# Accelerationism

Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the dramatic change of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.
Ideas such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of deterritorialization, Jean Baudrillard's proposals for "fatal strategies", and various ideas of Nick Land are crucial influences on accelerationism, which aims to analyze and subsequently promote the social, economic, cultural, and libidinal forces that constitute the process of acceleration.
The term has also, in a manner strongly distinguished from original accelerationist theorists, been used by right-wing extremists such as neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists to increasingly refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through assassinations, murders and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate.

## Background and precursors

The term "accelerationism" was first used in sci-fi author Roger Zelazny's third novel, 1967's Lord of Light. 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 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Jean-François Lyotard in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy and Jean Baudrillard in his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death.
English right-wing philosopher and writer Nick Land, commonly credited with creating and inspiring accelerationism's basic ideas and concepts, cited a number of philosophers who expressed anticipatory accelerationist attitudes in his 2017 essay "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism". 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." Then, taking inspiration from this notion for Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari speculated on an unprecedented "revolutionary path" to further perpetuate capitalism's tendencies that would later become a central idea of accelerationism:
   But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution"? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to 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.
Land also 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:
   But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, prominent left accelerationists, additionally credit Vladimir Lenin with recognizing capitalist progress as important in the subsequent functioning of socialism:
   Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).
Robin Mackay, co-editor of #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader and a former CCRU member, additionally cites Russian cosmism, science fiction (particularly Terminator, Predator, and Blade Runner), cyberpunk, 90's cyberculture, and electronic music as influences on the movement. Iain Hamilton Grant, another former CCRU member, stated "Neuromancer got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You’d find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room.”

## Contemporary accelerationism

The Guardian has referred to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, an anthology edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, as "the only proper guide to the movement in existence." They also identified the University of Warwick, particularly the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) which included people such as Land, Mackay, Mark Fisher, and Sadie Plant, as significant to the movement. Fisher described the CCRU's accelerationism as “a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a ‘technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, partly inspired by the pro-markets, anti-capitalism line developed by Manuel DeLanda out of Braudel, and from the section of Anti-Oedipus that talks about marketization as the 'revolutionary path'."

### Nick Land and right accelerationism

In "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism", Land attributed the increasing speed of the modern world, along with the associated decrease in time available to think and make decisions about its events, to unregulated capitalism and its ability to exponentially grow and self-improve, describing capitalism as "a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process." He argued that the best way to deal with capitalism is to participate more to foster even greater exponential growth and self-improvement via creative destruction, accelerating technological progress along with it. Land also argued that such acceleration is intrinsic to capitalism but impossible for non-capitalist systems, stating that "capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic 'revolution' possibly could." In an interview with Vox, he stated "Modernity has Capitalism (the self-escalating techno-commercial complex) as its motor. Our question was what ‘the process’ wants (i.e. spontaneously promotes) and what resistances it provokes." He also said that “the assumption” behind accelerationism was that “the general direction of [techno-capitalist] self-escalating change was toward decentralization.” Mackay summarized Land's position as "since capitalism tends to dissolve hereditary social forms and restrictions [...], it is seen as the engine of exploration into the unknown. So to be ‘on the side of intelligence’ is to totally abandon all caution with respect to the disintegrative processes of capital and whatever reprocessing of the human and of the planet they might involve." This view has been referred to as "right-accelerationism."
Fanged Noumena, an anthology of Land's work, has been described as “contain[ing] some of accelerationism's most darkly fascinating passages." In “Meltdown”, a CCRU work and one of the writings compiled, Land envisioned a technocapital singularity in China, resulting in revolutions in artificial intelligence, human enhancement, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. This upends the previous status quo, and the former first world countries struggle to maintain control and stop the singularity, verging on collapse. He described new anti-authoritarian movements performing a bottom-up takeover of institutions through means like biological warfare enhanced with DNA computing. He claimed that capitalism's tendency towards optimization of itself and technology, in service of consumerism, will lead to the enhancement and eventually replacement of humanity with technology, asserting that "nothing human makes it out of the near-future." Eventually, the self-development of technology will culminate in the "melting [of] Terra into a seething K-pulp (which unlike grey goo synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates)." He also criticized traditional philosophy as tending towards despotism, instead praising Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis as "already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972."
Land has continually praised China's economic policy as being accelerationist, moving to Shanghai and working as a journalist writing material that has been characterized as pro-government propaganda. He has also spoken highly of Deng Xiaoping and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, calling Lee an "autocratic enabler of freedom."

#### 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.” He has advocated for accelerationists to support the neoreactionary movement, though many have distanced themselves from him in response to his views on race.

### Left-wing accelerationism

Left-wing accelerationism (also referred to as left-accelerationism or L/Acc) is often attributed to Fisher. Left-wing accelerationism seeks to explore, in an orthodox and conventional manner, how modern society has the momentum to create futures that are equitable and liberatory. While both strands of accelerationist thinking remain rooted in a similar range of thinkers, left accelerationism appeared with the intent to use technology for the goal of achieving an egalitarian future. Fisher, writing on his blog k-punk, had become increasingly disillusioned with capitalism as an accelerationist, citing working in the public sector in Blairite Britain, being a teacher and trade union activist, and an encounter with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whom he considered to be using similar concepts to the CCRU but from a leftist perspective. At the same time, he became frustrated with traditional left wing politics, believing they were ignoring technology that they could exploit.
In "Terminator vs Avatar", Fisher claimed that while Marxists criticized Libidinal Economy for asserting that workers enjoyed the upending of primitive social orders, nobody truly wants to return to those. Therefore, rather than reverting to pre-capitalism, society must move through and beyond capitalism. Fisher praised Land's attacks on the academic left, describing the academic left as "careerist sandbaggers" and "a ruthless protection of petit bourgeois interests dressed up as politics." He also critiqued Land's interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari, stating that while superior in many ways, "his deviation from their understanding of capitalism is fatal" in assuming no reterritorialization, resulting in not foreseeing that capitalism provides "a simulation of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis." Citing Fredric Jameson's interpretation of The Communist Manifesto as "see[ing] capitalism as the most productive moment of history and the most destructive at the same time", he argued for accelerationism as an anti-capitalist strategy, criticizing the left's moral critique of capitalism and their "tendencies towards Canutism" as only helping the narrative that capitalism is the only viable system.
Nick Srnicek befriended Fisher, sharing similar views, and the 2008 financial crisis, along with dissatisfaction with the left's "ineffectual" response of the Occupy protests, led to Srnicek co-writing "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" with Alex Williams in 2013. 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 like 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." They expanded further in Inventing the Future, which, while dropping the term "accelerationism", pushed for automation, reduction and distribution of working hours, universal basic income, and diminishment of work ethic.
Land rebuked its ideas in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, stating "the notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism is a deep theoretical error."

### Effective accelerationism

Effective accelerationism (abbreviated to e/acc) takes influence from effective altruism, a movement to maximize good by calculating what actions provide the greatest overall/global good and prioritizing those rather than focusing on personal interest/proximity. Proponents advocate for unrestricted technological progress "at all costs", believing that artificial general intelligence will solve universal human problems like poverty, war, and climate change, while deceleration and stagnation of technology is a greater risk than any posed by AI. For example, James Brusseau advocates reconfiguring AI ethics to promote acceleration, arguing that problems caused by AI innovation are to be resolved by still more innovation as opposed to limiting or slowing the technology. 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.
Benjamin Noys is a staunch critic of accelerationism, initially calling it "Deleuzian Thatcherism". He accuses it of offering false solutions to technological and economic problems, considering those solutions “always promised and always just out of reach." He has also said "Capitalism, for the accelerationist, bears down on us as accelerative liquid monstrosity, capable of absorbing us and, for Land, we must welcome this."
In The Question Concerning Technology in China, Yuk Hui critiqued accelerationism, particularly Ray Brassier’s “Prometheanism and its Critics” from #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, 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 tries to universally apply a western conception of technology based on Prometheus despite other cultures having different myths and relations to technology. In "A Politics of Intensity: Some Aspects of Acceleration in Simondon and Deleuze", Yuk Hui and Louis Morelle analyzed Deleuze and Simondon from an accelerationist perspective.
Slavoj Žižek considers accelerationism to be “far too optimistic”, critiquing it as retroactively deterministic and contrasting it with Freud’s death drive and its lack of a final conclusion. He argues that accelerationism considers just one conclusion of the world’s tendencies and fails to find other “coordinates" of the world order.
Benjamin H. Bratton's book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty has been described as concerning accelerationist ideas, focusing on how information technology infrastructures undermine modern political geographies and proposing an open-ended "design brief". Tiziana Terranova's "Red Stack Attack!" links Bratton's stack model and left-wing accelerationism.
Laboria Cuboniks, a feminist group, advocated for the use of technology for gender abolition in "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation", which has been described as "regrounding left accelerationism in its cyberfeminist antecedents." Aria Dean, proposing an alternative to both right and left accelerationism, synthesized racial capitalism with accelerationism in "Notes on Blacceleration", arguing that the binary between humans and capital is already blurred by the scars of the Atlantic slave trade.

## Other uses of the term

Since "accelerationism" was coined in 2010, the term has taken on several new meanings. Several commentators have used the label accelerationist to describe a controversial political strategy articulated by Slavoj Žižek. 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 former U.S. president Donald Trump as the candidate more likely to disrupt the political status quo in that country. Steven Shaviro described variants that “embrace the idea that the worse things get, the better the prospect for a revolution to overthrow everything”, though he considers it very rare. Mackay noted a misconception that accelerationism involves a Marxist "acceleration of contradictions" within capitalism and stated that no accelerationist authors have advocated such a thing. Chinese dissidents have referred to 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.

### Far-right accelerationist terrorism

Despite its originally Marxist philosophical and theoretical interests, since the late 2010s, international networks of neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, White nationalists, and White supremacists have increasingly used the term "accelerationism" to refer to right-wing extremist goals, and have been known to refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks and eventual societal collapse to achieve the building of a White ethnostate. Far-right accelerationism has been widely considered as detrimental to public safety. The inspiration for this distinct variation is occasionally cited as American Nazi Party and National Socialist Liberation Front member James Mason's newsletter Siege, where he argued for sabotage, mass killings, and assassinations of high-profile targets to destabilize and destroy the current society, seen as a system upholding a Jewish and multicultural New World Order. His works were republished and popularized by the Iron March forum and Atomwaffen Division, right-wing extremist organizations strongly connected to various terrorist attacks, murders, and assaults. Far-right accelerationists have also been known to attack critical infrastructure, particularly the power grid, attempting to cause a collapse of the system or believing that 5G was causing COVID-19, with some encouraging promotion of 5G conspiracy theories as easier than convincing potential recruits that the Holocaust never happened. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups and files class action lawsuits against discriminatory organizations and entities, "on the case of white supremacists, the accelerationist set sees modern society as irredeemable and believe it should be pushed to collapse so a fascist society built on ethnonationalism can take its place. What defines white supremacist accelerationists is their belief that violence is the only way to pursue their political goals."
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the perpetrator of the 15 March 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that killed 51 people and injured 49 others, strongly encouraged right-wing accelerationism in a section of his manifesto titled "Destabilization and Accelerationism: Tactics". Tarrant's manifesto influenced John Timothy Earnest, the perpetrator of both the 24 March 2019 Escondido mosque fire at Dar-ul-Arqam Mosque in Escondido, California, and the 27 April 2019 Poway synagogue shooting which resulted in one dead and three injured; and it also influenced Patrick Crusius, the perpetrator of the 3 August 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting that killed 23 people and injured 23 others. Tarrant and Earnest, in turn, influenced Juraj Krajčík, the perpetrator of the 2022 Bratislava shooting that left dead two patrons of a gay bar. Sich Battalion urged its members to buy a copy of Tarrant's manifesto, encouraging them to "get inspired" by it.
Vox 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 far-right racial 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. Land himself became interested in the Atomwaffen-affiliated theistic Satanist organization Order of Nine Angles (ONA) which adheres to the ideology of Neo-Nazi terrorist accelerationism, describing the ONA's works as "highly-recommended" in a blog post. Since the 2010s, the political ideology and religious worldview of the Order of Nine Angles, founded by the British neo-Nazi leader David Myatt in 1974, have increasingly influenced militant neo-fascist and neo-Nazi insurgent groups associated with right-wing extremist and White supremacist international networks, most notably the Iron March forum.

#### Fascist accelerationist organizations

* Active Club Network is decentralized Clandestine cell system of white nationalists. It promotes mixed martial arts to fight against what it asserts is a system that is targeting the white race, as well as a "warrior spirit" to prepare for a forthcoming race war. Some extremism researchers have characterized the network as a "shadow or stand-by army" which is awaiting activation as the need for it arises.
* Atomwaffen Division is a neo-Nazi terror organization found in 2013 by Brandon Russell responsible for multiple murders and mass casualty plots. Atomwaffen has been proscribed as a terror organization in United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
* The Base is a neo-Nazi, white supremacist paramilitary hate group and training network, formed in 2018 by Rinaldo Nazzaro and active in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Europe. As of November 2021 it is considered a terrorist organization in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
* Combat 18 is a neo-Nazi organization that has been proscribed in Canada and Germany and is tied to the assassination of Walter Lübcke and the 2009 Vítkov arson attack.
* The Manson Family was a doomsday cult, led by Charles Manson, responsible for the Tate–LaBianca murders, in which seven people were murdered between August 8 and August 10, 1969. Manson was a white supremacist and neo-Nazi who prophesized about a race war in which African-Americans would rise up and exterminate all white people in the United States, with him and his followers hiding in safety. Afterward, the Family would rule over the Black population, with Manson as their "master," as he believed that Black people were not intelligent enough to govern themselves. The Tate–LaBianca murders were an attempt to bring this scenario closer to reality, with Manson believing that the killing of people who he considered "pigs" would inspire Black people to do the same.
* Nordic Resistance Movement is a pan-Nordic neo-Nazi organization that adheres to accelerationism and is tied to ONA and multiple terror plots and murders, like the murder of an antifascist in Helsinki in 2016. There has been an international effort to proscribe NRM as a terrorist organization, and it was banned as such in Finland in 2019. On 14 June 2024, the United States Department of State designated NRM and its leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT).
* Order of Nine Angles is a neo-Nazi satanist organization that has been connected to multiple murders and terror plots. There has been an international effort to proscribe ONA as a terror organization. Further, the ONA is connected to the Atomwaffen and the Base, and the founder of ONA David Myatt was a one-time leader of the C18.
* Russian Imperial Movement is a white supremacist organization founded in Russia and proscribed as a terror organization in the United States and Canada for its connection to neo-fascist terrorists. People trained by RIM have gone on to commit a series of bombings and joined the separatist militants in Donbas.