - the Tea Party died out and its remains were absorbed by the Republican Party just around the time that a Presidential candidate who had demanded to see that Black President’s birth certificate was making his ascent to the Oval. And - golly gee willikers - none of them came out of the woodwork to dissent when Trump ran up the national debt.
It’s almost like they were using taxation as an excuse to be mad at a Black President, after all!
But their racism isn’t the lesson I want you to draw from this. I want you to think back to around the time that Barack Obama got elected President. What led to those circumstances, and what was the outcome?
Well, first were disastrous wars in the Middle-East launched by the Bush Administration. Now, I don’t believe the W Bush Administration was legitimately elected - but a Republican-leaning Supreme Court and the fact that W’s brother was the Republican Governor of Florida made sure we never got a full recount. But that only fuels my point, here.
Second was the fact that the economy was entering into the “Great Recession,” a time of economic turmoil I’m still not sure is over.
In other words, far-right (I’d argue the Tea-Party was at the very least proto-Fascist) interests created a crisis, and then created a movement to “address” the crisis that ended up eventually giving them political power.
I feel like maybe I’ve gotten lost in my thoughts, so allow me to rephrase in case I lost you:
Bush made things so bad that Obama could only fix things around the margins, helping Trump gain power that ended with a failed self-coup attempt.
In other words, they accelerated - but only enough to create a minor crisis that they promised they could solve politically. The Tea Party was a political vehicle for a hyper-partisan movement that ultimately coalesced around a Fascist who, true to his word I guess, delivered a major tax cut to the wealthy.
They used electoral politics to get exactly what they wanted.
If they can do it, why can’t we?
Do We Need Democratic Socialists On Steroids?
To be absolutely fair, it’s not like people on the Left haven’t been trying this. It’s not even like we haven’t had success! The Squad, an informal group of ‘far’-left Democrats, has at times shaken things up in Washington. Perhaps most famous among them is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, nicknamed AOC. She’s a popular target for far-right monsters, while also being decried as having become a “regular old Democrat” in the years following her primary victory against ‘moderate’ Democrat stalwart Joe Crowley.
That suggests that a further-to-the-left Democrat got into power, shifted the Overton Window a bit, and is now viewed as status-quo by many even though, to be honest, she’s probably pretty far to the left of that Overton Window.
We follow workers strikes pretty heavily on this publication, and UPS workers just won a massive tentative contract. Yellow Freight just averted a strike by negotiating with the workers whose pension fund they’d appropriated. All these little victories add up to better, potentially life-changing working conditions for employees. UPS is going to put air conditioning in their trucks, most definitely saving lives and healthcare bills.
It’s gradual!
It’s slow!
It’s certain to annoy the ever-living shit out of people who realize how desperately significant change is needed if we’re going to save this planet and the various species that live upon it!
But when weighed next to the cost of the blood that would be spilled if a violent revolution spun out of control? In my personal - and in many ways quite privileged - opinion?
We have to at least try electoralism in a concerted, significant effort before we give into the urge to burn it all down and hope for the least-bad outcome. While that might not avert the maybe-inevitable, it might also put decent people in charge of the levers of power - even if they don’t necessarily intend to use those levers to reform each and every system we’d like to see reformed.
After all, there’s always the next generation to push them further.
In Other News…
In breaking-as-I-write-this news, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has charged Donald Trump with Obstruction Of Justice over the handling of camera footage. Carlos De Oliveiera, head of maintenance, was also charged - and allegedly is the one responsible for draining Mar-A-Lago’s pool into its surveillance server room. It’s taken far too long to get to this point, but at least we’re there. Oh, and there’s apparently a totally separate and coincidentally-timed “indictment watch” taking place in Fulton County as they’ve barricaded their courtroom. Ain’t this an interesting circus?
Houston Independent School District in Texas is offending my ex-teacher sensibilities by converting their libraries in to discipline rooms. The fact that this sends a message of negative reinforcement - “Behave or you’ll be sent to the library!!!” - is most likely thoroughly welcomed by the Fascists who ruin libraries.
Speaking of education, here’s some examples of what PragerU is going to be sending as educational documents for Florida. For starters, they compare climate change mitigation with the Warsaw Uprising, so I really don’t need to tell you how opposed to reality this Fascist drivel is.
In what legal analyst Elie Mystal called a “Weaksauce lawsuit,” the Biden Administration is suing the state of Texas over its insane, migrant-endangering Rio Grande River barrier stunt. Why he hasn’t sent the National Guard to dis-establish this infringement on Federal authority over immigration is unknown.
Speaking of Biden, he’s finally made the right decision with regards to sending U.S. evidence of Russian war crimes over to the International Criminal Court. We had talked previously about how the administration was balking at that notion because of the risk that we might be held to account for the war crimes of folks like Ron DeSantis.
Finally, a group of Trans folks in Tennessee are suing the Vanderbilt University Medical Center for turning over their healthcare records to the state in violation of HIPPA.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.