The entry that turns two opposing lists into one bidirectional map. Everything in the accelerationist cluster — the occult, the thermodynamic, the venture-capital arms — grows off a left-wing root, and the right-wing branch is a mutation of it, not its mirror. Get this genealogy in view and the whole study stops being “the bad right-wing ideology and its left twin” and becomes what it actually is: one valence-indifferent engine, ridden in opposite directions.
The root
The word accelerationism was coined in 2010 by Benjamin Noys — as a critique, not a banner — to name a trajectory already decades old on the post-structuralist left: Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), Baudrillard. The founding gesture is a single sentence from Anti-Oedipus: “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it… we haven’t seen anything yet.” The deeper taproot is Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” (the Grundrisse) — capital building the very forces that will burst it. The shared move is deterritorialization: break the world out of its static equilibria and push, trusting the process to carry you somewhere worth arriving. Note the ancestor named in the quote — Nietzsche — who is also a patron saint of the right-wing manifesto. The two branches share a grandfather.
And note who walked this root rightward. Nick Land came out of this Deleuzian milieu — the CCRU was left-adjacent theory before he carried “accelerate the process” into teleoplexy and the demon-qabbala. The Land flip is the Sorel event replayed: a left-libidinal program exiting right with the engine unchanged. Same deterritorialization, new destination.
The flip and the fork — one engine, two Y’s
Here is the framework reading, and it is exact. The accelerationist move is “accelerate the process” — but “the process” has no destination written in it. Deterritorialization is a direction manufactured by a loop; where it points is a free choice of Y. So the engine forks by the Y you bolt on:
- Right (teleoplexy / e/acc): accelerate into capital and the singularity — the techno-capital god, the future as the owner.
- Left (l/acc): accelerate through capital and out the other side — Srnicek & Williams’ Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013), Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019): seize the productive forces, automate the work away, redistribute the abundance.
Same engine. Opposite destinations. Which is the whole point: the fate-rail is politically promiscuous because it is a structure, not a politics — exactly what Sorel’s one myth proved by feeding both syndicalism and Mussolini. Left and right accelerationism are not opposites; they are two Y’s on one loop.
Where the left branch is closest to the cure
And now the honesty the discipline demands, because the symmetry is not clean and forcing it would be a cheap mirror. Left-accelerationism is, by this book’s own lights, the node in either cluster that comes nearest to the cut — and I will not flatten that to make a tidy pair. Srnicek and Williams explicitly reject Land’s fatalism. Their manifesto argues against submission to an autonomous rail and for deliberate steering — planning, navigation, the conscious construction of a future rather than surrender to one. In framework terms they are reaching for the right thing: free will is the choice of Y; they want to own the reference on purpose instead of laundering it as destiny. That is the cure’s posture, not the disease’s.
So the cut on l/acc is gentle and specific. Its residual error is not the fate (it denies the fate) but a leftover faith that “the process” has an emancipatory grain you can ride toward — still treating a created direction as partly read, still trusting deterritorialization to tend somewhere good rather than merely somewhere. Keep the steering; drop the grain. The process has no side; only the navigator does — so navigate, and stop expecting the current to be your ally. That is a correction, not a kill — and that l/acc earns a correction where its right-wing siblings earn kills is itself the most honest finding in the map.
The honest bar
Living authors (Srnicek, Williams, Bastani, Noys); no person is diagnosed. The kernel is generously credited — the steering-over-submission instinct is right. The cut is structural and narrow (the residual directional faith), and the genealogy is documented intellectual history, not retrofit. This is modern theory, an articulation, not an ancient tradition and not prior art (lens-not-encoding). The value of the entry is the map: it forbids the lazy read in either direction — neither “accelerationism is a right-wing pathology” nor “the left version is just as bad.” One engine; many Y’s; the cut sorts by where the reference came from, never by whose flag is on it.
Sources
No links that rot. Documented intellectual genealogy; living theorists cut at the level of argument; no individual diagnosed; the steering-kernel credited as correct.
- The root. Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (2010) — coins “accelerationism” as critique; Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972, “accelerate the process… as Nietzsche put it”); Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (1974); Marx, the “Fragment on Machines” (Grundrisse). Search: Noys accelerationism Anti-Oedipus accelerate the process Lyotard libidinal economy Marx fragment on machines.
- The left branch proper. Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (2013) — explicitly anti-Landian, pro-navigation/planning; Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019). Search: Srnicek Williams Manifesto Accelerationist Politics navigation Bastani fully automated luxury communism.
- The flip. Land’s emergence from the Deleuzian/CCRU milieu into teleoplexy; the Sorel horseshoe as the structural precedent. Search: Nick Land CCRU Deleuze left accelerationism flip right.
- The cut it instantiates. Choice of Y (the process has no destination; the navigator does) · Sorel (valence-indifference, proven) · Teleoplexy / acc (the right fork) · The Modern Mirror (free will = choosing the Y on purpose).
- Brakes. Scalpel, and the lightest in the cluster — l/acc’s steering instinct is credited as nearest-to-the-cure, only the residual directional faith is cut; no living person diagnosed; modern theory, not tradition; explanandum, not prior art (lens-not-encoding); genealogy is documented history, not retrofit; no forced symmetry — that the left node earns a correction where the right earns kills is reported, not smoothed; writer’s-void brake (The Last Outside) applies.
Appears in: Teleoplexy · The Mobilizing Myth (Sorel) · Nietzsche (the shared grandfather) · Effective Accelerationism · Gothic Violence · The Numogram · The Oldest Tail · The Modern Mirror