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For those struggling with this, the last three paragraphs sum up the author's thesis pretty well. It's actually more of a critique of current leftist ideas (from a Left perspective) than anything. quote: Getting less work seems unlikely to come about without the fight for solidarity, the chief intellectual achievement of the workers’ movement, and one that none of the accelerationists see fit to mention as an ideal worth preserving or even renovating. This is despite the fact that automation—or, more broadly, the increasing precariousness of labor through technologically assisted means—has always been dialectically connected with it. What tech enthusiasts call“disruption” is in fact almost always directed at forms of organization that preserve a modicum of workers’ control over knowledge and the products of labor. Because London taxicabs are controlled by people who have built up impressive maps of one of the world’s most complex cities in their brains, they ought to be replaced by self-driving cars operating on Google Maps. Because high school teachers have professional systems of accreditation and training and have unions to protect these, they must be replaced by lower-paid short-term Ivy-League graduates and cyber charters. Automation isn’t a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers’ control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense of control they have over their work. The only reason such work has ever not been totally shitty is that some attempt to preserve such control was made. This — not some implausible notion of a fully automated postwork future—still remains the surest of utopian impulses, the one most likely to deliver the things we want. Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. We recall Lenin’s comment about how communism would be “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about the Soviets, the electricity will do that work for us! But politics can’t get done by machines. |