In his science fiction novel Pop Apocalypse, Lee Konstantinou imagines the existence of a “Creative Destruction” school of Marxist-Leninist thought. The adherents of this school “interpret Marx’s writings as literal predictions of the future, so they consider it their mission to help capitalist markets spread to every corner of the world, because that’s the necessary precondition for a truly socialist revolution.”

As far as I am concerned, accelerationism is best defined—in political, aesthetic, and philosophical terms—as the argument that the only way out is the way through. In order to overcome globalized neoliberal capitalism, we need to drain it to the dregs, push it to its most extreme point, follow it into its furthest and strangest consequences.

Audre Lord famously argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But what if the master’s tools are the only ones available? Accelerationism grapples with this dilemma.

Global warming and worldwide financial networks are examples of what the ecological theorist Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects. They are phenomena that actually exist but that “stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience.”

Marx rightly noted that crises are endemic to capitalism. But far from threatening the system as Marx hoped, today these crises actually help it to renew itself. As David Harvey puts it, it is precisely “through the destruction of the achievements of preceding eras by way of war, the devaluation of assets, the degradation of productive capacity, abandonment and other forms of ‘creative destruction’” that capitalism creates “a new basis for profit-making and surplus absorption.”

In any case, the emphasis on capitalism’s destructive, deterritorializing force is picked up in the 1990s by the British philosopher Nick Land. In a series of incendiary essays, Land celebrates absolute deterritorialization as liberation—even (or above all) to the point of total disintegration and death.

Marx famously says that “men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

our tools incessantly modify us, even as we produce and extend them. We cannot simply manipulate them just as we please. This means that we need to engage in ==alliances with our tools, as Bruno Latour would say, rather than seeing them as flawless instruments or prosthetic extensions of our will==

Richard K. Morgan’s near-future thriller Market Forces is an exemplary accelerationist fiction. It envisions a world in which the corporate practices of the present have pushed to their logical culmination.

Under the harsh discipline of the market, morals are an unaffordable luxury. Even the slightest weakness or hesitation is immediately punished.

Tout se résume dans l’Esthétique et l’Économie politique. Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy. Mallarmé’s aphorism

Kant says two important things about what he calls aesthetic judgment. The first is that any such judgment is necessarily “disinterested.” This means that it doesn’t relate to my own needs and desires. It is something that I enjoy entirely for its own sake, with no ulterior motives, and with no profit to myself.::0

To use a distinction made by Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, art under capitalism at best offers us ==escapism, rather than the actual prospect of escape.==

For Marx, it is labor that is “subsumed” under capital. In formal subsumption, capital appropriates, and extracts a surplus from, labor processes that precede capitalism, or that at the very least are not organized by capitalism. In real subsumption, there is no longer any such autonomy; labor itself is directly organized in capitalist terms (think of the factory and the assembly line).

This means that labor, subjectivity, and social life are no longer “outside” capital and antagonistic to it. Rather, they are immediately produced as parts of it. They cannot resist the depredations of capital, because they are themselves already functions of capital.

Virtual reality supplements and enhances physical, “face-to-face” reality, rather than being, as we used to naively think, opposed to it

The process of real subsumption requires the valuation and evaluation of everything, even of that which is spectral, epiphenomenal, and without value. Real subsumption leaves no aspect of life uncolonized. It endeavors to capture and to put to work even those things that are uneconomical, or “not part of the mechanism.”

Aesthetic sensations and feelings are no longer disinterested, because they have been recast as markers of personal identity: revealed preferences, brands, lifestyle markers, objects of adoration by fans

But this is no longer the case today. Neoliberalism has no problem with excess. Far from being subversive, transgression today is entirely normative. Nobody is really offended by Marilyn Manson or Quentin Tarantino. Every supposedly “transgressive” act or representation expands the field of capital investment. It opens up new territories to appropriate, and jump-starts new processes from which to extract surplus value.

In such a climate, nothing is more prized than excess. The further out you go, the more there is to accumulate and capitalize upon. Everything is organized in terms of thresholds, intensities, and modulations.

Neoliberalism now offers us things like personal autonomy, sexual freedom, and individual “self-realization”; though of course, these often take on the sinister form of precarity, insecurity, and continual pressure to perform.

the problem with accelerationism as a political strategy has to do with the fact that—like it or not—we are all accelerationists now. It has become increasingly clear that crises and contradictions do not lead to the demise of capitalism. Rather, they actually work to promote and advance capitalism, by providing it with its fuel

I think that the attitude described by Deleuze is a good fit for accelerationist art today. Intensifying the horrors of contemporary capitalism does not lead them to explode, but it does offer us a kind of satisfaction and relief, by telling us that we have finally hit bottom, finally realized the worst

The reference is presumably to the billionaire brothers Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, owners of the privately held Koch Industries. The company is heavily involved in petroleum production. The brothers themselves are best known for their massive political spending, much of it in opposition to environmental regulation and climate-change legislation. They have also led initiatives against public transportation and against the use of solar power as an alternative energy source. The Koch brothers could be considered accelerationists of a sort; it almost seems as if, under the cloak of climate denialism, they were deliberately trying to increase CO2 emissions and to raise the average global temperature as high as possible.

Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance.

contemporary capitalism has already provided us with the conditions for universal abundance. We no longer need to wait for some distant future: because, as William Gibson famously put it, “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

In our world today, there is already enough accumulated wealth, and sufficiently advanced technology, for every human being to lead a life of leisure and self-cultivation. In principle at least (although of course not in practice) we have solved the economic problem of humankind—

Self-cultivation requires a climate of leisure and indolence that is incompatible, as Jonathan Crary puts it, “with the demands of a 24/7 universe.” Self-cultivation is a kind of reflexive turning inward; as such, it is the opposite of self-branding, where I stylize myself in order to market myself, to be an entrepreneur of myself, and to increase the value of my “human capital.”

as William Blake wrote—“less than All cannot satisfy Man,” and we see only disparagement in Blake’s observation that “those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”

In our current age of capitalist realism, and of what may well be called the metaphysics of desire, this ethos of surplus and self-cultivation seems bizarre, alien, and nearly unimaginable. Yet it makes sense as a response to the abundance that capitalism actually produces, though without allowing us to partake of it.

Radical self-transformation is unavoidably problematic, since it involves changing the very “self” that wills the transformation in the first place. If posthuman self-alteration is not folded into an aesthetic of self-cultivation, then it will only be answerable to the programs of large corporations.

Environmental concerns as well need to be posed in terms of surplus rather than scarcity. Ecology should not be confused with austerity. We must learn not to live with less but to partake more fully of the Sun’s overabundant bounty and to dissipate its gifts more widely.

Both materially and affectively, they develop an ethos of abundance, generosity, and self-cultivation, even in the face of terror and dispossession. This is, finally, what we must learn to accelerate.

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