Abstract
Contemporary theories of social emancipation contend that it is time to dispense with the concept of revolution and leave it merely as the legacy of political struggles belonging to the age of industrial economy. Today’s globalization, semio-capital, speculative design, crypto-economy, and artificial intelligence would engage epistemologically different emancipatory lexicons and techniques of resistance. All new futurisms posit technological solutions for hitherto political stakes. What remains unheeded in them is the existential need for cognitive equality and social continuity with the masses in constructing the collective subject of emancipation. Recent election results in the U.S., U.K., Eastern Europe, and Russia diagnose an immense cognitive rupture between the producers of emancipatory lexicons and disadvantaged workers. Such a split between mind and body was already made apparent in Hegel’s dialectics of lord and bondsman. In order to surpass this split, it is of utmost importance to reconsider the conditions in which the premature construction of the proletariat took place in the context of the October revolution. The proletariat was posited in this case not only as revolutionary subject, but as the principal subject of Enlightenment as well.
Highlights
In contemporary techno-oriented emancipatory programs, the idea of repoliticizing the social sphere — as well as the term revolution — is dismissed in favor of reprogramming the capitalist machine
Accelerationist, cybernetic, xenofeminist, and ANT (Actor Network Theory) futurologies alike identify techno-scientific development as a productive force capable of superceding political deadlocks. They privilege a redesign of the software of cognitive practices and technological inventions over politics — an idea that sounds rather more like a solidarity appeal to silicon valley workers than broad solidarity with the working masses or disenfranchised social groups. While this defiance of revolution and of the political subject in techno-scientific theories of emancipation is justified on the grounds of the inevitable technological reconstitution of social agencies, such theories ignore the fact that it is to a considerable extent political will and existential and ontological need that is able to establish continuity with the unprivileged masses and delegate them the tools for social, economic, and cognitive subjectivation
The question is whether the contemporary enlightened cognitive producer is able to solve the problem of rupture by using lexicons of emancipation that divide society into a socially progressive “intelligentsia” and an obscurantist brain-washed masses — a rupture which continues to determine the success of conservative political forces today
Summary
In contemporary techno-oriented emancipatory programs, the idea of repoliticizing the social sphere — as well as the term revolution — is dismissed in favor of reprogramming the capitalist machine. Accelerationist, cybernetic, xenofeminist, and ANT (Actor Network Theory) futurologies alike identify techno-scientific development as a productive force capable of superceding political deadlocks They privilege a redesign of the software of cognitive practices and technological inventions over politics — an idea that sounds rather more like a solidarity appeal to silicon valley workers than broad solidarity with the working masses or disenfranchised social groups. For Marx and Lenin, the proletariat is not merely the working class, struggling for political emancipation It is the class which, despite its deprivation, is able to prematurely acquire self-consciousness, i.e. to posit itself as a supreme subject of knowledge, and embody the most developed stage of consciousness — even ahead of any nominal grasp of the cognitive outcomes, technologies, and productive forces that would allow it to reach such a developed stage. The question is whether the contemporary enlightened cognitive producer is able to solve the problem of rupture by using lexicons of emancipation that divide society into a socially progressive “intelligentsia” and an obscurantist brain-washed masses — a rupture which continues to determine the success of conservative political forces today
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