► Accelerationists across the ideological spectrum—right-wing, left-wing, and techno-optimist—share the belief that disruption and chaos are necessary preludes to the emergence of a new socio-political and economic order.
► Trump’s reelection is expected to amplify systemic chaos by dismantling global governance structures, heightening racial conflict, and deregulating digital technologies, accelerating both societal fragmentation and capitalist contradictions.
► Whether through racial conflict, unregulated technological advances, or the unchecked expansion of capitalist markets, the accelerationist vision anticipates a turbulent transition to a new, uncertain order.
“History has accelerated. The world is going to change, and change in a quicker way than before,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently exclaimed about Donald Trump’s reelection at an informal summit of EU leaders in Budapest.1 If Orbán is correct, we have moved beyond the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1989) to the acceleration of history.
Given the ideological exchange between Orbán’s Fidesz and Trump’s MAGA movement and their mutual opposition to immigrants and people of color, we can assume that this statement is at least loosely drawn from right-wing “accelerationism”. Far right-wing accelerationists (R/acc) like James Mason, William Pierce, and the Order of Nine Angles (ONA) argue that societal fragmentation and conflict, especially racial conflict, should be actively fostered to hasten the emergence of a white Christian ethno-state from the wreckage.
The far right is not alone in seeking disruption. In fact, they have adopted the term from the left. The term “accelerationism” was coined by Noys (Noys 2022) in 2010 to characterize ideas developed by Nick Land and CCRU (e.g., Land 2024) and later repackaged by (Srnicek and Williams 2016), among others. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, left accelerationists (L/acc) argue that reforms cannot overcome the contradictions of capitalism (like capitalism’s destruction of the environment on which it depends) and that the only choice is to accelerate capitalism’s development in order to usher in a new order.
More recently Silicon Valley venture capitalists have also adopted the concept. Though Silicon Valley has long embraced disruption, Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm a16z recently published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (Andreessen 2023), which calls for unhindered and ever more rapid technological development, since the positive long-run benefits will outweigh the short-term costs of creative destruction. This “effective accelerationism” (E/acc) has faith that the only ethical action is to push forward the development of artificial intelligence (and other technologies) to the point that it exceeds human intelligence and is capable of making better choices for humanity, an achievement known as the Singularity.
What all these approaches to accelerationism have in common is the anticipation of a period of disruption, chaos, disorder, confusion, and uncertainty before a new order establishes itself. For Giovanni Arrighi, this transition would be the fourth such period in the long history of capitalism’s evolution. In The Long Twentieth Century (Arrighi 1994) and other works, Arrighi argues that capitalism has experienced four “long centuries” since roughly 1350: the Spanish-Genoese, the Dutch, the British, and the American. Each long century reflects a particular hegemonic socio-political economic order in which power, production, distribution, and consumption are organized into a new stable arrangement. Each order experiences a material expansion of commodity markets that eventually fails to provide returns to capital as profitable as investing in an emerging socio-political model, leading to the financialization of the economy and a turbulent transition to the new model under a new hegemon, as was the case when Dutch financiers invested in English industrialization.
Arrighi refers to these disruptive transformations as periods of “systemic chaos”. His description is worth quoting at length.
[Systemic chaos] is a situation that arises because conflict escalates beyond the threshold within which it calls forth powerful countervailing tendencies, or because a new set of rules and norms of behavior is imposed on, or grows from within, an older set of rules and norms without displacing it, or because of a combination of these two circumstances. As systemic chaos increases, the demand for ‘order’—the old order, a new order, any order!—tends to become more and more general among rulers, or among subjects, or both. (Arrighi 1994: 30)
Indications that the global economy is entering a period of systemic chaos abound. The result of centuries of environmental exploitation are undermining the viability of the contemporary economy, as extreme weather events threaten long established settlement patterns, as livelihoods are destroyed by climate change, as conflicts over dwindling resources ratchet upward. Economically, the US is increasingly financialized (Krippner 2005), and has spent several decades actively investing in an emerging challenger. Arrighi himself and affiliated thinkers (e.g., Frank 2008) hypothesized that China will emerge as the new global hegemon. However, technological advance, especially the rise of automation (including both roboticization and artificial intelligence) and platform capitalism (like Google and Apple) (Srnicek 2019), suggests the emergence of a different deterritorialized hegemony of global firms (Bratton 2015; Durand 2024; Varoufakis 2024).
In many ways the details do not matter. If the accelerationists and Arrighi are correct that the planet is entering a period of system chaos, then we must anticipate growing disorder, regardless of who is in power. As Orbán’s excitement conveys, Trump’s reelection will contribute to the disorder of our period of systemic chaos and the fracturing of global governance. As the transition is structurally driven by the superhuman force of capitalist and technological development (or God’s will for some), if it were not Trump working to dismantle contemporary governance arrangements, it would be someone else. The rise of other populist iconoclasts like Bolsanaro, Milei, DeSantis, and Orbán suffices to show that global restructuring is not driven by singular personalities.
While the broad contours of the breakdown of global governance are systemic rather than individual, we can identify specific ways in which President-elect Trump will accelerate the process.
R/acc adherents will be heartened by Trump’s past performance, his public announcements about policy, and the promise of his Cabinet nominations. His actions will amplify racial conflict. His campaign demonized all immigrants with an implicit racial bias, as the false accusations that documented Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets attest. He has vowed to employ the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from his first day in office.2 Presumably viewing his first election as an endorsement of racial bias, racist perpetrators committed more hate crimes (Rushin and Edwards 2018). His pro-Israeli Cabinet selections and pronouncements that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was recently indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, should “finish the job” also promise to inflame conflict between the Arab world and the West.3 So humanity can anticipate a rise in global racial tension as white supremacists push for modern Crusades and ethnic cleansing that will reestablish the old order.
E/acc aficionados will be enthusiastic about the promised removal of guardrails for digital technologies in particular. Trump’s campaign was generously funded by Silicon Valley interests.4 The most prominent of these was, of course, Elon Musk, who is already pushing for less regulation and more privatization in his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). However, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence interests also funded the campaign and expect less regulation of crypto markets and AI development, hastening a shift from a managed sovereign currency to unregulated private currencies on the one hand and from ethical and property rights concerns that slow the development of AI toward a free-for-all rush toward the Singularity on the other. If the E/acc dream of a new social order run by artificial intelligence is realized, democratic governance will be undermined as decision-making is delegated to a black box algorithm that is unlikely to have humanity’s best interests in mind, were it even capable of understanding them (cf. Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer).
L/acc adherents will recognize Trump’s acceleration of capitalism’s expansion. Through initiatives like DOGE and a Cabinet arguably deliberately designed to dismantle and weaken existing governance arrangements, capitalist markets will be given a freer hand over a wider scope of activities, amplifying systemic contradictions. For example, privatization of education, social welfare, and environmental regulation will undermine workforce quality, inflame political tensions, and poison our bodies. For L/acc thinkers the chaos wrought as Trump’s administration turns our lives over to the inhuman demands of capitalism will only bring us closer to another form of order.
“The old order, a new order, any order!” Arrighi’s quote is echoed in the calls of the accelerationists. From their perspective, the incoming Trump administration will accelerate history by damaging global governance and amplifying systemic chaos. “Après moi, le déluge!”