Acceleration as the Rotational Velocity of Capital’s Globalized Circulation
Discussion
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"It points to a historical process by which capital as a whole becomes increasingly circulatory. Production, marketing and financialization become increasingly tightly integrated; ever larger ratios of waged labour are devoted to logistical, marketing and financial (i.e. “circulation1”) rather than production activities; the “annihilation of space by time” (Marx 1973, 539), the mission of the circulation1, is intensified by production operations at the scale of the world market and the whole ensemble is increasingly governed by the logics of velocity.
The oscillating semantics of circulation this point to the accelerationist tendencies of capital. Acceleration, in both its left and right variants, is often thought as a rocket-like ascension of technological powers, blasting towards some fatal or utopian destination. That ascending, dynamic is, however, propelled by, and in turn propels, the rotational velocity of capital’s globalized circulation. The technological medium, both product and cause, of this circulatory intensification is provided through the successive revolutionizing of industrial processes by capital, of which the latest is the so-called third or fourth industrial revolution of mobile communication, high speed 5G networks, artificial intelligences, and advanced automation (see Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012 and 2014; Kjøsen 2016). This is the process for which Big Tech (and, increasingly, its Chinese capitalist competitors) are capitalism’s vanguard, and circulation is the concept that we will use as to connect the ascendancy of platform capitalism with the rise of populist electoral parties, a global pandemic, and worldwide riot. The thread of circulation links platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots."
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