The other day, Hillary Clinton made a speech about the 'alt-right', summing it up as a continuation of long-running right wing ideologies that have existed in the US and the world for decades. In many ways this is true, but there is a deeper philosophical underpinning of the 'alt-right' that actually comes from Marxist analyses of capitalism. The key figure behind this philosophy is a bloke from the University of Warwick named Nick Land, and his philosophy is accelerationism.
A primer from September last year (worth reading the whole thing):
https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac19#.8jrl1tt3v
The author in the above article goes deeper into the idea below:
https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-left-and-right/
A primer from September last year (worth reading the whole thing):
https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac19#.8jrl1tt3v
Land’s greatest legacy was a philosophy now known as “Accelerationism,” a heady cocktail of nihilism, cybernetic Marxism, complexity theory, numerology, jungle music, and the dystopian sci-fi of William Gibson and Blade Runner. Land identified the critique that progressively dissolved all claims to truth as the philosophical correlate of a capitalist economic system locked in constant revolutionary expansion, moving upwards and outwards on a trajectory of technological and scientific intelligence-generation that would, at the limit, make the leap from its human biological hosts into the great beyond. For Land, as for Nietzsche, the death of God results ultimately in the desire to be destroyed, with capitalism the agent of this destruction.
The author in the above article goes deeper into the idea below:
https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-left-and-right/
Absent LTV [labor theory of value], all that Left Accelerationism can really hope for is a sort of socialist voluntarism that subjects production and exchange to supervenient political aims. But here we’re back to the problem of central planning, and thus have lost whatever libidinal futurist appeal Left Accelerationism had in the first place . More strikingly, absent LTV, the problem posed to humanity by the technological drive of capital is not how to reach the New Jerusalem that the elimination of human labor from the production process will allow, but that this elimination will simply result in humans becoming superfluous to an increasingly autonomic system of machine production. What we will do with a warming planet of 10 billion people when progressively fewer of them can be productively integrated into the global economy, the marginal cost of their labor sinks below the cost of their own social reproduction, and states are obliged to provide for larger and larger numbers of unproductive workers at the expense of smaller and smaller numbers of high-skill workers who can still be plugged in to economically-productive roles? This is an entirely different economic, political, and ethical problematic. In this landscape, Land’s killer AI, speciation, and Galt’s Gulch-style ‘exit’ all begin to look like provisional speculative (if malevolent) answers to the question of: what do you do with all these (economically) useless people?