from #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

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."