Hi Rob, everyone, yes - I chose that particular passage because it is so clear.
It raises the question "What's new?". The historically progressive role of the
bourgeoisie in terms of constantly revolutionising production is an absolute
given in Marx.
Equally given and ubiquitous is his back of the hand, swatting a mosquito,
demolition of the "if I want it, it's so" utopians - Fourier and his conversion
of the oceans into lemonade being a particularly brilliant example, but it
applies equally to Owen, Proudhon, Kropotkin and others... The accelerationists
strike me as a version of the utopians but nearly 180 years too late ( and
there is such a strong temptation to quote Marx on"the first time as tragedy,
the second time as farce" that I'm going to yield) What characterises them is a
profound *mistrust* of ordinary people -the Owens, the Fouriers &c were great
system builders -*they* and only *they* would bring enlightenment with their
precisely ordered and often deeply odd systems. The key thing being the they
were the great enlightened ones.Don't get me wrong -I'm all for dreaming and
artists in particular do that well, they are often the storm petrels, the
windsocks, of impending social change. But when hen we mistake our dreams and
our systems as a substitute for the hard business of actually changing the
world , when we fall in love with our own cleverness, the problems start.
Cambodia stands as the most terrible practical warning here.
michael
From: Rob Myers <[email protected]>
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<[email protected]>; Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2016 1:58 AM
Subject: Accelerate Marx [Was: Re: [NetBehaviour] Accelerationism]
There's also the discussion of machines in the Grundrisse, which the
"Accelerationist Reader" book starts with as "Fragment on Machines" (from "once
adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes
through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine" here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm )
This is probably where Left Accelerationism originates as an attitude towards
and seeking to work through or escape the process Marx & Engels describe below.
What's particularly interesting in relation to "Inventing The Future" is its
discussion of automation and free time. And it touches on the quality of the
alien in a way that might, in a funhouse mirror way, be recognizable in *some*
other post-70s Accelerationism.
On April 23, 2016 8:38:21 AM PDT, Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]> wrote:
Marx & Engels on accelerationism in 1848:
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of
existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelledto face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." This does the
*descriptive* job as well as anything written since and it still stands
perfectly well...Sent from my iPhone
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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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