To reduce the value of software to its capacity for monetization, as Terranova suggests, leaves unspoken the enthusiasm and creativity in evidence in open source movements. Perhaps the latter are better thought of as a collective practice of supererogation seizing on the wealth of opportunities already produced by capitalism as a historical product, in the form of hardware and software platforms, and which breaks the loop whereby this wealth is reabsorbed into the cycles of exchange value. This invocation of the open-source movement is a powerful reminder that there are indeed other motivating value systems that may provide the 'libidinizing impulse' that Fisher calls for in the search for alternative constructions; it also recalls Firestone's call for a cultural revolution in which the distinction between aesthetic imagination and technical construction is effaced.

However, as Marx observes (and as Deleuze and Guattari emphasise), capitalism continues to operate as if its necessary assumption were still the 'miserable' basis of 'the theft of labour time', even as the 'new foundation' of machine production provides 'the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high'. The extortion of human labour still lies at the basis of capitalist production despite the 'machinic surplus value' (Deleuze and Guattari) of fixed capital, since the social axiomatic of capital is disinterested in innovation for itself and is under the necessity to extract surplus value as conveniently as possible, and to maintain a reserve army of labour and free-floating capital. The central questions of accelerationism follow: What is the relation between the socially alienating effects of technology and the capitalist value-system? Why and how are the emancipatory effects of the 'new foundation' of machine production counteracted by the economic system of capital? What could the social human be if fixed capital were reappropriated within a new postcapitalist socius?

Fixed capital, in its character as means of production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value; i.e. is itself the product of labour, a certain quantity of labour in objectified form; (2) in so far as it increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, by enabling labour, through an increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products required for the maintenance of living labour capacity in a shorter time. It is therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker shares with the capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that goes, itself a product of labour, and of alien labour merely appropriated by capital) makes labour easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive character, by means of the machine), or makes his labour shorter. Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here -- quite unintentionally -- reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation. [...]

[...] For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption
under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest
tools.

The machine process compels a more or less unremitting attention to phenomena of an impersonal character and to sequences and correlations not dependent for their force upon human predilection nor created by habit and custom. The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the adaptation of the workman to his work, rather than the adaptation of the work to the workman. The machine technology rests on a knowledge of impersonal, material cause and effect, not on the dexterity, diligence, or personal force of the workman, still less on the habits and propensities of the workman's superiors. Within the range of this machine-guided work, and within the range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the course of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect. It inculcates thinking in terms of opaque, impersonal cause and effect, to the neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage and on the conventional standards handed down by usage. Usage counts for little in shaping the processes of work of this kind or in shaping the modes of thought induced by work of this kind.

[...] Negating forces can only arise outside of capital. Since capital has absorbed all the old contradictions, the revolutionary movement has to reject the entire product of the development of class societies. This is the crux of its struggle against domestication, against the decadence of the human species. This is the essential moment of the process of formation of revolutionaries, absolutely necessary for the production of revolution.

[...] And just as we found, on the side of human surplus value insofar as it resulted from decoded flows, an incommensurability or a fundamental asymmetry (no assignable exterior limit) between manual labor and capital, or between two forms of money, here too, on the side of the machinic surplus value resulting from scientific and technical flows of code, we find no commensurability or exterior limit between scientific or technical labor—even when highly remunerated—and the profit of capital that inscribes itself with another sort of writing. In this respect the knowledge flow and the labor flow find themselves in the same situation, determined by capitalist decoding or deterritorialization. But if it is true that innovations are adopted only insofar as they entail a rise in profits through a lowering of costs of production, and if there exists a sufficiently high volume of production to justify them, the corollary that derives from this proposition is that investment in innovations is never sufficient to realize or absorb the surplus value of flux that is produced on the one side as on the other. Marx has clearly demonstrated the importance of the problem: the ever widening circle of capitalism is completed, while reproducing its immanent limits on an ever larger scale, only if the surplus value is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed or realized. [...]

Here Andre Gorz's double portrait of the "scientific and technical worker" takes on its full meaning. Although he has mastered a flow of knowledge, information, and training, he is so absorbed in capital that the reflux of organized, axiomatized stupidity coincides with him, so that, when he goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little desiring-machines by tinkering with a television set—O despair.80 Of course the scientist as such has no revolutionary potential; he is the first integrated agent of integration, a refuge for bad conscience, and the forced destroyer of his own creativity. [...]

For the conflicts that wrack capitalism have time as their essential stake, the workers, the minorities struggling for ends of amelioration, faster changes than the powers want: here is the root of the 'contradictions', a struggle for time. A ten percent raise in salary, now, not in six months; free abortion, retirement at sixty, right now, not in five years' time; but also on the international scale: in one go the price of raw materials is doubled. [...]

Consequently, 'revolutionary' actions are not those which aim to overthrow the system of Capital, which. as opposed to Marxist analyses, has never ceased to be revolutionary, but those which complete its rhythm in all its radicality-that is to say, actions which accelerate the metamorphic processes of bodies. [...]

We know very well that as soon as they are destroyed, a new apparatus of power, with a new terror, will replace the old one; but on this occasion unbearable reactions are deactivated, other unprecedented, sometimes delicious ones become possible, pending the unforeseeable moment when they too join the sorrow of the old ones. So that all there is for us to do, to hope for, is to cut short the reign of powers and their repression, and to do so endlessly, since the combat against powers has no end. It's not much, yet it's enormous. Such is the meaning of permanent revolution, which we now identify with the multiple movements of acceleration in their desire for a saving of time.