Dictionary

accelerationism en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /əkˌsɛl.əˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nɪ.zm̩/
• (General-American) audio
• /ækˌsɛl.əˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nɪ.zm̩/
• /ɪkˌsɛl.əˈɹeɪ.ʃə.nɪ.zm̩/

Etymology

From acceleration + -ism. Usage as “support for accelerating capitalism” attributed to Benjamin Noys, 2010s.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that historically characterised it, should be expanded and accelerated in order to generate radical social change.
   • The new accelerationisms instead concentrate primarily on constructing a conceptual space in which we can once again ask what to do with the tendencies and machines identified by the analysis […] 2014, Robin Mackay, Armen Avanessian, “Introduction”, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader:
   • Land (2011) has brought forward the notion of accelerationism: Rather than halting the onslaught of capital (such as by defending a welfare state or defending the right to work), accelerationism is a philosophical and political strategy that strives to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions and thereby hasten its destruction, […] 2013, Jonas Andersson Schwarz, Online File Sharing: Innovations in Media Consumption, Routledge, →ISBN, page 20:
   • Meanwhile, over the same half century, almost entirely unnoticed by the media or mainstream academia, accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential. 2017 May 11, Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 02 Mar 2025:
2. (countable, uncountable) The theory that excessively low unemployment accelerates inflation.
   • Accelerationism was the most fundamental transformation of the Phillips approach into an expectational format. It hypothesized that inflation will become increasingly rapid in any maintained situation in which unemployment lies below some critical, or “natural,” rate. 1975, Arthur Melvin Okun, “Inflation: Its Mechanics and Welfare Costs”, in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, volume 6, number 2:
   • For the period through 1984, there is weak support for accelerationism, though the linear fit is mainly due to the disinflationary impact of high unemployment, which no one disputes, not the inflationary effects of prosperity. 1998, James K. Galbraith, “Comments”, in Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy, page 66:

Forms

Deriveds

effective accelerationism

Relateds

e/acc · accelerationist

Translations (9)

hu akceleracionizmus (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · fr accélérationnisme (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · it accelerazionismo (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · de Akzelerationismus (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · vi chủ nghĩa tăng tốc (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · tr akselerasyonizm (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · es aceleracionismo (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · pt aceleracionismo (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated) · cmn 加速主義 /加速主义 (theory that capitalism or some of its processes should be accelerated)