embodied in writings that sought an immanence with this process of alienation

a politics that must hope for the worst and can think the future only as apocalypse and tabula rasa

even the keenest liberals are hard-pressed to argue that capitalism remains the vehicle and sine qua non of modernity and progress

Hegemonic neoliberalism claims there is no alternative

leaves concrete technological nous and economic arguments to its adversary

paled by comparison with the oneiric escapades of '68

dissolving all bulwarks that would preserve the past

It would indeed be churlish to deny the enduring rhetorical power of these texts

the inauguration of an aleatory drift

thanatizing Lyotard's jouissance

Both in theory and in political practice the 'operaismo' (workerism) of the 1960s and 70s

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.

rethinks the inhuman futural feedback process through which it conducts human history not as a thanatropic compulsion but as social participation in the progressive and self-cultivating anastrophism of in/humanity

generating paths to an outside that does not conform to the infinite homothetism of 'more of the same'

Machine production follows directly from, maximally effects, and enters into synergy with capital's exigency to reduce the need for human labour and to continually increase levels of production.

Man no longer has a direct connection to production, but one that is mediated by a ramified, accumulated objective social apparatus

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?