Accelerationism

A number of philosophers have expressed apparently accelerationist attitudes, including Karl Marx in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade":

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.[8]

In a similar vein, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it",[9] a statement often simplified, following Deleuze and Guattari, to a command to "accelerate the process".[10]

Prominent theorists include right-accelerationist Nick Land.[7] The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an unofficial research unit at the University of Warwick from 1995 to 2003,[11] included Land as well as other social theorists such as Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant as members, and is considered a key progenitor in both left- and right-accelerationist thought.[12] Prominent contemporary left-accelerationists include Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics",[5] and the Laboria Cuboniks collective, who authored the manifesto "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation".[13] For Mark Fisher, writing in 2012, "Land's withering assaults on the academic left ... remain trenchant"—though problematic—and "Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist".[14]

Along accelerationist lines, Paul Mason, in works such as PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, has tried to speculate about futures after capitalism. He declares that "[a]s with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism's replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started". He considers that the rise of collaborative production will eventually help capitalism to kill itself.

Focusing on how information technology infrastructures undermine modern political geographies, and proposing an open-ended "design brief", Benjamin H. Bratton's book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty is associated with accelerationism. Tiziana Terranova's "Red Stack Attack!"[15] links Bratton's stack model and left accelerationism.

Since the late 2010s, the vanguardist faction of white nationalists and neo-Nazis has increasingly embraced a violent form of accelerationism as a way of establishing a whites-only ethnostate.[16][17][18] The origins of the far-right version of accelerationism dates back to the 1980s, when American Nazi Party-National Socialist Liberation Front (ANP/NSLF) member James Mason advocated for mass killings or assassinations of high-profile targets in the newsletter Siege. Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings that killed 51 people and injured 49 others, had embraced accelerationism in a section of his manifesto, titled "Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics". It also influenced John Timothy Earnest, the man accused of causing the Escondido mosque fire at Dar-ul-Arqam Mosque in Escondido, California, and the Poway synagogue shooting, resulting in one dead and three injured. Furthermore, it influenced Patrick Crusius, the Allen-born man accused of being responsible for the El Paso Walmart shooting, that killed 22 people and injured 24 others.