Accelerationism. Part 1.

What It Is, It's Origins, Philosophy and Role In The Extreme Right

Morning Comrades.

This is the first part in what is definitely a two part essay, potentially a three part essay spread over this week. For housekeeping sake, tomorrow’s patreon-only email will move to Friday and that will include not only previews of a few new designs for the merch department but also the weekly free print to download.

Obviously you are wondering why I am willing to invest an entire week’s worth of writing and your time on this subject. Totally fair question, as this subject matter isn’t part of the mainstream narrative when we talk about neo-nazi terror and / or capitalism. I am certain it will be soon as there has been a recent resurgence of this topic and its illustrious and yet disastrous history in certain euro-centric academic fields I am involved in and with that I figured to get you all not only interested in the topic but clued up as to what is what. Predominately because this “theory” has become ideology and subsequently been bastardized through a Gramsican approach by the elite post-humanistic, post-capitalist fascist elites currently pushing for Armageddon.

If you are beyond the bullshit narrative that the last decade of terror, both on the individual level as well as on the global scale by our so-called captains of industries and want to understand and know your enemy, this is for you. If you are curious what binds the extinction-event Evangelists like Steve Bannon, the man behind Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel to the Ultra-Right Wing of the Atomwaffen Divison, the Azov Brigade to the Christchurch and Buffalo Murderers, this is for you. Yes, there is a massive, public connection, no, this isn’t some wild ass conspiracy theory and yes, if you are serious about stopping their aim of total destruction, this should be your starting point.

The idea, the philosophical theory, turned ideology and hence turned action-plan of these lunatics is called accelerationism and in today’s email we will look at the history, its philosophy and the contention within Marxist thought, as that part is important. Tomorrow’s email will deal with the real time application of accelerationism in our world, who utilizes it and how and why it is dangerous.

Definitions

Accelerationism is the idea that capitalism, or various processes attached to it, should be deepened or “accelerated” in order to prompt radical change. As Steven Shaviro sums it up,“‘accelerationism’ is the idea that the only way out is through”.

The concept of accelerationism has been traced back to Karl Marx and has been a part of both, post-Marxist thought ( think Lenin, Gramsci and Luxemburg ), Critical Theory ( think Deleuze ) and Neo-Marxist / Post-Capitalist thought ( think Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek ).

It has, since the late 60s/70s also been hijacked, incorporated and put into place by fanatical Christian groups ( mostly U.S. Evangelists ), Silicon Valley ( Thiel and Zuckerberg for example ) and a lot of Capitalists ( think Musk ).

Some understand “accelerationism” as being the process by which capitalism is pushed to its worst excesses as soon as possible in order to provoke an anti-capitalist response. In this basic model, exposing the true evils of late capitalism will lead inevitably to revolt. Marx and Engels occasionally did vocalize this as did Deleuze and certainly Srinceck does and I’ll argue for the case against it.

You might, for instance, theorize that it’s better to vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton, as the latter will maintain the status quo, while the former’s negative disruptive influence might instigate a true socialist backlash. (Historically, this does not go well). Yet few philosophers preach anything so simple (or so passive). Of course, there are different varieties of accelerationism. Some philosophers, for instance, focus on repurposing the tools of capitalism, outlining a model for political change opposed to the work of those Marxists who seek to entirely reject the suspect tools of, to give one example, knowledge of late capitalist economics.

In our current version of accelerationism, the aspects of capitalism and culture which may instigate its own downfall are seized and refashioned to speed up the process of its undoing.

It’s History & Philosophy

Now, accelerationism definitely has its roots in Marxist theory. To the extent that left accelerationists draw upon Marx, they are reflecting Marx’s recognition of the positive historical role capitalism can and must play, specifically in its capacity to develop the forces of production, increasing intensively and extensively the productivity of human activity.

Yet insofar as they reject the dialectic, they lose Marx’s crucial *political* insight. This developmental dynamic is intimately tied to the struggle of the working class to increase value of its labor power, and thus to diminish the need to work. Yet technology is employed not to emancipate the worker from the need to work, but from the opportunity to do so, and thus to emancipate the capitalist from the worker. It is employed in order to drive down the value of labor power, precisely to the point at which their labor-power becomes cheaper than “labor-saving” alternatives.

In other words, the development of the productive forces comes into conflict with the existing relations of production. Wage workers, displaced by machinery, are proletarianized, deprived of access to the means of subsistence they collectively produce.

It was precisely this tendency that Marx saw “accelerating” with the completion of the bourgeois revolutions. Yet he did not advocate it simply because it led to technological advancement, but because it forced the proletariat to organize itself to mediate the deprivation they faced. As the population threatened with and afflicted by proletarianization would grow in proportion to industry, the organizations of the proletariat would be forced to express the common interests of the “immense majority” of the population “without distinction of sex or race”, and to face the possibility, and the need, of taking political power. These interests would coincide in the abolition of private property in the means of production, which would be appropriated by the proletarian dictatorship and applied for the common benefit of all.

To put differently, the acceleration of the development of productive forces (or “technology”) under capitalism creates a potential for emancipation that manifests negatively – freedom from any means of production of their own – as a problem that can only be solved politically.

In our modern times things get a little stranger and less economic and definitely more deadly. The mainstream ethos of the 1990s was thoroughly capitalist, the collapse of the Soviet Union creating a sense that the spread of the American economic and political model was inevitable and irresistible. This coincided with a technological revolution — the rise of widespread internet access and the birth of mass internet culture, a sense of a world defined by and connected through technology in previously incomprehensible ways.

At the University of Warwick, a young philosophy professor named Nick Land argued that the triumph of capitalism and the rise of techno-culture were inextricably intertwined. Drawing on the work of continental theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Land argued that capitalist technological advancement was transforming not just our societies, but our very selves. The self, he believed, was being dissolved by the increasing speed and pace of modern life — the individual was becoming less important than the techno-capitalist system it found itself in.

According to Andy Beckett, a journalist who chronicled the Land’s rise and fall in the Guardian, Land and his remaining followers moved into a home in Leamington formerly owned by prominent British satanist Aleister Crowley, part of an obsession with the occult that had flourished in the accelerationist ranks. Beckett describes a psychologically tortured group that would scribble strange diagrams on the walls of Crowley’s former home. In Fanged Noumena, Land describes his “tool of choice” during his darkest period as “the sacred substance amphetamine ... after perhaps a year of fanatical abuse was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.”

After the logical collapse of this “school”, its members spread across British academia as well as fields ranging from journalism to music production. Its ideas rose to prominence again in the early 2010s, taking two separate, and opposed political turns.

One was left-wing and academic, a school of Marxist thought focusing on how technology can be conscripted toward building a post-capitalist future. The other was right-wing, and in major part a product of Land’s mind.

The modern day Marxist / Post-Capitalist school within accelerationism is essentially defined by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, who put it this way: “The most important division in today’s Left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” Essentially, embracing this theory for a globalist post-capitalist world and their arguments are extremely sound.

Land, however, turned this admiration for technocratic strongmen into an entire political ideology. Linking up online with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin — who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug — he helped construct the doctrine of “neoreaction,” or NRx, essentially an argument that democracy had outlived its usefulness. In his 2013 series of essays on the topic, titled The Dark Enlightenment, Land argues that the ideal state is a capitalist monarchy described as “gov-corp,” the state-controlled by an authoritarian CEO organizing policy according to the dictates of “rational corporate governance.” Sounds awfully familiar, I know. This theory turned violent reality has been eaten up and implemented from multiple sides of the far right spectrum, ranging from armageddon-level Evangelists like Bannon, to technocratic megalomaniacs like Thiel, Zuckerberg and Musk.

Neoreactionaries argue that egalitarian and democratic policies described as “progressive” by left-liberals are, in fact, a way of slowing down the only progress worth having — acceleration toward techno-capitalist singularity. Neoreaction is a version of accelerationism adapted to address this problem.

“Neoreaction is Accelerationism with a flat tire,” Land wrote in a 2013 blog post. “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.”

Though NRx has few public mainstream proponents, it does have connections to prominent figures. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has reportedly read neoreactionary literature, and Trump-backing venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s fund supported Moldbug’s tech startup Urbit. In emails to right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos obtained by Buzzfeed, Moldbug claimed to be “coaching Thiel,” telling Yiannopoulos that he “watched the [2016] election at [Thiel’s] house ... He’s fully enlightened.”

With that I am going to leave you with Part 1 of this essay. Tomorrow, we are going to examine how the extreme far-right has been working with this idea and what violent realities have been caused by it and will cause for us all. Potentially, I will find time to counter argue not just the obvious far-right approach to this, but also the Post-Capitalist approach also.

I do realize that this is turn from the norm here but I do consider this conversation to be one of the main root causes for our ails. Furthermore, I do believe understanding the why’s and how’s is crucial in our plan to organize and work towards a different reality, something I firmly believe to be possible and obviously necessary.

Thank you for your time, attention and support, until Thursday, I remain yours, without compromise,

V.