Sorry e/acc, Accelerationism is Anti-Capitalist to its Core

An Essay on Reclaiming Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophical Project

Introduction

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” — Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

It is a funny thing when words come to somehow mean their opposite. It can often be innocuous, as when “literally” began to mean “figuratively” at some point in the past few decades, or when “bad” became a stand-in for “stylish and confident.” It can also happen in more problematic ways, as when the relatively narrow technical term “fake news” began to refer to any form of contested journalism. This essay is about a similar shift that took place sometime in the past few years, one that hinges on the meaning and outcome of technological development, and consequently the logic behind its intentional acceleration. In other words, this essay is about “accelerationism.”

If you examine the contemporary online discourse around artificial intelligence (AI), you will find that accelerationism has come to be equated with advocating for a kind of hyper-capitalism. This perspective, often referred to as “effective accelerationism” (e/acc) portrays capitalism as an unstoppable force that, if intensified, will lead humanity to a utopian future characterized by technological marvels and boundless economic opportunities. Proponents of e/acc advocate for the removal of regulations and social safety nets, believing that unfettered markets will naturally correct societal issues. This vision has mainly been presented in a loose assemblage of posts on Twitter and Substack by accounts such as Beff Jezos and BayesLord. The most fleshed out version of this was presented by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, published roughly a year ago. As many critical voices on the left have pointed out though, the vision of Marc Andreessen and his colleagues seems just as likely to lead to greater degradation of social cohesion, mental health, and environmental sustainability as it does to any sort of technological utopia.

Was e/acc always how accelerationism was understood? An essay written by Matt Southey last month traces the lineage of the current movement backwards in time to the philosophy of Nick Land, and eventually to its origin in the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Unfortunately, Southey rather glibly dismisses the original source text Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia as being “unreadable” and quickly moves on to instead discuss Land’s fringe ideas about machines replacing humans as the agents of technological progress. This dismissal is unfortunate because it prevents critical engagement with what the two thinkers who actually coined the term accelerationism were trying to say. Sotheby isn’t alone, as few outside academic departments have engaged much with Deleuze and Guattari’s original philosophy. As a result, a false dichotomy between the regular right-wing hyper-capitalist vision of e/acc and the ultra right-wing anti-humanist vision of Nick Land seems to have dominated the conversation.

In reality, both views represent the exact opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari originally intended when developing the concept of accelerationism. They did not advocate for the unchecked acceleration of capitalism in order to enhance it, but instead proposed intensifying its processes — particularly its tendency to fragment society for commodification and exploitation — to push it to an ultimate breaking point. Their vision was anti-capitalist to its core. In this essay, I seek to reclaim the original radical leftist understanding of accelerationism as a project for hastening a post-capitalist world. A world in which there is the possibility for new forms of social and economic organization, forms that may finally be able to truly prioritize human well-being and flourishing over profit.

The Fragmentation of Society for Commodification

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari observed that throughout human history, capitalism has functioned by fragmenting society into increasingly smaller units, a process that makes these units more amenable to commodification and exploitation. In early pre-capitalist societies, communities functioned as cohesive entities with strong communal bonds and activity tied to the well-being of the community as a whole. With the advent of capitalism, labor became a commodity that individuals sold in the marketplace. This shift not only altered the nature of work but also fragmented social relations, as people began to compete with one another for jobs and wages.

Eventually the social unit ceased to be the community at large and became the smaller family unit whose members might all work together towards a single economic goal. Towards the end of the twentieth century the nuclear family unit itself began to fray, with increases in divorce and unwed childbirth leaving only the parental bond fully intact. In the twenty-first century, this fragmentation has intensified. Individuals often now live alone, thousands of miles apart from their families, driven by the expectations of the market and their careers. The rise of the gig economy in the past decade illustrates how capitalism continues to divide labor into smaller, more exploitable units. Workers on platforms like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr are not traditional employees but independent contractors who often lack job security, benefits, and collective bargaining power. Their labor is atomized into discrete tasks, making it easier for companies to commodify and profit from each micro-unit of work.

Capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit drives it to commodify all facets of life. By breaking society into more granular units, it uncovers new resources for exploitation. The past decade has been marked by internal as well as external commodification. Time, attention, creativity, and even emotions become commodities in the marketplace. Social media platforms commodify personal data, preferences, and even relationships. Our online interactions are mined for information that is sold to advertisers, turning our social lives into profit-generating activities for corporations. Even our romantic lives are commodified and algorithmically organized. This pervasive commodification infiltrates every aspect of human experience, reducing rich social bonds to transactional exchanges and rich inner lives to fragmented patchworks.

The Capitalist Engine: Absorbing Opposition

Why the need for fragmentation? Deleuze and Guattari likened capitalism to an engine that must perpetually consume fuel in order to sustain itself. The more modular the units of our behavior and attention, the easier they can be repurposed and recombined as new forms of fuel for commodification. For Deleuze and Guattari, the need to accelerate this trend rather than try to slow it stems from their recognition that all attempts to dampen or reverse this process have hitherto backfired. It turns out that the engine of capitalism is uniquely adept at absorbing and neutralizing opposition by transforming it into marketable commodities. The clearest example of this is how countercultural movements intended to challenge capitalist norms are often co-opted and commercialized. They saw this firsthand, writing Anti-Oedipus as they did only a couple years after the failed May ’68 protests in France.

There are other examples as well. For instance, the punk movement of the late 1970s emerged as a rebellion against mainstream culture and capitalist values. Yet, elements of punk — such as in fashion and music — were quickly commodified. Clothing brands began selling “punk” apparel, and punk music was marketed to wider audiences, stripping away its original subversive intent. Not only is “punk” no longer a real threat to capitalism, but it is simply another manifestation of it. We might also consider the original intent of the internet itself, an open space meant for the free exchange of ideas. The internet of today looks nothing like this idealistic vision from the 1990s. Again and again we see demonstrations of capitalism’s capacity to assimilate dissent, turning potential threats into profitable opportunities.

Recognizing capitalism’s ability to absorb traditional forms of direct resistance, Deleuze and Guattari realized that perhaps the only way to truly challenge capitalism’s dominance is paradoxically to accelerate capitalist processes to the point of collapse. This concept is encapsulated in the often-repeated phrase “the only way out is through.” As bad as things are now, going backwards (or simply trying to keep things static) won’t make them fundamentally better. By intensifying capitalism’s inherent traits — particularly fragmentation and commodification — we open the possibility of pushing the system to a critical juncture where it can no longer function effectively. In their words:

“For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough… Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”

This doesn’t mean passively accepting capitalism’s excesses but actively engaging in strategies that highlight and amplify its contradictions. For example, embracing technologies that disrupt traditional economic models can expose the unsustainability of relying on commodification as a basis for societal organization. In the digital age, open-source technology and creative commons media are two forms of such disruption. Both of these enable greater flows of information while also threatening the logic underlying capitalism. These movements in themselves however have not been capable of appreciably changing the course of capitalist development, at least not yet.

The Role of AI In Capitalism’s Demise

It is no coincidence that renewed interest in accelerationism has coincided with the increasing competency and visibility of advanced AI systems. In the span of a decade AI has rapidly developed from systems barely capable of generating coherent English sentences to systems capable of reasoning through scientific problems at graduate student levels. Many believe that we are clearly approaching a point at which there will be Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), systems capable of performing cognitive labor as well or better than humans in all meaningful domains.

Those that see AGI ushering in an era of unfathomable prosperity naturally wish to hasten such a process, hence the appeal of e/acc. From a Deleuzian perspective, AI may instead be seen as the final catalyst necessary in triggering capitalism’s self-destruction. As I see it, the undoing of capitalism will likely play out from two sides simultaneously.

On the production side: AGI would automate virtually all forms of labor–both cognitive and physical–rendering human workers obsolete in most industries. This would disrupt the traditional labor market, where human labor is exchanged for wages. Without the need for human workers, the fundamental capitalist relationship between employer and employee dissolves. There would be no reason to employ anyone because the value of their labor compared to the abundance of available AGIs would be nearly zero. The commodification of labor, a cornerstone of capitalist profit generation, would be completely undermined. If this was considered in isolation, it would seem like a victory for the hyper-capitalists, but there is another side of the equation.

On the consumption side: AGI would lead to the production of goods and services at costs which approach zero and are constrained only by the scarcity of the raw materials required to produce them. If products and services become universally accessible and orders of magnitude less costly, the market mechanisms based on supply and demand would falter. Scarcity, which underpins the value of commodities in capitalism, would diminish. This abundance challenges the profit motives driving production under capitalism. If individuals do not need to pay corporations in order to access the goods and services they need, then those corporations no longer have a capacity to profit, regardless of how efficient they may be. The entire system thus breaks apart in a potentially irreversible way.

Possible Futures Beyond Capitalism

So if the hyper-capitalist vision of Marc Andreessen and others in e/acc is not to be, then what will the future brought about by AGI look like? Some, like right-wing theorist Nick Land, predict a dystopian future where technology advances beyond human control, leading to new forms of domination and inequality. He envisions a world ruled by “machine desire” where individual human agency is diminished and technological systems operate with little regard for human welfare. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari offer a more hopeful perspective. They suggest that accelerating capitalism’s demise opens the possibility for new forms of social organization that prioritize collective well-being, freedom, and creativity. They ultimately align with Marxist ideas of a post-capitalist society where the means of production are communally owned, and individuals can develop their capacities without the constraints imposed by capitalist exploitation.

The transition to such a post-capitalist society is not automatic, nor is it guaranteed. It is indeed possible that Nick Land’s vision, or that of the AI doomers comes about instead. Realizing a leftist post-capitalism requires deliberate action to shape the emerging structures in ways that promote equity and justice. The trajectory of the future hinges on our collective response to these transformative changes. To ensure that the collapse of capitalism leads to a more equitable society rather than new forms of oppression, we must engage in conscious, collaborative efforts. As theorists Nick Srnieck and Alex Williams have pointed out, those of us on the left must not merely be critical of right-wing visions, but must work to “invent the future” ourselves. Importantly, such a vision is still one of acceleration rather than regulation, but acceleration is the service of greater humanistic goals that transcend the profit motive. Below are three very rough outlines for such a vision:

Guiding development of technology: Developing frameworks to guide the use of AGI and other advanced technologies is crucial. Current efforts in this domain such as the California AI Safety bill have focused on developing and enforcing regulations that prevent misuse, protect privacy, and ensure that technological benefits are distributed fairly and freely to all. Many of these efforts unfortunately represent precisely the kinds of interventions which only serve to protect entrenched interests (i.e. regulatory capture). Perhaps surprisingly to some on the right, advocacy for open source principles and the decentralization of power and resources are highly aligned with the leftist accelerationist vision of Deleuze and Guattari. The key of course is to ensure that this proliferation of intelligence is used to undermine rather than encourage traditional attempts at commodification.

Redefining work and value: As traditional labor becomes less central to the economy, we need to explore new ways of defining work and human value. On the economic side, universal basic income or other alternative economic models that decouple income from labor must be taken seriously as means of resolving unnecessary economic inequality. Given their love of all things rhizomatic, Deleuze and Guattari would likely have argued for a radically decentralized system of wealth distribution. Just as important will be the existential realignment necessary to move away from viewing one’s self-worth as being contingent upon one’s economic productivity. The conservative right has begun to address this through appeals to traditional Christian value systems. While these may have been functional in past pre-capitalist societies, it is unclear that they are suited for a truly post-capitalist society. It is essential that those on the left provide compelling alternative metaphysical systems that offer more meaningful forms of existence than what is possible through mere scientific materialism or appeals to narrow self-gratification.

Strengthening intra- and inter-personal bonds: Deleuze and Guattari saw the final point that capitalism was trending towards as one of schizophrenia: complete fragmentation. In a post-capitalist society, rebuilding our lost mental and societal cohesion will be an essential project if we are to live in ways that are at all meaningful and fulfilling to us as humans. At the social level, community-based initiatives, cooperatives, and local organizations can foster solidarity and mutual support. The rise of third and fourth places speaks to our need for such connection. The need for cohesion applies to the individual as well, with practices to build and strengthen psychic integrity such as meditation, psychotherapy, psychedelics, and others becoming increasingly common. A key point to recognize is that such practices must be deployed in a truly anti-capitalist way, and not simply as temporary regulators of existing capitalist tendencies.

Conclusion

Mark Fisher popularized the saying: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current AI discourse, where acceleration is framed as either bringing about a hyper-capitalist dystopia or worse: the literal end of the world. By reclaiming accelerationism as originally envisioned by Deleuze and Guattari, we have a novel and powerful tool which enables us to imagine another way. By understanding how capitalism fragments society for commodification and exploitation, we can strategize ways to accelerate these processes to reveal the system’s unsustainability. By exploiting that inherent unsustainability we have the potential to move into a world no longer defined by the logic of capitalism.

Many critical questions must be answered in the coming years: What should a liberated post-capitalist society look like? How can we ensure that the acceleration of capitalist processes doesn’t lead to increased suffering in the short term? What safeguards can we put in place to prevent new forms of exploitation in a post-capitalist world? How do we balance the need for rapid change with the importance of democratic decision-making and inclusivity? As we stand at this pivotal juncture, the future is not predetermined; It is shaped by our actions and decisions. Critically, given the rapid pace of technological development, it is shaped by what we are collectively doing, saying, and writing right now. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Referenced Works

• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
• Andreessen, M. (2023). The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto.
• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
• Marx, K. (1867). Capital: Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. Penguin Classics.
• Land, N. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Urbanomic/Sequence Press.
• Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso Books.
• Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
• Le Guin, U. (2014) Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal.