Karl Marx once backed free trade because it would speed up revolution
In an 1848 speech, Karl Marx called free trade destructive, a force that broke up old nations and pushed workers and owners toward open conflict. Then he voted for it, precisely because it would hasten social revolution. Philosophers later called that logic accelerationism: push capitalism faster rather than resist it.
Accelerationism covers a range of ideologies that want to use capitalism and its processes to drive radical transformation, speeding up some tendencies while leaving others behind. Its versions disagree sharply about whether the ride ends beyond capitalism or deeper inside it. The word itself appeared in Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light, but the critic Benjamin Noys gave it its modern sense in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative, a critical study that ironically revived interest in the ideas.
Scholars describe three waves. The first came from French thinkers after the upheavals of May 1968, especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose 1972 book Anti-Oedipus asked whether the revolutionary path might lie not in withdrawing from the market but in going further, to accelerate the process, a phrase borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche. They saw desire not as a lack to be filled but as a restless productive flow, and capitalism as history's most boundary-dissolving force. The critic Mark Fisher summed up its contradictions as a world where food banks coexist with iPhones.
The second wave arrived in the 1990s at the University of Warwick, where Nick Land led a collective called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Mixing philosophy with cyberpunk and jungle music, it imagined a self-revolutionising capitalism culminating in a technological singularity. In the 2010s a third wave split the inheritance. On the left, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argued for harnessing capitalist technology, including the automation of work, to move beyond a stagnant economy. Land, by then living in China, moved right, rejecting democracy and equality in favour of states run like companies.
The label has since stretched further, to people who want to worsen capitalism to provoke revolt and to militant far-right extremists who promote social collapse. The admirers of the idea's lineage also cite an older Marx, especially a passage in the Grundrisse known as the Fragment on Machines.
Source: Accelerationism
