Accelerationism
Andoni Alonso & Iñaki Arzoz
School of thought founded at the British University of Warwick in the 90s of the last Century by the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) whose leaders were Sadie Plant and Nick Land. Characterized by an analysis of capitalism, described essentially as an economic and social system in constant movement, expansion and change.
Accelerationism showed a double characteristic at the beginning. First, it tried to define how capitalism works, not from the point of view of economic theory, but as the main modifying agent of contemporary society. From here, Accelerationism generated an activist proposal that consisted of programmatically promoting these changes of capitalism, accelerating them as much as possible, with the aim of going beyond their own foundations and then opening space for new social configurations. That would give birth to a new post-capitalist society.
The CCRU proposal tried to differentiate itself from the traditional left because it was considered inefficient and outdated for modern times. Accelerationism presented an alternative program where technology was understood in a different way, not only as a simple means of production but as the main accelerating and reconfiguring factor of society. For this reason, technology, and especially digital and computer science, stands as privileged elements for the definitive revolution due to its capacity to transform social mechanisms. From this conception, authors such as Sadie Plant proposed a feminist perspective for accelerationism – which she called “cyberfeminism” – because she considered computing and the digital world as essentially favoring progressive gender policies. Plant thus considered that non-linear thinking, multitasking and the constitution of networks were typical of women and could become feminist strategies to overthrow patriarchy and the bourgeoisie (Plant, 1998).
Accelerationism vindicated a set of eclectic precedents for their thought. From the literary point of view, they considered Samuel Butler, the Russian cosmologists, and some works of science fiction as precedents. From philosophy, they mention two main sources especially – Karl Marx and the couple Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – who became classic references in accelerationist writings. With respect to Marx, the accelerationists take the interpretation of his philosophy by looking at the contradictions of capitalism, which become deeper in time, as a strategy to reach the collapse of the system and give way to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This would be the necessary stage to reach the dissolution of the State. That interpretation has been labelled as the “scientific” Marxism (Acosta & Arroyo García, 2019).
From this conception, it is not possible to fight capitalism from outside this economic system because there is no outside (as Margareth Thatcher coined TINA, there is no alternative) or from nostalgia because it is impossible to go back, but it is necessary to go through each of the phases enunciated by Marx to reach the end of history, that is, the definitive crisis. Accelerationists support this Marxian interpretation in the Grundisse (1939-1941/1973), especially in the text entitled Fragment of the Machines. In this text, Marx describes the contradiction between a technology that tends to automate itself and therefore needs less work, with working time being a determining measure of value for the capitalist economy (see Capitalism and the Ecological Crisis). The accelerationists postulated that progressive automation would produce the emancipation of society because this would solve the paradox posed in Fragment. This is a programmatic point that left-wing accelerationism will later defend; the suppression of work by technological automation, as expressed, for example, in the so-called “fully automated luxury communism”, the utopian proposal of Aaron Bastani (2019).
According to the accelerationists, Guilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari enunciated in Anti-Oedipus the approach that it is not possible to withdraw from the process (capitalism) since it is impossible but to accelerate it. From them, accelerationism takes the notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The first assumes that capitalism, in its globalizing flows, also acts as a dissolvent of traditional structures precisely thanks to its fluidity and mobility of capital. In this sense, there is a revolutionary advance because spaces are opened for new ways of life, beyond traditional ones such as, for example, patriarchy. The second presupposes the reverse movement: capitalism feels the need to redirect these flows and fix them again in other stable structures. It is precisely this freeze that must be fought with successive deterritorializations. The ideal would thus be an absolute deterritorialization that is, in Deleuze’s words, an “immanent utopia” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, pp. 101-102) because it is not a about pursuing a future, to build something new, but to activate the elements that are already present and take them to their maximum expression through successive deterritorializations. The notion of immanent utopia is also present in the thought of the first Nick Land, when he considered himself belonging to that renewed left and was an attentive reader of Deleuze.
Although accelerationism was born as a way of rethinking the left, later bifurcated into two opposing currents. There is thus a left-wing and a right-wing accelerationism. Of the former, its best-known representatives are Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams who, in 2013, published the manifesto #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Policy. Declaring themselves progressive thinkers, they maintain the postulates of the historical CCRU because they consider that the traditional left is not up to the current political challenges such as climate change, global financial crises, resource depletion, etc. All these challenges are beyond the analytical and propositional capacities of what these authors derogatorily call “folk politics” (Srnicek & Wiliams, 2017, p. 9). This folk politics has been anchored in the modes of the nineteenth century such as strikes, banners and communes. They do not understand that technology is the fundamental factor of change today, but paradoxically, the capitalist system itself is hindering its complete development. The technology that has been created is thus limited, these authors say, by interests of capitalism such as economic profit, and it is the political task of the new left to liberate this potential.
Right-wing accelerationism was initiated by Nick Land, one of the founders of accelerationism, when he radically changed his leftist affiliation to create what he called the “Dark Enlightenment” (Land, 2021), as a counterpart to the classical Enlightenment that encouraged Modernity. Land proposes that capitalism is a kind of self-replicating machine, endowed with intelligence and that uses human beings to grow, deterritorializes and encompass not only the planet but also the colonization of space. The acceleration would thus consist of freeing capitalism from all obstacles, through the free market without any governmental restriction, the creation of all possible technology, the abolition of democracy and the restoration of a kind of techno-feudalism, the elimination of the rights of women and minorities as well as the fusion of human and machine in a sui géneris transhumanism. Unlimited space must be left, then, for capitalism to reach its apogee, assuming that it is beneficial to the human species.
The success of accelerationism manifests itself in a rather uneven way because it depends on its political affiliation. Left-wing accelerationism does not seem to have been able to bring together the discourses of the current political left in a majority way. It gives the impression that there is no real opposition to the capitalist power, technologies and forms of production that threaten the very survival of the human species. The end of work thanks to automation is far from being fulfilled. According to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, a well-known critic of accelerationism, we are at a time when digital work is indistinguishable from free time and spreading without limits, so the utopia of complete automation that abolishes salaried work is far from being fulfilled, especially in digital immaterial work (Berardi, 2019).
Also, the new actors that have become part of the current political situation – neo-fascism and neo-imperialism, predatory geopolitics, the rise of fundamentalism and radical nationalism – seem to be curtailing the processes of deterritorialization proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. It seems that technology is not even the main actor in contemporary politics either. For this reason, the utopias presented by Aaron Bastiani (2019) and Paul Mason (2016) do not seem to be close and the general impression is that we are entering a dystopian stage aimed at both social and ecological collapse that technology will not be able to remedy and that, at most, will be able to partially mitigate its catastrophic effects.
Although maybe surprising, right-wing accelerationism has had much better luck. At the present time, there are various movements of the ultra-right that vindicate the figure of Nick Land and his Dark Enlightenment. From the incel to the Alt-Right, movements against women’s and minority rights have resurfaced as this philosopher promulgates, in a confusing amalgam called NRx or contemporary Neo-Reactionarism. The basic statements of the Dark Enlightenment —technological neo-feudalism, disruption of social structures, states turned into corporations, supremacism, neo-fascism and sexism, induced pursuit of social collapse (Land, 2022) — are widely shared by so-called “techno-bros” and their 21st-century bosses, techno-oligarchs such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, among others. President Trump’s current U.S. policy and his unconditional support for the development of artificial intelligence is an indicator of how influential accelerationism has become. In fact, the idea of a super-thinking machine that uses human beings as fuel had already been enunciated by Land. In any case, right-wing accelerationism has an undeniable role in politics and in the collapsist vision of the 21st century.
In the context of the current eco-social crisis, accelerationism is presented as a controversial philosophical-political proposal, anchored in the myth of progress – a kind of progressed progress – since it lacks a rigorous scientific and economic analysis on which to sustain itself. Influenced by a certain sinister post-cyberpunk poetics of the so-called “magic of chaos”, derived from related concepts such as Land’s “hyperstition”, a performative fiction that creates its own reality or “the experimental (techno-) science of self-fulfilling prophecies” (CCRU, 2021), his disruptive proposal prefigures the irrationalist drift of certain contemporary theories in their implication in the present and future of a convulsive world.
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