Left Accelerationism Failed Us: It's Time to Reclaim 'Folk' Politics

A definition of 'Left Accelerationism' from Daniel Tutt, author of 'How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche'

The following text is taken from a conversation between Daniel Tutt and Grady Page, recorded live at Pure Panic Books in Silver Spring, Maryland in November of 2025. Daniel Tutt is the host of Emancipations, and the author of How to Read Like a Parasite: Why The Left Got High On Nietzsche.

This excerpt covers Tutt’s introduction to the history of left accelerationism, from Saint Simon to Mark Fisher and Nick Land. The rest of the conversation is available here. Thank you to Daniel for letting us share his introduction. The transcript has been lightly edited for publication.

---

Welcome to ‘Accelerationism and Violence’, with my great friend Grady Page. Daniel Tutt here, with the Emancipations podcast. So nice to be live in Silver Spring at Pure Panic Books. Thank you to Aladdin, thank you to Grady for hosting us.

Welcome. So nice to see some friendly faces, people we know.

What is this event all about? Well, we’ve decided to put forward what we’re calling a philosophy salon, examining the question of what accelerationism is, what its legacy is, what its origin is, and what has happened to accelerationist ideas.

Can everybody hear me in the back? Good. So I want to start before I turn it over to Grady, with an overview of this concept. Now, one way in is to reflect upon this concept of capitalism itself, understood as a system, understood as a total systematic logic that governs all of social life.

Part of the problem that Marx and the tradition of Marxism identifies embedded in capitalist social life, is a sort of a challenge for us as subjects of the capitalist system, to actually see it as a system. This is what in Marxism is called “fetishism”.

It’s an old philosophical concept which refers to a process of covering over reality. And capitalism has a sort of ingenious way of covering over its interlinked status as a system.

What accelerationism is about is a sort of exercise that’s conceptual. I think what’s best about accelerationism is precisely this idea that it offers us a way into thinking about capitalism as a systemic logic.

So that’s my first point. Now, its technical historical origin is really the Industrial Revolution in Europe, in which you have Enlightenment ideals of progress fusing with this early industrial Promethean orientation.

So this idea of Prometheus, the God who takes fire, and can sort of ignite a process of technology, of technological innovation and invention, for the saving of humanity.

So you have a kind of Promethean humanism that emerges in the earlysocialist movement. Even before Marx and Engels come onto the scene, there is a kind of utopian view that technology can be harnessed for the betterment of the workers, and if technology is coordinated in the right way, this capitalist system that somehow dominates the working class can in fact be overcome. So the first idea behind accelerationism is that it really emerges as a sort of intellectual enterprise of socialist thinkers.

Early socialist thinkers from figures like Saint Simon have a type of leftwing elitism, a kind of socialist elitism. And in a way the premise of accelerationism is so ambitious that it basically has this highly positive view of what technology can do, in terms of liberating the working class.

But the main problem is that these socialist intellectuals want to harness the power of technology, to send capitalism in a more egalitarian direction; in a direction that might actually provide for people, in terms of overcoming the problem of wage slavery, things of this nature.

The problem becomes that they do not have a connection to the masses, to the working class. So there becomes a kind of through line; an accelerationism that is almost like an elitism. So this is what I would call the prehistory of accelerationism, this kind of enlightenment ideal.

We also see this with Robert Owen and later with Charles Fourier, these people who created utopian communes where they would try to think of an alternative to the degradations of industrial processes.

In the twentieth century some of these same tendencies emerged in the 60s and 70s counterculture, and in some avant garde movements. And it’s here where the birth of accelerationism truly, I think, develops and truly spawns out. So we have May ‘68. I don’t know how many people are familiar with this event. On the left we talk about May ‘68 almost as if it is a kind of mystery.

We’re always trying to figure out the true meaning of what took place here. But what it represents is a moment in global capitalism, a situation that largely took place in France, definitely in Latin America, but also globally, in which left wing revolution in the west broke from Stalinism and halted the processes of the capitalist machine for a very long duration.

This resulted in a halting of all work. And this then becomes a sort of germinal laboratory of thinking about what we call post-capitalist futures. So again, accelerationism is this ambitious utopian idea that we can come up with almost technocratic solutions that circumvent a big theme of accelerationism. Once we get to the more recent period, where it has its second life after the great economic crash of 2008. We now have the return of these kinds of utopian ideas.

But now, there are some technical things we could mention about the new left, and about some very particular philosophers that emerged from this milieu. Most importantly, we have the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari.

They developed this book called Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. And at the core of the premise of their book is this wager that capitalism can be overcome by going all-in on its tendencies, its flows and dynamics – not necessarily by subtracting from those flows and dynamics.

And that capitalism creates a whole new body, a whole new assemblage, a whole new system of desire in which revolution can be thought of in this almost polymorphous sense. So they develop a new theory of subjectivity. And their work is extremely influential on left wing thought. In the origin of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is also an embedded dynamic, and a question as to whether the proposals inherent in their work are of the right or whether they are of the left.

So a debate emerges from the accelerationist movement as to whether this approach to revolution is actually something that is reactionary or not. This becomes a real question, and this is something that we want to grapple with tonight.

So that’s the prehistory. The formal development is in this kind of counterculture, May ‘68-oriented thinking. Another big thing here is “libidinal accelerationism”.

Libidinal accelerationism was huge, and this is where Deleuze and Guattari technically fit. The idea behind this is sort of this anti-humanist impulse, in which the old way of thinking, socialist revolution can be abandoned, and we no longer need to sort of organize the working class for their own emancipation. They develop a new theory of groups; a new theory of left wing group solidarity that eschews the Marxist and socialist way of thinking about revolution.

Now, one of the philosophers of accelerationism that emerges in the third period, what’s called the third wave of accelerationism, is a very controversial philosopher who’s influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, by the name of Nick Land.

Nick Land’s view is that this debate as to whether the ideas of accelerationism have a right or a left wing, or a cold and a warm stream embedded in them is false. Accelerationism, according to him, really can only be seen as a right wing phenomenon.

Ultimately, however, a very interesting thing happens in the post 2008 period, largely driven by the millennial generation. Socialists in the UK (and to a lesser extent in the US) begin to publish a series of books, like the #Accelerate Manifesto.

We get a sort of burgeoning literature about what it would mean to rethink revolution in the wake of 2008. Which is very interesting, because it does not necessarily give us a picture of capitalism as some accelerating, dynamic and fluid system.

If anything, we have the thesis of secular stagnation, right? In fact, is capitalism truly a progressive entity? Is capital a kind of impersonal force of value? If it’s set free, what would actually happen?

This is the mysterious wager that exists beyond and behind accelerationism. So immediately from a socialist perspective we have the sense that, “Wait a second… isn’t this just kind of an ultra libertarianism?”

Ultimately that becomes a real question. And to the credit of the socialist accelerationists in the post-2008 period, with thinkers like Srniceck and Williams, who wrote the ‘Accelerate Manifesto’, to figures like Mark Fisher, who was of the view that Nick Land presents one of the most important conceptual enemies to the contemporary left.

He died a few years ago, tragically. But Mark Fisher was of the view that embedded in the accelerationist proposal is something very emancipatory. But what’s emancipatory about it is that it allows us to conceptualize capitalism from the point of what I described at the very beginning as a system, as a total logic.

Mark Fisher is known as a figure who wrote a book called Capitalist Realism. This is a very prophetic book; one of the most important left accelerationist books. His argument in this book is that we have lost the ability to think capitalism as a total system.

That’s capitalist realism. And I think he’s very much right about that. And moreover, he says, look, what accelerationism is advantageous for is it introduces the idea of rethinking this old Marxist Hegelian idea of capitalism as a totality. The problem is, as Benjamin Noys – who’s technically the philosopher who coined the word“accelerationism” in his his best-selling book Malign Velocities, the problem according to Noys is that we have the repetition of the same elitist danger or trap from the early Saint Simonian elitist socialist vision, that was looking at capitalism as a system that had a kind of inherent power unto itself; technology left to itself to be steered in a better direction by the bureaucrat or by the technocrat.

So ultimately, according to Benjamin Noys, the problem with left wing accelerationism was the fact that they advocated for circumventing what they called “folk politics”, or “politics from below”. Politics of the exploited, of the working class. A huge manifesto during this time was Aaaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Left accelerationists felt that universal basic income would be a beautiful solution, which kind of goes back to this latent libertarianism that they have.

So I myself, as a socialist, am highly critical of accelerationism. Now I want to pivot here and turn it over to Grady precisely because one of the great things about my friend Grady Page, who is the co owner of this bookstore we’re in, is the idea that he and I have a philosophical debate that is one of those things that’s kind of ongoing, ever going, never stopping.

I think we sent voice memos – you know that you’re in a close relationship when you have voice memos going.

Because one of the questions is, once Trump comes to power and the Sanders movement and the Corbyn movement are effectively kneecapped, we now face a horizon in which these kind of idealist and utopian ways of thinking about left wing accelerationism are no longer relevant.

There are longer books about it, it’s no longer talked about, and it sort of disappears into the margins. Nick Land, who Grady’s going to tell you about, says, look, I prophesied this from the beginning. And maybe perhaps at that point, we could turn it over to Grady to maybe describe Land’s position on all of this.

So the question is, do you agree with Mark Fisher that Land is a productive enemy to us on the left today?

---

To find out what happened next, and what Grady thinks of Fisher and Land, watch their whole conversation on Daniel Tutt’s Emancipations podcast.

]