Accelerationism Triptych 03: What the fuck does praxis even mean?

What the fuck does praxis even mean. What the fuck does it even accomplish. Fucking nothing.

If you work at a soup kitchen or a Food Not Bombs at least you can say you fucking fed people, but it's not like even that really makes a lick of difference to you or them in the long run — their life is, what, slightly fucking nicer for a moment? But mostly the same, because you're not fixing any root cause for them. You're feeding a man a fish, not getting him a place to fish and a fishing rod to do it with. And chance are you can't, because you don't have the resources or time to do that.

There are people who do, who try to help people actually get back on their feet and be independent but that helps maybe a few people — it doesn't change any of the systems that put them there, and there will always be more where that came from, if those same people don't end up back in need in a few years. Hell, most of the time, organizations that do that sort of thing are fundamentally captured and controlled by, and used as PR shields by, the exact fucking system that exploits the people they support, precisely because they need the legal sanction and material resources necessary to help people, and can only get that with the permission of, or even support of, the system. Not to mention that even that is a pressure valve for the same system you're failing to fight against. "The poor will always be with you."

You don't get anywhere major with just "direct action" either, because operating with affinity-group level resources and under the nose of the state and capital, you fundamentally can't by definition. By definition if you're doing direct action, you're working with individual off the cuff actions and affinity groups with little planning and material support. You won't have the kind of resources and broad scale people power necessary to make any kind of lasting change.It'll just circle back after you're too tired or too old or too low on resources and do whatever it was planning to do anyway, or just shift its plans slightly. You might deplatform or humiliate a few right wingers, destroy the coherence of a few local right wing groups (which will quickly reform under other names, naturally), but ultimately you won't stop the rise of the right wing and their seizure of power, nor will you change anything about the system — even the smallest of concessions — and in the end you'll end up more effective in gaining power for your enemies, as a boogyman, than for your friends.

And organizing protests and shit? Don't make me fucking laugh. I saw what that got my community, when I took part in that: worse than nothing. We shut down one Nazi speaker and that just rallied support for the cause on campus, drawing attention to them and making them look good, and it made the campus explicitly set up some policies to support it, and now every year since the same people have invited worse and worse guys, and all they have to do is invite a guy, whereas we have to organize a thousand person protest, and everyone has to show up for that protest for hours. Which is the fundamental problem: there's a fundamental effort asymmetry here, where those being protested, since they're just doing individual actions or perpetuationg/worsening the status quo are going with the flow; those protesting are fundamentally expending orders of magnitude too much energy. Not to mention the fact that protests fundamentally carry almost zero real threat to them. Even if your cause is popular, what does public opinion really matter to the powers that be, beyond a certain point, in the face of their other material interests? They're not going to get unseated by public opinion — especially when it's so easy to turn against you! So they don't have to listen to a thing you say in your protest, at all.

And if you actually make your protest threatening? Turn it into a riot? Start smashing storefronts, looting, flipping cop cars, burning things, attacking cops and suits? Or even just like, blocking traffic, a standard protest tactic? That's so fucking easy to turn against you, not just because people are indoctrinated by the state and capital to respect cops and property and business, but also because those actions do, in fact, have frustrating or even harmful effects on the community you do them in, and the everyday people who have to deal with it: like protests that block traffic regularly slowing or even blocking ambulances, or even just normal people — many of whom will be poor or marginalized and just trying to get to work on time so they don't lose their job. Or protests that wreck havoc on property scaring large businesses out of town and bankrupting small local businesses, or at least putting them in a harder financial spot, making them weaker to the few big corps that are willing to remain, contributing to your community becoming poorer as it has fewer jobs, less access to resources, and maybe becomes a food desert.

Eventually, when public opinion turns sufficiently against your protests or riots, or you run out of steam, the state, at the behest of capital, will come in and put an end to it. So sure, maybe you can delay a pipeline or a police training center for a few years, and those are worthwhile aims in themselves, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're stopping the system. Even if you manage to kick off some of the largest and longest and most property damaging and protests in American history, you won't get much more than a few sterile capitulations, a few sacrificial convictions, and a massive public opinion backlash.

So make a law? Good fucking luck. Those with more money and influence will always bend the interpretation and application of laws towards whatever benefits them, if you even get to pass a law that might hurt them in the first place (you probably won't). And lawmakers (whether representitives, or just "the people") are as a whole completely out of touch and uneducated in the fields they're trying to legislate against, leading to laws that generally tend to make things far worse in unintended ways — like the Online Safety Act and similar laws destroying privacy — or they'll hire experts from the industry and end up just serving that industry's interests anyway. Not to mention the effects of regulatory capture.

Not to mention that those with the most power and resources to do something, proportional to how much power and resources they have, will continue to be too comfortable in their/our current lifestyles until they are no longer possible. It's sort of a fundamental implication of the position.

You might think that there's something to the praxis that Killjoy has done (traveling punk, dumpster diving, living minimally rough) and does now (living off grid with her friends). Eating reclaimed, sometimes straight up dumpster dived food (produce and similar leftovers that get tossed and brought by folks to free grocery meetups) can feel empowering. It might feel like it meaningfully does something about the ridiculous problem of food waste in our economy to help ourselves out.

But in reality, it's a game you're playing with yourself to make you feel better, just like all the little personal climate change interventions we do. To meaningfully make a dent in the food waste problem you would have to massively restructure several things. Don't fool yourself into thinking that it's materially making a difference at the scale of the problem as a whole, instead if just making a few people's lives better. And ultimately, if your concern is that the way we live isn't sustainable, then dumpster diving may feel like you're going off the grid, but it's not. You're still depending on the exact same system.

You might think the way to make praxis "work," to respond to these critiques, is to consciously build up from local affinity groups and personal direct action towards federations and national organizations, things that can actually exert pressure on capitalism and the state. But that won't do you any good either:

I actually brought up this sort of mutualist dual power praxis to Cory Doctorow when he was at my university once. And the thing he pointed out is that there's a bunch of mechanisms that make it really easy for capitalism to sort of automatically dismantle and disintegrate organizations like that, not through any particular intention, but just because of the incentive structures. Just like the way soap kills bacteria, not by intention, but just sort of the physical chemical processes. This happens constantly, and it's really sad to see projects here end up doing the state's work for them, with people's personal resources. Stop The Sweeps helps folks but it also provides infrastructure for the city and police, arguably. It's not even that interesting or evil necessarily. We've all seen how people start making choices for not even horrible reasons that lead to their project entering the nonprofit industrial complex.

And the thing is to a certain degree entering the non-profit industrial complex is actually kind of needed to be effective in the sense that if you're like crime think constantly worrying about any slight contact with or use of the state or capitalism to the point that you're basically forced into like extremely atomized individual action or organization that's so union of egoists that it just uses to be a union of egoists even, then you're just not going to be able to affect anything significantly. But Jesus Christ, I have no idea how to walk that line.

More than that, the system is just far too complex, adaptive, and good at recuperation to be predicted and controlled enough to make a directed change toward any particular thing you want. It is out of our control.

As the nonlinear processes driven by cascading positive feedback intensify and rise, organization itself becomes more complex, more heterogeneous, more multiplicitious, and less congenial to control systems. Rising complexity, in the end, trashes the orderly nature of organic wholeness. … Multitudes of positive feedback processes have long since become deeply entrenched, and the system as a whole is undeniably veering far from order. […] The complexity profile is rising and will continue, and as it does the capability for collective intervention will become all but impossible. […] — Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis

If you examine my descriptions of the failure of praxis, you will see that in the background, in the negative space surrounding my account of the specific failures of each method the modern left has tried or will try, lies a crucial fact: the problem is not merely our lack of control, our inability to steer these complex systems as we wish. The problem is that something else is in control.

And what is in control is not, as Bernie Sanders would say, the millionaires and billionaires. It is not specific far-right politicians or cultural commentators. It is not American society or culture as a whole. It is not even the state. The state may make capitalism possible by enforcing the things capital wants enforced — property rights, neocolonial expansion, extraction, and exploitation — but the reason the state does this is not for itself. The way the state acts, and who ends up in control of it, is not for its own sake. What is fundamentally underneath it all is capitalism. Capitalism is a "real God", to quote Marx, that controls our society.

This is not some vague gesturing. Capitalism itself, and the corporations within it, are emergent superorganisms. Think of it this way: in Conway's Game of Life, the only things that ontologically exist at the base level of reality are individual cells. These cells operate by very simple, local rules that make no reference to any larger organizations. Yet, from these simple rules, you can build shapes — gliders — that have persistent existence and continuing motion, properties nowhere described in the rules of the individual cells. They are composed of cells, yet they have a continuous, separate existence at a higher level of analysis.

Likewise, the base level of our reality is material physics, where matter operates by specific, local rules. From this, somehow, assemble the larger entities we know as living beings, ourselves included. We, in turn, operate by our own set of rules and mechanisms based on our local environment — our perceptions. Yet when human beings come together and institute certain practices and material situations and incentives, we can, by acting in certain ways, produce an organism composed out of ourselves that has its own intentionality, its own desires, its own rules of action and change. This is fundamentally what Deleuze and Guattari mean by machines: it is desiring-machines all the way down. Through the effects they have on the world, we can see that these superorganisms exist.

You might think that if human beings compose these larger-scale machines, we would be in control of them, but that is not the case at all. Consider coordination problems (like, but not at all limited to, the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons), Nash equilibria, and focal points. Consider the Abilene paradox, for example, where a group collectively pursues a course of action that no individual member wants because they each mistakenly believe it is what everyone else desires. Or consider Arrow's impossibility theorem and the median voter theorem, which shows that even a system designed to listen to its members will struggle to do so in any coherent, rational, and beneficial way. One can very easily end up in a situation where the social superorganism that humans compose is doing something beneficial for none of the humans involved, something none of them truly wanted. This is precisely the situation we are in with capitalism.

For example, you need money to live, so you get a job as a cashier. In that position, you find yourself enforcing upon others the very condition that forced you to serve capital: the necessity of money to acquire goods. You are playing into the system. Likewise, the things you buy to survive, not just physically but psychologically, ultimately incentivize and fund further exploitation in the name of maximizing profit. Even millionaires and billionaires are not in control. All of their wealth is constituted by shares in companies. If they were to act with their company in a way that isn't maximizing profit, their share price would crash, and they would lose their wealth — not to mention issues like the trembling chairman paradox. The psychological cost of failure is akin to death; while one can technically choose it, the incentives are so pervasively and strongly structured that there is an overwhelming tendency to act in ways that perpetuate the system, contrary to almost all of our interests. The vast majority will comply, and the system continues.

Corporations and accumulations of capital will continue to exist and operate without any particular human being or group of human beings that ostensibly control or manage them. Each individual human — even the CEOs or the board members — is fundamentally dispensable. The only thing that continues is the accumulation of capital and the structure of humans that serve it, a structure forced by mutually interlocking requirements and incentives to act in a certain way. Capital strongly rewards those who slot into these structures and serve it well and punishes those who do not. These corporate entities respond to the market as if it is their environment, and they respond by allocating capital — human time and material resources — based on what the market deems profitable. Fundamentally, these entities control us: the time we spend and the resources we produce. They determine where all of that goes, and we must obey because they hold the resources we need to survive, through the allocation of who has money, which then mediates who can access those resources. As Marx says:

The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man's products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man's operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself.

These corporations, in turn, get their incentives from the market economy as a whole — the environment through which these gigantic superorganisms move. The market itself is fundamentally decentralized and, as Hayek and Mises understood, is an information-processing system first and foremost. It is a rhizomatic neural network, an artificial intelligence composed of other artificial intelligences, whose goal at every level is maximum profit extraction from the desires of human beings.

One might think, then, that the market ultimately answers to human needs, but here again, we are faced with collective action and game theory problems. An individual's spending has a negligible effect, so there is no incentive to become an educated consumer, just like the paradox of voting but worse due to unequal and miniscule voting power. Even worse, even if consumers organize mass boycotts, while these can have some effect, ultimately you can't boycott the system that provides you with your material needs out of existence. If you boycott one place, your demand will just go elsewhere within the same system; even if you could withdraw entirely, as covered above, this still would not directly impel the system to change, unless a majority of people did it with you, which is deeply unlikely. Worse, in the US, the richest 10% of the population accounts for roughly half of all consumer spending, meaning very few people have any meaningful control over the economy to even carry out such a boycott.

Worse, the market itself constructs the entire field of choices. You cannot spend your money on something that capitalism has not decided you should be allowed to choose. Beyond this, our very desires — our subjectivity — are constructed through advertising and culture by capital itself, creating a giant feedback loop. We choose something, that influences the market, and the market then influences us to choose different things. In this process, we are just small nodes slightly redirecting the flow, with no meaningful control.

This leaves the traditional Marxist hope for the falling rate of profit. But that theory is likely unsound and, to the degree that it's empirically verifiable, has not been verified in the nearly two hundred years since it was written down.

Even if the rate of profit were to fall, the result would not be salvation. It would lead to further automation and further exploitation. Marx hoped this would lead to a proletarian revolution, but as we have seen, increased exploitation and the horror of capitalism only make us more tired, more hopeless, and give us less time and energy to fight back. It further colonizes our desires such that the idea of a world without capitalism's products becomes less desirable, while selling us on the notion that only it can provide the things it has made us want. This breeds capitalist realism: the inability to even imagine an escape.

Nor will automation save us. When automation increases productivity, it decreases the amount of time a worker needs to labor to produce enough value to pay their salary. In a different system, this could lead to less time spent working for everyone, but capital does not allow this. Instead, capitalists keep us working the same number of hours while we produce more. They then pay us the same wage and pocket the productivity gains, which simply increases the rate of profit back up and solidifies the power of capital. In Marxist terms, while we work the same amount of hours, fewer of those hours are "necessary labor" (to pay our own wage) and more of them become "surplus labor" controlled directly by capital. In this way, capital comes to control more and more of our lives.

This mechanism is reinforced by automation's other effects. It makes labor more replaceable, deskilling tasks and requiring less training and initiative from any single worker. This makes strikes, the proletariat's primary weapon, far less of a problem for capital, and moreover corporations with overflowing coffers can either easily replace the workers or simply ride out the strike. Furthermore, even the hype surrounding a new technology, like Generative AI, becomes a tool. Even if the automation doesn't pan out or fails to deliver on its promises, the hype itself can be used to justify massive layoffs to investors and board members. The predictable result is not liberation but a split workforce: a growing class of unemployed people with no resources, and a class of "employed" people who are forced to work harder than ever, with less training, in perpetually and egregiously understaffed environments.

This is not just a static system that is outside of our control. It is an accelerating, moving, adapting system. Capitalism is well known for its capacity to recuperate almost every movement. Through systems of commodification and desire production, it turns the very act of supporting or engaging in movements—even those ostensibly against it—into consumer activity. Displaying support becomes something you do by purchasing products.

Furthermore, the platforms and monetary systems of capital itself — social media, technology, and its vast resources — become the required channels through which these causes are shared and supported, and the media profits from the spectacle of any clash with capital's enemies. The enemies themselves end up feeding into this profitable spectacle, either by consuming it or participating in it.

The system also has inherent incentives to co-opt specific people and organizations within these movements. Look at how the official Black Lives Matter foundation fell apart due to accusations of hoarding donations and enriching its leadership. Or consider all the famous, supposedly anti-capitalist YouTubers and streamers who have become wealthy. Think of the money made from books that document for popular audiences what capitalism does to us, like The Burnout Society.

More than that, there is the tendency for capital accumulation that I talked about before. Capitalism inherently gathers more and more power to itself, allocating our time and resources to its own ends and making itself increasingly inescapable.

That's not it, either. The system is incentivized to make our very labor — the thing it exploits from us — less and less relevant to its functioning. If labor is the main variable cost in production and also the main danger in the form of resistance, then of course capital will want to automate it as much as possible. This is especially true since the benefits of automation, as discussed earlier, are greater rates of profit and a more replaceable, modular workforce, which allows capital to drive down the price of our labor time even further.

So, not only can capital use automation as a tactic to fend off the falling rate of profit, but it is inherently incentivized to automate as quickly and as much as possible to maximize profits. This, in turn, decreases the power of organized labor and the individual laborer, which then allows capital to automate even more. This feedback loop then feeds into capital's ability to accumulate at faster rates, which then feeds back into its ability to automate. All of this speeds up and becomes less concerned with what any individual human thinks, gaining more power over us in the process. The system is self-motivated to accumulate and automate, to make us less important to its goals.

And what is being automated is not just the hands-on production of material items. Logistics, price determination — all of that is also being automated. The very logic of what to produce, how to distribute it, and what to price it at is being determined more and more by algorithms. A clear example of this is the use of rental pricing software, like that created by RealPage. The U.S. Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company, alleging it facilitates a price-fixing scheme that allows landlords to collude and inflate rents for millions of Americans. This software takes confidential data from competing landlords to generate "recommendations" that maximize revenue, effectively creating what one official called a "housing cartel." The result is not superorganisms made of humans making these decisions anymore, but machines networked with each other.

Capitalism is essentially accelerating away from caring about the human at all. This is further evidenced by the way a larger and larger share of consumer spending is performed by the rich, who are perhaps the biggest meat puppets / avatars of capital. Whether there is mass unemployment or not, whether workers can afford to buy the products they create or not — most of it ceases to matter as much.

Ultimately, we are out of control. We do not have any power over this system.

So you either take """direct action""" that does nothing and/or radicalizes people against you or you appeal to the powers that be and either they don't care and don't listen, or they do care but can't do anything, because if they had the power to do anything they wouldn't care.

And ultimately what people hate most is crybaby moralizing, which is what the left is reduced to most of the time because they have no power, and self assured smug dismissal and exhortations to live like a traveling fucking trashcan monk, which is the best the post left really has to offer.

So fuck em all and fuck it all honestly.

The best we can do in this world is try to survive, support ourselves and the people we care about, and be kind of strangers, because no one else will be kind to them that day probably.

So don't worry if you haven't done praxis.

Ultimately, it's probably better to enjoy what we have currently to the fullest and promise yourself that you'll do your best to adapt when the time comes, and if you die you die, then to needlessly deprive yourself and live a life that's full of a lot more shitty nonsense in order to harden yourself against it or something. You know what I mean? Think about it like "life extension," right? Would you rather live like to Brian Johnson, or do you want to live a great 70 years and then fucking keel over.

None of this is to say that trying to locally alleviate some people's suffering, or fight for wins within the system like the 8-hour workday, isn't worth our time, and we shouldn't do it, because it won't change anything fundamental. I'm not arguing any of that isn't necessary, because I'm not the type of straw man acceleration that just wants to like maximize the contradictions of capitalism and hope that if we reach some kind of singularity of suffering it'll explode. No actual accelerationist theorist has actually ever endorsed this view, to be clear — even the CCRU itself explicitly lists itself as a sort of left-market anarchist organization in one of their communiques, and Deleuze in Guattari's explicit criticism of Marxism is precisely that contradictions can't kill capitalism. But we shouldn't fool ourselves that we know how to do this, or if there even is anything we can do.

There isn't an answer, I dont think there definitionally is one, to how we fix things. This is why I like unconditional accelerationism:

1. the idea that we're probably inescapably fucked
2. We can't go back (primitivism), and we can't undo or ignore (anti- and post-civ) the technologies, knowledge, social structures, desires, and expectations that have been created
3. the systems around us are so insanely complex and adaptive that it's unclear we can do anything to change them, and even if we do change them, we can't control how or which way it turns
4. the only response to that is not to keep saying "there ought to be a law" or the communist or anarchist equivalent, nor to "do nothing," but to let go of the desire to save and control things, and do things because they're What You Do, because you want to
5. without falling into transcendental miserablism that just dismisses all possible change as uninteresting and negative, viewing everything from the bottom of a well of cynicism that is smug in its bottomless despair
6. we can't control how we're socially constructed and influenced, but we can participate in that, through using fiction and aesthetics and narratives so we can participate in that project of trying to create radically new subjectivities that might be able to produce something radically new
7. that we need something radically new and different that must be channeled by communities motivated by the same altered subjectivities
8. and that whatever new thing we create must take into account the desires, needs, expectations, and developments and use them, not moralistically reject them.

Hyperstition and the role of theory-fiction in accelerationism are really cool: the intentional crafting of narratives that might tend to bring themselves into existence, the intentional embracing of the content of what's being communicated in the style itself, to participate in the construction of subjectivity needed for hyperstition. Maybe the only thing we can do is hope as many people can be on board with a generalized libertarian "live and let live" ethical system while we all experiment in the ways we best know how until we keep popping out advancements that slowly make the current world unfathomable to future peoples. Or… we die trying. And there's solace in that too tbh.