Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-16
Lenin with drones: is a left accelerationism possible?
I A ghost in the hangar
In 1917, Lenin climbed into a sealed carriage to inject a vanguard into the tsarist locomotive.
A hundred and eight years later, picture him walking into a drone hangar: autonomous swarms, 4-D printers, tactical AI on edge computing.
The question: can left-acceleration—accelerationism of the left—take this arsenal and turn it against capital, or does every attempt end up feeding the neoliberal turbine?
II Red accelerationism: brief foundations
- Srnicek & Williams (2015) — Inventing the Future: automate to free up time, roll out universal basic income, plan with big data.
- Post-workerism — The digital “General Intellect” belongs to the collective; the platforms must be expropriated.
- Xenofeminism — Technology to abolish gender, not to reinforce it.
They all share one thesis: the only route to emancipation runs through more—not less—technology, but orchestrated by common interests.
III Drones as flying proletarians
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Popular algorithmic agriculture
- Collectives in Chiapas fly swarms to sow native maize, map the humidity, share the data in DAO cooperatives.
- They cut their dependence on Monsanto and their pesticide costs.
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Hybrid union logistics
- Drones run by cooperative riders deliver medicines in a favela; the income is split by usage, not by UberEats algorithms.
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Inverted surveillance
- “Workers' guards” deploy micro-drones to police factories dumping waste in rivers; the video goes on IPFS, the popular trial runs live.
IV Planning in the cloud: cybercommunism 2.0
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Twin models of the economy
— Simulate demand, energy and material cycles to decide production—a crystalline version of Lenin's GOELRO, now with GPUs. -
Token Supply-Chain
— A public blockchain records how much copper, how much labour time, how much emission: the Marxist “Ledger” becomes an auditable API. -
Socialist basic income
— Funded from the profits of nationalised/DAOised platforms; a dynamic payment based on the automation surplus.
V Obstacles of turbulence
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Instant corporate capture
— Every cooperative innovation becomes an Amazon premium feature in the next update. -
Chip asymmetry
— An NVIDIA H200 costs what a village costs; with no sovereign hardware, the red cloud depends on silicon imperialism. -
Algorithmic bureaucracy
— Big-data planning can degenerate into Gosplan 2.0 with pretty dashboards and invisible queues (server latency). -
Dual use
— The drone that fertilises can also bomb; the difference between a state monopoly and horizontality lies in the firmware and the command protocol.
VI Lenin-drone tactics
| Principle | 2025 translation | Quick example |
|---|---|---|
| “Rob the robber” | Fork closed code, release it under GPL-C | Copyleft of the DJI firmware for agro-community purposes |
| “Kombinat” | Merging smart factories with a local solar farm | A fab-solar park in Córdoba run by the union |
| “Revolutionary education” | Maker bootcamps for the peasantry, instead of cadres | Hackers living on ejidos for 3 months, passing on the know-how |
| “Material internationalism” | A peer-to-peer supply network with no patents | Swapping drone spares between Kerala and Oaxaca |
VII Rumbling paradoxes
- Redemption through obsolescence — In emancipating ourselves with AI, we rush to make new versions that make the cooperative obsolete every 18 months.
- Transparency vs. privacy — Planning asks for total data; workers' surveillance can suffocate freedoms.
- Income vs. motivation — Freedom from work can turn into political lethargy with no culture of participation.
VIII Coda: the drone, the hammer and the cloud
“Proletarians of all cores, connect.”
A Lenin with drones would not preach a return to the village; he would connect the village to popular clusters of computing and propulsion, expropriate the patents, and launch swarms that sow, watch and—if need be—defend.
Left accelerationism does not fear the metallic hum; it fears that the rate of profit is flying it.
The way out is not to stop the rotor but to rewrite the firmware in favour of whoever holds up the soil and the cloud.
May the next take-off be not of speculative capital but of shared futures programmed in insurgent code.