this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Accelerationism would mean accelerating the growth of the empire to bring about its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, so, voting for the best imperial managers to keep growing the empire. That means voting for Democrats, they're better imperial governors. They're better at doing war crimes and getting away with it.
What I want is for the empire to lose. That's not accelerationism. That's revolutionary defeatism.
No. It means picking the person who will accelerate into whatever calamity which will cause a collapse.
I feel like there is a lot of revisionism of the definition because the definition is inconvenient to the opposing argument.
You're the one doing revisionism, completely overlooking the part of accelerationism where they seek to accelerate development.
Accelerationists believe that capitalism is a progressive self-revolutionizing force that is rapidly creating the conditions for its own obsolescence, and so we just need to develop capitalism more and more until it revolutionizes itself away. It views free trade as a system that breaks down nationalities, automation as a system that breaks down class antagonisms, and technological singularity as the ultimate end point of capitalism where profit and private property cease to exist. We enter an age of post-scarcity and transhumanism and algorithmic government i.e. the end of history. Capitalism collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
This is a really bad idea because unchecked capitalist development is creating conditions for human extinction. Maybe if there weren't ecological limits the accelerationists would be right in the long-run, but in the real world we're running into the limits to growth and capitalist development has put us on the path towards the collapse of civilization rather than merely the collapse of capitalism.
This is all in contrast to revolutionary defeatism, which predates accelerationism by almost 100 years. It is the recognition that the workers do not benefit from capitalist wars, that instead, workers should seek the defeat of their own capitalist governments. If the empire loses, the world wins. There's no interest in developing the empire further to create the conditions for its collapse, there's only interest in seeing it collapse. That's like saying anyone who wants to end capitalism is an accelerationist. It's nonsense.
Read this out loud into a reflective surface as many times as it takes.
Just smugly doubling down on being wrong