Accelerationism is a range of ideologies that call for the use of capitalism and associated processes to create radical social transformations. Broadly, accelerationism engages with antihumanism, as well as posthumanism, and seeks to accelerate desired tendencies within capitalism at the expense of negative ones, though variants differ greatly on which tendencies and if this will lead beyond capitalism or further into it.
Accelerationism originated from ideas from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who speculated in the 1970s that emancipatory forces within capitalism, particularly deterritorialization, could be radicalized against it and its oppressive aspects. Inspired by these ideas, some University of Warwick faculty and students formed a philosophy collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the 1990s, led by Nick Land. Land and the CCRU drew upon contemporary media and culture such as cyberpunk and jungle music to further develop these ideas. They theorized a self-revolutionizing capitalism that would culminate in a technological singularity, resulting in artificial intelligence surpassing and eliminating humanity, though they drifted from these ideas and dissolved by the 2000s.
In the 2010s, the movement was termed accelerationism by Benjamin Noys in a critical work, followed by a renewed interest in its ideas. Thinkers such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams advocated a left-wing accelerationism based on embracing capitalist technology and infrastructure to move past a stagnant capitalism, exploring themes such as automation of work. This was associated with Prometheanism, which engaged with ideas such as rationalism, posthumanism, and a rejection of limits on change. Land, having moved to China, also engaged with the Dark Enlightenment movement as part of his right-wing accelerationism, rejecting egalitarianism and democracy in favor of CEO-run states to promote the singularity. Effective accelerationism arose with influence from effective altruism to promote technological progress and artificial general intelligence to solve human problems, and ascend the Kardashev scale.
Various other meanings for the term also emerged, such as to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it, as well as by far-right extremists promoting racial violence and the collapse of society in order to establish a white ethnostate (militant accelerationism).
Background The history of accelerationism has been divided into three waves. First, there were the late 1960s and early 1970s French post-Marxists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, whose thought arose in the wake of May 68. According to David R. Cole, texts produced during this period had little effect "other than as perhaps scattered art practices", with the result being that "capitalism has emerged as triumphant in the past 50 years, and the idealism of the student 1968 revolution in Paris has subsequently faded." The second wave arose in the 1990s with the work of Nick Land and the CCRU, with the third being the Promethean left-accelerationism of the 2010s. Influences and precursors The term accelerationism was previously used in Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light. It was later popularized by professor and author Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative to describe the trajectory of certain post-structuralists who embraced unorthodox Marxist and counter-Marxist overviews of capitalist growth, such as Deleuze and Guattari in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Lyotard in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard in his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death. Noys later stated "at this point, what we can call accelerationism is dedicated to trying to ride these forces of capitalist production and direct them to destabilize capitalism itself."
Patrick Gamez considers the French thinkers' philosophy of desire to be a rejection of orthodox Marxism and psychoanalysis, particularly in Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Particularly influential is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desiring-production; rather than viewing human desire as a lack that is satiated by consumption, they view it as an inhuman flow of productive energy, having no proper organization or purpose. Any normativity or functionalism comes from flows of desire performing work and territorializing until new flows of desire override them in the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
Vincent Le notes that Deleuze and Guattari's model is based on machines; as machines are assemblages of different parts which perform different functions, humans and social bodies are assemblages of "organs" which produce desires. They find capitalism to be the most radically deterritorializing process in history, as it is based on constant deterritorialization rather than a stable code of desire. Le uses the example of sex and food; they are no longer coded only for marriage and sustenance, but rather as commodities which produce other desires. While capitalism tends toward the body without organs, or a state without determinate functions or coded desires, it never reaches that state, as it causes reterritorialization by recoding things as commodity for sale, to be deterritorialized again.
Mark Fisher describes Deleuze and Guattari's model of capitalism as defined by the tension between destroying and re-establishing boundaries, with the inclusion of new and archaic elements seen "where food banks co-exist with iPhones." Gamez describes Land's thought as influenced by the French thinkers' antihumanism, as well as their ambivalence or even celebration of capitalism's destroying of traditional hierarchies and freeing of desire.
Land cited a number of philosophers who expressed anticipatory accelerationist attitudes in his 2017 essay "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism". Firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche argued in a fragment in The Will to Power that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it." Taking inspiration from this notion for Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari speculated further on an unprecedented "revolutionary path" to perpetuate capitalism's tendencies, a passage which is cited as a central inspiration for accelerationism:
Fisher describes Land's interpretation of this passage as explicitly anti-Marxist. Land cited Karl Marx, who, in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade", anticipated accelerationist principles a century before Deleuze and Guattari by describing free trade as socially destructive and fuelling class conflict, then effectively arguing for it:
Maya B. Kronic and Armen Avanessian note "Fragment on Machines" from Grundrisse as Marx's "most openly accelerationist writing". Noys states of Marx's influence, "it favors the Marx who celebrates the powers of capitalism, most evident in The Communist Manifesto (cowritten with Engels), over the Marx who also stresses the difficulty of transcending and escaping capital, the Marx of Capital", also characterizing the accelerationist view of Marx as filtered through Nietzsche. Sam Sellar and Cole state that while he was dismissive of Marxists, Land studied works such as Capital and Grundrusse as "exemplary analyses of how capital works".
Sellar and Cole attribute Land's ideas to continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Deleuze. Paul Haynes notes Bataille's concepts of general economy and excess, which Land wrote about for The Thirst for Annihilation, and McKenzie Wark notes Bataille's solar economy as key to Land along with a non-vitalist interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari. Fisher notes the same excerpt from Anti-Oedipus as Land, along with a section from Libidinal Economy, as "immediately [giving] the flavour of the accelerationist gambit":
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams additionally credit Vladimir Lenin with recognizing that the development of capitalist forces was important in the subsequent foundation of a socialist system:
Accelerationism was also influenced by science fiction (particularly cyberpunk) and electronic dance music (particularly jungle). Neuromancer and its trilogy are a major influence, with Iain Hamilton Grant stating "Neuromancer got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You'd find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room." Fisher states of Land's "theory-fictions" from the 1990s, "They weren't distanced readings of French theory so much as cybergothic remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as Gibson's Neuromancer." Fisher and Kronic additionally note Terminator, Predator, and Blade Runner as particular sci-fi works which influenced accelerationism, particularly through jungle music which sampled from such movies. Kronic also notes Russian cosmism and Erewhon as influences, while Noys notes Donna Haraway's work on cyborgs. H. P. Lovecraft has also been noted as an influence, with Land drawing upon such work in the 1990s and later in the 2010s. Cybernetics has been noted as an influence on both Land and left-accelerationism, with Gamez tracing this to neoliberals such as Friedrich Hayek being interested in cybernetics and the self-organization of markets; as well as socialists such as Oskar Lange who sought to use cybernetic computers to address the socialist calculation debate.
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a philosophy collective at the University of Warwick which included Land, Kronic, Fisher and Grant, further developed accelerationism in the 1990s. Fisher described the CCRU's accelerationism as "a kind of exuberant anti-politics, a 'technihilo' celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, partly inspired by the pro-markets, anti-capitalism line developed by Manuel DeLanda out of Braudel, and from the section of Anti-Oedipus that talks about marketization as the 'revolutionary path'." As Land became a stronger influence on the group and left the University of Warwick, they would shift to more unorthodox and occult ideas. Land suffered a breakdown from his amphetamine abuse and disappeared in the early 2000s, with the CCRU vanishing along with him.
Popularization Accelerationism emerged again in the 2010s, with Kronic crediting the publishing of Fanged Noumena, a 2011 anthology of Land's work, with an emergence of new accelerationist thinking. In 2014, Kronic and Avanessian published the anthology #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, which The Guardian referred to as "the only proper guide to the movement in existence." They also described Fanged Noumena as "contain[ing] some of accelerationism's most darkly fascinating passages." In 2015, Urbanomic and Time Spiral Press published Writings 1997-2003 as a complete collection of known texts published under the CCRU name, besides those that have been irrecoverably lost or attributed to a specific member. However, some works under the CCRU name are not included, such as those in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. In November 2025, Noys called the movement a "corpse" which had disappeared or been eclipsed by more urgent debates, but found it still relevant in contemporary debates on large language models and artificial intelligence, as well as in the corporate world with effective accelerationism.
Concepts