Accelerationism or Revolution?
A look at the many accelerationisms and their relevance...
The term accelerationism or accelerationist has increasingly come into use, both as a self-identifying label and as a pejorative. There are also multiple versions of accelerationism, both left-wing and right-wing, and there are things that don’t necessarily get labeled as accelerationism that relate to it or could be seen as a form of it. It seems tricky to condense accelerationism into a pithy definition, and it’s possible for one to agree with some of the premises used by an accelerationist argument while rejecting the conclusion. But let’s attempt to break this down.
One simple way to describe accelerationism is the notion that things need to get worse in order for them to get better, on the premise that revolt does not happen until people are pushed to do so by being disenfranchised or impoverished enough, or on the premise that the system needs to be pushed to collapse more quickly to open a window for a desired alternative. Thus, a general version of accelerationism would be to support things that you yourself know hurts the general public, or the dissolution of institutions that the public depends on, or anything that could be construed as sabotaging or dissolving the existing system in some way as an end in itself. There is truth to the notion that revolutions don’t happen when people are fat and happy, and if you *are* a political radical of any kind, the dissolution of the current system *is* entailed in your politics as part of the process of what you’re after. But there’s issues.
Of course, this begs the question of what “the system” really is or what exactly it is you are targeting, what your desired alternatives are, and what the actual prospects and preconditions of a revolution are. Political radicals of various types (this includes libertarians, Marxists, communists, anarchists, and the reactionary right) may all easily agree, despite having different visions, with the general idea that the existing system deserves to fall in some way, otherwise they would not be political radicals. But disliking the existing system in itself is not a political position, the collapse of an existing system or a particular government is not in itself a revolutionary transformation, and what comes after that is a gamble with no guarantee that it will be an improved situation or that a better alternative comes from it.
This cuts to the question of the preconditions for revolution, and the difference between system collapse and revolutionary transformation. There is reason to doubt that you can achieve a revolutionary transformation without pre-existing alternative institutions or counter-power or something resembling a prefigurative politics, otherwise the collapse of a state is just a power vacuum, and we can expect power to be reconstituted soon afterwards in ways that have nothing to do with anyone’s revolutionary pretenses. Likewise, simply destroying technology or disrupting markets as an end in itself will simply create suffering for people, leaving us with directionless eco-terrorism or sporadic riots. This is nihilism in effect.
Another way to define accelerationism is a bit less overt than this, what we might call “thin accelerationism”, and it’s an easier position to agree with. What I’m making up as “thin accelerationism” is the recognition that the current system, and/or the position of the U.S. as a powerhouse empire, is on some sort of trajectory of decline that will eventually lead to some sort of collapse, whether we like it or not, and that therefore we should prepare for that. This is a somewhat more reasonable proposition because it does not necessarily lean on purposefully empowering what you oppose or endorsing things that are bad to most people, and it dovetails into a prefigurative politics. There may well be limitations to prefigurative politics, but it’s not a nihilist void. Of course, even “thin accelerationism” can also easily dovetail into paranoid prepper thinking, and people’s predictions of system collapse can be hasty.
In a sense, radical libertarianism can manifest as an accelerationist position. Modern movement libertarianism positions itself as a reductive anti-statism in which anything that can be construed as reducing the government is good as an end in itself, even if that means pressing a button that eliminates all social services and welfare that people depend on overnight, or creating mass unemployment by firing the majority of public sector workers, or undermining environmental initiatives, etc. The most common and simple arguments against the libertarians that are their kryptonite amount to utilitarian and practical arguments that their ideas fuck the public in the ass. That’s why the libertarians often have to default to deontological moral arguments, make methodological individualist arguments that “society doesn’t exist”, or make economic claims that markets spontaneously solve everything through a process of economic magic. Furthermore, market libertarians focus their chief energies on hastening the fall of nominally public or democratic institutions, but they are simps for private power, even governmentally. Their anti-governmentalism unravels in private authoritarianism. It’s a frail way to be “against the system”.
The classic gambit of anarchism is also a type of accelerationism or at least related to it. The most pivotal classic difference and argument between anarchists and Marxists is that the anarchists think that the state and capitalism can and should be abolished at once swiftly, while the Marxists think that there inherently has to be a transitional period and that the state has to be progressively transformed until it withers or isn’t needed. Revolutionary anarchism is an “immediatist” position that pushes for revolution early and quick, and it becomes historically associated with “propaganda of the deed”. Anarchism traditionally emphasizes action and immediacy, thus fitting in with accelerationism in this way. Later versions of anarchism can be more mellowed over than this, such as Chomsky’s anarchism, but anarchist radicalism is “immediate”. It pushes for “revolution now” and quickly “abolishing the state”.
Yet it is actually in Marxism rather than anarchism in which accelerationism is more known as an explicit position or theory, based on certain readings of Marxist theory. Both my libertarian and anarchist examples are perhaps related to accelerationism, but anarchist idealism does not purposefully or knowingly want to make things worse, while the market libertarians can be prone to simply not care about or not realize the consequences of their own propositions. The Marxist version of accelerationism is a bit more cynical and nuanced. Marx thought that capitalism is necessarily a precondition for socialism, that socialism must come out of capitalism’s contradictions reaching a breaking point, and that in some sense capitalism is simultaneously a progressive and reactionary force. These are all legitimately positions from Marx, but with garbled interpretations in the canon.
Lenin and other thinkers pick up on this by focusing on industrial development in Russia, while others in a more contemporary context, such as Chris Cutrone, pick up on it by taking the position that capitalism actually must be outright intensified to the maximum and that America and the industrial core of the world is inherently the most revolutionary progressive force of history, thus American dominance should be strengthened, the gutting of the administrative state is good, and what are actually the most reactionary forces of modern day capitalism, such as Trump, are “accidentally good” because they break down the status quo of regular liberal capitalism. There is reason to doubt that Zombie Marx, if updated on what’s happened for the last century and a half, would approve of such a position. But it’s one version of a Marxist position, if you cherry pick the right parts of his theory or interpret his theory in weird ways.
Accelerationism as an explicit, self-conscious contemporary theory, however, is most significantly associated with Nick Land, as a sort of right-wing techno-futurist gambit - though it also is notable that Land draws on postmodernist influences and was originally associated with the left and is part of the “post-left” in a way. Land’s theory is more fatalistic and openly dark than the Marxist version of accelerationism, it embraces moving toward what most people would consider something dystopian and rejects the possibility of a socialist or communist future from its vision. Postmodernism by its nature rejects the possibility of progress, something I myself was told point blank early on in my own interactions and debates with postmodernists. And part of the reason many Marxists reject postmodernism is because many postmodernist thinkers end up embracing some kind of “capitalist realism”, where they can only describe and analyze “late capitalism” and the dystopian consequences of modern technology. The critical theorists within Marxism, in their way, also bump into this wall, where the upshot is radical skepticism with no way out.
Nick Land makes the leap to embracing rapidly moving the world towards something along the lines of what Yanis Varoufakis and Jodi Dean call “techno-feudalism”, and he becomes influential in what coalesces as the neo-reactionary movement. While the technologically optimist version of communist futurism is to believe in the possibility of harnessing technology to create “automated luxury space communism” ala Star Trek, Land embraces the opposite interpretation of technology - automation and AI as a tool for entrenching elite control and dehumanizing transhumanist experiments, except for him this is not dystopian but good. In his devolution into reactionary politics, Land also lionizes the past, but since one is unable to actually turn back the clock of time, things from the past get re-imagined in a technological and postmodern context. These same types of ideas also have some travel in market libertarian circles, which always had a sci-fi loving techno-futurist faction that now idolizes Elon Musk. J Neil Shulman famously wrote a cyberpunk fantasy novel "Alongside Night” from an anarcho-capitalist aspirational angle, or people took speculative fiction like Neil Stephenson’s "Snow Crash" novel as inspirational material. These are visions that gleefully embrace people’s worst fears about libertarianism, as an essentially medievalist world but with high technology, or a cyberpunk dystopia.
The more left-wing or Marxist interpretation of accelerationism, which still holds out a possibility of using technology for egalitarian purposes, is associated instead with Mark Fisher, and in its more benign form amounts to something pretty similar to “fully automated luxury space communism” - the idea is to use technology and harness the mass surplus created by capitalism to lessen the need for work and establish a distribution of needs or a baseline for everyone, and perhaps to take advantage of ways in which the internet can be a “commons”. The more vulgar version of Marxist accelerationism would seem to either come from people’s poor interpretations of Fisher, or from other sources or the aforementioned kind of conflation engaged in by people like Chris Cutrone, where reactionary politics and what are actually right-libertarian causes are paradoxically supposed to help the cause of socialism. There is some precedent for these ideas in Marxism and it can have a strain that is hyperbolically “pro-growth” without regard for either distributive or ecological concerns, but it isn’t until we get to the absurdity of MAGA communism and adjacent positions like Cutrone’s that Marxist accelerationism is just flat out a wild rationalization for supporting right-wing stuff that makes things worse.
It is here where we get more specific about what accelerationism means. What both the Marxist and right-wing versions of accelerationism have in common is some kind of techno-optimism, where they differ is in what purpose the technology is ultimately meant to serve. The accelerationism of Mark Fisher would seem to start out as a somewhat benign techno-optimism. But the bolder that Marxist accelerationism gets, the more it starts to look a lot like an example of “horse-shoe theory”, where what started as a left-wing position has merged with a right-wing position or been subsumed by it, which the position of someone like Cutrone would seem to amount to. This particular horseshoe is not inherent to the far left or to Marxism though, and the flaw in conventional liberal horseshoe theory is the total conflation of radical left and right politics, of communism and fascism, and in its inability to define the center itself. But it is true that certain strands of Marxist thought can point one rightward. The accelerationism of Nick Land, on the other hand, rejects the idea that a non-capitalist society can produce or sustain high technology, so drops the leftist pretense.
Accelerationism, more specifically as a developed theory, is not merely the idea of making things worse so that they can get better, or hastily declaring a revolution, etc. It is linked with how one views technology and production, and it relies on using technology to destabilize the status quo in some way. What it favors accelerating is “growth”, resource extraction, industrial and technological development, to a point of transhumanism and deterritorialization. It gets associated with notions of a technological singularity. In many ways it’s the domain of technophilic nerds and naturally reflects their interests. Silicon Valley libertarians are a natural fit for it.
I have also seen the term accelerationism used in the opposite of a pro-technology and pro-growth context, in reference to certain positions coming from primitivists or anti-civs. What might be called the “radical green” version of accelerationism is to actively support the destruction of industrial civilization and be perfectly fine with the mass depopulation that would ensue, while eco-terrorism is embraced as a strategy to hasten that. The Unabomber was a primitivist accelerationist. In a different way than the postmodernists, primitivists also reject the notion of progress, but while holding up an ideal pure human subject that is one with nature, before technology and civilization came along and wrecked it. Radical primitivism easily becomes a kind of doomer position, where there is no future to look forward to and industrial civilization is inherently headed towards collapse. One can only look backwards and embrace the fall of civilization in this view.
To tie this into current events (1) the technophilic libertarian right and neo-reactionary types that supports similar things as Nick Land has currently gotten a foothold in the government, with Elon Musk at the helm (2) the phenomenon of Trump himself and the direction it points to could be seen as an acceleration of capitalism, with business leaders more directly and openly taking political power (3) many market libertarians are gleefully supporting Trump’s relative “slash and burn” approach to the welfare and administrative state, because on the surface it’s “reducing government” or “starving the beast” (though the contradiction for the libertarians is that Trump is simultaneously strengthening the government’s power in other areas, and their assumptions about what is “more” or “less” government quickly gets convoluted and shaky) (4) the accelerationist Marxists like Doug Lain and Chris Cutrone are also spinning both Elon and Trump’s actions as good or revolutionary.
It is notable that Lain, previously as the owner of Zero Books, was among those who originally published Mark Fisher’s work. The legacy of Fisher hangs over the milieu that Lain is part of, though I get the sense that Fisher would not necessarily approve of the direction it’s gone. The narrative trajectory of the Sublation Media channel on YouTube, which has dominantly been lead by Lain, Cutrone, and Ashley Frawley, is consistent with an accelerationist reading of Marxism, down to Frawley’s own preoccupation with a strong pro-growth stance. But Chris Cutrone seems to be the biggest intellectual thought leader at the front of the push for what are essentially vulgar accelerationist narratives, where Trump is construed as an inadvertent revolutionary shining a light on the nakedness of power, undermining the professional managers and the “deep state”, and completing the bourgeoisie revolution so that the window for socialism is opened. You have to follow Cutrone in a contradictory, confusing maze of theory to believe that. But this is where the conversation has gone for those who let theory take them to weird places. Nicholas Villareal wrote an illuminating piece breaking down how Cutrone warps theory.
The problem with all of these positions is that the upshot is just that things get worse. For the less intellectual forms of accelerationism, viscerally being a “fuck the system” person is a meaningless politics if you’re just a nihilist who wants things to burn. Opposing the status quo without a real alternative is just political nihilism. The more intellectual forms of accelerationism nonetheless depends on the stupid idea that light will naturally emerge out of darkness if we push darkness to the brink. Whether it’s openly supporting technocratic oligarchy in the name of socialism, or embracing the fall of industrial civilization in the name of oneness with nature, it’s like pouring gasoline on the fire. This isn’t to say that we should embrace the status quo. But expanding its darkest elements isn’t a revolution and lighting it on fire without an alternative isn’t a productive or useful politics. The precondition for revolution is building autonomous power, and yes, it does eventually involve some violence.
The prospect of revolution is also admittedly complicated by modern technology itself. The kind of weapons technology and power that the modern-day military has pretty much rules out the conventional kind of revolutionary warfare that might have legitimately worked a few hundred years ago, so it’s not as easy to have a revolution, at least not without the help of military defectors and some major solidary. Speaking of solidarity, the kind of mass politics that existed a century ago also hasn’t been a thing for a while, so it’s difficult to even build the base for a revolutionary political movement. In a strange way, Jan 6 also made a trivial spectacle of the notion of revolution, when a group of clowns actually invaded the capitol only for there to be no substantive effect, and we were treated to a much-circulated picture of a guy dressed as a New Age Libertarian Space Juggalo at a podium. A Juggalo Revolution. It was the ultimate “revolution as farce”, of course, not a real one at all.
I don’t mean to doom the possibility of a productive, successful revolution myself. But surely we can do better than sending in the clowns?