Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Loud Whispers]

Forgive my ignorance but... what is accelerationism?

People who presume that society is willing to accept anything radical provided it is done in gradual increments, which includes accepting a radically shit system of exploitation. Thus the only way to trigger a revolutionary change, is to accelerate the move towards the radically shit system so that people are shocked instead of acclimated; your political mileage may vary

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Accelerationism has three related but fundamentally divergent definitions depending on who's using it. Most commonly, it's used by leftists to mean a strategy of encouraging capitalist collapse instead of trying to manage it. Because socialist theory operates on the premise of capitalism's inherent self-destructiveness, one might as well not get in your enemy's way when they're making a mistake. Some people phrase this as intentionally making things as horrible as possible, but I think that is unfair as the choice between horrible and not horrible is never present in that form. This is the definition being used here.

Other people use accelerationism to refer to the process of escalating technological and social change, i.e. we now get ten years of change in one year, and soon it'll be a hundred years of change in one year, taking society beyond the bounds of prediction. These are usually people who believe in AI gods, so it's not really worth listening to. Even less worth listening to are the neo-Nazis who have adopted the term as referring to intentionally trying to spark a race war so they can come into power, which is also just them stealing notes from Charles Manson.

[Doomblade187]

Meanwhile the calls to poison control over exposure to cleaning agents are increasing all over the country...

I'd really like to see the data on that. You would expect an increase because so many people are doing much more intensive cleaning than they usually do (both because they're afraid of the virus and thus cleaning aggressively, and because people are spending so much more time at home and thus making their houses dirty quicker), so it is possible that only a portion of the increase is related to people blindly following the orange god they made. One of the local news stations had a report a few weeks ago reminding people to be careful what chemicals they mix, because there was an increase in poisonings of the "bleach+ammonia" type.

There have been increased calls, but they run back to earlier in the pandemic. Luckily, most people aren't injecting Lysol.

[MrRoboto75]

Luckily, most people aren't injecting Lysol.

most

[Doomblade187]

Luckily, most people aren't injecting Lysol.

most

Unfortunately, I *did* have to qualify that statement, yes.

[Eschar]

neo-Nazis who have adopted the term as referring to intentionally trying to spark a race war so they can come into power, which is also just them stealing notes from Charles Manson.

You should sell them directions to the bottomless pit

[The Ensorceler]

How is accelerationism not a universally terrible idea? You can't afford to activate like-minded voters to vote for the people you want in power without negating your own accelerationist vote, and if you activate them as accelerationists but disagree about when to flip into genuine votes for who you want in power, you'll be bogged down by the antivotes of the accelerationists you are hypothetically working with.

It seems like you need an amazingly clear threshold with no room for interpretation to flip at, *and* a way to not fuck over your allies who don't antivote. (And if you don't have a threshold, or it's one that never comes to pass, all you've done is made yourself feel better about bad things existing by saying they are good, actually.)

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Because it's not a voting strategy? Politics isn't voting. Personally, I don't see accelerationism as even a proactive strategy either, so much as preparedness to take maximum advantage of moments when capitalism stumbles, as it will.

[SalmonGod]

And that sort of analogy is completely disingenuous. It's hyperbolic, has nothing to do with reality and is just good old fashioned scare mongering.

Overwhelming majority scientific consensus is that without radical change, environmental collapse will reach a threshold in roughly 10 years where the acceleration of positive feedback mechanisms and sheer scope of damage will make the eventuality of an apocalyptic scenario almost certainly unavoidable.  The American and European political systems are already straining under the pressure of refugee crisis that are driven in large part by environmental issues.  There's no way they will be able to survive 100x that pressure, plus increasing disruption to global supply chains from an ever accelerating pace of constant natural disaster.  The fires in Australia were a preview.  Having been closely tuned in to environmental news for 20 years now, the impression I get is that the collapse of modern civilization will be plain as day within 30 years at the most.  If there isn't a revolution against capitalism first, it will likely take the shape of billionaires fleeing to hospitable northern lands with mercenary armies, founding bunker cities, and trying to defend against waves of hundreds of millions of desperate refugees.  Ready to spend your golden years in a tent city?

[WealthyRadish]

By the accelerationism argument I meant the "silver linings" to a Trump presidency (like growing discontent with the dysfunctional political and economic system), but I also said these weren't enough to justify holding out. With the current outlook I'm sure we won't be wanting for crises and "acceleration" (with or without Trump), and the political effects of his presidency have been very ambivalent. The radicalizing effect hasn't been limited to the left, the media and Democrats have barely learned anything, fascism and the prospect of a civil war have been normalized, and we don't seem much closer materially to the sort of articulation and organization needed for a popular movement to change the constitution.

So in my view it's worth voting for Biden, even though he's a rapist and a discount Republican. Well, if the vote is cast from a jurisdiction where it has an effect, I guess.

[The Ensorceler]

Because it's not a voting strategy? Politics isn't voting. Personally, I don't see accelerationism as even a proactive strategy either, so much as preparedness to take maximum advantage of moments when capitalism stumbles, as it will.

Fine, replace voting with other actions. If you help people, things remain tolerable so that's right out. Everyone not working hard enough to fix things deserves whatever they get until they do better. This is just bootstraps for politics.

Helping your allies organise and survive is way better at increasing your societal clout than spitting on them and blaming them for not overthrowing the status quo. Also, because they don't have to watch you tighten any thumbscrews, they don't hate and resent you. Explaining to people why things are bad and how to fix them accomplishes the same realization that things are bad and need to be fixed without crushing the soul out of  your activism.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Again, accelerationism isn't really "make everything horrible" as it is "accept that capitalism is going to make everything horrible and be ready to hammer on the cracks in the wall", and it will continue to make everything horrible regardless as to if you do that or not. You're ascribing a whole lot of baggage to this that isn't there.

Independent organization/dual power is a highly accelerationist strategy by nature, since it does assume except in its most idealistic projections that the capitalist system is just going to catch on fire and explode at any moment, causing your outside organizing to fill the void.

[The Ensorceler]

Fine, I guess. I just... idk. I've seen people do the bad way and call it accelerationism. I've also been very annoyed by the suggestion that it'll be easier to fix things after trump than under biden. I'm not just voting, I'm helping my friends out quite a lot and that's so much harder under trump. I need the equality act. I need an end to gerrymandering. I need judges that wouldn't deny my friends medical or financial aid.

The chaos of trump is not the way you fix things, just do your best to help who you can as much as you can. It's enough. You can make the world a little better even if you can't save it and that's enough. I do think the world can be okay, but like... do what you can and don't stop when things look bad. If voting for biden is what helps, that's what i'm doing. Pretend you're voting for his VP if you have to, you may very well be, just keep your finger on the scale and vote.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It doesn't help. The problem you're having is that you're trying to win a rigged game, worse, a game that you know is rigged but still hold on to the belief that it might someday not be rigged if you play good enough. But there is no good enough. The game is rigged. If there were such a thing as good enough, then it wouldn't be a rigged game.

I say again that Obama created Trump, just as Clinton created Dubya and Carter created Reagan. Who do you think Biden will create, when he's more incompetent than all of them?

The truth is that the weight of the system that is bearing down on you and yours is not going to let up when Trump is gone. At most, they'll stick a pin in it and call that the new normal, just like they did after 08. You can't go back, none of us can. The guard will not change just because the banner does, and certainly not the banner of the Democratic Party.

The purpose of the system is to garner your consent, empty your pockets, and break your nose if you don't thank them for it. Only once you are awoken to that reality is there any possibility of scamming the scammer.

[scriver]

Take the red pill neo