I think the word "accelerationist" has the potential to become the next "tankie", or even a worse, more mainstream version of it. In the way a small number of liberals are currently using it, it is equally useless for understanding the world / equally useful for misunderstanding the world. It can be used to equate any leftist with a person who wants to start WW3. It can be used to draw a connection between the far right and the far left, without even having to use another concept like "authoritarianism" to mediate the comparison.
We are also quickly approaching the part of the American electoral cycle where liberals will start trying to suppress any non-abstract criticism of the Democrats. "Bernie bro" will start to seem outdated, so they are in need of a new rhetorical tool.
"Tankie" could also serve as this tool, but it has the downsides of its meaning being harder to intuit from the word itself, and its explanation including an actual historical event. "Accelerationist" is also directly rhetorically related to the current campaign of hate towards LGBT people, but does not necessarily reference it so it can still be used by cis people to insult trans leftists.
iirc 2016 had an moment of "Zizek said Trump will be better than Hillary, is he an accelerationist?"
Since accelerationist was used against people who said that no biden is not the lesser evil and that you should not vote for the democrats because they were not going to protect marginalized communities, just like tankie was used by the old chapo reddit community before being appropriated by libs, this will a 100% the case.
“Tankie” is just too online a term to break into the mainstream. “Accelerationist” is broad enough and has enough implication in the word sans context that it can be applied to smear a wide variety of positions libs don’t like.
Is it? I think tankie is much simpler and easier to understand, the idea of someone who knee jerk defends anyone with a red flag vs someone who's trying to play some weird fifth dimensional chess where they make things worse in order to radicalize people into supporting their cause, somehow. The latter is way more weird and confusing imo.
On the other hand, you could accuse liberals of doing the same thing, when they want to increase arms for Ukraine, if not nuke Russia themselves. So, yeah, it's just another future vague buzzword that'll get used, abused, and dumped, like a re-used preservatif.
It's happened to me before. I got called an accelerationist just for saying that things will get worse in the capitalist world before they'll get better (if they ever do get better).
I actually agree with this one. Since libs thing voting for the blue racist is harm reduction, they also think that by not doing that you're intentionally trying to make America worse. And if you start talking about how voting blue vs voting green or whatever other color you wanna vote do basically the same thing anyway they'll start going off about how you're just mad and trying to destroy the world over it.
Meanwhile I would argue that voting blue no matter who actually is an accelerationist act but libs won't understand what that word actually means so
Accelerationism has also been coopted by fascists for starting the race war. Will be easy to horseshoe theory leftists using the term
So how is the term "accelerationist" actually going to be abused? Before it basically meant a right wing troll pretending to left wing to make you support the right. Like how the boogaloo boys would say "death to america", but really want a race war.
"You want the US government to collapse? Why do you hate the poor and lgbt people, you accelerationist?!"
How do you want the US government to collapse? If it collapses into fascism thats not going to be good for US minorities or the rest of the world. You'll get the exact same outcome that Bin Laden got after 9/11.
All this just sounds like people are gearing up to argue that US socialists should actively vote for Trump, as the "accelerationist" trolls were in 2016 and 2020.
Fwiw accelerationism was originally a branch of left-wing academia. It tends to have right wing connotations currently because the whole “stochastic terror” strategy is quite literally right-wing accelerationism. Meanwhile, left-accelerationism, imo, is not a tradition that’s tied to materialist praxis. Or maybe I’m ignorant and just can’t be bothered to read enough Deleuze to understand it. I dunno. Apparently Mark Fisher belonged to an accelerationist collective at one point.
I'd be curious what actual left wing accelerationist praxis is but I suspect it all sort of dead ends or goes Blanquist. You can't make any sort of mass movement of out of people wanting to make their lives worse.
Also, the western left just isn't at a point were accelarationism makes any sense strategically. In about any imperial core country, better organization and mobilization means it's fascism that would be much more likely to benefit from a systemic collapse.
I am a proud tankie.
But I am also anti-accelerationist; I don't care if liberals mis-use the term.
It's an incredibly useful term.
Is it your turn on the lathe today or are you just prognosticating?
