What would you pick, 20 year of fascism or 1 year of accelerationism? If you choose 20 years of fascism to keep your hands clean, then you are the one who is “fucked up”.

“So my choices are ‘or death’ ?”

No. I think that the premise there is faulty but, if the choices were:

• 20 years of fascism

Or

• 1 year of ultra-fascism with the goal of encouraging a workers’ revolution and/or complete societal collapse. All of the features of fascism but also people undergoing treatment for cancer, AIDS, and other diseases with high risk of fatality will die, mass starvation will occur, transgender people will have no access to medications for gender-affirming care, people with mental illnesses will have no access to medications that allow them to function and prevent their deaths, LGBTQ+, POC, and other vulnerable people will face lynchings and genocide, and people will die en masse from things that are currently uncommon even in developing nations (exposure due to lack of electricity, septicemia from splinters due to lack of antibiotics, malnutrition, etc). With the added “bonus” of all historical data showing the most likely outcomes generations of oppression and violence, not a workers’ utopia.

I’ll reiterate that I reject the premise as a false dichotomy but, with the option of 20 years of fascism there’s a chance of ending up like modern Spain and a possibility for some people that I love and care about to survive (and continue to fight for a more just world), whereas one year of ultra-fascism with potential societal collapse would mean that virtually ever single person that I know and care about in this country would be dead inside the year, unless I were able to somehow find the resources to get them out, which is very unlikely (I already lost a cousin to cancer due to lack of hospital capacity during the height of COVID - societal collapse would make Trump’s excess deaths during COVID look like rookie numbers).

It’s easy to get myopic and not see or empathize with the millions that would be impacted. The world is much easier to deal with when it can be simplified to “society is broken, we should just start over” but, this isn’t a video game where we can just reseat the cartridge and try again without consequences. Our species organizes into societies for many reasons, including protection of the vulnerable. There’s 340M people in the US, 170M of which require a prescription medication at a given time. Not all are medications that are necessary to sustain life but, a good portion are. Accelerationism marks their deaths and those of other populations as “collateral damage” and moves on, without dwelling and acknowledging that each and every one of these individuals is a human being with hopes and dreams that means something to someone (even if it is just the medical staff charged with their care).

Sure, the intention looks better but, by measure of total human cost, it is kinda hard to see accelerationism as the lesser of evils here. As the proverb goes: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Additionally, (I can’t emphasize or repeat this enough) there’s no historical data to suggest that accelerationism doesn’t just end up with straight-up fascism or another oppressive society in the end, with history in the West and from Imperial China showing oppression as the most frequent result of similar actions. It is a reactionary ideology, bordering on religion, without direction from data or fact. Sure, one would hope that it results in a more just society built from the ground up but as another proverb goes: “Hope in one hand and shit in the other, then tell me which fills up first.”