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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerationism | 9/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:56:05.593251+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== 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. Aria Dean articulated a position of "Blacceleration" as a "necessary alternative to right and left accelerationism". Synthesizing racial capitalism with accelerationism, she argued that accelerationism is intrinsically tied to the black experience through capitalism's relationship to slavery, particularly the treatment of slaves as both inhuman capital and human, which is not accounted for in other accelerationist analyses of capitalism. This challenges the accelerationist distinction made between human and capital, in turn challenging their rejection of humanism in favor of an inhuman subject since black people have historically been treated as such a subject; she states "to speak of transversing or travestying humanism in favor of inhuman capital without recognizing the way in which the black is nothing other than the historical inevitability of this transgression—and has been for some time—circularly reinforces the white humanism these thinkers seeks [sic] to disavow." 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. Fisher considered this a misunderstanding of left-accelerationism, with such misunderstandings being the reason Srnicek and Williams dropped the term for Inventing The Future. Trafford and Wolfendale consider both hastening revolution and intensifying the contradictions of capitalism to be misconceptions, attributing them to Noys characterizing first wave accelerationist thought as "the worse the better". Several commentators have also 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 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. 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." The New York Times held such accelerationism as detrimental to public safety. Predecessors of such tactics include 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. 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 == Accelerating change Capitalist Realism Creative destruction – Concept in economics Economic calculation problem Futures studies Great Acceleration – Proposed geologic epochPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets Non-simultaneity – Concept of uneven temporal development in the writings of Ernst Bloch and Marxist theories Roundaboutness – Method of goods production Speculative realism – Movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy Strategy of tension – Political policy encouraging violent struggle Time–space compression – Idea in space–time
== References ==