Capital is reeling. In its death throes it has the opportunity to not just unseat the fabric of class society, but to destroy the Earth we inhabit. Speaking frankly, the latter seems more likely to happen. Even if we are to throw off the shackles of Capital its vices have permanently scarred this planet, its rot seeped so thoroughly deep. Climate Scientists have long agreed that we are past the point of no return. Our strategies are no longer preventative, but are questions of how we even survive the incoming fallout. The worst part: most, or at least many, people acknowledge this.
What separates the Left and the Right is a matter of action, not observation.1 The Dissident Right (Anti-Liberal Right) and the Far Left (Anarchists and Communists) both can offer a sort of descriptive writeup of society and its ills, where they break is the prescriptive role of action and solution.2 However, there is one action where dissident factions find themselves tactically united on: Accelerationism.
Accelerationism, for those not in the know, is the broad range of ideas, tactics, and strategies that advocate for the hastening, or acceleration, of the material conditions. Oftentimes this presents itself as keeping dismal living conditions or making them worse, usually through acts of indiscriminate or targeted terror. Tactics such as these are found across history, regardless of time and place. Currently, accelerationism is found most common in right wing spaces. Groups such as AtomWaffen and The Base seek to ferment a racial war through terroristic means. Mike Ma writes his thinly veiled fetish novels pretending to be political theory. Militias train for “The Great Reset”. Similarly on the left, groups engage in targeted terror campaigns against the State, anarchists have their own writings, such as Desert. Looking at the past, even the Narodniks represented a form of proto-accelerationism. What unites these people in their strategies is one thing: alienation.
One of Capital’s most pernicious evils it inflicts upon society is the widespread alienation that is thrust onto humanity. Marx, as well as a multitude of writers since him, has already described capitalist alienation at length, so I’ll save myself the effort of relitigating his words. If we examine accelerationist and terroristic means, one of the subconscious goals is the hijacking of the Spectacle (Re: Debord). In the spectacle-ist and capitalist economy, attention is just as meaningful of a currency as the U.S. dollar. Corporations vie for your every second of attention. Patents based on “consumer retention” are created everyday. Your algorithm is hand catered to keep you consuming for as long as possible (as well as in the most profitable way). It should be no surprise then that accelerationists do not carry out their terrorism anonymously. 17 year old white supremacists adorn their father’s AR-15 with the slogans of their movement. Attacks are livestreamed online with clips disseminated across social media. Every bomb that goes off is paired with a communique sent to every local and regional news station. The Spectacle is reinvented.
Hijacking the Spectacle
Or is it? Terrorism does little to move the needle towards revolution or societal collapse. What terrorism does offer is attention. To the disaffected young man who is alienated from his labor, his family, humanity, and himself what better life can exist than to be “canonized” and venerated amongst the dozens of other alienated youth?3 Accelerationism is less of a coherent political ideology and more of the exasperated sigh of the oppressed (to bite off Marx). In one final act, they attempt to write the world in their image and wrestle control of the Spectacle. It’s similar to the way suicide allows one to end their life “on their own terms”. Ultimately, both terrorism and suicide are worthless acts. Any individual act to subvert the Spectacle will ultimately be reformatted into itself and become commodified. It also fails to notice that Capital doesn’t need external acceleration to ramp up its contradictions. It’s already headed on that path.
Even though terrorism offers up no real political strategy, one cannot help but notice the sort of romantic appeal it has. For a brief moment, whoever has carried out the attack protagonizes themselves. They are vilified and reviled; venerated and celebrated. Their slavish, cattle-like life is up-ended and their legacy is immortalized, for better or for worse. Who can blame them? Who wouldn’t choose to burn bright like a gas-soaked fire, even if for only a moment? This is the true danger of accelerationist thought, it preys on the pre-existing decay of social cohesion. Whether consciously or not, the individual worker seeks to protagonize their meaningless and futile existence. The easiest way to achieve this is to play by the rules set out by society, that is to hijack the spectacle.4
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.
From birth, mankind is thrust into the world of communication. Babies are urged to utter their first words. When they grow up they are introduced to picture books, although recently electronics are substituting physical media. News, romance, entertainment, friendships, everything on this planet ruled by humanity is mediated through the lens of communication, and in our current technological landscape the digital world of the Spectacle has united our communications even more. At first glance it would seem that the globalization of the communication economy has given way to a more democratic world, but upon closer inspection the only victors in this outcome are of course those that have previously won the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries: the bourgeoisie. It makes no difference to our overlords that there exists pockets of free, radical action online where information is disseminated openly. We use their very platforms to communicate our disdain for them, yet they have already made their dollar. In terms of the question on accelerationism, every new terroristic campaign carried out has a direct, proportional relation to revenue earned. In fact there are already entire online industries dedicated to profiting off these “tragedies”!5
When placed in the realm of conscious acts, accelerationism does little to actually accelerate. Racialized attacks against minorities only seek to alienate the dissident right from mainstream, normal conversation, on the other hand left wing terror only gives credence to the legitimacy of the state and allows for further repression and state terror. The only acceleration happening is the hegemony of the capitalist class. This is, of course, not to say that there is no place in our movement for violence, or even terroristic, tactics; it is to say that our intention and expectation with these should be different.
Accelerationism not only fails in its aims, but it also operates off the same teleological framework that it, supposedly, rivals. Examining the understanding of history that accelerationism puts up shows that it is merely the developmentalist worldview that most Marxists already subscribe to, simply inverted. Marxists, mainly those of the Leninist variety, already claim the stageist view of history. What is accelerationism if not flipping the role of the stageist development on its head? In both cases the Marxist and the accelerationist both believe in the power of the proletariat to seize the reigns of history with their own hands. Regardless of the tactical and strategical differences, the teleology remains similar.
Now or Never
Bordiga once said something to the effect of “Long Live the Butcher Hitler who works in spite of himself to bring about the proletarian revolution”. While his quote has been incessantly satirized by detractors, there exists a bit of truth to it. As the rate of profit falls to an unstable level, the bourgeoisie will employ ever more reactionary and cutthroat tactics. We can see this presently in America with cuts to the most basic of social security and welfare. Accelerationism’s most ardent warriors are not the Tiqqunists blowing up railways or the Pagan Neo-Nazi teenager who shoots up his school; but instead are the federal bureaucrats, liberal politicians, and architects of the current administration.6
To this we have little to say but:
LONG LIVE THE BOURGEOISIE AND THEIR CLIQUE, WHOM SO GRACIOUSLY WORK IN SPITE OF THEMSELVES TO BRING ABOUT THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE END OF CLASS SOCIETY!
Notes:
In terms of “Left” and “Right”, I am acknowledging the farthest ends of either spectrum. Any of those who subscribe to a sort of “Anti-Liberal” politics. ↩︎
This is of course not to mention that the Right (both in its Liberal and “Anti-Liberal” wings) offers no real solution to the question of Capital. They can only muster up varying forms of reaction in whether they want to uphold Capital, which they already identify as a negative force on society, or to return to a pre-capitalist lifestyle (physically and socially impossible). ↩︎
Canonization is a practice commonly found on the accelerationist and white supremacist “Terrorgram” network where individuals that commit acts of mass terror and violence are “canonized” as Saints in the movement. Many recent shootings have had references to certain “saints”, such as the Columbine Shooters. ↩︎
Similar to the role alienation plays in this article, I will not spend time discussing the minutia of the Spectacle, if you don’t understand what it is I implore you to read Debord’s seminal piece Society of the Spectacle and then return to this article. ↩︎
There are some accelerationist theorists who arrived at pro-capitalist positions. Nick Land came to support a wider form of pro-capitalist acceleration in that technological development would allow for a self over becoming of the social and economic. This is of course not mentioning his current ketamine fueled anti immigrant tirades he goes on, but I digress… ↩︎
Avant! 
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