Accelerationism: Dos and Don’ts
Accelerationism is the word for the political tendency among radicals to encourage the worst among their enemies, and to be dismissive of short-term material gains that fall short of a revolution. It’s a form of logical argument, and you can see this form replicated among many political movements with different concrete values.
It’s leftists who argue that Trump will be good for revealing the ugly face of nationalism; it’s right-anarchists who thought the ACA would be so bad it would undermine support for all of big government liberalism; an environmentalist would rather a park become polluted and ugly and get people to focus on corporate actors who contribute to climate change.
The current society is mired in a capitalist ideology dedicated to making everyone miserable. It cannot be redeemed or purified. Should measures like increased Medicaid funding, or a cool black man as President, be supported as making lives better and the oppressed happier, or should we withhold our support because they distract from the only goal that will get us out of this system: anti-capitalist revolution?
That’s the question of accelerationism in a nutshell. Things are getting bad, do we make them get bad faster to bring about the inevitable end state sooner? It’s an accusation that gets through around between center-leftists and far-leftists a lot.
But we are really talking about two different things, and that is key.
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In purely material terms, should you help the worst off, or should you refrain in order to stoke the fires of their anger?
This is obviously a dumb question.
There is no guarantee the revolution is coming. There might never be a revolution. Or the revolution might just empower a totalitarian dystopia. Or your neglectful immiseration of people might be entirely irrelevant to that revolution.
The world is very large, and very complex, and incredibly uncertain. Especially when it comes to political tactics. Who the fuck knows what works. Who knows if your long-term goal is really a good idea. We’re not talking “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush,” we’re talking “a bird we’re about to catch is still better than two thousand birds in a bush on top of a high mountain in another country that someone told you about once.”
Your ethical responsibility is to proximate results. Help the people you can, do things that you know will work and that you can see the results of. Resist ideologies and political theories that say “actually doing this mean or easy thing serves the greater good in the very long term” and who never seem to actually pay out the greater good. Focus instead on specificity in your practical solutions.
So yes, increased Medicaid funding is great. No ethical left should oppose it.
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But there’s a difference between helping everyone, and making a situation smoother and more pleasant.
For instance, David Simon, creator of the Wire which dramatizes amazingly well how the drug war hurts black communities, is opposed to marijuana legalization.
“I’m against it,” Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. “The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed.“I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that’s very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail,” he continued, “and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do.”(Yes, I’m assuming everyone who reads this is pro-legalization, at least in terms of ending the brutal Drug War.)
If you think Simons is being too blinkered here, let’s imagine a more extreme scenario: What if we legalized heroin and instituted addiction-rehabilitation programs for the families of Congresspeople?
Now, the families of Congresspeople are people too. Their pain is real. If one of them goes to jail for possession, that is bad. And if they are addicted, humane and effective rehabilitation is better than jail. So from a pure harm reduction stance, how can you object to this?
But we of course know the incentives it sets up. It is good that Congress labors under the same laws as the rest of its citizenry. They should pay the cost for these laws like the rest of us, so that if the laws are cruel and unjust they will notice and get rid of them. A world where their kids don’t go to jail for possession is more pleasant to them, but it’s not beneficial for everyone.
That may be absurdly extreme, but it’s not very different from “legalizing the drug white people do.” The Drug War is cruel, invasive, and counter-productive - exempting some upper classes from it allows them to forget that experience, and to Other the people who do experience its vicissitudes.
This is, for instance, the problem with tax deductions for employer sponsored healthcare. It guarantees healthcare to the people our ruling class interacts with, leaving out and isolating the people our rulers avoid anyway, making it even harder to get any help for them. This is why universal programs are so important.
That accelerationism, to pull down the benefits some people enjoy that allow them to ignore the pain of the larger masses, is good and just. It is right to pull off the pleasant mask of capitalism or state violence, so that everyone sees its obscene underneath.
So, when faced with the question of, “do I want to make things worse in order to encourage far off radical solutions”, we need to figure out whether it’s a policy that helps everyone, or a policy that merely covers up the existing harsh reality, and then decide our accelerationism.
How is marijuana for white kids? A quick Google confirms marijuana use is about even across race, but there’s a disproportionate number of black arrests for marijuana
This! This! This!
From the ACLU: “Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana.“
@bambamramfan is defending (along with David Simon) continuing a policy that disproportionately hurts blacks, in the name of not taking palliative measures that disproportionately benefit whites. This isn’t smart accelerationism, it’s pants-on-head lunacy.
I also think @balioc is right on principle in the (counterfactual) debate he’s been having bambamramfan about this, but ultimately secondary to the fact that the position the latter is taken is premised on factual claims that simply aren’t true.
When in doubt, check numbers!
(Not to mention that a lot of the black kids who take up smoking crack would likely take up smoking cannabis instead, if smoking cannabis were legal and smoking crack continued to be illegal. Because duh.)
I suppose I should say: yes, this is entirely true. The fight-over-ethical-principle is worth having, which is why I’ve been doing that, but the particular object-level issue at hand here is more properly dealt with by pointing this out.