Left-NRx is a very neglected field in accelerationist-adjacent circles, because some modern leftists (mainly left-anarchists like the anarcho-communists, and the anarcho-syndicalists) are afraid to research things outside of leftism in fear of making them seem like fascists, and because to left-accelerationists, it’s a contradiction of ideals. However, NRx (which we will term as Right-NRx) can be very valuable to the philosophy of anarchism, and if we’re going to have an anarchist society, it will inevitably (and biologically) take influence from moldbuggian schools of political thought (patchwork or neo-feudalism for example).
This is a guide to guide you in understanding Left-NRx, and in understanding this blog (Correan Collar).
PART 1: Right-NRx.
Right-NRx and it’s adjacent scenes are one of the starting points for discussion about Left-NRx. It’s systems for abolishing liberal democracy are very useful for Left-NRx thought because it lays the grounds for a critique of capitalism without going through the loopholes of dialectical materialism (the dying-from-contradictions that those espousing ML talking points, for example, are doing) or social democratic utopianism.
The founders of Right-NRx are Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, the latter founding a tech company called Urbit, and the former being a former academic steeped in the marxist tradition, being one of the founders, along with Sadie Plant, xenofeminist author, of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit).
Right-NRx Reading List:
Mencius Moldbug - An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives
Mencius Moldbug - Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century
Mencius Moldbug - A Brief Explanation of The Cathedral
Hans-Herman Hoppe - Democracy: The God That Failed (as an ideological precursor)
Nick Land - The Dark Enlightenment
Part 2: Left-Accelerationism
Left-Accelerationism (also known as L/Acc) is a branch of accelerationism that is espoused by people like Mark Fisher and Alex Williams, that moves further away from CCRU-era Land and Deleuze (but not fully, as Deleuze has many thoughts that was a precursor for Left-Accelerationism) in order to fully embrace a Marxist understanding of accelerationism. It proposes that since communism/socialism via revolution is dead and inefficient to the eyes of the western world, revolution isn’t possible anymore , the only way out of capitalism, is in fact, through it.
L/acc reading list:
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek - #ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri - Anti-Oedipus
Nick Land - Meltdown
Mark Fisher - The Weird and the Eerie
Part 3: Situationism
Situationism was a movement that was started in the mid 50s as a part of a Lettrist schism. One of its founders, Guy Debord, wrote the book The Society of the Spectacle, which serves as the basis for Left-NRx’s critique of mass media, and how it effects late stage capitalism and the human condition. Unfortunately, it split after the last issue of it’s magazine (a comment on the events of may 68), but it’s legacy is impossible to ignore.
It also paved the way for other theorists going into the same vein critiquing mass media, like Baudrillard. Adorno is also a good precursor and also one of the most valuable Marxist philosophers to Left-NRx, along with Gyorgy Lukacs.
Situationist Reading List
Guy Debord - Society of the Spectacle
Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution of Everyday Life
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Jean Baudrillard - Simulation and Simulacra
Theodore Adorno - The Authoritarian Personality
Left-NRx Primer
Dear, @correancollar , you offer an elegant solution... However, I'm not sure how we escape Dialectal Materialism... Not that we shouldn't think it, but, I wonder, do we fetishize this overcoming? As psychoanalysis teaches us we cannot ever full occupy the space of the Signifier, we're always trapped in the interregnum of the traumatic symptom that is the real (if we're talking like this our real is first-world Capitalist order)... The rhizomatic emergence of semi-feudal anarchic utopian society is as likely as any other potential ideological re-organization of labor-power, within localized and proximate participants, of course.--But TBH... I'm drawn to your entangling of (LR)-NXr = Nice equation. Great paper!... Ps. sorry for all the ML talking points... I'm just romantic like that!
far from being convinced by the idea of a left-wing Neo-Reaction i'm willing to entertain the thought but will point out certain thinkers or strand of thought that at least thread the same terrains and ideas as the people listed in the article above but are nowhere near NRX except as potential critics of it :
Murray Bookchin's scaled out, networked localism and focus on the multi-causal potentialities of the political process as part of (not only an authentic but any) everyday life and as the necessary precondition to any self-governed polity would be a good addition to a left project that seeks both to look at the way technology conditions and sometimes determines political processes and a project that hopes to have something to say about the absolute state of the climate crises we find ourselves in.
(as well as having been an actual influence on existing projects and processes https://communalistlibrary.carrd.co/)
The work of information theory offers a good starting point for thinking about the true limits to action in the world, which are not uniformly "material" but rely on the capacity to process and treat information, those questions are related to political processes by many thinkers and scholars, Seeing Like A State's james c. scott being a famous one, but recently the people who most touch on those question wrt left-politics are found at the Center For A Stateless Society (https://c4ss.org/content/52963) and are not afraid to pit hayek's insights against his own lies to make him somewhat marxist(https://c4ss.org/content/54067) or to push the normative assumptions of transhumanism towards their logical anarchistic conclusions (https://c4ss.org/content/44993) and (https://c4ss.org/content/56320).