Against accelerationism
You think things have to get worse before they can get better? Think again!
About 12 years ago, after a long period of doing zero physical exercise, I decided to drag myself back to the gym. My weight had just passed the symbolic 90kg threshold for the first time, and I realised that something had to change.
In hindsight, I should have done that two or three years earlier. But in the years prior, I kept looking for excuses, and I kept finding them. Things had to get worse before they could get better.
These days, at the events I attend, I often meet people who think Britain is in a similar situation today.
It’s not exactly news that Britain isn’t in great shape. The economy has barely grown in 18 years. From the state of the public finances to the state of the health service, from the cost of living to unemployment, nothing seems to be going in the right direction. Most people are more than aware of this, even if they couldn’t cite the exact figures. Surveys consistently show a widespread, deep dissatisfaction with the state of the country. It is perhaps the only thing on which Britain’s political tribes can agree.
But at the same time, there is not much appetite for the kind of reforms that could actually begin to turn things around. There is no political equivalent to my back-to-the-gym moment from 12 years ago. Why is that?
The explanation I keep hearing is that things are bad, but not quite bad enough. There is a chronic sense of malaise, but not an acute sense of crisis. Maybe a little crisis would be beneficial, to create the momentum for real policy change. Maybe things need to get worse before they can get better.
We could call this a free-market version of ‘accelerationism’. Free-market accelerationists like to point to Argentina, where a crisis of late-stage Peronism led to the election of Javier Milei. They like to contrast Edward Heath’s government to Margaret Thatcher’s: Heath failed in his reform attempts, because the country wasn’t ready for it yet. Things had to get worse before they could get better.
I am very much not an accelerationist, and I believe that in the current context, free-marketeers are deluding themselves if they think a deterioration of economic conditions would work in their favour. It would be much more likely to have the exact opposite effect, and we should certainly not hope for it.
Accelerationism can only work when certain conditions are met: people need to have an accurate understanding of what is causing their problems, and what needs to change in order to improve them. I opened this article with a fitness analogy, because that is the clearest example of a situation where these conditions are met. We all know what we need to do if we want to be in good shape. It’s just that we don’t always act upon that knowledge. We don’t always do what we know we should be doing. Because we can’t always muster the discipline and the willpower. When a lack of willpower is the problem, a little shock can help.
The mistake that free-market accelerationists make is to assume that the electorate’s unwillingness to accept free-market reforms is comparable to a physically inactive person’s unwillingness to do exercise. In other words, they assume that, deep down inside, most people already agree with them. Deep down inside, most people know that Britain needs free-market reforms. We just don’t have willpower to admit that to ourselves, and to act upon it.
But what if that’s not true? What if the issue isn’t a lack of willpower, but a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem? What if people don’t agree that Britain’s problems are caused by an overbearing government?
I think it’s fairly obvious that the ‘misdiagnosis’ thesis is a lot closer to the truth than the ‘lick of willpower’ thesis. People who want to be in better shape, but who can’t summon the willpower to do any exercise, will look for excuses. But they won’t actively deny that doing exercise would be good for them. They certainly won’t attack the very idea of doing exercise, let alone construct an elaborate anti-exercise ideology.
In contrast, Britain is fertile ground for people who claim that the country’s problems are caused not by a lack of, by an excess of free-market economics. Take Andy Burnham’s ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ speech. Take the hundreds of thousands of young people flocking to Zack Polanski. Look at Gary Stevenson’s YouTube figures or his book sales. If economic conditions deteriorate, it will just drive even more people in that direction.
At the moment, the trend seems to be that the worse things get, the stronger the support for bad ideas becomes. The fiscal situation is clearly much worse today than it was at the end of the last decade. How do people respond to that? By supporting wealth taxes. How do people respond to high rents? By supporting rent controls. How do people respond when loose monetary policy causes inflation? By supporting price controls. The worse things get, the worse our political climate becomes.
Accelerationism was originally a Marxist concept. Free-market accelerationists would do well to revisit Marx’s original version of it, because it was, in one important way, superior to their own.
Marx presented his accelerationist (without using that word) case in the context of free trade. He explicitly rejected the idea that free trade would raise the living standards of working-class people. He did believe that free trade would deliver lower consumer prices, but he also believed that the capitalist class would just respond to that by reducing workers’ wages by an equivalent amount, leaving them no better off. But Marx supported free trade anyway – for accelerationist reasons:
“[W]hat is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. […] So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. […] [T]he antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers […] will stand out still more clearly. […]
Let us assume for a moment that there are no more […] custom duties; in fact that all the accidental circumstances which today the worker may take to be the cause of his miserable condition have entirely vanished, and you will have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his true enemy.
He will see that capital become free will make him no less a slave than capital trammeled by customs duties. […]
[F]ree trade […] breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution.”
Another word for ‘hasten’ is, of course, ‘accelerate’.
We can see that Marx’s argument wasn’t simply that ‘things have to get worse before they can get better’. He didn’t even say that free trade would make things worse, just that it would replace one bad situation with another bad situation.
He thought that the advantage of the second bad situation was that it would be bad in more transparent ways. In the second scenario, it would be easier for the average worker to grasp what the problem is (=capitalism), and what to do about it (=revolution). He didn’t think workers would revolt just because material conditions are bad. He thought they would revolt once they understand the reasons for their bad material conditions. This was more likely to happen under capitalism with free trade than under capitalism without free trade. He was an accelerationist, because he believed in the educational value of accelerationism.
There is no reason to believe that he would have supported a non-educational version of accelerationism, where people’s living standards deteriorate, but they have no idea why. In that sense, Marx and I are on the same side of this argument. The sentiment that ‘things have to get worse before they can get better’ only applies when people know why things are getting worse, and what it would take to make them better. Otherwise, you’re only accelerating on a road to nowhere.
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