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Acceleration

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Precursors

The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, February 1848).

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and
has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash
payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and
political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent
awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage
labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a
mere money relation.
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages,
which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been
the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian
pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all

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former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby
the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of
production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial
classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-
frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-
formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface
of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to
production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under
the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been
destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes
a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw
material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not
only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the
country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place
of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal
inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations
of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become
more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world
literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated
means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of
its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the
barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation
into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has
greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable
part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns,
so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of
peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means
of production, and of property. It has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely
connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped

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together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier
and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more
massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of
Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation,
railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such
productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

If Marx and Engels had systematically substituted ‘capitalism’ for ‘the bourgeoisie’ in this passage, its
accelerationist credentials would have been vastly upgraded.

Acceleration Aggregators
Accelerationism (at Monoskop)

#Accelerate (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek)

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics (Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, 14 May
2013). The founding text of contemporary Left Accelerationism.

+ In French.
#Accelerationism: Remembering the Future (Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Armen Avanessian,
2014/02/10)
#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (McKenzie Wark, 2013/05)
Nowhere Fast? A Brief Critique of the Accelerationist Manifesto (J D Taylor, 2013/05/30)
Some Reflections on the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO  (Antonio Negri, 2014/02/26)
The Age of Speed: Accelerationism, Politics, and the Future Present (Craig Hickman, 2013/05/26)
Futurism or the Future: Review of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (Automatic Writing,
2014/09/23). (Deontologistics responds.)
Speed Trials: A Conversation about Accelerationist Politics (Mohammad Salemy, Nick Srnicek, and Alex
Williams, Fillip 20, 2015/Spring)

Essays / Posts on Acceleration

Accelerationism (Benjamin Noys, 2008/10/20)

Clever Monkey Versus the Accelerationists, 1, 2 (Jehu, 2013/05).
The Labour of Abstraction: Seven Transitional Theses on Marxism and Accelerationism (Matteo
Pasquinelli, 2013/11/09, Portuguese translation here)
Maximum Jailbreak (Benedict Singleton, 2013). Initial version.
So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about? (Pete Wolfendale, 2014/07)
Technoscience and Expressionism (Joseph Weissman, 2014/07/16)

Jehu on Accelerationism and Marxism 1, 2, 3 (2014/08)

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Labor Theory and Acceleration (Jehu, 2014/10/08)

Accelerated Substance Abuse, Benjamin Noys, 2015/01/17
A Response to Benjamin Noys’ Critique of Accelerationism, Ivan Niccolai, January 16, 2015/01/16

Blogged Acceleration
Accelerationism
enemyindustry (accelerationism)
noir ecologies (accelerationism)
Synthetic Edifice (Nick Srnicek)

Books on Acceleration
#Accelerate (Urbanomic, May 2014). Collected writings in accelerationism.

Reviews
Turn Down for What?, by Malcolm Harris (2014/07/14)
The Missing Subject of Accelerationism, by Simon O’Sullivan (2014/09/12), meta-reviewed.

Acceleration @ UF
#Accelerate (2014/02/13)
Annotated #Accelerate (#1) (2014/02/14)
Annotated #Accelerate (#2) (2014/02/15)
Annotated #Accelerate (#3) (2014/02/17)
Quotable (#4) (2014/02/18, on Andrea Castillo).
On #Accelerate (#1) (2014/03/05)
On #Accelerate (#2a) (2014/03/06)
On #Accelerate (#2b) (2014/03/07)
On #Accelerate (#2c) (2014/03/11)
Quotable (#8) (2014/03/17, on Franco Berardi Bifo)

Acceleration related
The Wired Man’s Burden (Andrea Castillo, 2014/02/11)

Other online acceleration resources

Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (John Armitage, ed., 2001). A pre-emptive critique.

7 THOUGHTS ON “ACCELERATION”

S.C. Hickman on October 19, 2014 at 3:49 am said:

Hey, Nick just added a slight intro to Benjamin Noys Malign Velocities which

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seems more of a history and commentary with a basic critique, nothing offered
in detail as an alternative but the usual traditional ploys of Marxist tradition:

http://darkecologies.com/2014/10/18/benjamin-noys-on-accelerationism-counter-
accelerationism/

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dmf on October 5, 2015 at 7:02 pm said:

http://syntheticzero.net/2015/10/05/from-cyberpunk-to-grungy-accelerationism/

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syffr on February 14, 2017 at 5:49 pm said:

Added “Requiem for Left Accelerationism” https://medium.com/@syffr/requiem-

for-left-accelerationism-4048d8bec72e#.4904hdvqi

Reply ↓

dmf on April 26, 2017 at 2:19 am said:

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/28/the-darkness-at-the-end-of-the-
tunnel-artificial-intelligence-and-neoreaction/

Reply ↓

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