[green, speaking, looking smug]
Okay, hear me out, here’s the plan…
We go full apathy, basically we let capitalism fully spiral out into fascism. Once it’s done, people will rise up and the system will collapse under its own weight. From its ashes, with our help, a better society will rise. This is how we win.
[we now see that green is tied up in front of a bleak wall, along with a group of other people, being aimed at by a firing squad of characters in fascist uniforms]
[green, smiling] OK?
[blue, pissed] Dude…
This is kinda mostly a strawman though, no serious political movement advocates for accelerationism, it’s just a strawman used against people further to the left than oneself.
There are a few weird fringe cults who are accelerationist like Posadists (who believe nuclear war or aliens will bring communism), but it’s not by any means a position that holds a good footing in any serious political project.
The strawman often takes claims like “there is not a big practical difference between these two political parties” and twists them into “I would rather have the worse party win”. Also takes descriptive statements like “people usually revolt when hungry” and attributes an intentionality to them, like “I wish more people would go hungry so that they starve more”, as if making an observation about the nature of protest and revolt implied supporting the conditions that create it.
A lot of the far right is accelerationist. They’ve been hoping for a “race war” for many decades. Then there is the newer Effective Accelerationism/Network State/Dark Enlightenment stuff that the ultra wealthy seem to be into.
Wow…a race war would not go well for the far right.
When I hear “far right”, I think of middle aged angry white guys. We already HAD that war! At least in the united states…it was in the 1800s, and it did not go well for those who supported racial discrimination.
And that’s underselling the whole thing quite a bit.
I believe nuclear war will bring a better planet.
I mean, there will be no more humans alive, but thats what will make the planet better!
Aren’t all the Plantir people (well people with money high up) epushing for an accelerationist movement with their stuff? I would think the billionaires are serious is all. Mean it sounds freaking stupid to me but I don’t have the bullhorn that the people who have all our private data does is all. However with the US they’re using project 2025 as a starting point before they buy up everything after it breaks. Least that’s what it appears, mean the VP is picked, groomed and supported by Theil. Just have to let them break enough then swoop in and mould a society they wanted. It’s not something 99.99% of what people would want from what I can tell.
Perhaps I’m missing some subtly which I will say I haven’t really looked into the definitions a lot but I don’t think with current forces is as much of a strawman as it may seem is all. Though I don’t think people on that side would want the same outcome as Mr Green is all.
Literally Ernst Thälmann. He said to let the Nazis take power, and then the whole world will see how incompetent they are, and then his communist party will surely rise up! But there are no prizes for guessing what happened to him in the end!
The candidate the social democrats wanted won and he’s the guy who appointed Hitler chancellor! There was a three way race between “literally Hitler,” “guy who will put Hitler into a position of power” and “not Hitler” (Thälmann) and somehow libs are still mad that “not Hitler” was on the ballot.
The social democrats were the ones with the brilliant plan of punching left in favor of a “center”-right coalition, and they actually won and got what they wanted and wound up in the camps as a direct result of it!
No prizes for guessing what happens when you trust the bourgeois parties to be an ally against fascism.
Capitalists: take notes on what the Nazis did wrong and tiptoe around it
Doesn’t help that the social democrats had murdered the more moderate leaders of the communists (like Rosa Luxembourg) just a few years before that and funded the Freikorps with government funds. How is a small party (KPD) without access to government more accelerationist than the big party in government (SPD) actively funding Nazi death squads to murder communists already a decade before?
Also, the SPD leaders literally flipped its anti-militarist stance overnight when WW1 broke out. Again, who’s the accelerationist, the one protesting against that and being murdered by fascists or the party in government funding said fascists and supporting WW1?
choked on a bone in a pie eating contest, which was weird because it was an apple pie?
well this is going to make you happy. i just read this comic and was coming here to post it :3
It does, thanks, that’s pretty cool ! 🥰
This isn’t even the stupidest point of accelerationism. That’s the assumption that your personal utopia will emerge from the ashes, instead of something much worse.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no path to “perfect” which doesn’t track through an infinite amount of “better” first.
This isn’t even the stupidest point of accelerationism
Agreed, but like, there are no actual accelerationists, it’s mostly a strawman used to misrepresent people who are more radical. Sure, there may be a few random accelerationists around, but there’s no serious political movement anywhere with accelerationism in their policy because it is a very bad idea.
“no serious political movement” my dude, statesian republicans are maybe not explicit
statesians[edit woah oaky maybe too many drugs] accelerationists but like, i’m gonna lose teeth because of them.and don’t say they aren’t serious because just because they’re dipshits, they’re still a major political party and killing people. that’s pretty damn serious.
This is exactly the problem. “Supporting policies that make things worse for the average person” is not the same thing as “accelerationism.” Some people are just wrong, or they have different motivations (like making them and their friends rich). If accelerationism just means making things worse, then everyone is an accelerationist to everyone who disagrees with them, it loses any real meaning.
There may be a handful of actual accelerationists in the party, but they’re mostly driven by material interests and a whole bunch of brainworms, not by some accelerationist strategy.
Reminds me of this meme:
Or this one:
Yeah the take plays against their point and into the hands of fascists. A common retort from “capitalists” goes “well why doesn’t your economic system compete on the free market? If it’s so good it will rise to the top.” You believing your ideology will defacto rise from a blank slate after society collapses lends credence to that argument. (Which is flawed in so many ways)
Obviously, we shouldn’t need to detail “villains bad” in media, but with so many of them having “from the ashes” plans, I’d like to see more heroes deconstructing their approach like this.
After WW2 65 million people were dead and 50% of the boys and men in Germany were dead. Everyone loses with fascism
Fully agreed but why the particular focus on the offending nation? You could give similar statistics about, say, Belarus or Poland. To me it’s not morally the same when a Nazi German soldier is killed in combat to when a Belarusian civilian is starved to death in a Nazi concentration camp.
oh goodie. question that has absolutely no bearing on reality whatsoever: so in Austria and Germany there had to have been people who, before WW2, were crippled. I know war leaves people crippled but i’m curious as to the fate of those who were crippled before the war. No reason whatsoever ignore the cane and wheelchair and cabinet full of glue.
aw who am i kidding they’re gonna turn me into glue
Okay, but capitalism dystopia is not going to look like that. In real capitalism, that wall will be covered in advertisements and motivation posters.
Me and who 😳
get shot rearing an ad for Amazon™ Bezz-box® rented apartments on Mars.
No need to market to you when they simply extract your labour and rent and you buy the swill that is cheapest to you.
Marketing is more than just selling products, it is a form of social manipulation and conditioning in the constant bombardment of information. It keeps the people not only buying your products but conditioning them to think that they need your products in the first place.
Advertisers will never go obsolete. They are too good at advertising themselves.
Yeah. Shit can hit the fan to make space for Something new. But thats a huge “could”. There is also space for something even worse.
Accelerationism isn’t just being apathetic, it’s actively making things worse. It’s voting for Trump because the DNC didn’t elect Bernie Sanders.
Lenin was much the same. He knew a revolution wouldn’t happen if things got better, so he did everything he could to make things as bad as humanly possible. When the provisional government came along, granted free speech rights and universal suffrage, Lenin was vehemently opposed to it, because you can’t have a communist revolution when stuff is going well. A stable government is not one you can overthrow.
How many actual Bernie supporters voted for Trump? Or are you just making up a strawman to blame the left for the Democrats being incapable of winning the elections to a sex criminal or at the very least banning a fascist from elections during their mandate?
Lenin was much the same. He knew a revolution wouldn’t happen if things got better, so he did everything he could to make things as bad as humanly possible
You are abso-fucking-lutely making that up. The Bolsheviks had support from workers and soldiers precisely because they advocated from the start on an unconditional retreat from WW1, which was leading to massive casualty numbers and famine. Pulling your country out of imperialist war (which they did immediately after Bolshevism won the revolution btw) is literally the opposite of accelerationism.
When the provisional government came along, granted free speech rights and universal suffrage, Lenin was vehemently opposed to it
If by “universal” you mean male suffrage, female suffrage was I actually first implemented in the former Russian empire by the communists. The Bolsheviks organized a coup against the provisional government to pull the RSFSR out of imperialist war, and the fact that a bunch of former political prisoners and exiles had the military support to do this and maintain a stable state (and win the upcoming civil war) proves that it was the correct choice. The unelected provisional government barely survived the fascist coups that sought to reinstate the Tsar and society was growing exhausted of famine and poverty due to the wartime conditions, if you support the provisional government you’re literally arguing for Russian nationalism and militarism, blows my mind that you’d be doing this on 2026.
Look up the dates for the independence of Finland or Estonia, and tell me whether they line up with the Provisional Government or with the October Revolution, then tell me again which government was more democratic, the one keeping them under their thumb or the one drafting a constitution granting the unilateral right to self-determination and secession.
so i was part of a group of friends in high school. we campaigned (at the high school, by wearing buttons and thinking up stupid slogans, not really getting involved in politics) for the green party because by our logic, we couldn’t convince democrats to vote republican because they were too smart for that. but we could trick them into voting green.
of my close friends group in high school, only half to 3/4 of us ever grew up. there’s one friend in particular i’m thinking of though, he was a “bernie bro” online until bernie lost. after the 2016 election he told us that he tried to commit voter fraud for the russian candidate. in a way that would get noticed and his first vote rejected, also a method that had been discussed online on forums associated with agent krasnov and promoted by agent krasnov himself, but my friend has always been a dipshit. i mean hell so have i. evidence, paragraph 1.
You have anecdotal “evidence” with a sample size of 1 and using it to make a sweeping, generalization statement.
i’m having a conversation, not making sweeping generalizations dude. get over yourself.
You are having a conversation in which you have made sweeping generalizations. Don’t be fucking stupid.
When the provisional government came along, granted free speech rights and universal suffrage
The provisional goverment was unelected and self-appointed, arrested people for arguing in favor of refusing to fight in WWI, and after months of protests said they would allow women to vote whenever they got around to having an election but women couldn’t vote until 20 and men 18.
Lenin wasn’t opposed to the provisional government when it came along because he was in Germany and didn’t know how mad a lot of people were at the random gang of Chuck Schumers from the Tsarist government who had declared themselves in charge, ignoring the Soviets that were already forming an elected government, and spent months stalling their version of an election so they could keep the incredibly unpopular WWI going.
Lenin started opposing the provisional government after 20k awol marines with machine guns showed up at his office saying they hated it, he said ok and then spent a couple months writing a book to explain why the angry guys with guns have a point.
If he was trying to be accelerationist he would have just hyped up the marines and let them shoot everybody instead of following the path of least resistance to a stable government that could last 6 months without a coup.
I think you forgot the part where the provisional government wanted to keep drafting people to feed into the pointless meat grinder of WWI, which Lenin opposed rather strongly.
A stable government is not one you can overthrow.
Governments (nations) are in their nature not stable. Governments can be overthrown at any moment. It is a question of how many are willing to participate, which is not that many.
because you can’t have a communist revolution when stuff is going well
Not Lenin’s reasoning, nor is it as a statement true. Revolutions have happened exactly at points where things were looking up, take the transitions that have happened in history where monarchies were superseded by the liberal state. It is not a cyclical trend where, oh no, we have some sort of downtrend in productivity or some other sort of crisis and then the magical revolution comes to save the day. Revolutions happen because systems are forced to adopt organisational structures that satisfy (novel) needs, not because of shittiness.
It’s voting for Trump
Accelerationism is when you vote. And the more you vote, the faster things get
I voted for Biden and things did indeed get worse. Now we see that Trump was voted in and they are getting worse. Soon we will vote in a new Congress and then a new President and things will continue to get worse.
Thankfully I stopped voting after Biden, so my bad luck 🍀 has peaked.
PSA to all the “voters” out there. I no longer worry about politics because I know that things can only get worse. 😎
Thankfully I stopped voting after Biden, so my bad luck 🍀 has peaked.
I mean, you joke. But folks really do seem to believe there’s a karmic curse on people who “vote wrong”. That’s the entire theory of Leopards Eating Faces, anyway.
That’s just cause & effect.
Are things going to keep getting worse? Probably.
Do you need to vote if that’s the case? Not really, but it’s an external locus of control. You feel you have power because you got to choose who made things worse.
As a Millennial this is basically how I feel about Gen Z. Why are they so apathetic regarding everything? If anyone gets passionate about anything because they want something done about the rise of fascism, you get labeled as “crashing out”! It’s annoying as fuck!
As a millennial, you should understand that there’s no coherent volition behind surplus objects like Gen Z. Do you remember how the US just added every muslim to the list of terrorists or how suddenly all single mothers in the UK became a parasite?
Why are you generalizing a whole generation?
Advertising stupidity, the only reason anyone ever has.
Trump was elected under millennials, not Z. Americans in general are apathetic - it’s a culture issue, not a generational one.
I see that difference extremely clearly now that I live in Finland.
“The youngest voters and those entering middle age tacked hard to the right. Gen X — which slightly favored president-elect Donald Trump with a one-point margin in 2020 — shifted 9 points toward Trump this cycle. Gen Z favored Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 points, compared to 24 points for President Joe Biden.
…
Gen Z’s big shift to the right wasn’t entirely unexpected. Teens were twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents compared to millennials 20 years ago, per a Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study conducted last fall.”
-Business Insider
As a millennial who remembers massive climate change and anti Iraq war protests I get it.
Stop crashing out… :)
No but I think its because of never ending negative things happening. People stop to care because they cant affect it.
Accelerationism is really dumb which is why it’s such a popular strawman.
Does someone have a different opinion? Well, it could be that different people have different ideas about how the world works as well as different priorities. But that’s all complicated and nuanced and forces you to contend with different perspectives. Instead, just assume that everyone has your perspective because it’s just inherently obvious to everyone, but some people are intentionally trying to make things worse because they’re stupid and evil.
Virtually no one is an actual accelerationist.
Yep very few actual believers but if you don’t support their “pragmatic” suggestions that throw billions under the bus they accuse you of this.
The real solution btw is just a better consensus mechanism in our electoral process in the form of STAR Voting.
It is quite literally that simple.
The lack of choice (as explained in Duverger’s Law) is what kills our politics and helps the media portray all political battles as us vs them and not “What shade out of a million shades of gray should this policy be?”.tl;dr - STAR Voting is quite literally a panacea for nearly all the extreme ills that plague our politics - even a large portion of “voting doesn’t matter so I won’t” apathy…because to vote “strategically” under STAR Voting is to just vote honestly and every vote matters. No revolution required - just a better electoral process. I’m happy to answer any questions.
Sure, but only if you naively believe that electoralism is an acceptable system. Many, many anarchists would vehemently disagree with you though.
No revolution required - just a better electoral process. I’m happy to answer any questions.
Why would the ruling capitalist class allow an electoral process that represents the working class against their own interests, if they haven’t allowed this anywhere at any time?
Someone do a version of the comic with this guy’s comment as the text of the first panel, please.
Almost nobody is arguing this maybe i should give you the benefit of the doubt but I just can’t people hating your “nicer” imperialist genocidal capitalists don’t believe this.
Please use punctuation.
Once it’s done?
Facissm doesn’t end on its own. It needs to get pushed out.
Pretty much the same plan as the Republicans, right? They were all about burning it down but plenty of them are arriving at the “Dude!” stage.
