67
Negri's practising of this method in the 1970s was predicated on accepting and radicalising the crisis of the Fordist social compact to license a thinking of the imminent and immanent apocalypse of capitalist relations. If capitalism started to rupture the structure of the factory and guaranteed employment then one should not regret this and go backwards to some lost world of social democracy, but push the tendency further into exodus, sabotage, and destruction of the 'fetters' of the remnants of Fordism. This is a form of the accelerationism of struggles.
The implication of his work, reflecting on the crisis of Fordism and its 'planner-state', was that communism had already arrived and would need to simply be realized. [...]
in his 1971 Crisis of the Planner-State
Negri's practising of this method in the 1970s was predicated on accepting and radicalising the crisis of the Fordist social compact to license a thinking of the imminent and immanent apocalypse of capitalist relations. If capitalism started to rupture the structure of the factory and guaranteed employment then one should not regret this and go backwards to some lost world of social democracy, but push the tendency further into exodus, sabotage, and destruction of the 'fetters' of the remnants of Fordism. This is a form of the accelerationism of struggles.
The implication of his work, reflecting on the crisis of Fordism and its 'planner-state', was that communism had already arrived and would need to simply be realized. [...]
in his 1971 Crisis of the Planner-State
91
The idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment--the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. This is another instance of accelerationism, which either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply because the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labor at the hands of dead labor to do the work.
The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy--which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of 'socialism'). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels's anathemas against 'feudal socialism'. Rather, Benjamin argues that: 'Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.' We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.
The idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment--the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. This is another instance of accelerationism, which either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply because the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labor at the hands of dead labor to do the work.
The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy--which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of 'socialism'). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels's anathemas against 'feudal socialism'. Rather, Benjamin argues that: 'Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.' We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.
99
A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach 'work' from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound.
A working solution, to be deliberately ironic, is to struggle for decommodification of our lives. Campaigns against privatization and for the return of privatized services to public control try to reduce our dependence on work by attacking the way work is supposed to account for all of our self-reproduction. These struggles are in parallel for struggles to defend public services, protect benefits, and sustain social and collective forms of support. While they may be unglamorous, especially compared to space travel, these struggles can negate the conditions of the impossibility of work by trying to detach 'work' from its ideological and material role as the validation of citizenship and existence. In relation to the Nietzschean rebels of absolute communism or absolute acceleration these struggles can be dismissed as reactive, but they react precisely to the contradiction in which we are currently bound.