Is capital an accelerator? Acceleration of the productive forces as escape and antagonism

Abstract

Modern capitalism is often defined by its speed and acceleration when compared to previous social formations. Contemporaneously, the theoretical position known in general as “accelerationism” gained some relevance, which puts, in general lines, that capital is a driving force of development, progression and, consequently, acceleration, inciting revolutions and ruptures in the modes of social organization and, thus, not being a deterritorialization process that can be contained, the acceleration of capital is seen as an imperative. Immanently to this current, there appears, on the left, an opposition to the idea that it is capital that should be accelerated, alerting to the blockage and restriction that capital causes in the social productive forces, opening space for a socio-technical reappropriation and an opposite acceleration to the development of capital, towards a post-capitalism. In our view, as much as these theories make important contributions to the debate on the development of capitalism, they lose sight of the centrality of productive forces and desiring-production as the real vector of acceleration. Returning mainly to Deleuze and Guattari and the theoretical matrix of (post-) operaism, we seek to analyze the weak points in the theoretical development of both the accelerationism of Nick Land and the accelerationism of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, taken by us as the main vectors of two accelerationist tendencies, seeking to affirm the thesis that, it is the desiring-productive forces that accelerate the active production of their lines of flight in a process of antagonism, to which capital and its apparatus of capture must, "running after" in a second structural moment, capture with an acceleratory and progressive movement.