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「貝寶黑幫」 – Wikipedia
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瀏覽10,876 ｜回應5｜推薦1 |
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05/08我們66級物理系同學網上聊天時，歐陽博兄提到「貝寶黑幫」一詞，做了大略的解釋。這是我第一次注意到它；轉載《維基百科》上的說明；對了解美國政、經、和高科技生態會小有幫助。
PayPal Mafia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is referred to as the "don" of the PayPal Mafia 人像照片
The PayPal Mafia is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed other technology companies based in Silicon Valley,[1] such as LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.[3]
History
Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called Confinity, which merged with X.com in 1999. X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by eBay in 2002.[4] PayPal's employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay's more traditional corporate culture, and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left.[5] They remained connected as social and business acquaintances,[5] and several of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined.[4] The term[6] gained even wider exposure when a 2007 Fortune magazine article featured the group, along with a now-iconic photograph of its members dressed in mafia-style attire, highlighting their influence in Silicon Valley and their role in founding or investing in major technology companies.[7]
Members
People the media calls members of the PayPal Mafia include:[8][6]
* Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and former CEO.[9] Sometimes called the "don" of the PayPal Mafia, he is a founder of Palantir and chairs its board, a founder of Founders Fund, and the first outside investor in Facebook.[10] In 2025, Thiel and Palantir began collaborating with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for the second Trump administration.[11]
* Elon Musk, co-founder of Zip2 and founder of X.com (which merged with Confinity to form PayPal), SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.[12] He bought a controlling share in Tesla Motors and purchased Twitter (rebranded as X). As of October 2025, he is the wealthiest person on Earth, with a net worth of $750 billion.[13] In 2025, he was a senior advisor to President Donald Trump and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).[14]
* David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO who later founded Geni.com and Yammer. In December 2024, President Trump named Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar for the incoming administration.[15]
* Max Levchin, founder and chief technology officer at PayPal, CEO of Affirm, and co-founder of Glow.
* Scott Banister, early advisor and board member at PayPal.[16]
* Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO who became a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
* Steve Chen, former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube.
* Reid Hoffman, former executive vice president who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook and Aviary. He sits on the board of Microsoft.
* Ken Howery, former PayPal CFO who became a partner at Founders Fund and served as the US ambassador to Sweden during the first Trump administration and US ambassador to Denmark during the second Trump administration.
* Chad Hurley, former PayPal web designer who co-founded YouTube.
* Eric M. Jackson, who wrote the book The PayPal Wars, became chief executive officer of WND Books, and co-founded CapLinked.
* Jawed Karim, former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube. Founder of YVentures.
* Dave McClure, former PayPal marketing director who co-founded 500 Global and became a super angel investor for startup companies.
* Andrew McCormack, founding partner at Valar Ventures.
* Luke Nosek, PayPal co-founder and former vice president of marketing and strategy who became a partner at Founders Fund.[17]
* Keith Rabois, former executive at PayPal who later worked at LinkedIn, Square, Khosla Ventures, and Founders Fund.
* Jack Selby, former vice president of corporate and international development at PayPal who co-founded Clarium Capital with Peter Thiel and is the founder of AZ-VC (formerly invisionAZ Fund), which focuses on Arizona.[18]
* Premal Shah, former product manager at PayPal who became the founding president of Kiva.org. Serves on the Change.org board.
* Russel Simmons, former PayPal engineer who co-founded Yelp.
* Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal who co-founded Yelp.
* Yishan Wong, former engineering manager at PayPal who later worked at Facebook, became the CEO of Reddit, and founded Terraformation Inc.[19]
* Yu Pan was one of the co-founders of PayPal and played a role in designing the company's user interface and user experience.[20] He later became involved in YouTube and co-founded Kiwi Crate, Inc.
Legacy
The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the reemergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001.[21] The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. They are discussed in journalist Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good.[22] According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill sets.[4] PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal.[4] An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting comaraderie among former employees.[4][23]
Politics
Some members of the group, such as Thiel, Sacks, and Musk, later expressed libertarian and conservative political views.[24] By contrast, Hoffman has been a top donor to many Democratic Party campaigns and political efforts.[25]
After the 2024 United States presidential election, The Economist wrote that “the PayPal Mafia would" take over America's government" with Trump's reelection.[26] Thiel protégé JD Vance is Trump's Vice President,[26] Musk became head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),[27] and Sacks became Trump's advisor on AI and cryptocurrencies.[28] Musk alone donated over $250 million to Trump's 2024 campaign.[29]
See also
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References
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Further reading
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美國當下的民主形同寡頭政治 - Matt Simonton
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Oligarchy's Ancient Origins
Matt Simonton, 07/01/26
The struggle between democracy and oligarchy in classical Greece was bitter, with oligarchies relying on skillfully designed political institutions to shore up unpopular regimes. As concerns grow over the “rule of the few” in the United States, Americans should consider how their own institutions are doing oligarchs’ work for them.
PRINCETON—In the autumn of 403 BCE, democracy triumphed in Athens. It was a hard-fought victory. The 27-year conflict with Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War had ended the previous year with the besieged Athenians capitulating. An authoritarian regime called the Thirty then took control of the city and, despite their claims of “virtue” and “justice,” soon executed more than 1,500 people.
This paroxysm of violence inspired a democratic resistance movement, comprised in part of working-class resident foreigners and slaves. After nearly a year of civil war, the rebels had won—a remarkable moment of democratic restoration that still resonates today. To celebrate, they offered a sacrifice on the Acropolis to the city’s patron goddess, Athena.
But far from the festivities, a very different kind of commemoration was taking place. Remnants of the Thirty were setting up a monument to their fallen leader, Critias. An older relative of the philosopher Plato, Critias was an intellectual, poet, and political theorist who virulently opposed the city’s democracy. He had spearheaded the Thirty until his death in battle earlier that year.
To pay tribute to Critias and the entire anti-democratic movement, his fellow partisans erected an elaborate marble gravestone. A carved relief showed a fierce young woman brandishing a torch and setting another woman on fire, with the epitaph: “This is the memorial of good men, who for a brief time restrained the hubris of the cursed Athenian people.” According to an ancient Greek commentator, the woman holding the torch is Oligarchy personified. Her victim is Democracy.
Democracy’s Nemesis
No trace of Critias’ gravestone survives, and the only reference to it is in the marginal note of a manuscript. Some scholars have understandably doubted its existence. Surely, they argue, such a subversive object would have been built in secret, raising the question of how anyone could have recorded its content. Perhaps it is a bit of ancient fan fiction.
Still, real or invented, the monument encapsulates a major political phenomenon of classical Greece: oligarchy, or “the rule of the few.” Oligarchs viewed themselves as a rarefied minority set apart by their breeding, wealth, manners, and superior education, which rendered them fit to rule. They were, in a word, the “good” of Critias’ epitaph, as opposed to the unwashed majority—the demos—who lacked the training and discernment necessary for politics, and whose misplaced priorities could result only in hubris. It was the duty of every right-thinking member of the elite to hold back the tide of ignorance by whatever means necessary. (In ancient sources, the demos is often compared to a rushing river or inundating wave; the torch imagery of the tombstone, opposing fire to water, may therefore be deliberate.)
If the oligarchic sentiment embodied in Critias’ monument seems extreme, that is because it reflects the bitterness of the struggle between democracy and oligarchy in classical Greece. It is well known that, beginning in the fifth century BCE, Greek thinkers devised a simple yet ingenious method for classifying constitutional types based on number. States could be ruled by the one (tyranny), the few (oligarchy), or the many (democracy). What is less understood is that democracy and oligarchy quickly became the two most common—and most violently opposed—forms.
Writing in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle observed in The Politics that “most constitutions are either democratic or oligarchic.” It would not be an exaggeration to say that the choice between the two nearly tore the Greek world apart. Columbia University historian John Ma, in his recent history of the ancient Greek polis, refers to the period between about 460 and 360 BCE as a “Hundred Years’ War” between democracy and oligarchy. Much more than tyranny, oligarchy was the great nemesis of popular government.
But oligarchy, no matter how ubiquitous, never had widespread appeal. Oligarchs were not a political “party” who alternated with democrats through peaceful transfers of power. Most constitutional changes were the result of a coup d’état. That was true even for the establishment of democracies. But whereas democracies, almost by definition, enjoyed the support of a majority of citizens, oligarchies often managed to persist in spite of their unpopularity.
The Rules of the Few
Ancient Greek oligarchies are a case study in how skillfully designed institutions can preserve even the most authoritarian regimes. On the surface, oligarchy relied on a property requirement to ensure that only a minority of the population, perhaps the wealthiest 10–15% of the male citizen population, had access to political office. But oligarchy had a strong ideological class component, too. As Aristotle rightly observed, oligarchy and democracy refer to number, but actually entail the rule of the rich and the poor, respectively.
To maintain power, the oligarchic “gentlemen’s club” employed a classic strategy of divide and rule. Leading lights from the opposition were co-opted into the regime. Publicly posted rewards for informants sowed doubt and division among would-be conspirators. Movement in the central spaces of the polis, where protest could spiral into revolution, was heavily regulated. And if the domestic scene grew turbulent, international allies stepped in to restore “order”: the Spartans in particular were notorious for intervening to help shore up oligarchies.
One set of institutions thus dealt with the restive demos; another maintained tolerable relations within the ranks of the oligarchs themselves. Cooperation among these outsize egos could not be taken for granted, even though their survival depended on it. (If that sounds far-fetched, just imagine a government composed exclusively of the billionaires who flanked US President Donald Trump at his second inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk may benefit from the current order, but it is far from clear that they could cooperate long enough to sustain it.)
Equipped with this institutional order, oligarchy had a decent run. In the end, however, it could not withstand the spread of democracy. This may come as a surprise: a common narrative—promoted by, among others, the framers of the US Constitution—holds that the tumultuous direct democracies of antiquity inevitably succumbed to demagoguery and disorder. The history of Athens itself, as told by the historian Thucydides, has been used to bolster this story.
But contemporary scholars, drawing on new literary, inscriptional, and archaeological discoveries, increasingly agree that democracy did not begin and end with classical Athens. In fact, between the third and second centuries BCE, democracy may have been the most common form of government in the ancient Greek world. It was celebrated in painting, coinage, sculpture, and everyday discourse as the best way to secure freedom and equality for the free male citizen (slavery and gender-based exclusion being notorious features of the ancient Greek regimes that identified as “democracies”). Then as now, hardly anyone spoke well of oligarchy in public—in fact, Critias’ tombstone, if it existed, would represent the sole attested instance of oligarchia depicted in art.
The Supermajority Trap
After some time in abeyance, the word “oligarchy” has come roaring back in the United States. It first reappeared on the political agenda in the 2010s, with the Occupy Wall Street movement and Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, and gained wider currency in January 2025, when former US President Joe Biden warned in his farewell address of “an oligarchy … of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.” When people hear the term now, they are more likely to think of American tech bros than the Russian super-rich who accumulated their wealth by appropriating state assets in the 1990s.
In many ways, American society is ill-prepared for this moment. Despite the importance of oligarchy in Greek antiquity, where so many of the United States’ political ideas originate, the issue was largely sidelined in constitutional debates of the early modern period. That is partly because the US Constitution’s framers shifted the terms of discourse away from “democracy vs. oligarchy” and toward a contrast between the rule of law and the tyranny of the majority.
The Federalists, in particular, sought to downplay the loss in democratic power that might come with the incorporation of the separate states into the strong federal union they envisaged. As numerous scholars have pointed out, the proposed Constitution of 1787 was far less democratic than many state politicians and constituents preferred. But in the first of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton assured readers that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” In other words, it was an excess of democracy, rather than its deficit, that would lead to political instability.
As a result, the Federalists were somewhat on the defensive when it came to touting the popular bona fides of the Constitution. James Madison admitted in Federalist 38 that the most common charges against the document were that it would end in monarchy or aristocracy; there was little danger, it seems, that it was too democratic.
But we can still draw on the Federalists for rhetorical ammunition against the idea that the US Constitution was not meant to be democratic at all. The claim that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” continues to circulate, with the understanding that a majority vote should not necessarily prevail. As Madison explained in Federalist 10 and 14, however, what “republican” means in practice is primarily the use of representative, rather than direct, voting on legislation. In both cases, the method for tallying votes is majoritarian.
In fact, in an indirect allusion to oligarchy, Madison stated that “[i]f a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.” Madison seems incapable of imagining that a majority could be held hostage to a stubborn minority holdout.
Hamilton, while not necessarily a friend of democracy, also had sharp words for super-majoritarian, as opposed to bare majority, voting rules. “To give a minority a negative upon the majority,” he wrote in Federalist 22, “(which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.” Such a system aims “to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
And yet, the process that Hamilton disparaged is precisely how the US now regularly formulates policy, through the use of the Senate filibuster. Two-fifths of the Senate, potentially representing only about 10% of the total US population, can stymie legislation through its de facto veto. So long as this continues, America is effectively governed by an oligarchy, against the express intentions of the Federalists—men who were not all that enamored of democracy to begin with.
The US faces unprecedented challenges. In addition to Trump’s daily attacks on the rule of law, American society must decide how to navigate the rise of AI, climate change, and runaway inequality, among many other issues. Progress will require, at a minimum, insisting on the basic rights of democratic majorities as guaranteed by the Constitution. To maintain the status quo is to do the oligarchs’ work for them. In antiquity, oligarchy was imagined as actively setting fire to democracy. Today, as the meme goes, democrats sit in a burning building of their own making and declare, “This is fine.”
Matt Simonton is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University and the author of Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Ancient Greek Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2026). He’s been writing for PS since 2026.
Forthcoming
The Monetary Root of Political Evil, Ann Pettifor, Coming Jul 8, 2026
Ruling Class Clown, James Livingston, Coming Jul 15, 2026
How the Tech Lords Hacked the Firm, Quinn Slobodia, Coming Jul 22, 2026
Saving Democracy Calls for Taxing Extreme Wealth, Michael Madowitz, Coming Jul 29, 2026
Why Wealth Taxes Always Fail, Cristina Enache
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最高法院確認「出生地原則」 – Mark Sherman
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Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, rejecting Trump’s proposed limits
MARK SHERMAN, 06/30/26
WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment, “We keep that promise today.”
Three conservative justices would have allowed the restrictions to take effect.
“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 91-page dissent, more than three times as long as Roberts’ opinion. “In doing so, the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
The Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.
During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.
The case framed another test of Trump’s assertions of executive power that defy long-standing precedent for a court with a conservative majority and a robust view of presidential power that has largely ruled in his favor. In the notable exceptions when the court has not, Trump has responded with starkly personal criticisms of the justices.
The justices ruled on Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions.
The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, is part of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown.
Birthright citizenship was the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used that way.
Trump reacted furiously to the late February tariffs decision, saying he was ashamed of the justices who ruled against him and calling them unpatriotic.
He also seemed to recognize the court was likely to rule against him on birthright citizenship, too, using his Truth Social platform to criticize “dumb judges and justices” and wealthy pregnant women from China and elsewhere who come to the U.S. to give birth so their newborns will have American citizenship.
Trump’s order would have upended widely held views that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born in the U.S., excluding only the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.
The amendment was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship, though the Citizenship Clause is written more broadly. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it reads.
In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down Trump’s executive order as illegal. The decisions have invoked the high court’s 1898 ruling in Wong Kim Ark, which held that the U.S.-born child of Chinese nationals was a citizen.
Roberts, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberal justices, said the amendment’s language, the historical context and the 1898 case make clear that children born to parents illegally or temporarily in the U.S. “are citizens at birth.”
But there was only a bare majority of five justices on the constitutional question.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the majority, but only because of a federal law that makes those children citizens.
Kavanaugh joined the dissenters in finding that Trump’s order does not violate the Constitution. His view would enable a future Congress to change the law to restrict birthright citizenship.
The Trump administration had argued that the common view of citizenship is wrong, asserting that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.
More than one-quarter of a million babies born in the U.S. each year would have been affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.
While Trump has largely focused on illegal immigration in his rhetoric and actions, the birthright citizenship restrictions also would have applied to people who are legally in the United States, including students and applicants for green cards, or permanent resident status.
MARK SHERMAN has covered the Supreme Court for The Associated Press since 2006. His journalism career spans five decades. He is based in Washington, D.C., and previously lived in New York, Paris and Atlanta.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.
相關報導
* Supreme Court says Fed’s Cook can keep her job for now, but it upholds other Trump firings
* Supreme Court rules states can count late-arriving mailed ballots, rejecting Trump-led challenge
* Supreme Court will weigh Trump-backed Republican appeal to enforce Arizona voting laws
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當下的共和黨是一群「舔狗」- Nick Anderson
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請參考：
* Standoff between Republicans and White House over the 'anti-weaponization' fund remains unresolved
此之謂：「物以類聚；蛇鼠一窩」。人是唯利是圖，趨炎附勢的生物；維持社會穩定運作本來就要靠法律和社會規範。不幸的是，當一個半瘋半痞，又蠢又不要臉的人掌握了「國家機器」，而這個國家的社會風氣又以「拜金」掛帥時，執政黨自然就成了「舔狗團」。
摘錄一段拙作(該欄2025/11/23，第3節)：
川普對美國最大的傷害，是把一個本來就不怎麼「要臉」的國家，在一位「什麼都吃就是不吃虧；什麼都要就是不要臉」國家領導人每天賤招層出不窮的示範下(請參考此欄各篇報導/評論)，逐漸變成一個幾乎人人以「不要臉」為第一優先的社會。大概要等50 – 100年後，美國老百姓才能從這個惡夢中醒過來。
下文意旨跟我以上的觀點相近。
Today's Republican Party increasingly revolves around loyalty to one man rather than governing principles.
Nick Anderson, 06/01/26
The Party of Lincoln is dead.
What remains is a movement organized not around principle, ideology, or governance, but around a man. Not conservatism. Not fiscal restraint. Not constitutional fidelity. Not even patriotism in any recognizable form.
The modern Republican Party has become a cult of personality whose golden calf is a doddering old man singularly consumed with grievance, vengeance and self-enrichment.
Recent events alone offered another grotesque portrait of what the party has willingly become.
Loyalty has replaced conservative principles
The Trump administration announced the creation of a $1.7 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” designed to compensate allies of the president who believe they were wronged by the Biden Justice Department. Pause for a moment and appreciate the staggering absurdity of that sentence. The federal government − under Donald Trump − is now effectively constructing a taxpayer-backed victimhood fund for political loyalists under the banner of lawfare.
At nearly the same time, new financial disclosures revealed Trump engaged in hundreds of millions of dollars in securities transactions tied to some of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions. Microsoft. Meta. Goldman Sachs. Oracle. Somewhere between $220 million and $750 million in transactional activity in just the first quarter of 2026.
This is from the movement that once screamed itself hoarse about corruption, elites, insider dealings and "draining the swamp." The swamp was never drained. It was purchased. Branded. Monetized.
And then there was Kentucky.
Trumpism rewards obedience and punishes independence
Congressman Thomas Massie, one of the few remaining Republicans occasionally willing to deviate from the orthodoxy of Trumpist obedience, was swallowed by the most expensive House primary in American history. Tens of millions of dollars flooded into Kentucky’s 4th District to politically execute a man whose greatest sin was occasional independence.
That is the defining feature of today’s Republican Party: Deviation is intolerable. Heresy must be crushed. Every institution, every elected official, every donor network, every media apparatus exists to reinforce loyalty to one man.
Not the Constitution. Not conservative philosophy. The man.
There is understandable exhaustion among many Americans when critics warn that Trump represents an existential threat to democratic norms and ethical governance. People grow tired of alarms that never seem to stop ringing. But when a fire is still consuming the structure, the alarm is supposed to continue.
The warning persists because the threat persists.
MAGA’s lullaby has become the alarm itself. Its followers soothe themselves not with evidence or ethics, but with the outrage of their opposition. The very fact that critics are horrified becomes proof, in their minds, that they must continue marching deeper into the madness. Trump could walk onto a stage tomorrow and declare the Ohio River flows north, and half the party would accept such without question.
The GOP's moral center collapsed long ago
This is no longer a political movement operating within normal democratic boundaries. It is an ecosystem of permanent grievance fueled by celebrity worship, paranoia and transactional loyalty. The old Republican language of limited government and moral rectitude now survives only as decorative wallpaper pasted over naked opportunism.
And perhaps the clearest sign of decay is this: the movement no longer even pretends to hide the enrichment.
A president financially entangled in massive trading activity while simultaneously wielding extraordinary governmental power would once have triggered weeks of congressional hearings and breathless outrage from conservatives. Today, it barely interrupts the applause. A Justice Department creating compensation mechanisms for political allies would once have been denounced as authoritarian rot. Today, it is marketed as justice.
The moral center collapsed years ago. Now we are simply watching the structure cave inward.
I suspect historians will eventually look back on 2024 not as the beginning of Republican dominance, but as the bright final burst that often precedes collapse. Stars, after all, grow brightest shortly before they die.
There is still noise. There is still money. There is still power. The maps will continue to be redrawn. Billionaire donors will continue inflating the lungs of a suffocating party. Trump will continue demanding loyalty oaths from trembling Republicans desperate to survive another election cycle.
But something fundamental has broken.
The Republican Party once sold itself as the steward of institutional stability, personal responsibility, and fiscal seriousness. Today it operates as a vehicle for one man’s appetites and one movement’s resentments.
The Party of Lincoln did not evolve. It decayed.
And like all decaying things, it mistakes volume for vitality right until the very end.
Nicholas Anderson lives in Walnut Hills.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Trumpism has transformed the GOP into a cult of personality | Opinion
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億萬身價的美國進步派政客 -- Andrew Prokop
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The rise of the progressive billionaire candidate
Why some on the left are feeling warmly toward Tom Steyer and other very wealthy contenders.
Andrew Prokop, 05/15/26
California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer speaks during a news conference on May 7, 2026, in Los Angeles. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Left activists who love Sen. Bernie Sanders have this year flocked to a surprising new champion: hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.
Key takeaways
* Tom Steyer, JB Pritzker, Ro Khanna, and Saikat Chakrabarti are all very wealthy candidates or politicians who have been surprisingly successful at winning praise from the left, given the general suspicion of billionaires and fear of big money in politics.
* Each has a different story of how, exactly, they built these bridges — Steyer is making big promise, Pritzker pushed through a progressive governance agenda, and Khanna and Chakrabarti have longtime ties to Bernie Sanders-world.
* But the commonality is that progressive activists are optimistic these candidates will feel more beholden to them — and less beholden to the traditional Democratic establishment and business interests.
In his campaign for California governor, Steyer has racked up the endorsements of Our Revolution (a group founded by Sanders 2016 campaign notables) and the California Nurses Association (the state’s leading champions of single-payer healthcare).
And earlier this month, even the Democratic Socialists of America’s California chapter praised Steyer as “most progressive of the current viable candidates for governor” — and advised against making a further-left protest vote.
Though all tout Steyer’s positions on the issues, the optics of the anti-billionaire left backing a candidate who has spent $132 million of his own money to saturate the state’s airwaves with his ads may seem strange.
Yet Steyer isn’t the only example of a very wealthy pol who’s won at least some left enthusiasm:
* Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a billionaire from his family’s Hyatt hotel empire, impressed some left writers and posters with his progressive achievements once in office — and may run for president in 2028.
* Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who per financial disclosures has an estimated median net worth of $232.7 million (largely his wife’s money in a trust), is frequently mentioned as a potential presidential contender in the “Bernie lane” for 2028.
* Saikat Chakrabarti — who got quite wealthy through his work for the financial payments startup Stripe — is cultivating left support in a primary campaign to succeed Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives.
Wealthy politicians who can plow millions into their political runs are hardly new, of course, with plenty of current examples in each party, as well as independents like the late Ross Perot. Today’s progressives frequently trace their roots to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was himself a scion of one of the most well-connected families of its era.
But the rise of this specific class of left-leaning ultra-wealthy candidates is noteworthy, because it comes after years of Democratic alarm over the influence of megadonors on elections in the Citizens United era — and over how billionaires have increasingly imposed their will on the government and society more broadly. (Hence the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies from Sanders and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez around the country last year.)
In conversations about this broader topic with left activists, I heard some mixed feelings about backing wealthy candidates, especially prolific self-funders like Steyer — but also a general sentiment that, if they’re saying the right things on the issues and making the right enemies, they could be worth supporting.
“Every billionaire is a policy failure,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution. “That being said, we have to operate in the world that we’re in. And in this world we happen to have a billionaire candidate who is ideologically aligned with our organization and our policy priorities.”
Others on the left have gone even further, and questioned whether the left’s anti-billionaire rhetoric itself has been flawed.
“The fact that the DSA and many progressives in California are coalescing around Steyer underscores the problem with casting billionaires, per se, as the enemy,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation, wrote on X. “This frame doesn’t fare well in the real world, where some billionaires are very much part of the problem, while others are part of the solution.”
The candidates in question don’t hide from their wealth, nor do the progressives and socialists backing them pretend these tensions aren’t there. But each one has found their own individual way to address concerns — and an audience willing to hear them out. Here’s what the modern playbook looks like for a progressive tycoon seeking elected office.
How Tom Steyer built bridges to the left
A hedge fund billionaire who started his career at Goldman Sachs, Steyer isn’t exactly new to left causes — he’s been a major funder of climate change activism going back to the Obama-era fight to block the Keystone XL pipeline. Then, during Donald Trump’s first term, he spent millions on a push to get the president impeached, and then more than a quarter-billion dollars on his own quixotic presidential bid (his best showing was 11 percent in South Carolina).
But the open-seat California governor’s race provided a new opportunity. Steyer’s outreach to the left began with his choice of campaign consultants, as he signed on Fight Agency, the buzzy firm launched in January 2025 that’s behind left insurgent candidates such as Graham Platner in Maine and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Any consulting firm would typically love to land a big-spending self-funder, but Steyer was off-brand for Fight. Initially, its co-founder Rebecca Katz said, she told Steyer’s team all the reasons she’d never work for a billionaire — but they said Steyer still wanted to meet with her, and she agreed. After talking to her for an hour, he won her over.
“Being a billionaire, he’s not the messenger I would’ve expected, but there was no one else saying what he was saying.”
Rebecca Katz, Fight Agency co-founder
“I said, ‘My first question for you is: Should billionaires exist?’ He said: ‘Yes, but we should tax the hell out of them,’” Katz told me. “He wanted to change the way things are done and wanted to disrupt the system. He talked a lot about costs, the systems that were rigged from the inside, and the urgency of the moment. Being a billionaire, he’s not the messenger I would’ve expected, but there was no one else saying what he was saying.”
Steyer then set about wooing other left groups, and two of his positions mattered most of all.
One was a controversial wealth tax proposal going up for a statewide vote this year, a onetime tax of 5 percent of the wealth of residents with over $1 billion in assets. Gov. Gavin Newsom strongly opposes the proposal due to fears it would drive investment out of California. Most Democrats in the race have declined to support it, worrying it is badly designed despite sympathy for its aims. But even though Steyer has expressed some reservations about the wealth tax proposal, he’s also said he’d vote for it — and posed for pictures wearing a hat with the label “class traitor.”
“I understand it’s not the perfect measure, and that Steyer has said that,” Geevarghese, Our Revolution’s executive director, said. “But he’s willing to endorse it, he’s willing to support it, he agrees with the principle that extreme wealth should be significantly taxed.”
The second key issue is Steyer’s support for single-payer healthcare in California, which was crucial in winning him the nurses union endorsement. This is a promise that has frequently been made by California politicians, including Newsom — but it keeps not getting done. Leftists blame this failure on the Democratic establishment being captive to the insurance industry. Of course, there are other obstacles as well — politicians may fear disrupting voters’ current care, and no one seems to know how the cash-strapped state will pay for it (or get the Trump administration’s permission, which they’d need).
Steyer hasn’t put forth a serious proposal on paying for it — “God is going to be in the details,” he recently told KFF Health News — but he has promised to get single-payer done more consistently and unambiguously than his rivals in the race.
Both the wealth tax proposal and statewide single-payer tend to get the sideeye from wonks, who suspect they’re pandering promises that will work out very poorly in practice. But many on the left view such commitments as a promising sign that Steyer will break with the party’s establishment and the conventional wisdom about how things are typically done.
And, indeed, the evident reluctance of state party bigwigs to back Steyer — many initially were leaning toward Eric Swalwell, who dropped out over sexual misconduct allegations, and now seem to have switched to back former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra — is a draw in and of itself, as is the financial independence that lets Steyer avoid fundraising from moneyed interests.
This is central to Steyer’s pitch. “I’m the only person running for governor who’s taking them on,” he told my colleague Zack Beauchamp in a recent interview. “I’m the only person they’re worried about. I’m the only person they’re spending a nickel against and they’re spending tens of millions of dollars to stop because they think they run the state.”
It is quite possible that all Steyer’s millions in spending and his left activist support will be for naught. Recent polls have mostly shown Steyer behind Becerra and one or two Republican candidates (California’s primary advances the top two finishers, regardless of party, to the general election). But the race remains close, and perhaps, if a billionaire spends enough money and wins enough hearts, he’ll be able to achieve his dream.
How JB Pritzker won over skeptics
Four years before Steyer’s governor bid, it was another billionaire winning strange new respect from the left: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Pritzker was surely not the left’s candidate when he first ran for governor in 2018; progressive support in the Democratic primary went to second-place finisher Daniel Biss, who ran on a “middle-class governor” platform that called out his opponent’s wealth.
But in his first term, Pritzker passed a series of progressive bills — a minimum wage hike, marijuana legalization, and pro-choice and pro-union laws, among many others — that summed to an impressive record of achievement. “Pritzker has been signing bill after bill, and many of them are exactly what progressives want,” Nathan J. Robinson, a prominent socialist commentator, wrote in Current Affairs in 2022.
So during a period of frustration with President Joe Biden’s struggles to pass his agenda, Pritzker started to look pretty good to some. Online, a memeified version of Pritzker as a badass progressive hero was embraced — with some amount of irony — by accounts such as “Socialists for Pritzker.”
Writing in Jacobin magazine, Ben Burgis pointed out that this was all a bit strange because Pritzker was a “thoroughly mainstream Democrat” — but argued that he contrasted with the party’s national leaders because he “actually followed through.” (Though perhaps the difference is more that Pritzker, unlike Biden, had supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature.)
The physicality and personal charisma of Pritzker — who is overweight and happy to call attention to that by, for instance, making “Think Big” his campaign slogan — was also part of the appeal for some. “JB Pritzker is a unicorn for the Democratic Party in 3 ways: he is enormous, doesn’t come off as particularly intellectual, and has good instincts. you really never get all 3 in a Dem,” Felix Biederman, co-host of the Chapo Trap House podcast, tweeted in 2022.
But the interest is also mutual. Pritzker has said he takes pride in winning over Sanders supporters in his state— and he’s well aware he’ll have to find ways to address their skepticism in the future. In an interview with The Atlantic, he called his personal fortune an “obstacle” to overcome should he run for president 2028.
The Bernie-backing candidates who happen to be centimillionaires
The enthusiasm for Pritzker may have been situational; it’s not clear it would carry over to a potential 2028 campaign, where the left could have other champions. Ocasio-Cortez is the first name on everyone’s lips there, but there’s also been chatter around another longtime Sanders backer — Rep. Ro Khanna.
Khanna busted into Congress by challenging an aging Democrat, Mike Honda — unsuccessfully in 2014, and successfully in 2016 — for a Silicon Valley House seat. But he earned his anti-establishment cred early by endorsing Sanders over Hillary Clinton, and then by co-chairing Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2020.
Khanna is also, it turns out, quite rich — through his wife, whose immigrant father started an auto transmission business in Ohio. However, Khanna has publicly stressed that the wealth that shows up on his financial disclosure forms is “my wife’s money from prior to marriage over which I literally have no say or claim,” and that it is largely held in an independent trust. (Khanna also differs from the other politicians mentioned in this article in that he does not self-fund his campaigns.)
Initially, Khanna didn’t shy away from his connection to his wealthy district’s elites. And for a time, he seemed to be pulling off the delicate balancing act of cultivating support from both Bernieworld and the tech industry, including a longtime relationship with Musk, by emphasizing a more pro-growth and futurist approach to progressivism.
But the California wealth tax initiative this cycle finally forced him to pick a side — and he backed the tax, stoking fury among wealthy tech donors and earning him a Democratic challenger, Ethan Agarwal.
In office, Khanna has shown a knack for putting himself at the forefront of major national topics, such as by co-authoring the bill to release the Epstein files. Khanna is weighing a 2028 presidential run, and according to NBC News’s Natasha Korecki, he has lined up support from some key Sanders campaign figures and may run even if AOC runs too.
Not far away from Khanna’s district, another quite wealthy candidate is hoping support from the left can carry him into Congress. Saikat Chakrabarti, a software engineer whose early work at the payment startup Stripe helped make him a centimillionaire, is running for Pelosi’s open House seat in San Francisco.
“I experienced that lottery economy, that the startup economy really is,” Chakrabati said on a podcast last year. “It’s this system where you can just hit it big if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.”
Like Khanna, Chakrabarti has longtime ties to Bernieworld — he worked on Sanders’s 2016 campaign, and in 2017 co-founded Justice Democrats to back further left candidates in Democratic primaries. Four of the candidates he backed, once elected, would become the initial members of “The Squad” — including AOC, who Chakrabarti worked for as chief of staff. (He left after a few months, reportedly because his public criticism of moderate Democrats caused controversy.)
Now, Chakrabarti is campaigning with streamer and leftist influencer Hasan Piker, heaping criticism on the Democratic establishment, promising a “political revolution,” and saying he’ll spend whatever it takes to win. Recent polls have shown him behind the frontrunner, state Sen. Scott Wiener, but if he wins second place in next month’s primary he and Wiener will face off in November’s general election.
That other billionaire hanging over this conversation
Each of the above politicians are different in their own way, with different paths to relevance on the left. Steyer’s a longtime donor to progressive causes, Pritzker’s a larger-than-life personality who emphasizes his competence, Khanna’s a policy wonk with a knack for media, and Chakrabarti was an early organizer for “The Squad” before it existed. There’s no one quality that unites them — except that each has an enormous net worth.
But one thing that struck me in talking to their supporters was how some of their arguments for the virtues of a candidate like Steyer — that his wealth in this case helps make him independent of the establishment and big donors, and more willing to take on the system — resemble those arguments made for a certain other billionaire: Donald Trump.
So long as our campaign finance system remains broken, the fantasy of a billionaire savior will remain a tempting one.
Nobody would mistake Trump for a Sanders-style critic of money in politics. But in his 2016 primary campaign, the only one that he (mostly self-financed, he and his supporters frequently argued his money gave him the unique ability to take on both the party establishment and special interest groups. Trump himself argued his opponents were all bought off by the top party donors (many of whom he later embraced) and that his wealth gave him a unique perspective on how elites held down the working class.
There’s a perverse logic that in our current legal environment, where individual donors and industries are allowed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence races, turning a megadonor into a candidate makes a certain kind of sense. If he can spend his own money, at least he’s not pandering to get money from everyone else!
Yet progressives don’t want a billionaire in office who’s truly empowered and independent from special interests — they want one very dependent on the right kind of special interest groups, that is to say, on themselves.
“You do have to think about who that candidate will be beholden to if they enter office,” American Prospect editor David Dayen said on a recent podcast. “Certainly if Steyer wins, he would have to thank the teachers union, progressive groups, and the kinds of organizations that have traditionally been the most progressive in California. I think that means something — that he would come in on the backs of those interests, and be more likely and willing to take on special interests who attacked him the entire campaign.”
Here, too, there’s a similarity to 2016 Trump, whose biography and lack of credibility with movement conservatives spurred him to make extravagant promises — like that he’d choose his Supreme Court nominees from a prereleased list — to win them over.
Similarly, the bet from some progressives is that these wealthy candidates will feel that, to make amends for their wealth, they’ll have to work even harder to prove their left bona fides. After all, there are worse things than having a billionaire owe you a favor.
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這是我前幾天在我們66級物理系同學網上聊天時，從歐陽博兄學到的另一個時髦詞。轉載《維基百科》上的說明；對了解當前歐、美社會思潮的某些奇葩應該小有幫助。
看到下文第3節中諾伊教授的一段話(1)，讓我想到自己20多年前所做評論：
唸成「後現代」主義，它是批判社會的一種立場和策略(Lyotard, 1993，Best/Kellner, 1994)。大多數法蘭克福學派成員和「後現代」主義者，都師出馬克思主義。他們的不同在於：前者(如Habermas)認為「現代性」仍是實用的價值系統，後者(如Baudhillard、Lyotard)認為它已淪為當權集團悍衛既得利益的意識型態(比較81 - 12)。「後現代」主義者認為當代社會是資本主義制度下的一場惡夢(25)。但他們無法撼動資本主義的生產模式。到了20世紀50年代，西歐知識份子對共產制度的幻想終於完全破滅(26)，在鬥爭策略上需要新的出路，在意識型態上需要新的旗幟。「後現代」主義者採取了鬥倒鬥臭現代社會主流價值的策略，企圖從顛覆上層建築(78 - 11)下手，來瓦解資本主義制度。 -- 此欄開欄文(9之6)第2.2-b小節
這個觀點跟諾伊教授的評論有相通之處。
《維基百科》原文甚長，下面只摘錄前3節。
附註：
1. “Noys later stated "at this point, what we can call accelerationism is dedicated to trying to ride these forces of capitalist production and direct them to destabilize capitalism itself."[4]"
Accelerationism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the white supremacist movement, see Militant accelerationism.
For the concept from future studies, see Accelerating change.
For the concept of time in late modernity by sociologist Hartmut Rosa, see Social acceleration.
前言
Accelerationism is a range of ideologies that call for the use of capitalism and associated processes to create radical social transformations.[1] Broadly, accelerationism engages with antihumanism,[2][3] as well as posthumanism,[4] and seeks to accelerate desired tendencies within capitalism at the expense of negative ones, though variants differ greatly on which tendencies and if this will lead beyond capitalism or further into it.[5]
Accelerationism originated from ideas from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who speculated in the 1970s that emancipatory forces within capitalism, particularly deterritorialization, could be radicalized against it and its oppressive aspects.[5][6] Inspired by these ideas, some University of Warwick faculty and students formed a philosophy collective known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in the 1990s, led by Nick Land.[7] Land and the CCRU drew upon contemporary media and culture such as cyberpunk and jungle music to further develop these ideas[8] in a right-wing, pro-capitalist manner.[5] They theorized a self-revolutionizing capitalism that would culminate in a technological singularity, resulting in artificial intelligence surpassing and eliminating humanity,[6] though they drifted from these ideas and dissolved by the 2000s.[7]
In the 2010s, the movement was termed accelerationism by Benjamin Noys in a critical work,[9] followed by a renewed interest in its ideas.[8] Thinkers such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams advocated a left-wing accelerationism based on embracing capitalist technology and infrastructure to move past a stagnant capitalism,[10] exploring themes such as automation of work.[4] This was associated with Prometheanism, which engaged with ideas such as rationalism,[5] posthumanism,[2] and a rejection of limits on change.[11] Land, having moved to China, also engaged with the Dark Enlightenment movement as part of his right-wing accelerationism, rejecting egalitarianism and democracy in favor of CEO-run states to promote the singularity.[12] Effective accelerationism arose with influence from effective altruism to promote technological progress and artificial general intelligence to solve human problems,[13] and ascend the Kardashev scale.[14]
Various other meanings for the term also emerged, such as to worsen capitalism to promote revolution against it,[15] as well as by far-right extremists promoting racial violence and the collapse of society in order to establish a white ethnostate (militant accelerationism).[16]
Background
The history of accelerationism has been divided into three waves. First, there were the late 1960s and early 1970s French post-Marxists such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, whose thought arose in the wake of May 68.[17][18][19] According to David R. Cole, texts produced during this period had little effect "other than as perhaps scattered art practices", with the result being that "capitalism has emerged as triumphant in the past 50 years, and the idealism of the student 1968 revolution in Paris has subsequently faded."[17] The second wave arose in the 1990s with the work of Nick Land and the CCRU, with the third being the Promethean left-accelerationism of the 2010s.[17][18][19]
Influences and precursors
The term accelerationism was previously used in Roger Zelazny's 1967 novel Lord of Light.[7][20] It was later popularized by professor and author Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative to describe the trajectory of certain post-structuralists who embraced unorthodox Marxist and counter-Marxist overviews of capitalist growth, such as Deleuze and Guattari in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Lyotard in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard in his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death.[21][10][9] Noys later stated "at this point, what we can call accelerationism is dedicated to trying to ride these forces of capitalist production and direct them to destabilize capitalism itself."[4]
Patrick Gamez considers the French thinkers' philosophy of desire to be a rejection of orthodox Marxism and psychoanalysis, particularly in Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Particularly influential is Deleuze and Guattari's concept of desiring-production; rather than viewing human desire as a lack that is satiated by consumption, they view it as an inhuman flow of productive energy, having no proper organization or purpose.
Any normativity or functionalism comes from flows of desire performing work and territorializing until new flows of desire override them in the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.[2]
Vincent Le notes that Deleuze and Guattari's model is based on machines; as machines are assemblages of different parts which perform different functions, humans and social bodies are assemblages of "organs" which produce desires. They find capitalism to be the most radically deterritorializing process in history, as it is based on constant deterritorialization rather than a stable code of desire. Le uses the example of sex and food; they are no longer coded only for marriage and sustenance, but rather as commodities which produce other desires. While capitalism tends toward the body without organs, or a state without determinate functions or coded desires, it never reaches that state, as it causes reterritorialization by recoding things as commodity for sale, to be deterritorialized again.[6][22]
Mark Fisher describes Deleuze and Guattari's model of capitalism as defined by the tension between destroying and re-establishing boundaries, with the inclusion of new and archaic elements seen "where food banks co-exist with iPhones."[23] Gamez describes Land's thought as influenced by the French thinkers' antihumanism, as well as their ambivalence or even celebration of capitalism's destroying of traditional hierarchies and freeing of desire.[2]
Land cited a number of philosophers who expressed anticipatory accelerationist attitudes in his 2017 essay "A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism".[24][9] Firstly, Friedrich Nietzsche argued in a fragment in The Will to Power that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it."[25][24][9] Taking inspiration from this notion for Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari speculated further on an unprecedented "revolutionary path" to perpetuate capitalism's tendencies, a passage which is cited as a central inspiration for accelerationism:[4][26][15]
But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution"? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus[27]
Fisher describes Land's interpretation of this passage as explicitly anti-Marxist.[28] Land cited Karl Marx, who, in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade", anticipated accelerationist principles a century before Deleuze and Guattari by describing free trade as socially destructive and fuelling class conflict, then effectively arguing for it:[24][9]
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It 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. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade. — Karl Marx, "On the Question of Free Trade"[29]
Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian note "Fragment on Machines" from Grundrisse as Marx's "most openly accelerationist writing".[30] Noys states of Marx's influence, "it favors the Marx who celebrates the powers of capitalism, most evident in The Communist Manifesto (cowritten with Engels), over the Marx who also stresses the difficulty of transcending and escaping capital, the Marx of Capital", also characterizing the accelerationist view of Marx as filtered through Nietzsche.[4] Sam Sellar and Cole state that while he was dismissive of Marxists, Land studied works such as Capital and Grundrusse as "exemplary analyses of how capital works".[18]
Sellar and Cole attribute Land's ideas to continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Deleuze.[18] Paul Haynes notes Bataille's concepts of general economy and excess,[19] which Land wrote about for The Thirst for Annihilation,[31] and McKenzie Wark notes Bataille's solar economy as key to Land along with a non-vitalist interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari.[32] Fisher notes the same excerpt from Anti-Oedipus as Land, along with a section from Libidinal Economy which he describes as "the one passage from the text that is remembered, if only in notoriety", as "immediately [giving] the flavour of the accelerationist gambit":[26]
The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening. — Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams additionally credit Vladimir Lenin with recognizing that the development of capitalist forces was important in the subsequent foundation of a socialist system:[33][34]
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries). — Vladimir Lenin, "'Left Wing' Childishness"
Accelerationism was also influenced by science fiction (particularly cyberpunk) and electronic dance music (particularly jungle).[7][8][35][4] Neuromancer and its trilogy are a major influence,[36][30][37] with Iain Hamilton Grant stating "Neuromancer got into the philosophy department, and it went viral. You'd find worn-out paperbacks all over the common room."[7] Fisher states of Land's "theory-fictions" from the 1990s, "They weren't distanced readings o French theory so much as cybergothic remixes which put Deleuze and Guattari on the same plane as films such as Apocalypse Now and fictions such as Gibson's Neuromancer."[35] Fisher and Mackay additionally note Terminator, Predator, and Blade Runner as particular sci-fi works which influenced accelerationism.[8][35] Mackay also notes Russian cosmism and Erewhon as influences,[8] while Noys notes Donna Haraway's work on cyborgs.[4] H. P. Lovecraft has also been noted as an influence, with Land drawing upon such work in the 1990s[4] and later in the 2010s.[37][38] Cybernetics has been noted as an influence on both Land[6] and left-accelerationism,[39] with Gamez tracing this to neoliberals such as Friedrich Hayek being interested in cybernetics and the self-organization of markets; as well as socialists such as Oskar Lange who sought to use cybernetic computers to address the socialist calculation debate.[40]
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