/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

There is a recurring tendency within revolutionary politics to greet every crisis with optimism. Inflation rises, wages stagnate or fall, housing becomes unaffordable, ecological collapse accelerates, governments become increasingly reactionary, and someone inevitably declares that these are "good." Not because they are good in themselves, but because they are believed to contain the seeds of revolutionary transformation. The suffering of the present is interpreted as the midwife of a liberated future.

This tendency is neither confined to the political left nor unique to the twenty-first century. Throughout the history of capitalism, socialists, anarchists, communists, as well as fascists, liberals, and conservatives have all, at different moments, imagined catastrophe as politically clarifying. The wager is simple. The contradictions of society intensify until they become unbearable, forcing people to abandon old illusions, confront reality, and take action, lawful or otherwise.

Whether this wager is correct remains one of the most difficult questions facing revolutionary politics. The phrase "things have to get worse before they get better" expresses an intuition rooted in historical materialism. If the existing order continues to satisfy enough people's immediate needs, then those people have relatively little incentive to overthrow it. Reform appears preferable to revolution. Stability reproduces consent. Capitalism is not static. It generates recurring crises. Falling profitability, unemployment, debt, environmental destruction, imperial conflict, housing shortages, and declining public services are not external accidents but recurring features of the system itself. From this perspective, worsening conditions expose capitalism's inability to meet human needs. This is not obviously irrational. Revolutions rarely emerge during periods of widespread prosperity. They tend to occur during crises.

Yet this observation immediately confronts a second one. Most crises do not produce revolution, they produce exhaustion. Misery is not consciousness. The assumption that suffering naturally radicalizes people confuses necessity with possibility. Material hardship creates grievances. It does not automatically create revolutionary consciousness. A worker facing eviction may join a tenants' union. The same worker may instead blame immigrants, or become politically apathetic, or devote every waking hour simply to surviving. The crisis itself determines none of these outcomes. Organization and political education does.

History repeatedly demonstrates that identical material conditions can generate socialist movements, fascist movements, nationalist movements, religious revivals, or complete political collapse. Misery explains why people become dissatisfied. It does not explain what they become.e

Within sections of the revolutionary left there exists an aesthetic attraction to collapse. Every recession becomes "the final crisis." Every financial panic becomes capitalism's death throes. Every ecological disaster becomes evidence that history is accelerating toward rupture. There is understandable emotional appeal here. If one believes the existing system and everyone born into it is fundamentally irredeemable, then every failure appears as confirmation. But this perspective risks transforming human suffering into political symbolism. The bombing of a hospital is no longer primarily a tragedy. It becomes evidence. Mass layoffs become objective conditions. War becomes proof that contradictions are sharpening. The people actually experiencing these events can disappear behind theoretical categories. Marxism insists upon understanding history materially. That obligation extends to suffering itself. Real people do not experience crises as dialectical developments. They experience hunger, debt, trauma, disability, and death. If revolutionary politics loses sight of this, it risks becoming morally indifferent to precisely those whose liberation it claims to seek.

Another version of the argument claims that workers in wealthy capitalist countries possess too much comfort to become revolutionary. According to this view, declining living standards are politically necessary. Only once enough comforts disappear will resistance emerge. There is an element of truth here. Periods of expanding prosperity have often stabilized capitalist societies. Consumer credit, home ownership, welfare provision, and rising wages historically blunted class conflict. Yet the argument quickly becomes too neat. Workers in affluent countries already organize. They strike, they form unions, they resist evictions, they oppose austerity, they participate in anti-discrimination movements, they engage in tenant organizing. None of this requires absolute immiseration. Indeed, one might argue the opposite. People possessing some degree of security often have greater capacity to organize than people working three jobs merely to survive. Political participation itself requires time, energy, health, and community. The completely exhausted worker is not necessarily the most revolutionary. They may simply be exhausted.

Revolutionary debates frequently distinguish between the imperial core and the global periphery. Workers in wealthy nations undeniably benefit from unequal exchange, imperial dominance, and the extraction of value from poorer regions, although the extent and distribution of those benefits remain contested within Marxist theory. Some conclude that the decline of living standards in wealthy countries is historically unavoidable as global inequalities become harder to sustain. This may be descriptively plausible, but a descriptive claim differs from a normative one. To argue that standards of living will decline is one thing, to celebrate, encourage, and accelerate that decline is another. The left has long criticized ruling classes for treating human beings as expendable instruments of history. It should hesitate before adopting similar reasoning itself. The suffering of workers in one country does not become emancipatory simply because workers elsewhere have suffered longer. Internationalism demands solidarity, not competitive immiseration.

Perhaps the deepest problem with accelerationist thinking is its tendency toward historical automation. The assumption is "More contradiction equals more crisis, therefore more crisis equals more resistance, and more resistance equals revolution." History offers no such guarantee. Societies have endured astonishing levels of deprivation without revolutionary transformation. Others have collapsed into an even more reactionary politics. Contradictions do not possess political direction, human beings provide direction. Accelerationism attempts to resolve political frustration by embracing speed. If capitalism generates crises, perhaps those crises should intensify. If institutions are collapsing, perhaps they should collapse faster. If reform merely delays transformation, reform itself becomes counter-revolutionary. Different forms of accelerationism arrive at different conclusions. Some see technological development as the engine that ultimately undermines capitalist relations. Others argue that capitalism should be allowed or encouraged to exhaust itself through the intensification of its own contradictions. Still others, from entirely different political traditions, embrace acceleration because they believe crisis creates opportunities for transformation, emancipatory or otherwise. What unites these otherwise divergent approaches is a suspicion of stabilization. Order becomes the enemy, disorder becomes productive. Does History Have a Speed Limit?

One question accelerationism rarely answers is whether political development can actually be hurried. Capitalism already possesses extraordinary tendencies toward acceleration. Financial markets operate instantaneously, production is globally integrated, climate change advances rapidly, information circulates continuously, precarious employment expands, debt compounds, supply chains stretch across continents. The system scarcely appears in need of additional momentum. Indeed, much contemporary politics concerns managing the consequences of acceleration rather than overcoming stagnation. If capitalism already destabilizes itself at remarkable speed, the revolutionary problem may not be insufficient crisis, it may be insufficient organization capable of acting within crisis. Perhaps the central strategic divide is not between stability and crisis, but between expectation and preparation. Expectation waits for conditions. Preparation develops capacities regardless of conditions. Instead of simply interpreting crises, we must organize through them. Revolutionary movements historically succeeded not because suffering automatically generated resistance but because groups capable of transforming dissatisfaction into collective action already existed when crises arrived. Without these, crisis often produces fear and reaction instead of solidarity.

There is also a psychological attraction to believing that worsening conditions necessarily advance liberation. It transforms despair into hope, every defeat becomes secretly a victory, every setback becomes historical progress. Reality may offer no such consolation. Bad things may simply be bad. Factory closures may strengthen capital. Wars may entrench reaction. Climate disasters may destroy communities rather than radicalize them. Governments may consolidate power rather than expose their weakness. The proposition that "things have to get worse before they get better" contains an important insight and a dangerous temptation. The insight is that stable systems often reproduce themselves through relative legitimacy, and that crises can expose hidden contradictions while opening political possibilities that previously seemed impossible.

The temptation is to mistake possibility for inevitability, or worse, to interpret human suffering as intrinsically progressive. From a revolutionary working-class perspective, neither complacent reformism nor romantic collapse offers an adequate politics. Reformism assumes capitalism can indefinitely soften its contradictions. Collapse assumes those contradictions automatically generate emancipation. History suggests neither is true. Crises create openings, but those openings have to be prepared for in advance through organization. Whether those openings become revolutionary depends not on the severity of suffering alone, but on the capacity of ordinary people to build collective institutions, develop political consciousness, and act together. Bad things are not good, nor are they meaningless, they are historical moments whose political content is not predetermined. That uncertainty is precisely what makes revolution both necessary and difficult.