What Is Accelerationism?

This piece is going to be brief. I am writing it like this in an effort to make it accessible. Due to its relative brevity, it’s going to be low-detail in some areas. Forgive me for this.

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Here we go (Image is Dave Bowman [Keir Dullea], from 2001: A Space Odyssey, entering the star gate.)

This piece has been percolating for a while, but on Sunday night the need to do it was drawn out of me. Reactionary commentator Nick Fuentes (a person I had honestly never paid any attention to,) had apparently been placed on a no-fly list and then called for a red-brown alliance against the United States. A commentator and journalist that I very much respect (and still do,) Robert Evans, commented that what we were seeing here was the formation of a “pan-accelerationist movement” – which honestly confused me. The people across the political spectrum who subscribe to a sort of strategic, unconditional accelerationism who are inclined to cooperate with one another most likely already are. They want one thing, generally: the end of the current system by pushing everything past its breaking point.

This, however, is only one strand of accelerationism – the one that commentators have awarded with the term “accelerationism”, and whose adherents are called simply “accelerationists”, to the point that people who identify as “accelerationist” in other parts of the political spectrum are told that we shouldn’t use the term.

Which is, frankly, ignoring the history of the term.

I care about this because, while I don’t really have a solid term for what I consider myself, there are times, looking at certain pieces of writing that I identify as an Accelerationist. However, I don’t subscribe to the idea that we need to push society past its breaking point and make everything as terrible as possible in the hope that something new and better arises out of the ashes (there’s no reason to think that anything better would arise without a really strong ground game, and the breakage itself would be a shameful and avoidable loss of human life, something I have protested in other contexts and protest here.)

Left Accelerationism isn’t the same as Right Accelerationism. Nor is it the same as Unconditional Accelerationism. Hell, there isn’t properly one single Left Accelerationism. This all hinges on the fact that “Accelerate” is a verb, and it all depends on what is being accelerated.

Admittedly, the most high-profile people to use this term have been the likes of the Christchurch Shooter, who embedded the term in his manifesto, and the likes of the Atomwaffen Division. The word, however, has a long history on the left – and much as the American right-wing adopted the term “libertarian” and wrestled it away from the libertarian socialists that had been using the term at the time, they are attempting to steal “Accelerationism” and paint it as only referring to their violent, exterminationist ideologies. This has the side effect of making Left Accelerationism harder for the average person to understand.

Let’s examine the origin.

After ‘68: Acceleration and Postmodernism

Accelerationism was born out of the same roiling philosophical cauldron that postmodernism came from: the aftermath of May ‘68. Triggered by student protests in Paris, police repression led to sympathy strikes by trade unions, and soon 11 million people were on strike – nearly a quarter of France’s population, it was the first wildcat general strike to take hold of a whole country: and a western, developed country at that.

Sorry, these guys are back again.

It was only ended when snap elections were called, but the dominant Gaullist party made gains, and there was no appetite for continued violence. It had no lasting political effects, though the social ones are still felt. The task for France’s radical intellectuals became to explain why it failed. The three texts to consider here – and any quotes will be of about a sentence, because I want this to be accessible, and French High Academic style is...not – are Anti-Oedipus (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1972; the only one of the three I’ve actually read,), Libidinal Economy (Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1974; excerpts from which featured in a review I wrote, though,), and Symbolic Exchange and Death (Jean Baudrillard, 1976).

Each of these texts was written by a Marxist or someone of Marxist orientation, and were aimed at trying to explain why the long-awaited revolution didn’t appear. What was at work in the psyche of the average person that led them to embrace the world as it was?

Each of these texts also built upon the prior one, in conversation with them and pushing harder in the new direction they were pointing out. I’ve mentioned all of these people before, and it’s notable that I was first introduced to Lyotard and Baudrillard as members of the “gang of four” who were responsible for postmodernism (a formulation that left out Deleuze – a major oversight and a lacuna in my education.) Postmodernism, as I’ve mentioned (though I believe I wrote it as “Post-Modernism” in the article, a decision I don’t quite understand making,) was largely a trauma-response to the Second World War. It could also be seen as a trauma response to May ‘68.

Referenced and reviewed substantively on this website in several places.

Anti-Oedipus was the first, and it’s a sprawling, difficult-to-read book that begins by considering Freudian and Lacanian psychology and spiraling out to talk about the formation of hierarchic societies, before considering the world outside the window. In a passage commenting on Third-World economies, they mused that perhaps the approach they should take is to “Not . . . withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet” (p. 239). The Nietzsche quote is a reference to The Will to Power, where he wrote that “the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it.”

Lyotard negated the whole project. He argued that the reason it happened was that people secretly enjoyed their own destruction and suffering. Even if this wasn’t the case, though, he made a second prediction: with the Soviet Union on the back foot, and the United States turning its eyes southward towards the Developmentalist economies of the third world, there now wasn’t really a future outside of Western Capitalism: it would eat everything – and for Lyotard, who was a communist, that was something we could interpret as a bit of a “black pill”. It’s no wonder that Lyotard and others refer to Libidinal Economy as his “evil book.”

Finally, we have Baudrillard. If Lyotard was reacting against Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard did what he normally did and reacted against the whole lot. He states that the battle was lost long before it was waged, when the model of linear time – along with the logic of investment and the separation of death from life – superseded the model of cyclical time. I haven’t read it yet, and I don’t pretend to understand it, but that appears to be what Symbolic Exchange and Death is about.

These three texts were identified as crucial starting points in the 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative, by Benjamin Noys, the British philosopher and Black Metal theorist who coined the word “Accelerationism”.

So if the seeds of Accelerationism were fully planted by 1976, one might wonder what they were doing in the thirty-four years between Symbolic Exchange and Death and The Persistence of the Negative.

The answer, regretfully, is Nick Land.

Nick Land

I hate writing about this guy. To quote True Detective, he’s “like the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch.”

What I know about Nick Land comes largely through Dr. Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk (reviewed here), though some information is available secondhand through other sources.

In prior pieces, I’ve described Nick Land as something like what would happen if a Lovecraft protagonist had discovered that he lived in a prosaic, rational universe that wasn’t out to destroy his sanity and then started to home-brew his own madness. To Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard, he bolted Georges Batailles’s concept of the accursed share (a political-economic concept relating to the tendency of human societies to waste their productive forces.) and Schopenhauer’s concept of Will (the blind, idiot force of continued life, which breeds only suffering.) He heavily used amphetamines, and it shows in the frenentic, disjointed style of his writing.

As far as I can tell, Land didn’t use “Accelerationism” to describe his philosophy until after Noys coined the term, a time at which he had begun to align himself with Curtis Yarvin, AKA Mencius Moldbug, a computer programmer who thought that he could solve political problems as if they were technical issues. It’s still not terribly clear if this is sincere or part of some extended, Andy Kaufman-esque bit, though he did pen a text called “HYPER-RACISM” (all caps original. Link is to an Archive.org mirror) in 2014, so I don’t particularly care to find out.

Before this, though, Land was part of an unofficial group at the University of Warwick called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which hosted a conference described in the Guardian piece that seemed to carry the term “Accelerationism” into the mainstream, though the New Statesman also wrote a solid, if brief, primer. Alumni of the CCRU included Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestrani, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher (this last one being my own bridge into the topic,) none of whom seem to have followed Land into his reactionary phase.

It seems, looking at his earlier works – such as “Machinic Desire” – that his philosophy was characterized by a sort of apolitical resignation: this is going to happen, so it might as well happen quickly. He seems to have found joy in the idea more recently, though he also resigned from academia and moved to Shanghai to write travel guides.

This man is too large a topic to cover here, but he is the key figure: he alchemized Yarvin’s “neocameralism” into “Neoreaction” and the “Dark Enlightenment”, which then filtered down into people like the Christchurch shooter. He also taught Mark Fisher, who is a major influence on real Left Accelerationism.

No True Scotsman

I don’t think that the Unconditional Accelerationists are the only ones who have a right to the name. They view Accelerationism as a strategy, and it’s a temper tantrum writ large, hardly a strategy at all. There are also those who view Acceleration as a philosophy.

I should actually finish reading this, though it is apparently softer than their “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics”, also notable, though from a different strand of Accelerationism, is “Xenofeminism: A politics for Alienation.”

Most notable among this latter group are the Srnicek-Williams Left Accelerationists. I’m not going to pretend to know everything about their approach, though it seems, to me, that they could be described loosely as nvested in a kind of social democracy that has discovered the operant principle behind the shock doctrine, as outlined in Milton Friedman’s statement that “Only a crisis—actual or percieved—produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” This is an oversimplification of their stance, but it is a starting point: they are, at least, committed to not causing the crisis that their strategy depends on, and their commitment to policies like Universal Basic Income and full automation are not things that I’m necessarily going to spend a lot of energy arguing.

The Fisherian Accelerationists are those who take the writing of Mark Fisher as a guide. They return to the original texts mentioned above, referenced by Noys and seek to theorize their way into what Fisher referred to as “Acid Communism”, a political project of collective liberation that Fisher was working on when he died.

Of these, I’m closest to the Fisherian branch. Though I would read him alongside David Graeber – his article in the Baffler, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, written two years after the term “accelerationism” was coined, and not written in relation to the idea at all, is especially important. Notably, the idea I find important is that our current regime of Capitalism does not breed innovation, and there have not really been any qualitative, important changes in our way of life since the moon landing, outside of communication and surveillance technology (often the same thing.) In Graber’s argument, Capital suppresses true innovation.

Which is, admittedly, a bit of a far cry from the people now using the term.

Accelerationism is an incredibly broad term. People from every point on the political spectrum can use the term, because it’s so poorly defined, and so contested. I am frustrated by the journalistic insistence to use the term as a shorthand for, essentially, vanguardist white nationalists and leaderless resistance types. There is nothing especially different about these people that requires a different term. Allowing this term to refer only to vanguardist white nationalists obscures the philosophical and strategic contributions of left accelerationists.

The term began on the left. This is easy enough to swallow, because the right has a hard time creating anything. They appropriated the term “libertarian”, they’re trying to appropriate furries, and Norse paganism, and metal, and they tried – and failed – to appropriate punk. They are succeeding in appropriating “Accelerationism”, primarily because there’s no consensus on the meaning of the term, because it took a back-channel from academia to the mainstream.

Studying this process is important, because tracing how ideas move is important. Eventually, it seems, the right wing fringe of society will try to appropriate and swallow any idea, and I think the best we can do is deny them the right to do that with anything. The worst thing we can do is assist them in that.

So we return to our second question – not “what is accelerationism?” but “what is being accelerated?” Is it the entropy we see all around us? For some, yes, but they’re not the only ones. So what?

The society we live in suppresses – decelerates – certain desirable tendencies. Capital suppresses innovation and fellow-feeling. The electoral process decelerates change by sapping energy from non-electoral forms of democratic politics. The media apparatus diverts energy and saps power from collective mythologizing and creativity. The atomization that we undergo decelerates the formation of groups and communities.

All of these things need to be accelerated, because the structures that work on us want them to stop.

We’re down to eight and a half years until we hit the climate cliff. It wouldn’t be accurate, but we could render that down to the hour, down to the minute, down to the second. If we move at the current pace, are we going to make it?

No.

So we need to accelerate the process, we need to break the things trying to break us. We need to build the institutions and structures that will save us, and we need to do it faster.

That, in my mind, is the spirit of Left Accelerationism.

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If you want a slightly more in-depth history from a somewhat different (but still perfectly valid) perspective, I suggest reading “Acceleration Now” by Edmund Berger.

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