Marxists have attributed every real defeat of the working class since the post war era to accidental causes. When the Soviet Union collapsed it was because they were revisionist or capitalist or something; when China turned toward Dengism, they too revealed themselves to have always been revisionist or capitalist or something; the rise of Reaganomics is attributed to the proliferation of conservative think-tanks or the betrayal of the Democrats or bourgeois ideologies like racism; the steady decline in union membership in all the advanced countries is the product of sabotage by union misleaders or whatever. There has been an unmistakable trend toward neoliberalism, with pretty much every developed country undergoing deregulation http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/econ/oecd3.html
Every defeat can be explained by its own particular causes and, indeed, according to some of the Leftists, every crisis is now said to have its own cause.
The nightmare for the Left is the possibility that Land connects all of the dots, disclosing the inner logic of what has, until now, been considered disparate and unrelated events, thus showing them all to be no more than particular moments in the unfolding of an impersonal, indifferent, process that cannot be reversed or halted. Rather than the class conflicts of the last three decades being moments of “anti-capitalist resistance”, in Land’s argument they are simply the process of capitalist development expressing itself through the actions of individuals who have no grasp of the forces with which they contend.
In this visioning of capital, even the human itself can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilizations. As Land has it, through the acceleration of global capitalism the human will be dissolved in a technological apotheosis, effectively experiencing a species-wide suicide as the ultimate stimulant head rush.
Capitalism, in this view, is less something we do than something done to us. Contra business-class bromides about the market as the site of creative expression, for Land, as for Marx, capitalism is a fundamentally alien institution in which “the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative.” This means simply that the competitive dynamics of capitalism drive technical progress as an iron law. If one capitalist doesn’t want to build smarter, better machines, he’ll be out-competed by one who does. If America doesn’t breed genetically modified super-babies, China will. The market doesn’t run on “greed,” or any intentionality at all. Its beauty—or horror—is its impersonality. Either you adapt, or you die.
Accelerating technological growth, then, is written into capitalism’s DNA. Smart machines make us smarter allowing us to make smarter machines, in a positive feedback loop that quickly begins to approach infinity, better known in this context as “singularity.” Of course, since by definition you can’t reach infinity, what this singularity actually represents is a breakdown in the process of extrapolation; something happens—a “phase shift,” in cybernetic patois—that changes the dynamics of the entire system. This could be a system collapse, and in fact, positive feedback loops often burn themselves out once they consume all the inputs that made them possible in the first place. Another option, however, is the emergence of something totally new at a higher level of organization. An example might be the shift from single-cell to multicellular organisms, or, more to the point, biological to artificial intelligence.
Despite progressive reforms, capitalism is hard to corral. For one, social democracy doesn’t seem to be a sustainable fix. The golden age of the Western welfare state —roughly 1945 to 1973—looks in retrospect to have been a freak accident of history. It rested, as Thomas Piketty has argued, on a number of special conditions unlikely to be repeated. Moreover, capital is elusive, global, and decentralized, while political sovereignty remains tied to bounded territorial units. Perhaps most deadly of all, capitalism is fast, while democratic deliberation is slow. The market generates new realities before we’ve even had time to agree on what to do about the old, and this trend intensifies exponentially (or hyperbolically) at higher levels of technological development.
To Land, Thatcher was entirely correct to tell the society, “There is no alternative.”
There was never any alternative, says Land; the only possibility was to accelerate an otherwise inevitable epoch in human history. Marxists, and the Left in general, have never been happy with Thatcher’s famous declaration, but they have yet to credibly refute it.
http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/