I’m behind the curve on this, but Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek have written a very nice manifesto for accelerationism that you can find here. While I’m just beginning to get a sense of what the accelerations are on about, my initial feeling is that this is the most exciting and promising proposal for political change that I’ve seen in a number of years (that’s different than saying I have no reservations). It’s certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the models that currently dominate these discussions. Put differently, reading this manifesto doesn’t fill me with pessimism, gives me the sense that there are real things that can be done, and doesn’t fill me with the sense that the authors are just in a state of willful denial that they try to patch over with happy talk about organization, protest, and subjects. That’s a good start. Here are the good points of the program as far as I can tell:
1. While it has a place for critical analysis, it is not based on the naive– and self-servingly academic! –belief that critique is sufficient to produce social and political change (“I will vilify you for all time through my mighty pen!”)
2. It clearly recognizes the futility and narcissism of protest politics.
3. It calls for a clear-sighted understanding of how complex power is organized today (what I call “cartography”) as a necessary component for political engagement, and doesn’t disavow sociology and other cartographic tools such as economic knowledge as we see in the case of figures like Badiou and Zizek (figures who, while I adore them, I increasingly feel are merely “inspirational” discourses not unlike certain forms of Christian apologetics on faith.
4. It clearly understands how ecology is a key issue today and therefore doesn’t restrict its Marxism to issues of labor and social justice (though these are at the core of its program as well)
5. It does not repeat tiresome denunciations of technology and science such as we find among those influenced by Heidegger, Stiegler, and Adorno, but clearly discerns how technology and science are both necessary components of any effective cartography of the complex ecology of our political world today, and are necessary elements of solution (perhaps we’re finally moving beyond pious Heideggerian discourses on enframing and “Western metaphysics” as the “real problem”? I sure as hell hope so!).
6. It recognizes the need to form institutions such as think tanks and to acquire funding if we’re to produce any real political change. It’s about friggin time!
7. It recognizes the twin dangers of centralized political organization such as we find in some disturbing recent calls to resurrect “the party” and absurd claims that the party is the “position of the analyst” (those folks need to read some systems theory!), while also recognizing that ideas such that of spontaneous self-organization aren’t tenable either.
Perhaps leftist political theory and strategery is finally abandoning its romanticism, academism, and reaching a point of maturity. I hope so! For a critical perspective, see McKenzie Wark’s critique of the manifesto here.
Larval Subjects . 
May 31, 2013 at 7:45 pm
Ben Noys is also critical of accelerationism. You might already know his perspective … but if not, see for instance http://www.academia.edu/2197499/Cybernetic_Phuturism_The_Politics_of_Acceleration
May 31, 2013 at 8:53 pm
brer noir has been going head to head with Nick Land&co in his usual flurry of posting:
http://darkecologies.com/2013/05/26/the-age-of-speed-accelerationism-politics-and-the-future/
May 31, 2013 at 10:13 pm
Wow, noir’s post on them is incredibly ungenerous and not at all what I take them to be saying. His point about them not talking about the left and seeing them as part of the problem (and putting Obama and the democratic party on the left?!?) Is especially peculiar if you’re at all familiar with the work of these guys and their participation in various political struggle. I suspect they’d say there is no left at the level of governments, only different neoliberal parties (especially and above all in the US). Perhaps I just completely fail to understand what the accelerationists are on about, but I find noir’s picture unrecognizable.
June 1, 2013 at 2:07 am
well if your working this line of thought thru it might be worth checking out the whole series of posts and the related threads that they generated, some interesting folks showed up to add their 2cents including Land and this fellow:
June 1, 2013 at 8:11 am
An interesting very specific point from Wark’s critique (but one with significant implications) is if and how the current crisis is a “crisis of capitalism” in some internal sense. If it were, then one version of accelerationism is to push “with the system” in a sense to widen those cracks.
But Wark argues (section 1.5), roughly in agreement with center-left commentators like Krugman on this point, that the current crisis is actually perfectly resolvable via a standard Keynesian approach, not a moment that exposes deep internal flaws in centrist liberal models of the economy. But it’s not being resolved, despite the tools existing to do so, because political coalitions have shifted and there no longer exists sufficient support to maintain a centrist liberal economic framework. (This is perhaps even more obvious in Europe, where the Greek crisis is not hard to resolve from a technical perspective, but there is no political consensus to do so.)
Where to go from there, I’m not sure, but I do think Wark is right that we’re closer to something like “center-left capitalism-with-a-social-system could work fine, but the political consensus doesn’t want it anymore” is a very different situation from the alternate situation some posit, closer to “this is the last gasp of capitalism, exposing its internal contradictions”.
June 18, 2013 at 3:04 pm
[…] of the manifesto (pdf) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in my previous post. My friend Levi in a post affirming aspects of Srnicek and Williams manifesto mentioned in passing – commenting on my […]
July 23, 2018 at 4:46 pm
[…] the manifesto (pdf) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in my previous post. My friend Levi in a post affirming aspects of Srnicek and Williams manifesto mentioned in passing – commenting on my […]