Notes on Fossil Marxism
Fossil Marxism understands that capitalism creates temporal disparities across a topographical view of energy and material accumulation (tracked via teleoplexy). Time peaks on a topological plane illustrate the inequality of time. This isn’t to advocate a Flatlining of time but to refocus and redistribute these peaks to focus on cultural production and decouple it from commodity production.
It is adjacent to Acid Communism.
Fossil Marxism uses peak oil as a critique of the debt of oil at an ecological scale as well as understanding the view of accelerationism as Mark Fisher puts it:
“In a nutshell: Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating idiotically on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out.” — Mark Fisher, Terminator vs. Avatar.
Thus what are we left to do? One is to submit ourselves to capitalism and be pulled by the techonomic black hole of capitalistic vampiric burnout. And end up like the fossilized creatures, frozen in time. The alternative is to take the Promethean mantle and affirm. A neo-vitalism to find new lines of escape and neologize humanism to dream an alternative, to actualize what’s already here in Time, not what’s to come in “the future.”
The struggle itself is against the inhuman forces of techno capital and to tackle the geotrauma of oil and its death drive. We must produce desires outside of those capitalism produces on to us. In any case, we are already dead, but the path towards that inevitable horizon is a plane of immanence of pure possibility.
