Robert King's Illuminations Lecture

Which Way to Go? Deciding on a Planetary Politics: The Future Behavior of Capital’s Accumulation Regimes and its Modes of Crisis-Governance This lecture analyzes the dynamics of the capital from a systems-theoretical point of view, combined with analysis of its social metabolic reproduction (SMR) - a variation on Marx’s concept. The main aim is to assay the future behavior of the capital system: the fluxes of capital suggest how the system is being attracted by, or gravitates toward, its path-dependency on accumulation regimes (AR), with implications which indicate that we must fundamentally redraw the lines of our political and economic theorizing. The system’s current, financial, rentier-oriented neoliberal path-dependency yields a reduction of its eco-immunity buffers, creating an environs in which capital’s rival ARs vie to maintain governance over the structural parameters of the system’s status-quo reproduction. The situation is unique inasmuch as capital now adapts to its own (cyberpositive) production of chaos (evident in its acceleration or teleoplexy, or else in its stultifying reformisms). These rival ARs vie for exergy: free energy available in the system for the SMR of its structural order. Today, three rival attractors set the stage for analysis of the system’s future behavior: 1) top-down management of emergent order (e.g., in the form of returns to Keynesian-style governance of the political economy or Lenin-esque imperialist management); 2) experimentation with bad forms of chaos (neocon tactics like the development of US DARPA’s research in robots designed to forage for biomass to secure their functioning- the devouring of human and other materials in war-zones)- an accumulation regime that responds directly to low-exergy environs; 3) low-input-oriented, horizontalist-minded, capture of spontaneous order (as can be witnessed in low-input urban agricultural movements). This last AR is embraced by a variety of strains of contemporary Continental political theory, varieties of beautiful soul- oriented Deleuzo-Guattarianism, tactic-oriented anarchism, occupy-oriented democratic theory championing grassroots organizational principles, etc., but has also been heavily criticized by the recent accelerationist movement. For these latter, horizontalisms fail to grasp the ineluctability of the capital system’s cybernetic intensification (Land), the inescapability of its tendencies toward technological singularity (Srnicek & Williams), etc. This lecture proposes a framework for grasping the future behavior of the capital system and uses a thermo-entropic analysis of the system to reframe the debate about rival ARs. The idea is to determine which amongst the rival ARs (and the theories which advocate for them), seem like reasonable (thermodynamically feasible) planetary political programs in the 21st century.