(en) WSM.ie: Irish Anarchist Review #10 - Futurism or the Future: Review of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics

The proliferation of computerised surveillance and security systems across workplaces has 
had the effect that now, in offices across the world, workers? toilet usage is 
continuously monitored. You swipe your ID card to get in and out, producing a data event 
with a time and duration, which is quietly recorded by some computer. ---- Upstairs, some 
horrendous bureaucrat ponders over all this data: How long does a shit take? How many 
shits is too many? Does she have a medical condition, or is she just slacking? 
Copropolitics: a new technology of discipline and a fresh form of indignity that was 
inconceivable as anything other than a cyberpunk nightmare (and a dull one at that) a 
couple of decades ago; the kind of technological revolution that no-one wanted, and nobody 
is particularly excited about, but which nonetheless happens.

Of course this is easily explained entirely in terms of capitalist imperatives: remove a 
potential for unauthorised respite, produce a panopticon so total that it watches you 
shit, greater discipline, greater exploitation, more profit. If we don?t design/implement 
these technologies someone else will, and then we?ll be at a competitive disadvantage ? 
the basic mechanism of capitalist technological development. Freud once told us that an 
obsession with excrement is a pathological manifestation of extreme greed. Today, at the 
highest stage of capitalist development, it is a mundane expression of bourgeois values, 
made possible by technological advances, or ?progress?, as it is often called.

The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (ii) (MAP from here on) appeared to 
considerable interest and excitement last year (with some apparent resonance beyond the 
too-cool-for-school, anti-academic academics who normally consume this kind of thing) to 
announce an ?accelerationist politics? as a programmatic remedy for a Left mired in crisis 
and depression.

Contextualising itself within a historical moment characterised by a set of existential 
threats to humanity (?the breakdown of the planetary climatic system? terminal resource 
depletion, especially in water and energy reserves? etc.), by the stagnation of 
contemporary capitalism, which has embraced a ?death spiral? of austerity policies, 
privatisation and wage stagnation, and by the retreat of the political imaginary, which is 
no longer capable of conceiving of a future other than more of the same, the MAP calls for 
a kind of ambivalent alliance with capital, as an alternative and more realistic 
revolutionary path to the ?neo-primitivist localism? and ?folk politics? of contemporary 
social movements, and the doomed fantasies of a return to Keynesianism clung to by various 
leftist parties.

Accelerationism argues that ?the only radical political response to capitalism is not to 
protest, disrupt or critique? but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, 
abstractive tendencies?(iii), that ?liberation must occur within the evolution of capital; 
that labour power must move against the blockage caused by capitalism; that a complete 
reversal of the class relation must be accomplished by the pursuit of constant economic 
growth and technological evolution? (iv) in order to produce ?an alternative modernity 
that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate?. Explicitly presenting itself as 
simultaneously a ?political heresy? (v) and as recovering some suppressed true progressive 
core of leftism, accelerationism effectively asks us to stake the future of the human 
species on an uneasy and ultimately treacherous alliance with capital: we must navigate 
our way through the blockages and crises of capital, liberating its potential, but only so 
that, ultimately, it can be transformed into something that is not-capital. (vi)

The thesis is certainly seductive, not least due to the rhetorical bombast (one might say 
machismo) of its presentation, but also in its capacity to speak to the frustrations of 
contemporary leftists, and its insistence on resurfacing futurist and utopian themes of 
space exploration and the transcendence of the limitations of the human body. But is this 
the seduction of a liberatory politics or of a suicidal impulse?

My contention, for reasons that I hope to make clear, is that the MAP is the presentation 
of the latter as the former, and therefore is not to be taken seriously as a programmatic 
document. It is more useful, I think, to read it as a kind of provocation to an 
ecologically-minded left. The question is not ?should we embrace accelerationism?? (to 
which I think the answer is a fairly obvious ?no?) but rather ?why not embrace 
accelerationism??

Why not throw your lot in with the massive abstract machinery and torrential flows of 
capital? If the revolutionary path is not to act within the evolution of capital, then 
what is it? What is it that we, the non-accelerationists, think can
(1) actually affect the kind of transformations necessary to confront the existential 
threats and political-economic formations we face, and
(2) recover the idea of a communist horizon designating the possibility of a world that is 
not only less oppressive than this one, but which is actually exciting in the experiences 
and possibilities it entails?

Cyborg-Lenin against the hippies
One of the strongest points of the MAP (or in any case, one which goes a long way towards 
purchasing credibility for its argument) is its withering critique of the Left, which 
speaks readily to the frustrations of a generation of leftists who had pinned their hopes 
to a set of anti-austerity movements and strategies which came, spectacularly, to nothing. 
The various Parties, both of the social democratic and Lenin-necromancing variety, are, 
rightly, castigated for their failure to think of any alternative to the neoliberal 
death-drive beyond an unlikely return to Keynesianism.

The social conditions that enabled Keynesian social-democracy simply no longer exist and 
cannot be recovered: ?We cannot return to mass industrial-Fordist labour by fiat, if at 
all.? And in any case, who would want to, given that the system relied on ?an 
international hierarchy of colonies, empires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national 
hierarchy of racism and sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation? and 
condemned workers to ?a lifetime of stultifying boredom and social repression? in return 
for security and a basic standard of living? I would only add that the Keynesian 
class-compromise didn?t work too well for us the first time round, leading, as it did, to 
the destruction of the trade union movement and the advent of neoliberalism, and we are 
unlikely to fare better a second time round given the present balance-of-forces between 
organised labour and capital.

?New social movements? and, implicitly, anarchists, are also singled out for critique by 
the MAP. Lacking transformative political vision, these movements fetishise ?internal 
direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy? and 
cling to ?a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism? which 
is utterly insufficient against an enemy that is ?intrinsically non-local, abstract, and 
rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.?

No one who has been through a process like the Occupy movement could fail to recognise 
some truth in this characterisation, and the notion of process-as-politics (and its 
corollary insistence on radical openness to the point of paralyzing incoherence) certainly 
needs to go the way of flower power into history?s dustbin of nice ideas that don?t work, 
but it is certainly possible for similar movements to sharpen their understanding of the 
relationship between means and ends without embracing the crypto-vanguardism of the MAP?s 
attempted rehabilitation of ?secrecy, verticality, and exclusion?.(vii)

Indeed, the MAP?s rather troubling solution to this problem is to dispense with the 
consideration of means altogether and define democracy entirely in terms of its end: 
?collective self-mastery? which must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, 
to the extent that it is only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and 
our world better (our social, technical, economic, psychological world) that we can come 
to rule ourselves? [through] a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in 
addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality? in which ?[the command of The Plan 
[is] married to the improvised order of The Network? ? a kind of Leninism via Facebook, in 
other words. Abstracted from all considerations of process, what sort of theory of 
sovereignty grounds this ?legitimate vertical authority??

No answer is given, but one suspects, given that for the MAP ?collective self-mastery? 
means to align politics with the goal of understanding ourselves and the world, and given 
the emphasis on the decisive role of cognitive labour (which the manifesto itself 
acknowledges consists of ?a vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual workers?) 
in the process of acceleration, this amounts to rule by a scientific-technical elite 
counterbalanced by some system of cyber soviets. (The flaws with this are obvious and I 
have neither the desire nor space here to rehearse debates over the Russian Revolution 
through speculative fiction.) (viii) Moreover, democratic concerns aside, what the MAP 
proposes in terms of strategy essentially amounts to a Gramscian long march through the 
institutions,(ix) a process surely far more tedious and self-defeating than the worst 
Occupy assembly.

More interesting and important is the anti-localism of the MAP. This is a significant and 
serious challenge to ecologically-minded leftists, many of whom are unfortunately trapped 
in an idealism which ?oppose[s] the abstract violence of globalised capital with the 
flimsy and ephemeral ?authenticity? of communal immediacy.? If capitalism is global so too 
must be our resistances and our efforts at social transformation. (x) History is not 
reversible, and globalisation means there is no longer any solution at the level of the 
nation-state, much less at the level of the locality, the ?transition town?, the 
bioregion, or any other territorial conception of space; all localisms entail the 
disappearance of the complex webs of relations that constitute the spaces of a globalised 
world, and consequently lack a plausible path from this world to theirs.

To take one example: modern food production and distribution relies on complex global 
networks, without which we would all starve within a matter of weeks. The practice of 
growing your own vegetables and building local distribution networks, which is commonplace 
in green milieus, and is often treated as if it were a radical ecological praxis, fails 
utterly to confront the complex logistical problems of producing enough food to feed 
everyone, and does not offer a scalable solution to the ecologically destructive effects 
of industrial food production. The accelerationists are right on this point: the material, 
social, biological, cultural, technological world around us is the only one we have to 
transform, and we either embrace the messy and contradictory task of making a livable 
world from it, or we perish.

Techno-Oedipalism
Perhaps the central contradiction of the MAP is that their pursuit of a radical 
orientation to the future requires the dusting off of an extremely old set of ideas. 
Marx?s historical materialism ? the theory that capitalism, which begins as the great 
liberator of the productive forces, sooner or later becomes an impediment to further 
development as the relations of production become too narrow and constraining xi ? is 
reproduced without any significant alteration.

Indeed, the manifesto?s basic diagnosis of the present social/political situation is 
precisely that capitalism, in its neoliberal form, has already become such a fetter on the 
forces of production:
?Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, 
direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea monopolisation are 
contemporary phenomena that point to both capital?s need to move beyond competition, and 
capital?s increasingly retrograde approach to technology? rather than a world of space 
travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where 
the only thing which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry.?

In 1848, Marx made a similar diagnosis xii:
?Modern bourgeois society? is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the 
powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the 
history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive 
forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are 
the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule?"

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development 
of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful 
for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these 
fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence 
of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the 
wealth created by them.?

Spot the difference! Needless to say, bourgeois society has spent the intervening 166 
years continually revolutionising the forces of production without too much difficulty. 
One might assume that the boy has cried terminal crisis too many times at this stage for 
anyone to seriously make such pronouncements anymore (particularly in a context that?s 
many orders of magnitude less revolutionary than that of 1848), but here we are.

The MAP translates the argument from the language of Marxist dialectics to that of Deleuze 
& Guattari?s anti-dialectical focus on potentials, assemblages and multiplicities ? we no 
longer have the forces of production straining at their fetters, but rather the latent 
potential of technosocial bodies that is blocked by neoliberalism ? but the argument 
remains substantially the same. There?s a distinction between ?acceleration? and ?speed? ? 
acceleration includes the concept of direction, and so accelerationism entails navigation 
and experimentation rather than blindly pursuing an already-determined direction ? but 
this is simply a fudge to pre-empt obvious critiques.

The physical concept of acceleration can have either a positive or negative value (i.e. 
can be an increase or decrease in speed), but this possibility is explicitly discounted as 
reactionary by the MAP ? there is to be no slowing down of capitalist acceleration ? the 
argument is every bit as teleological (i.e. the idea that history has an inbuilt tendency 
towards a goal, that of liberation through development of the productive forces) as the 
worst Hegelian moments of Marx.

Worse, this translation into trendy Deleuzo-Guattarian terms totally ignores one of the 
major insights of their thought: that crises, far from sounding the death knell of the 
capitalist mode of production, are part of the dynamism of capital that allows it to 
continually revolutionise production, without any natural (i.e. inbuilt or automatic) 
terminal point: the more the machine breaks down, the better it works.xiii

Central to the MAP?s enterprise is the reconnection of the Left ?to is its roots in the 
Enlightenment, in a rationalist and universal vision of collective human 
self-construction?.xiv To this end, 19th and early 20th Century modernist themes of Man?s 
mastery over nature are uncritically regurgitated, as if an entire century of critique had 
never happened.xv The MAP insists ?that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over 
society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving 
victory over capital.?

This Prometheanism is to be distinguished from classic Enlightenment chauvinism only in 
the sophistication of its science: ?[the clockwork universe of Laplace? is replaced by 
complex systems theory, but the basic conception of the Man-nature relationship remains 
utterly unchanged. Nature is a stage for Man?s triumphs, a problem to be overcome, and a 
thing to be dominated by Man?s will. Such arguments made a degree of sense in the 19th 
Century when capitalism still retained a vast outside waiting to be incorporated (although 
this incorporation involved rather a lot of genocide, and required the invention of race 
and racism as its ideological complement) and the resources of the Earth were still for 
all practical purposes infinite, but become rather more problematic in the context of a 
society whose very existence is called into question by the unsustainability of its 
relationship with the world it inhabits.

One might expect, at a minimum, some argumentation as to how the accelerated pursuit of 
economic growth and technological development is compatible with an ecologically 
sustainable civilisation. The MAP has nothing to say on this point. Instead, the various 
imminent ecological crises are raised at the beginning, only to be immediately brushed 
aside to talk about technology. The implication, made explicit in Negri?s ?reflections? on 
the manifesto, is that the question of ecology can be ?wholly subordinated to industrial 
politics?,xvi or really to the politics of technology, since it is technology which is the 
central concern of the MAP, and not class struggle.

This has two immediate implications, both disastrous. The first is the splitting of the 
human-nature relation from the relations of production, which ignores the ?fundamental 
identity [of industry] with nature as production of man and by man.?xvii There can be no 
industrial politics that is not immediately also a politics of nature, since all 
production presupposes and produces a particular way of relating to nature. All forms of 
capitalism necessarily require the objectification of nature ? its production as commodity 
and as property ? which produces its unchecked exploitation as a necessary feature. The 
metabolic relationship xviii of humans to nature is fractured through the subordination of 
both humans and nature to capital. It is with this process that the MAP insists we ally 
ourselves.

Second, in subordinating the question of ecology to that of technology, ecology is 
transformed from a political to a scientific-technical question. Rather than being a 
question of how to transform society to allow for a sustainable relationship with nature, 
we are asked simply to trust that liberating the productive forces can produce a 
technological fix. This is, at best, a massive gamble in the short to medium-term, in 
which the stake is the survival of human civilisation, and in any case, it fails to 
resolve the crises produced by our antagonistic relationship to nature, but merely 
displaces them in time, while deepening our entanglement with destructive forms of 
production in the meantime.

Moreover, the manifesto fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the relationship of 
technology to society. Technology is neither to be rejected nor embraced as such: it is 
neither a route to liberation (as the accelerationists contend) nor a bringer of doom (as 
the primitivists contend), but must be understood in a way that fully subordinates it to 
social relations (i.e. what kind of society produces and utilises it). This is not the 
same thing as arguing that technology is neutral and can merely slot unproblematically 
into whatever social relations it encounters. Technology is produced under particular 
social conditions and is designed for those social conditions. As an objectification of 
the intellect of a particular form of society, its tendency is to objectify the social 
relations of that society as the facticity of the non-human environment, and thus to 
reproduce those social relations. This means that any communist movement is inevitably 
confronted with the problem of repurposing a technological infrastructure built for a 
capitalist world to communist ends ? a task with no simple solution. The accelerationist 
response to this challenge, for all their out-of-context appropriation ofAnti-Oedipus, is 
decidedly oedipal in form: the major work of producing a communist and ecologically 
sustainable future is displaced onto ?the tendency? ? capital-daddy and techno-mommy.

Back to the Future
Ultimately, all this talk of politics is simply a means to an end from the point of view 
of the MAP?s central concern: the recovery of the vector of the Future, and the sense of 
hope and excitement that entails. For the MAP, this entails the resurfacing of modernist 
dreams of extraterrestrial travel, and the transcendence of the biological limitations of 
the human body (and specifically of the contingency and vulnerability of the human 
condition as a species within nature), and of sci-fi and cyberpunk concerns with 
cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and with the production of new an alien terrains of 
virtual and post-human experience. It is easy to mock dreams ? this is probably the 
ugliest and most hollow of all intellectual activities ? and there will be none of that 
here. In the context of a planetary deficit of imagination and hope that is the corollary 
of the contemplation of coming disasters that threaten our annihilation, and of a 
pervasive sneering postmodern sensibility that retains always a protective ironic distance 
from all belief, we urgently need to recover the capacity and courage to dream.

The accelerationist reminder that within living memory generations of humans really 
believed that a better tomorrow awaited them (whether through the social democratic state, 
the inventive powers of the free market, or the coming communist revolution) is hugely 
important. Even a thoroughly bourgeois thinker like Keynes believed that one day 
automation would liberate the masses from drudgery. Now, after decades being bludgeoned 
with neoliberal ideology, There Is No Alternative is the new common sense, and our dreams 
have been quietly smothered one-by-one. To dream today is a radical act, and one crucial 
to our hopes of survival. But what are we to make of the particular dreams of the 
accelerationists?

Throughout the MAP, there is an unstable tension between the future as open and 
experimental space of as-yet-unrealised potential and the Future as a particular and 
historically-specific set of dreams to which we must return, that is, basically, between a 
future that is yet to be imagined and constructed, and futurism as a particular aesthetic 
and cultural mode of imagining the future, which by now amounts to a set of warmed-up 
Hollywood sci-fi clich?s. ?Remembering the future?xix is the unfortunate theme of 
acelerationism, and, through its conflation of futurism with futurity, it ends up 
producing an imaginary that, rhetorical packaging aside, is much too narrow and 
conservative. Other futures are possible beyond the endless accumulation of new 
technologies. Even the primitivist milieu (or ?post-civ? as they now call themselves, 
having realised that a bunch of trendy white kids fetishising the ways of life of 
indigenous peoples is rather colonialist), for all their nihilism, have an idea of a 
future: instead of the safe and controlled virtuality of cyber-alterity, what about the 
actuality of wilderness as a space of excitement, exploration and danger?xx I?m not 
endorsing this ? certainly better dreams are possible ? my point, merely, is that 
technological acceleration is not the only vector to the future, that techno-utopians do 
not have a monopoly on libido, and that constraining our imaginings in advance to what is 
achievable through technological development does humanity a disservice.

In any case, there is something strikingly hollow in all this technological speculation. 
All this brushed aluminum cyborg novelty is all well and good, but its a rather 
mono-dimensional image of the future. What happens to the ordinary ? that dimension of 
mundane everyday experience that, no matter how far we push the horizons of technology, 
persists, reconfigures itself, and insinuates itself constantly into our 
lived-experience?xxi In its rush to escape the ordinary and pursue the alien, the MAP 
neglects this vital dimension of human experience, and de facto abandons a crucial concern 
of the Left (particularly the post-68 Left): the liberation of everyday life.

There is little discussion of, or concern with human relationships, in the manifesto; 
social relations are understood as essentially a problem to be overcome, a blockage to 
technological potential, and the task of their re-arrangement is basically subordinated to 
the project of neo-Enlightenment mastery. Never are social relations considered in 
themselves, in their meaning or importance for the human subjects that enter into them. 
This is crucial. One of the most commonly occurring themes in science fiction is that of a 
technological utopia that, on the surface, offers all sorts of fascinating and novel 
experiences, but whose obscene underbelly is that, in the sphere of everyday human 
relations, the same old repressions, the same violence and exploitation, the same misery, 
remains. (Indeed, from a certain historical point of view, that is precisely the world we 
already live in.)

What the MAP misses, above all else, is that what is oppressive and experientially 
miserable about capitalism is not its frustration of technological progress (that all that 
develops ?is marginally better consumer gadgetry?, say), but that, because we are 
determined to relate to one-another another always through the abstract machinery of 
capital, we have so little real experience of one-another. We spend our entire lives 
living and working together in utterly alienated ways and even the new communications 
technologies which supposedly bring the world together only function to trap us more 
totally in the prisons of our selves. What unexplored potential lies blocked by the 
alienated ways of working together that capital requires for its reproduction? What might 
we experience and achieve together if we were free to explore new ways of relating? These 
questions are left unexplored by the MAP, but, to paraphrase the manifesto?s rather 
cringey nod to Deleuze, surely we don?t yet know what a social body can do?



REFERENCES:
i Some of the arguments in this review were developed through a discussion with WSM 
members and supporters. The audio of that discussion is available 
at:http://www.mixcloud.com/workerssolidarity/a-chat-about-the-manifesto-for-for-an-accelerationist-politics-wsm-dublin/listeners/

ii Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, #ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, 
available at: 
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/(All 
quotations are from the Manifesto unless otherwise stated.)

iii Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, ?Introduction? in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist 
Reader,p.4
iv Antonio Negri, Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE 
MANIFESTO,http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/26/reflections-accelerate-manifesto/

iv Antonio Negri, Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO, 
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/26/reflections-accelerate-manifesto/

v Mackay & Avanessian, op. cit.

vi The authors noticeably shun the word ?communism? in favour of ?post-capitalism?. This 
is hardly incidental, given that MAP is concerned with the transformation of social 
relations for the purpose of unleashing suppressed productive and technological potential, 
rather than instrumentalising technology to the production of an egalitarian society. This 
distinction is significant.

vii The main problem with vanguards, from the point of view of social movements ? and this 
is hardly a moralising critique ? is that their tendency is to fuck things up far more 
often than they steer their troops with uncanny insight and prescience, and to leave a 
wasteland of bitterness and division in their wake. ?Relentless horizontalism?, exhausting 
though it may be, is generally preferable to being steered or manipulated by the 
blunderings of some tinpot Lenin.

viii One of the recurring ironies of the MAP is that amidst all its supposed novelty, some 
very old and worn-out ideas keep popping up. They even manage to reproduce the absurd 
practice of sticking in a tenuously relevant Lenin quote to authorise their argument.

ix Patricia Reed, ?Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism? in #Accelerate: The 
Accelerationist Reader, p.523

x Of course, everything remains localised to the extent that it happens somewhere and not 
elsewhere ? even cyberspace is still a space, albeit one with a weird rhizomatic geometry 
? it is not a question of producing One Big Movement that unites the whole world, but of 
building linkages between geographical localities based on an understanding of the 
increasingly non-geographical nature of social space. This, I think, is the only useful 
interpretation of the slogan ?think global, act local?.

xi ?At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into 
conflict with the existing relations of production or ? this merely expresses the same 
thing in legal terms ? with the property relations within the framework of which they have 
operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn 
into their fetters.? Karl Marx, Preface to ?A Contribution to the Critique of Political 
Economy?, 1859
xii Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

xiii ?The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a 
dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the 
contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they 
engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and 
has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility 
of capitalism?s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And 
the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American 
way.? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.181

xiv Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Armen Avanessian, #Accelerationism: Remembering the 
Future,http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/10/accelerationism-remembering-future/

xv There is a truly vast body of critique on this theme, spanning the Frankfurt School, 
ecofeminism, postcolonial theory, virtually all ecological thought, postmodernism, 
post-structuralism, and doubtless many more radical critical traditions. I?ve used the 
term ?Man? deliberately to emphasise the strongly gendered nature of the opposition 
between humans and nature, and of the notion of mastery over nature.

xvi Negri, op. cit.

xvii Deleuze & Guattari, op. cit., p.4

xviii ?Man [sic] lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a 
continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man?s physical and mental 
life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part 
of nature.? Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts. See John Holloway, Crack 
Capitalism, pp.125-9 for more depth on this point.

xix Srnicek, Williams & Avanessian, op. cit.

xx This point on danger could do with further elaboration, if space permitted. For now, 
let me simply ask: what if the end result of mastery over the conditions of human 
existence, and the transcendence of all contingency and vulnerability, is not liberation, 
but a new and intolerable kind of boredom that comes from being the kept pet of a 
benevolent and omnipotent machine intelligence? What if the abolition of all that keeps us 
weak is also the abolition of the danger and uncertainty that makes life interesting?

xxi Robert Jackson?s Ordinaryism: An Alternative to Accelerationism is an inspiration for 
this point, albeit a rather dull and turgid kind of inspiration. Available 
at:http://furtherfield.org/features/articles/ordinaryism-alternative-accelerationism-part-1-thanks-nothing