Accelerationism

Objective

By the end of this volume you know the history of a word that brought forth the thing it denotes. You know who coined the term and against whom, how an external attribution became a confession, and how the movement split into opposing camps. You know the three misunderstandings that surround it today, and you recognise the point that distinguishes this volume from a mere report on a concept.

Exposition

The CCRU never used the word. It appears in no text of the Warwick years. Land never described himself as an accelerationist in his most productive period, for the simple reason that the expression didn't exist. It is younger than the group it denotes, and it comes from someone who wrote against it.

Benjamin Noys, an English theorist with a Marxist background, coined it in 2010 in his book The Persistence of the Negative. He was looking for a name for a figure of thought he noticed in the French theory of the seventies and considered a dead end. Deleuze and Guattari with their provocation from Volume 5, Lyotard with his pleasure in dissolution from Volume 6, along with Baudrillard in an early phase. These thinkers shared, according to Noys, one movement. They answered the supremacy of capital by throwing themselves into its dissolving force instead of setting one of their own against it. Noys called that accelerationism and meant it as the diagnosis of an error. His charge was that a virtue was being made of political powerlessness here, that the celebration of acceleration is a compensation fantasy in which one's own incapacity to act appears as insight.

Note the situation. A critic invents a name for a position nobody held, that had no programme, no adherents, no self-designation. The name was an attribution from outside and a charge.

What happened next is the actual subject of this volume. The charge was accepted. People who until then had no shared cause recognised themselves in the word and reached for it. A battle term tipped into a confession, and within a few years what had previously existed only as an accusation existed. Accelerationism arose out of its critique.

With the name came the search backwards. Once a concept exists, you find its ancestors, and the lineage grew quickly. Marx moved to the centre, because in 1848 he had said something in a speech on free trade that now sounded new. He came out in favour of free trade, expressly not because he thought it good but because it sharpened social contradictions and thereby drove the upheaval forward. Alongside that came the so-called Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse, in which Marx describes how capital itself brings forth the knowledge and the automation that could make it superfluous. Together the two passages yield a figure in which the force you want to overcome builds the path to its own overcoming. What had previously been marginal notes became the founding document of a tradition that hadn't existed before. The canon arose after the name.

The decisive event followed in 2013. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek published a manifesto for an accelerationist politics, short and written in theses. Their starting point was a diagnosis of the left they took to be devastating. The left had settled into localism, protest, and refusal, into a politics of no that builds nothing. It defends remnants and designs no future. Against that they set the demand to take over the achievements of capitalism and turn them against it, technology, automation, planning, infrastructure. Capitalism fetters the productive forces it brought forth, and the task consists in freeing them. Out of that manifesto grew, two years later, a book that built out the line, with the call for full automation and an unconditional basic income.

With that the split was there. Left accelerationism wants to take over the process and steer it. It holds acceleration to be a capacity trapped inside capitalism that another society could put to better use. Its tone is constructive, its verb is build. Right accelerationism, for which Land stands, holds that hope to be an error of reasoning and answers with the objection you know from Volume 17. Whoever wants to steer doesn't stand outside what they want to steer. Its tone is descriptive, its verb is state.

Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian brought out the reader at Urbanomic in 2014 that put both sides between two covers and gathered the lineage from Marx to the present. The volume is a founding document of its own kind, because it made the tradition visible by producing it. Read the reader and you see a line that didn't exist before the reader.

A third position took shape around 2017 and bears the name unconditional accelerationism. It deletes the question of wanting altogether. Neither take over nor affirm, since both presuppose a subject that would have a choice. The process runs, and the positions you take up towards it are themselves products of the process. That version is the most consistent and at the same time the quietest, since it has nothing to demand.

Now the three misunderstandings, because they stand between you and the concept.

The first is the worse, the better. Accelerationism often gets confused with the old left notion that misery has to be deepened so that the masses finally rise. That figure has nothing to do with the matter. It bets on immiseration, accelerationism bets on development. It wants suffering in order to trigger a reaction, here the point is the intensification of capacities, of technology, productivity, abstraction. Take the one for the other and you're reading a theory of sharpening as a call to cruelty.

The second is speed. The word suggests it's about tempo, about faster instead of slower. Williams and Srnicek clarified that point themselves by separating the two terms. Speed is movement within a given frame, driving faster on the same road. Acceleration means the generation of new frames, new capacities, new spaces. One is haste, the other unfolding. Noys's choice of word laid a false trail here, because it pushes an image of hurry in front of a theory of intensity.

The third is programme. The question of whether one should accelerate sounds like a decision you could vote on. For Land it's meaningless. He describes what is running, and the question of what ought to be presupposes a standpoint outside that in his view doesn't exist. For Williams and Srnicek the question is precisely the point, since their whole manifesto is an ought. At this place it becomes visible that the term denotes no position but a field in which opponents mill about. A left and a right accelerationist share one observation and nothing else.

A fourth shift came later and is today the most consequential. Since around 2019 the word has been used in quite different contexts, in violent far-right milieus, where it denotes the bringing about of a societal collapse. That usage has nothing in common with this volume's line of theory in content, it shares only the word. Search for the expression today and you find that meaning first. A term that began as a charge has thereby been occupied from outside a second time.

With that the point stands that everything runs towards. Look at what has happened here. A critic invents a word for a thing that doesn't exist. The word enters circulation. People believe in it, recognise themselves in it, act on it, found journals, write manifestos, assemble a canon. And in the end the thing exists. The fiction has realised itself by being believed. The term accelerationism is a hyperstition, and the best-documented one this course has to offer. It confirms the CCRU's thesis on the CCRU itself. What was described in Volume 13 as a mechanism and tested on capital in Volume 14 has been carried out on the theory that asserts that mechanism. Land saw that irony and enjoyed it, because it's no accident but the procedure in pure form. A name was enough to pull a movement out of nothing.

Core Claim

Accelerationism is a word coined in 2010 by Benjamin Noys as a charge against a figure of thought in French theory, and it brought forth the movement it denoted. Out of the external attribution came a confession, then a canon reaching back to Marx, then a split into a left version that wants to take over the process and a right one that describes it. The term means no speed, no immiseration, and no shared position, but a field full of opponents. Its emergence is the best-documented case of a hyperstition the CCRU story knows.

Bridge to the Next Volume

With that the conceptual part of the fourth module is complete, and the course enters the zone most accounts leave out. Volume 19 turns to the Numogram, a diagram ordering the digits zero to nine into zones, currents, and gates. What looks like number mysticism is the place where the CCRU tested its own thesis in practice. You learn the construction of the system there, before Volume 20 treats the mythology it erected around it.