Accelerationists implicitly believe they'll survive whatever happens on the way to their envisioned Paradise, and are willing to sacrifice others to get to whatever end state they have in mind. It's fundamentally a belief of privileged, insulated people who don't care about those less fortunate than themselves.

I had some left wing accelerationist friends and man was it frustrating trying to point out the problems with the perspective.

i was open to buying into left related accelerationism until i remembered my history books. Power vacuums are rarely filled by who you want them to be filled by, and too many are hurt in the process.

It's nice to see someone reading history books. I despair at all the "new" ideas that have been endlessly tried already.

I just meant in in my high school history books and one world history class i took in community college. Other than that I wouldn't say I've really "read history books". I'm sure I've read about other events as I went through life though.

> Power vacuums are rarely filled by who you want them to be filled by, and too many are hurt in the process.

I wish more people learned from history.

Punch the Fascists? Well, the Left tried that in Weimar Germany, and it ended with the Fascists in charge.

Have a Socialist Revolution? You end up with Lenin and Stalin, or Mao and Deng, or, for extra points, the Khmer Rouge, a regime so insane even their fellow Socialists in Vietnam invaded them to end their brutality; even if you insist none of those people were True, Honest Socialists, that's part of the point, isn't it? They're the people Socialist Revolution ended up putting into power.

What is to be done? Maybe, just maybe, not something which puts the most violent out in front.

These are extremely simplistic takes on times that were the result of decades of power shifts and class struggles.

We won't have any of decades of power shifts and class struggles to contend with this time with the "glorious workers revolution"?

Oh but we will. Those things always exist.

What are you talking about? Did you make up a narrative of what my intentions with that post were and then attack it?

I was kind of wondering what you were talking about. On it's face it seems like justification for atrocities committed by Marxists for ideological purposes.

I get it: You think politics is for losers and you want to indulge your power fantasy.

Excuse me?

I think that’s a gross oversimplification of the history of political violence in Weimar Germany. Much of the Nazi’s rise to power in Weimar Germany came from their paramilitary forces, the SA and SS. The state was unable to control or suppress those forces. Most other political parties had their own paramilitary wing, including right wing parties besides the Nazis and left wing parties like the KPD and SPD. Left wing parties unilaterally standing down their paramilitary forces while other parties didn’t wouldn’t have prevented the Nazi rise to power.

This also seems misleading with respect to Hitler's rise to power, which had far more to do with the weakness of Weimar Germany's institutions and the cynicism of the ruling classes than the SA or the SS, although I agree with your point about the political violence of the time in general.

I just want it to be clear, I still consider myself a leftist, but I'll never buy into stuff like "we just need to let these folks run things until we're ready for communism".

You've made a very good point about the dangers of failing to learn from history, and I think that if you spent an hour or so researching how Hitler actually came to power in the Weimar Republic, you'd be able to appreciate it.

My point is that just punching Fascists doesn't stop them.

You have to engage with politics and the power structures.

You have to think and do hard work in building coalitions and power bases.

Gangs don't win power, they just get used by those who do.

Look up the SA and the Strasserists.

Actually, you said something hyperbolic that was spectacularly false, which you seem to have no intention of acknowledging. If one has a defensible point, it's usually much better to go ahead and make that point in the first place. As it stands, you'll have to hope that someone else makes it to me on some other day, I guess, if it matters to you.

So you refuse to acknowledge my points, then?

I shouldn't expect too much from people who refuse to see the larger issue and instead get lost in the weeds.

"Bonapartism" in the sense of popular movements being coopted by the powerful is a good place to start, for the curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonapartism#Marxism

Is there any evidence that this has anything to do with accelerationism?

No

While I'm glad that accelerationism is being discussed, this description does a poor job at laying out the map of the ideological territory. The thing it inadvertently does is confuse accelerationism with right-wing accelerationism.

> Accelerationism is the most inherently violent and dangerous ideology circulating in the global white supremacist extremist movement.

This for example is not untrue, but it omits the basics necessary to understand the broader context.

Accelerationism is a practical strategy able to be incorporated into any ideology. While right-wing accelerationism seeks to foment civil breakdown that results in a white ethno state, left wing accelerationism seeks to let the breaks off if capitalism in the hope that it will self implode and the resulting devestattion can be harnessed to bring about a communist utopia.

Between and around these lie myriad other accelerationist tendencies each with its own version of what will happen after the status quo self-annihilates. My point is that leaving out all of this is a huge omission and we haven't even gotten to Nick Land and the CCRU yet!

There's an important lesson to be learned here, in that the intricacies and subdivisions of your fandom only matter to you, and nobody else cares. Just like metalheads insist on profound differences between thrash and doom that no non-metalheads will ever notice, nobody cares about the differences between left- and right-accelerationsism when the practical effect-- destroying civilization and all its comforts, probably killing millions and leaving us in a miserable hard-scabble existence-- is the same.

I'm not sure we know HN the same way. The HN audience I know generally enjoys peering into subcultures and understanding the intricacies of their conceptualizations from the inside. I can't think of an audience more aligned with picking apart subtle distinctions than this one.

Without any evidence that ties accelerationism to this, this isn't adding context. It's just a distraction.

Why use the term accelerationism when sociopathy would describe those people even better? It's a dangerous disease, not just a mild difference in opinions.