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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accelerationism | 2/9 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T14:56:05.593251+00:00 | kb-cron |
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. Fisher describes Land's interpretation of this passage as explicitly anti-Marxist. 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:
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. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian note "Fragment on Machines" from Grundrisse as Marx's "most openly accelerationist writing". 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. Sam Sellar and Cole state that while he was dismissive of Marxists, Land studied works such as Capital and Grundrusse as "exemplary analyses of how capital works".
Sellar and Cole attribute Land's ideas to continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Deleuze. Paul Haynes notes Bataille's concepts of general economy and excess, which Land wrote about for The Thirst for Annihilation, and McKenzie Wark notes Bataille's solar economy as key to Land along with a non-vitalist interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari. 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":The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams additionally credit Vladimir Lenin with recognizing that the development of capitalist forces was important in the subsequent foundation of a socialist system:
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). Accelerationism was also influenced by science fiction (particularly cyberpunk) and electronic dance music (particularly jungle). Neuromancer and its trilogy are a major influence, with Iain Hamilton Grant stating "Neuromancer got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You'd find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room." Fisher states of Land's "theory-fictions" from the 1990s, "They weren't distanced readings of French theory so much as cybergothic remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as Gibson's Neuromancer." Fisher and Mackay additionally note Terminator, Predator, and Blade Runner as particular sci-fi works which influenced accelerationism. Mackay also notes Russian cosmism and Erewhon as influences, while Noys notes Donna Haraway's work on cyborgs. H. P. Lovecraft has also been noted as an influence, with Land drawing upon such work in the 1990s and later in the 2010s. Cybernetics has been noted as an influence on both Land and left-accelerationism, with Gamez tracing this to neoliberals such as Friedrich Hayek being interested in cybernetics and the self-organization of markets; as well as socialists such as Oskar Lange who sought to use cybernetic computers to address the socialist calculation debate.