Capitalism has to transform plenitude into scarcity, because it cannot endure its own abundance. Again and again, as Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, under capitalism "there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production". The wealth that capitalism actually produces undermines the scarcity that remains its raison d'etre. For once scarcity has been overcome, there is nothing left to drive competition. The imperative to expand and intensity production simply becomes absurd. In the face of abundance, therefore, capitalism needs to generate an imposed scarcity, simply in order to keep itself going.

Accelerationism is best understood as a response to this strange dilemma. [...] capitalism has already provided us with the conditions for universal abundance. We no longer need to wait for some distant future: because, as William Gibson famously put it, "the future is already here--it's just not very evenly distributed."