Speed, as a political concept, names the recognition that velocity is not neutral — that the acceleration of production, circulation, communication, and governance serves specific structures of domination and forecloses specific forms of resistance. Paul Virilio formalized this analysis as dromology (from the Greek dromos, race): the study of speed as the hidden variable of political power. In Speed and Politics (1977), Virilio argues that political power has always been dromological — the capacity to move faster than the enemy, whether through cavalry, railways, or telecommunications, is the foundational capacity of the state.
From an anarchist perspective, the critique of speed is structural, not nostalgic. The problem is not that things move too fast but that acceleration is organized to serve domination. Capital demands speed because faster turnover means faster accumulation: just-in-time production, high-frequency trading, same-day delivery, the compression of every interval between investment and return. The state demands speed because rapid response — military, police, administrative — is the condition of sovereignty over territory and population. Both compress the temporal space in which alternatives can be organized.
This compression is directly antagonistic to anarchist practice. Consensus decision-making, mutual aid networks, affinity groups, and prefigurative politics all require time — time to deliberate, to build trust, to maintain relationships, to disagree and work through disagreement without deferring to a leader who can decide quickly. Speed selects for hierarchy: when the situation demands immediate response, the structure that can act fastest is the structure with a command chain. Democratic deliberation is slow by design — its slowness is not a deficiency but a condition of its non-domination. Every demand to “move faster” is implicitly a demand to concentrate decision-making authority.
The colonial dimension is inseparable. Settler colonialism imposed industrial time-discipline on Indigenous peoples as a technology of dispossession: the replacement of seasonal, ceremonial, and relational temporalities with the clock, the shift, the deadline, and the fiscal year. Ivan Illich showed in Energy and Equity (1974) that the speed of modern transportation, once the time spent earning the money to pay for it is included, often produces no net gain in mobility — but it does produce dependence on industrial systems and the destruction of convivial alternatives. Speed reorganizes the built environment, the social fabric, and the rhythm of daily life around its own requirements, making slower forms of movement, production, and deliberation appear as failures rather than as choices.
The anarchist response is not deceleration as program but the refusal to accept speed as the measure of value. The refusal of work is partly a refusal of the temporal discipline that work imposes — the demand to be productive on capital’s schedule. Prefigurative politics insists on the time needed for non-hierarchical process even when — especially when — urgency demands shortcuts. Direct action operates on its own timeline, neither waiting for institutional permission nor racing to meet institutional deadlines. What Lauren Berlant calls slow death — the wearing-down of populations through ordinary conditions — reveals that speed and slowness are not opposites but two faces of the same dromological regime: capital moves fast while the bodies it uses up deteriorate slowly.
Related terms
- Prefigurative politics — the practice that speed forecloses
- Refusal of work — the refusal of capital’s temporal discipline
- Legibility — what speed demands of social life
- Slow death — the other face of the dromological regime
- Direct action — action on its own timeline
- Recuperation — how the spectacle absorbs the critique of speed
- Paul Virilio — who formalized dromology
- Ivan Illich — who analyzed speed’s false economy