(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams: Inventing the Future – Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso Books, 2015
One of the most interesting recent discussions about the technology's release opportunities has been under the hashtag Accelerate on social media, where proponents of a new and seemingly radical political agenda agitate for the left to abandon the monk Marxist fear of new state-of-the-art technologies, and instead re-fire the boilers of history's locomotive: Next stop – post -capitalism!
Tekno-optimism. Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams collect in the book Inventing the Future – Postcapitalism and a World Without Work up some key ideas from their so-called accelerationist manifesto, Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, which launched in the Twitter sphere in 2013 under the hashtag Accelerate. The manifesto advocates a techno-optimistic and hyper-rationalist political agenda, and to transcend capitalism's inherent restrictions on productivity by promoting liberation and intensification, in short Acceleration of the collective and technological forces of society. The tone of the book is less bombastic and imperative than the manifesto, and the term itself accelerationism are dropped, but the basic ideas are unchanged, and the reasoning is not to be mistaken: We stand on the eve of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, where new hybrid technologies will fundamentally transform our understanding of what it means to be human at all , what it means to live, work and interact in increasingly complex and machine-mediated contexts.
End the scarcity. According to Srnicek & Williams, the advent of the Internet (note the subtitle WWW, a World Without Work) and the new information technologies have already enabled an effective transition to post-capitalism, where arbejder is no longer thought to constitute the essence of man, but can be imagined as being a mere externalized mechanical process that leaves man free to organize his own life and his own identity formation beyond the curse of work and beyond all material scarcity: «The technological infrastructure of the 21st century produces the conditions for the creation of a very different political and economic system. Machines perform tasks that seemed impossible just a century ago. The Internet and social media give voice to billions of hitherto interrogated, bringing the existence of a global participatory democracy within immediate reach. Open-source designs, copy-left creativity and 3D printing herald a world where the scarcity of many products has been overcome. " In short, a kind of techno-utopian update of Marx's famous communist notion of being able to 'do this today, something else tomorrow, go hunting in the morning, fish in the afternoon, engage in cattle breeding in the evening, criticize upstairs at dinner' , without ever feeling like a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. "
Left-wing illiteracy. The fundamental problem with achieving this fully automated luxury communism, however, is that the left today suffers from widespread technological illiteracy coupled with a skepticism or fear of all technological solutions to political problems. Faced with increasing complexity, the left has chosen to isolate itself in small sectarian cells, to reject the technology instead of understanding and mastering it. This has led to a problematic glorification of ritualistic political practices centered around defensive and reactive forms of resistance such as flight, retreat, and entrenchment in “temporary autonomous sanctuaries,” and a valorization of the particular and local as opposed to the universal and global. This bunker mentality is, according to Srnicek & Williams, basically symptomatic of the left wing as a whole, which has completely given up on imagining the coming of a new age.
Longing for authenticity. Srnicek & Williams describes how many on the left lost faith in the more traditional forms of organization, partly due to the party and the union's (identity) political bankruptcy, and therefore tried to invent other ways to challenge power, ways that do not mimic the existing power hierarchies sexist, racist and militaristic way. In other words, it was no longer about taking over the means of production and "taking power", but about rejecting the capitalist relations of power and production. tout court. The anti-systemic focus that has its roots in the anti-authoritarian rejections of the 68 movement behold game societys (Guy Debord) forms of representation (parliamentary democracy included), have been evident everywhere in the great waves of mass protests of recent decades, from the alter globalization movements of the nineties to Occupy and beyond, that is, throughout the cycle of struggles which Srnicek's & Williams' critique specifically addresses. Their claim is so far-fetched that these protest movements are permeated by a distorted longing for lost authenticity on the one hand, as well as by a "naive" revolutionary wishful thinking with no hold in the realities on the other. The critique of the left Impasse summarized under the term people-politics, which on a very general level covers a – in their eyes – problematic inclination towards valorising spontaneous mobilizations and rebellions rather than giving up the long-term patient work towards a reconstruction of the lost political unity of the left, the construction of a veritable political-ideological mod-hegemony. But the question that insists on reading is that if the left is really dazzled by naive revolutionary dreams, and social democratic workers' reformism is no longer a viable path, what is the task then? How to reach the desired postcapitalist societies? Is continued technological optimization within the framework of a fundamentally capitalist economy, transhumanist manipulation, and more exponential growth really a way out of misery?
Srnicek & Williams have pieced together their techno-utopia of old Marxist wreckage, despite all assurances that they have invented the future.
Marxist wreckage. With their focus on technology, innovation, transformation and automation, Williams & Srnicek inscribe themselves in a mildly dubious tradition of techno-optimism that can historically be traced back to various socialist planned economy experiments, such as Salvador Allendes (failed) Project Cybersyn in Chile in the 1970s, where cybernetic principles were sought to be applied in a comprehensive political experiment with economic and social control. The administration of enormous amounts of data must, with inspiration from Allende's prototypical cyber model, serve to manage society, a comprehensive social control mechanism must ensure that the anarchy of market forces is kept in check, without either wage labor or capital relations being abolished. Synthetic freedom is the term by which the authors in a strange Orwellian maneuver try to justify their notion of a future cybernetic control apparatus. It is here that Inventing the Future really stands its test, both as a book / work and as a purported emancipatory program text for a (admittedly) clearly failed left wing. It is precisely here, in the transition from the book's negative project (the critique of the latent pathologies of the left wing) to the book's positive or edifying project (what must be done part), that one seriously begins to sense that Srnicek & Williams have cut their techno- utopia together of old Marxist wreckage, despite all assurances that they have invented the future. It is the classical impossible act of balance, the incompetent neither-nor in the sense of neither reform nor revolution, that turns out to result in a completely hidden defense of a reinvention of the most technocratic future utopias of traditional Marxism. The book's negative message – criticism of certain parts of the left's reactive activism fixation, the valorisation of (certainly often macho glorifying) anarchist spontaneity, violence and rebellion romance, and the often accompanying suspicion of theory opposite practice – addresses important themes and is undoubtedly one of the stronger aspects of the book. Unfortunately, the critique of certain problematic identity-political maxims on parts of the left is expanded and generalized completely without moderation, with the obvious purpose of constructing a straw man called the "left" who can then be easily shot down with easily bought claims of primitivism. The rejection of all radical groupings on the left since 68 – a rejection that is otherwise devoid of any form of self-criticism (of, for example, their own privileged statement position as white, male, Western subjects belonging to the academic elite) – has as its sole function that the authors can inscribe themselves in it quite large (and very traditional avant-garde) narrative in which the stupid and blind masses are to be politically directed by an elitist central body, like the head that controls the body: Behold, we bring you the future!
