Accelerationism

The history of accelerationism has been divided into three waves. First, there were the late 1960s and early 1970s French post-Marxists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, whose thought arose in the wake of May 68. The second wave arose in the 1990s with the work of Nick Land and the CCRU, with the third being the Promethean left-accelerationism of the 2010s. It was later popularized by professor and author Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative to describe the trajectory of certain post-structuralists who embraced unorthodox Marxist and counter-Marxist overviews of capitalist growth, such as Deleuze and Guattari in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Lyotard in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard in his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death. Firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche argued in a fragment in The Will to Power that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it." Land cited Karl Marx, who, in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade", anticipated accelerationist principles a century before Deleuze and Guattari by describing free trade as socially destructive and fuelling class conflict, then effectively arguing for it: Noys states of Marx's influence, "it favors the Marx who celebrates the powers of capitalism, most evident in The Communist Manifesto (cowritten with Engels), over the Marx who also stresses the difficulty of transcending and escaping capital, the Marx of Capital", also characterizing the accelerationist view of Marx as filtered through Nietzsche. Fisher notes the same excerpt from Anti-Oedipus as Land, along with a section from Libidinal Economy which he describes as "the one passage from the text that is remembered, if only in notoriety", as "immediately [giving] the flavour of the accelerationist gambit": Cybernetic Culture Research Unit The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a philosophy collective at the University of Warwick which included Land, Mackay, Fisher and Grant, further developed accelerationism in the 1990s. The group stood in stark opposition to the University of Warwick and traditional left-wing academia, with Mackay crediting the publishing of Fanged Noumena, a 2011 anthology of Land's work, with an emergence of new accelerationist thinking. In 2014, Mackay and Avanessian published the anthology #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, In November 2025, Noys called the movement a "corpse" which had disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates, but found it still relevant in contemporary debates on large language models and artificial intelligence, as well as in the corporate world with effective accelerationism. == Concepts ==

Accelerationism consists of various and often contradictory ideas, with Noys stating "part of the difficulty of understanding accelerationism is grasping these shifting meanings and the stakes of particular interventions". particularly the left-wing variant, referencing the Greek figure of Prometheus. Fluss and Frim associate it with posthumanism and using innovation and technology to surpass the limits of nature, characterizing it as misanthropic in stating "for the Promethean, flesh-and-blood 'humanity' is an arbitrary limit on the unlimited powers of technology and invention." Ray Brassier's "Prometheanism and its Critics", compiled in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, addresses Jean-Pierre Dupuy's Heideggerean critique of human enhancement and transhumanism. Critiquing the man-made vs. natural distinction as arbitrary and theological, Brassier expresses openness to the possibility of re-engineering human nature and the world through rationalism instead of accepting them as they are, stating "Prometheanism is simply the claim that there is no reason to assume a predetermined limit to what we can achieve or to the ways in which we can transform ourselves and our world." James Trafford and Wolfendale state that rationalist inhumanism "aims to extract the essential core of humanism [rationality] by discarding those features that are consequences of indexing rational agency to the biology, psychology, and cultural history of Homo sapiens." Trafford and Wolfendale note that the work of Wolfendale, Negarestani, and Brassier has also been deemed neo-rationalism. Prometheanism and left-accelerationism are connected to the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars rejects the myth of the given, or the concept that sense perceptions can provide reliable knowledge of the world Accelerationism is hyperstitional in constructing a prefigurative political imaginary of the very transformation it initiates. Noys stated, "[The] CCRU tried to create images of this realized integrated human-technology world that would resonate in the present and so hasten the achievement of that world. Such images were found in cyberpunk science-fiction, in electronic dance music, and in the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft." and Baudrillard. Noys notes Terminator and its use of time travel paradoxes as being influential to the concept. Land states "Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely". Fluss and Frim state that the left-wing perspective rejects pre-emptive knowledge of what a humane or advanced civilization may look like, instead viewing future progress as wholly open and a matter of free choice. Progress is then viewed as hyperstitional in that it consists of fictions which aim to become true. They also note its influence on Negarestani's thought, in which inhumanism is seen as arriving from the future in order to abolish its initial condition of humanism. == Variants ==

Right-wing accelerationism Right-wing accelerationism (or right-accelerationism) is espoused by Land, while Steven Shaviro describes it as "a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with regard to Capital" in celebrating its inhuman and destructive nature. Vincent Le considers Land's philosophy to oppose anthropocentrism, citing his early critique of transcendental idealism and capitalism in "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest", According to Le, Land opposes philosophies which deny a reality beyond humans' conceptual experience, instead viewing death as a way to grasp the Real by surpassing human limitations. This would remain as Land's views on capitalism changed after reading Deleuze and Guattari and studying cybernetics, with Le stating "Although the mature Land abandons his left-wing critique of capitalism, he will never shake his contempt for anthropocentrism, and his remedy that philosophers can only access the true at the edge of our humanity." Le states that Land embraces human extinction in the singularity, as the resulting hyperintelligent AI will come to fully comprehend and embody the Real of the body without organs, free of human distortions of reality. Hui stated "Land's celebration of Asian cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore is simply a detached observation of these places that projects onto them a common will to sacrifice politics for productivity." Land's interest in China for technological progress, stemming from his CCRU days, has been considered an early form of sinofuturism. Noys is a staunch critic of Land, initially calling Land's position "Deleuzian Thatcherism". He also criticized Land's interest in submitting to capitalism's destructiveness, stating "Capitalism, for the accelerationist, bears down on us as accelerative liquid monstrosity, capable of absorbing us and, for Land, we must welcome this." Dark enlightenment Land's involvement in the neoreactionary movement has contributed to his views on accelerationism. In The Dark Enlightenment, he advocates for a form of capitalist monarchism, with states controlled by a CEO. He views democratic and egalitarian policies as only slowing down acceleration and the technocapital singularity, stating "Beside the speed machine, or industrial capitalism, there is an ever more perfectly weighted decelerator ... comically, the fabrication of this braking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left." Le states "If Land is attracted to Moldbug's political system, it is because a neocameralist state would be free to pursue long-term technological innovation without the democratic politician's need to appease short-sighted public opinion to be re-elected every few years." Zack Beauchamp credits Land's life in China and his admiration for Deng and Lee. In another article on accelerationism, Fisher stated "the revolutionary path is the one that allies with deterritorialising forces of modernisation against the reactionary energies of reterritorialisation", arguing that while there is no outside from capitalism, very little necessarily belongs to capitalism; potentials restricted under capitalism could be actualized under different conditions. They posited that capitalism was the most advanced economic system of its time, but has since stagnated and is now constraining technology, with neoliberalism only worsening its crises. At the same time, they considered the modern left to be "unable to devise a new political ideological vision" as they are too focused on localism and direct action and cannot adapt to make meaningful change. They advocated using existing capitalist infrastructure as "a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism", taking advantage of capitalist technological and scientific advances to experiment with things like economic modeling in the style of Project Cybersyn. They also advocated for "collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal forms of sociality" and attaining resources and funding for political infrastructure, contrasting standard leftist political action which they deem ineffective. Moving past the constraints of capitalism would result in a resumption of technological progress, not only creating a more rational society but also "recovering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms." Steven Shaviro compared Srnicek and Williams' proposal to Jameson's argument that Walmart's use of technology for product distribution may be used for communism. Shaviro also argued that left-accelerationism must be an aesthetic program before a political one, as failing to explore the possibilities of technology via fiction could result in the exacerbation of existing capitalist relations rather than Srnicek and Williams' desired repurposing of technology for socialist ends. Land rebuked their ideas in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, stating "the notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism is a deep theoretical error." with Noys characterizing it as taking up the "call for utopian proposals" in Srnicek and Williams' Manifesto. Sam Sellar and David R. Cole characterize their work, along with Wolfendale's, as seeking the acceleration of rationalist modernity and technological development, distinct from capitalism. In particular, Brassier's Prometheanism accelerates normative rationalism as the basis for human transformation. They note Mackay and Avanessian's explanation of Negarestani: while deceleration and stagnation of technology is a greater risk than any posed by AI. This contrasts with effective altruism (referred to as longtermism to distinguish from e/acc), which tends to consider uncontrolled AI to be the greater existential risk and advocates for government regulation and careful alignment. Other views In a critique, Italian Marxist Franco Berardi considered acceleration "the essential feature of capitalist growth" and characterized accelerationism as "point[ing] out the contradictory implications of the process of intensification, emphasizing in particular the instability that acceleration brings into the capitalist system." However, he also stated "my answer to the question of whether acceleration marks a final collapse of power is quite simply: no. Because the power of capital is not based on stability." He posited that the "accelerationist hypothesis" is based on two assumptions: that accelerating production cycles make capitalism unstable, and that potentialities within capitalism will necessarily deploy themselves. He criticized the first by stating "capitalism is resilient because it does not need rational government, only automatic governance"; and the second by arguing that while the possibility exists, it is not guaranteed to happen as it can still be slowed or stopped. In The Question Concerning Technology in China, Yuk Hui critiqued accelerationism, particularly Ray Brassier's "Prometheanism and its Critics", stating "if such a response to technology and capitalism is applied globally, ... it risks perpetuating a more subtle form of colonialism." He argues that accelerationism's Prometheanism tries to promote Prometheus as a universal technological figure despite other cultures having different myths and relations to technology. Further critiquing Westernization, globalization and the loss of non-Western technological thought, he has also referred to Deng Xiaoping as "the world's greatest accelerationist" due to his economic reforms, considering them an acceleration of the modernization process which started in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and intensified with the Cultural Revolution. Fluss and Frim state that it emphasizes "the historical exclusion of black people from white humanist discourses, and the historical process whereby capitalism has engendered the 'black nonsubject. Unconditional accelerationism rejects the notion that anything can or should be done about acceleration, a position which has been compared to the original work of the CCRU. == Alternative uses of the term ==

Since accelerationism was coined in 2010, the term has taken on several new meanings. The term has been used to advocate for making capitalism as destructive as possible in order to cause a revolution against it. An often-cited example of this is Žižek's assertion in a November 2016 interview with Channel 4 News that, were he an American citizen, he would vote for U.S. president Donald Trump, despite his dislike of Trump, as the candidate more likely to disrupt the political status quo in that country. Richard Coyne characterized his strategy as seeking to "shock the country and revive the left." Chinese dissidents have referred to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as "Accelerator-in-Chief" (referencing state media calling Deng Xiaoping "Architect-in-Chief of Reform and Opening"), believing that Xi's authoritarianism is hastening the demise of the Chinese Communist Party and that, because it is beyond saving, they should allow it to destroy itself in order to create a better future. Militant accelerationism International networks of neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists use the term accelerationism to refer to right-wing extremist goals, namely an "acceleration" of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks and infrastructure sabotage, with the goal of eventual societal collapse to achieve the building of a white ethnostate. This form is also deemed militant accelerationism. Predecessors of such tactics include James Mason's newsletter Siege, Zack Beauchamp pointed to Land's shift towards neoreactionarism, along with the neoreactionary movement crossing paths with the alt-right as another fringe right wing internet movement, as the likely connection point between this form of accelerationism and the term for Land's otherwise unrelated technocapitalist ideas. They cited a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center investigation which found users on the neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff who cited neoreactionarism as an influence. == See also ==