Accelerationism and the Limits of Technological Determinism

Abstract

Critics who think inequality and crisis are endemic to capitalism have proposed accelerationism: speeding up the system’s immanent processes and potentialities to transcend rather than repair it. This writing has tended to focus on aesthetics and technology, rather than capitalism’s tendencies of motion. Efforts to show that capitalism develops solely on the basis of technological progress cannot be maintained theoretically or empirically, as the work of Bill Warren shows. An accelerationist political economy must begin from the conflict between the forces and relations of production, rather than an ahistorical, additive account of development factors. I suggest that an anti-determinist accelerationism remains possible, providing capitalist development is understood as a political struggle over the creation of value.