22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for
post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system,
but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological
development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been
unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can
and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by
capitalist society. The movement towards a surpassing of our current
constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more rational
global society. We believe it must also include recovering the dreams
which transfixed many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until
the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest of Homo Sapiens towards
expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily
forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent
moment. Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our
own time, and offer the promise of a future that is affectively
invigorating, as well as intellectually energising. After all, it is
only a post-capitalist society, made possible by an accelerationist
politics, which will ever be capable of delivering on the promissory
note of the mid-Twentieth Century’s space programmes, to shift beyond
a world of minimal technical upgrades towards all-encompassing change.
Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and the properly alien
future that entails and enables. Towards a completion of the
Enlightenment project of self-criticism and self-mastery, rather than
its elimination.
Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek, "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics", Critical Legal Thinking blog, 14 May 2013; repr. in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. Joshua Johnson, Miami: Name, Aug 2013; repr. in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader,
eds. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay, Urbanomic, 2014. "We believe
the most important division in today's left is between those that hold
to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless
horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an
accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction,
complexity, globality, and technology."
