Against Accelerationism

On why the desire to hasten collapse is a trap, and a left-wing one

Let it all burn, our institutions have failed us!
You can’t vote your way out of this man.

Oh they killed Charlie Kirk? Don’t they realise they killed the moderate? I’m really the Based one, wait until they find out about me!

If we lose the election then it’ll get really bad, so bad that the people will wake up and we’ll win.

My Friends, spend enough time online and you will encounter refrains such as these, all of course containing at least a smidge of truth. There is a growing disposition against the reformist impulse, a desire to ANNIHILATE ALL THAT EXISTS and unleash political chaos, a chaos that they believe will end in the establishment of a new political order.

This feeling is not entirely morally unjustified nor entirely inaccurate, but it is held by a variety of disparate groups. In this piece I wish to assault one way of thinking, a particular group’s disposition which I believe not only to be incredibly destructive, but far more importantly a disposition which reduces the chance of a successful new right wing political order emerging in the West.

Categorising things has gotten increasingly difficult in the internet age, particularly because to be categorised opens oneself to critique, strawmanning and ultimately Cringe, which is the one assault almost no digital social movement can weather. As such savvy operators constantly avoid categorisation and change their language in an attempt to retain cut-through, this is one of the many reasons digital personalities develop a kind of ideological transgenderism, one year being a neo-conservative, then a Social Democrat, a Catholic Traditionalist with posadist tendancies, a Nietzschean Vitalist and finally a Communist National-Socialist. Constantly changing their identity, style and language to contest their digital lifespan.

Abandoning that tangent let me run below to the main argument.

What is Accelerationism?

Providing a total and satisfying definition of anything in the internet age is rather difficult. In addition to the observations above, someone is bound to misinterpret what I am opposed to or be upset at an element left out of the definition.

This of course is magnified when discussing something like Accelerationism, so let me be precise about what I am and am not attacking.

I am not referring to the work and ideas of Nick Land, this theorized a self-revolutionizing capitalism that would culminate in a technological singularity surpassing and eliminating humanity. That is a separate and in many ways more interesting body of thought, deserving its own treatment.

What I am referring to is Political Accelerationism, an attitude that in order for things to get better, they have to get worse, and we should help that happen. It is a theory of political change that rests on the following two claims:

Political accelerationists believe that the existing political system contains internal contradictions, elements that pull against each other and will eventually tear it apart. Marxists have a phrase for this: “heightening the contradictions.” The accelerationist project is to accelerate those contradictions toward their breaking point in order to create more “political energy” in a system.

An example from the mind of an accelerationist opposed to Liberal Democracy, would argue that:

Powers within Democratic systems naturally seek to enfranchise additional groups in an attempt to gain an electoral edge, once all members of a political community are enfranchised these powers either borrow against the future for a political advantage (accumulate debt) and/or seek to enfranchise people outside the political community (engage in mass migration).

This pattern is fundamentally unstable, therefore we should be happy when the state accumulates debt and engages with mass migration as that simply brings forward the date when the political regime will collapse.

In this “collapse” we find the second core claim of Political Accelerationism, a kind of Political Rousseauism.

Rousseau posited a state of nature in which human beings are essentially good, and that it is society, its inequalities, its artificial hierarchies, its corrupting institutions. that produces vice. The accelerationist has simply transposed this framework into the political realm. Political Accelerationists seem to believe in a “Political State of Nature” in which absent from institutions the people would agree with them and that it is only the existing political institutions that stop this.

You see this type of thinking all the time, for example many people blame the existence of the Liberal Party for the lack of more right wing alternative parties and state that the Liberal Party has to be destroyed prior to any other movement emerging. This is of course wrong, and a fundamentally Rousseauian approach to Political change.

Things do not collapse into a better state of nature, they just collapse.

This is, at its root, a left-wing view of civilisation. To believe that our virtues and prosperity are natural, and that they are only suppressed by corrupt institutions, is the foundational assumption of progressivism. The right-wing view — the correct view — is the opposite: nature is nasty, brutish and short. Civilisation and all her virtues and pleasures are not natural states waiting to be uncovered; they are constructed and maintained through sustained human will, effort and organisation. They can be lost. They have been lost before. And they do not automatically return.

Even setting aside its philosophical incoherence, accelerationism fails the basic test of historical evidence.

The accelerationist model assumes a quick and decisive collapse that produces the conditions for political renewal. But decline rarely works that way. It took Rome centuries to fall. Many previously prosperous nations have simply deteriorated, gradually, into conditions we would recognise as third-world (Argentina, Lebanon, Rhodesia, Venezuela, South Africa) without producing the decisive political rupture that accelerationists anticipate. Some of these declines happened gradually, some happened suddenly; in neither case did material deterioration automatically generate a superior political order.

There are still committed socialists in Venezuela. There are still enthusiastic supporters of the ANC in South Africa. Decline does not change the minds of the masses. It simply makes their lives worse and the lives of everyone around them worse in the bargain.

The red line that was supposed to trigger mass popular resistance keeps moving. The last several years (COVID) have provided abundant evidence that there is, in practice, no threshold of government overreach that produces spontaneous popular pushback. The accelerationist is always waiting for the moment that does not come, consoling themselves that the next outrage will be the one that finally wakes people up.

Accelerationism provides a moral framework, an affirmation for the destruction of institutions as a mechanism for political change. To the prime mover of our political age (and perhaps every age) disenfranchised young men, this is a welcome development.

Many justly feel slighted by Western Institutions, schools, universities, politics and business, all areas in which they have been forced out in favour of other groups for the sake of “diversity”.

Many have rightly identified these institutions as enemies and want to destroy them, but ultimately that destructive impulse finding it’s expression in Accelerationism is not in their interests, that inclination leads them only to a more permanent defeat. The deeper problem is that accelerationism offers a passive theory of political change. It tells its adherents to wait to let things get worse, to cheer for collapse, to trust that the rubble will sort itself. It requires nothing of them except the abandonment of the effort to build anything. And this is where my deepest and most aggressive opposition emerges from.

Any idea, any social movement, any influencer who’s ideas and actions results in less of “our people” getting involved in politics, art and the real world is an enemy and I declare myself their opposition in the strongest possible terms. It is all distraction, life-denial, surrogate activities. For many of the changes we wish to see in society we do not have to convince a single additional person that we are right, we only have to mobilise those of the same spirit, who in their cowardice and deep slumber consume but do not create.

So, should we commit ourselves to an eternal stasis? Should we commit ourselves to defending every existing institution against all reform? Does decline present no greater opportunity for change?

No, no and no.

It is certainly true that decline does create energy. Political crises do create opportunities. But you have to have a vehicle to tap into and take advantage of this great energy, to absorb it. Without suitable political infrastructure to take advantage of chaotic situations the chaos simply plays out. The energy dissipates, the moment is lost. And it turns out that most of the time, when you lose, you lose.

Decline in and of itself does not change the minds of the masses (after all there are still Libtards in South Africa) too often you just slowly become the third world.

Accelerationists relies on a liberal view of “the people” as the prime movers of History/Political Action. But that is never the case! The people are largely inert, focused on their daily lives, in so far as they engage with politics they are always rallied by an external force, a cabal, an organised minority, an elite.

Many of our institutions have failed us, our political situation is riddled with a number of internal contradictions, etc. But we do not become stronger by becoming weaker, and we do not build a new order by demolishing the capacity for order itself.

In your daily life consider not what must be torn down but rather what can I build? What groups and institutions can I raise up? How can I cultivate more of the good and less of evil? How can I gather up strength?

I think we’ll find that as we build up and contribute to our own vehicles, it’ll become far easier to tear away all that is rotten.

As always friends, do you want to be pure or do you want to win?