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How Williams and Srnicek answered the left's silence after 2008, what their manifesto demanded, and why the demands outlived the theory attached to them.
London, 2009. A conference called The Idea of Communism fills a room with celebrated communist thinkers, a year after the financial system nearly came apart. A young theorist named Alex Williams sits in the audience waiting to hear the plan. There is no plan. Plenty of critique, plenty of history, nothing built for the moment. He later calls it the sheer paucity of the left's response. I will argue that left accelerationism failed as theory and succeeded as demands, following one manifesto from 2013 to the basic income pilots that now run without it.
The silence had a context. The 2008 crash wiped trillions off the world economy and almost nobody went to prison. Occupy filled parks in dozens of cities, then did not. "#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics," published by Williams and Nick Srnicek on 14 May 2013, reads like an answer written because nobody else was writing one. Its early line: in this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled. At a Goldsmiths symposium in September 2010, Srnicek had tested the move out loud: "Accelerationism can be used as a weapon, employing the rhetoric of neoliberalism against itself." Benjamin Noys, on the same program, set the terms for everything since: "acceleration is a capitalist fantasy." Then, drier: "if you want to cheerlead and support capital that's perfectly fine, you're on the winning side, congratulations."
The manifesto's central move is a reversal. The usual complaint says capitalism moves too fast, chewing up communities and burning the planet. Williams and Srnicek say capitalism is not dynamic enough. It invents machines that could shrink the working week toward nothing, then leaves half of them idle or points them at a slightly faster phone. It wastes the forces it creates.
Their most quoted sentence draws its line down the middle of the left, not between left and capital. "The most important division in today's left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology." One side occupies a park; the other wants to run the grid. Notice the target: not finance, the rest of the left.
Keep the infrastructure, change who owns it. "The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed," they write, "but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism." Do not blow up the supply chains, the automated ports, the logistics software; take them. Two years on, in Inventing the Future, the instinct becomes a program: full automation, a universal basic income, a shorter working week, and an argument against treating work as the source of meaning. Alongside them they set something slower, counter-hegemony, the long fight over what counts as normal and possible. Manifestos are the fast part; changing what counts as realistic takes decades. Basic income here is a lever, what Srnicek calls a bootstrapping mechanism. Williams sharpens it into a question: "How does capital coerce workers if they can exist without a job?"
In 2019 Aaron Bastani pushes the logic further in Fully Automated Luxury Communism, counting five convergences: automation, nearly free solar power, asteroid mining, gene editing, cultured meat. He values one asteroid, 16 Psyche, at ten thousand quadrillion dollars. "Our ambitions must be Promethean," he writes, "because our technology is already making us gods." Ville Kellokumpu calls that math "an intellectual sleight of hand," capitalism's "final spatial fix." McKenzie Wark says the manifesto fights an old war, since shutting every hair salon in a city does nothing like shutting a steel plant once did; the left needs "neither abstraction nor occupying, but the occupying of abstraction." On full automation: "In practice there's not enough planet left to entertain such an idea." Noys files it under nostalgia, the future as a rerun of 1969.
The label has faded. Srnicek writes about platform capitalism now, and nobody publishes under the l/acc banner. The demands survived. Basic income pilots have run in India, in Iran, in parts of the United States, argued over by people who never heard the theory. They kept the springboard and let go of the manifesto, the most honest thing to happen to accelerationism on this side of the fork.
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