Jeff Shantz || In the current period capital’s accumulation needs have driven more vicious outcomes. It is no longer enough, from capital’s perspective, to dispossess—accumulation, for capital, requires extermination. Capital is no longer willing to allow any profit to be drained off in, even minimal, service to sectors of the working class that it deems to be expendable, unnecessary to capital for either production or consumption. Clearing the path for accumulation means clearing out the working-class.
Capital is accelerationist. Working-class movements must recognize this, come to grips with this, and respond accordingly. A too often unrecognized, too little remarked upon aspect of the neoliberal project has been capitalist acceleration. While critical analysis has understandably focused on neoliberal austerity, de-regulation, upwards wealth transfer, and repression, the accelerationist aspect of this has too often been underplayed or omitted entirely—with a few exceptions such as the important work of Paul Virilio.
Neoliberal acceleration has had dual components—one in freeing up and speeding up capitalist exploitation and accumulation, as in de-regulation, union busting, free trade, etc. The other aspect has been the speeding up of life and labor for the working class—through intensified exploitation (speed ups), facilitated partly through computerization, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI), but also through the every hour “workplace” of social media, email, online labor and the every hour online marketplace.
The freeing up of accumulation has had an associated component of dislodging the working class—making the working class more precarious but also circulatable. The closure of workplaces (de-industrialization as occurred under the impact of free trade for example), the dispossession of working-class communities, gentrification and displacement of the urban working class, the privatization of public and social services, the pure commodification of housing (the end of social housing and rent controls, etc.).
The disruption, dispossession, and displacement of working-class communities has had a temporal aspect that is often overlooked. It has dislodged and disrupted the day-to-day rhythms of working-class life. Days structured around familiar rhythms of work (in or outside of the home), relaxation, rest, leisure, have disappeared for many in accelerated conditions of work—gig work, multiple jobs, virtual work, the permanent job search, etc.
The working-class has lost the, admittedly limited, moorings that offered some buffer against the forces of acceleration. So not only precarity, but the rapidity of precarity has accelerated.
The very different works that have offered the most developed analysis of the underlying processes of accelerationist neoliberalism and accumulation are Paul Virilio’s lengthy analysis of speed politics (going back to the Eighties) and David Harvey’s extended discussions of accumulation by dispossession.
Harvey details these various components of uprooting of the working class under neoliberalism and the clearing out of the working class to aid and abet capitalist circulation—removing the obstructions to the flows of capital which are what the working class and its lifeways fundamentally represent to capital.
Accumulation by dispossession highlights the thuggish, unwrapped viciousness by which capitalism today ravages the planet in its desperate rush to turn life into commodities and open or speed up circuits of realization of profit—and capital’s need to remove barriers to realization. As Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism:
“By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as “primitive” or “original” during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.”
The ground cleared, capital is freed up to accelerate-and pursues continuous acceleration as its own end, as Virilio has much earlier highlighted and stressed. To slow down, for capital, is to die.
From Accumulation by Dispossession to Accumulation by Death
In the current period, however, capital’s accumulation needs have driven more vicious outcomes. It is no longer enough, from capital’s perspective, to dispossess—accumulation, for capital, requires extermination. Capital is no longer willing to allow any profit to be drained off in, even minimal, service to sectors of the working class that it deems to be expendable, unnecessary to capital for either production or consumption.
Clearing the path for accumulation means clearing out the working-class waste completely and permanently, from the perspective of capital. Capital is not willing to see anything go to maintain the unneeded working class, even in bare poverty conditions. A penny spent on the surplus working-class is a penny wasted.
This is shown fully both in capital’s demand for tax cuts. But also, in its demands for cuts to essential human services—welfare, health care, housing, shelter, harm reduction, education at all levels. The intended outcome is the deaths of those masses of people needing these services. The expansion of murder infrastructures (regardless of cost because they have utility for capital)—police, prisons, military, border forces—will ensure that the killings happen with speed.
Death becomes a crucial policy outcome. The crucial outcome. Murder becomes the essential service.
A Hard Stop: Against Decelerationist Anticapitalism
This has significant implications for working-class movements and resistance broadly (including anti-colonial, anti-imperialist). It has implications for anti-capitalism itself. Previous movements, over generations, have been generally what we might call decelerationist. They have attempted to slow, restrain, limit, negotiate, and manage the speed of capitalist development. Slow capitalist development, slow the spread of its harms and impacts, slow growth, slow exploitation. This has shaped organizing approaches, aims, and timelines.
Capitalist accelerationism blows all of this apart. The speed of capitalism and its pursuit of accumulation is unleashing disasters, crises, and mass death. It is disrupting, dispossessing, displacing with such speed that only carnage is left in its wake.
There is no longer time for a slowdown—planetary life, under climate crises, is facing an end. Anti-capitalist opposition must not only accelerate its capacities to end capitalism—it must be oriented now to a hard stop. Not deceleration—an emergency break. A hard, jarring stop.
Further Reading
Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford:Oxford University Press
Virilio, Paul. 1986. Speed and Politics. New York: Semiotext(e)
Virilio, Paul and Sylvere Lotringer. 1983. Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e)
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