VOL 1.5 is an externally commissioned soundcloud mix with MCing and supporting text. The mix with MCing can be found at the link. The text is presented below.

soundcloud.com/min-report/005-liam-kenny

The idea that acceleration of capitalist processes might advance freedom is an apprehension generated by the ways time is experienced in capitalism, where the social practice of commodified labour comes into conflict with industrial imperatives that are both generated by and undermining of that practice, confounding cause and effect and turning the labourers’ demand for the value of their labour into the cheapening of its price. This is experienced as a function of time in at least two senses: time spent at work seems to persist as the measure of something and the accumulation of work over longer periods of time confronts humanity as an apparently alien stockpile and compulsion. Accelerationists, like Luddites, express one side of capitalism’s progressive/regressive dynamic stasis, a process we might alternatively want to affirm, reject, speed up, or “pull the emergency brake” on. Unlike Luddites, they claim to be doing theory.

'The new does not add itself to the old but remains the old in distress,' and 'only he who recognises that the new is the same old thing will be of service to whatever is different.' The separation of theory and practice is only potentially a false one – it remains real as long as 'the whole is false.' There can be no adequate theory without the practice adequate to it, which in turn cannot take place as long as theory gratifies itself ‘imagining’ ‘futures’ that are pale projections of existing tendencies. The Bonapartist police state is evidently keen to not only tolerate, but actually grant funding to such theory, which could conceivably be startling in another social context and appears to be no cause for concern in this one.

Probably related is the problem of ‘political art’ as that which takes a position – a confinement that would debase the aesthetic field if it were possible to further debase a ward of the state. Any meaningful statement anyone could make about anything might have to take as its starting point that there is nothing that could be said that the conflict between property relations and productive forces has not had an answer to for almost two centuries. This would be why Lenin thought that the immediate task was to be ‘radical’ in a very specific sense: to be as radical as reality itself. Today, trendoid theorists and content creators invert his challenge: taking themselves to be the radical element in a lagging reality, they weigh the latter on a scale that is worse than useless.

The writer has recorded a vocal track over a selection of songs as a contribution to this.