IM DELETING YOU, SOCIETY!😭👋

IM DELETING YOU, SOCIETY!😭👋 ██]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] 10% complete..... ████]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] 35% complete.... ███████]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] 60% complete.... ███████████] 99% complete..... 🚫ERROR!🚫 💯True💯 Societies are irreplaceable 💖I could never delete you Society!💖

During the 2016 election, there began to spread a widespread misconception about what it meant to legitimize accelerationism, and who an accelerationist was and what they wanted. "Burning it all down" would be too pat a narrative for anyone who wanted to call pessimism unwarranted or defeatist.

Before 2016, the ability to get even liberals to take seriously the threat of neo-Nazis, right-wing fascist militias, and even the concept of a white nationalist movement hellbent on a white ethnostate was, at best, difficult, and typically, was even more painful than getting a conservative to admit a view might be bigoted (because, at best, they probably don't care). In the run-up to the election, it was derided as a threat because everyone thought it was a slam dunk election, and afterwards, suddenly, without admitting these were real threats, they became legitimize as a rhetorical devices as shorthand for the apparently singular evil of Donald Trump.

So, as a result, continuing to speak to this threat (for example, a recent mass shooter was radicalized by a militia notorious in South Florida since the early 90's for embodying this threat) was regarded as overly cynical or conspiratorial, rather than this idea that the state was literally subsidizing institutional Nazism (at best, it was cosigning the behavior as politically useful, just like the state does whenever politically expedient, and this is not partisan behavior) but that an apparently anti-democratic "fascist" regime would, somehow, also be responsive to an apparently free election (because this belief system also requires believing in an actual conspiracy, based on almost no facts, about election interference)– this is just the inverse behavior of the coopting of fascist social movements for political currency. The end goal, of course, is simply to perpetuate neoliberal socioeconomic political culture without really moving the needle in terms of, either, combatting or emboldening fascists.

So, here's where the accelerationist smear comes into play: At the beginning of this narrative, there was a lot of smearing of leftists who liberals insincerely hoped to advance as covert Trump voters, with a bogus accusation of having done so in order to begin the collapse of the democratic order (never mind that the choices, in both 2016 and 2020, were between overt corporatists, the only difference being that the corporate interest dictating policy would either be self-interested or cartel-interested). This, of course, has the effect of removing an obvious class (and intersections of it) analysis from mainstream political discourse, because of course, for example, an ethnic minority being brutalized by the state, and are also experiencing an unprecedent bipartisan gaslighting about how this is actually good and necessary for the orderly function of society, might be amenable to saying this society can't be saved and call itself just.

The idea that this is all just about "burning it down" seeks to equate something like a protest against police brutality to a riot like we saw earlier this year at the Capitol; that it's all unruly, senseless violence when the former is a response to overtly violent and unnecessary state violence and the latter was about, well, nothing. The point is to make it seem feckless, not mature and refined like the reformist nature of almost all liberal strategy, which typically amounts to negotiating yourself down, before talking to a single opponent who will, of course, require more compromises, and this is to say that in acting on behalf of the latter/opposing tendency in the name of the former, liberals (in this case) are contributing to the bloat that prolongs the ineveitable when we're talking about the reality that capitalism, and the late-capitalist imperialist state, has already won– collapse.

I recently saw an editor of a mainstream publication essentially admit to feeling that collapse is the only way out from under this condition; This is good that we're at a phase of the long-running theory from someone in extremely mainstream media. Accelerationism can go one of two ways: the defeatism that breeds fascism (and requires the aforemention bloat to prolong the suffering), or the opportunism that breeds communism, as Marx might argue is an ineveitability but only opportunistically organizing can make it a liberative outcome rather than hegemonically evil by the ruling class that manages to survive. Only the latter respects the boundaries natural world.

I won't make an impassioned case for accelerationism, because it's not really about that, it's about the fact that we are dealing with the conditions of capitalist collapse as Marx observed, and correctly predicted, over and over again– this is one tendency that explains how the modern work might hasten it, and has nothing to do with an abstraction like a partisan election to usher it in; a similar absurdity is the notion I mention earlier, that to defeat a fascist, you simply vote him out. The big barrier, as not only (left-)accelerationists see it, is that this obvious ineveitably is, frankly, demoralizing– it's demoralizing to realize you're dying for a lie, and the lie isn't even a good one, that if you work hard in this society you'll succeed, but because of liberal and conservative removal of class as a consideration entirely, you are gaslit over and over about where the starting line truly was, or even if you were ever intended to find the finish line.

I don't fault people for being defeatist; it's the natural response to watching what's unfolding, and in any other time would've resulted in revolution 30 years ago. But, we can still do it, but it does require collapse, acceleration (either coerced, or because the collapse has begun to avalanche) to happen. There's no reform that can help.

See you in orbit, y'all.