Eco-Accelerationism

Historical development

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams founded left accelerationism with “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (2013) and Inventing the Future (2015). They demanded full automation, a universal basic income and less work. Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019) made the ecological case explicit. Leigh Phillips’s Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts (2015) attacked degrowth from the left as a politics of scarcity. Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism (2015) argued that information technology is undermining capitalist value. Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering (2019) explored what a left approach to carbon removal and climate engineering could look like.

The position has stayed a theoretical current more than a movement, but it shapes debate on the ecological left.

Principal claims

• Technology makes freedom possible. The problem is that capital owns and directs it.
• Scarcity, including ecological scarcity, should be ended by producing plenty. Managing it through restraint is the wrong approach.
• Degrowth and localism have no political future and would impose austerity on most people.
• Clean energy, automation and biotechnology under democratic control can raise living standards and repair ecosystems at the same time.
• Problems on a planetary scale need planned, technological responses on the same scale.

Policy implications

Eco-accelerationists call for huge public investment in nuclear and renewable energy, grids and storage. They want automation paired with a universal basic income and shorter working hours, and public ownership of key technologies and infrastructure. They support cultured meat, precision fermentation and vertical farming to free up land, and carbon removal and engineered climate interventions under democratic oversight. They want the transition planned internationally.

Internal disagreements

Supporters disagree about the role of markets after capitalism and about whether geoengineering is acceptable. They weigh central planning against decentralised invention differently. They also argue over whether the minerals and energy their vision needs could themselves be supplied sustainably.

Criticisms and controversies

Degrowth critics argue that plenty for eight billion people, on today’s technological path, would breach the planet’s limits, and they call the vision a Promethean fantasy. Political ecologists say it ignores the extraction its technologies depend on and the communities that bear it. Critics such as Benjamin Noys argue that accelerationism mistakes capital’s restless energy for a force of liberation. Conservationists say it cannot explain why nature matters apart from its uses to people.

Supporters answer that only plenty can win democratic support, and that the alternative is managed decline.

Relationships to other traditions

Eco-accelerationism shares ecomodernism’s technological programme but rejects its acceptance of capitalism. It shares ecosocialism’s opposition to capitalism but rejects its post-growth wing. It is the mirror image of degrowth, anarcho-primitivism and appropriate technology, and a radical neighbour of ecological democratic socialism and planetary stewardship.