Collapse is not a strategy
By Charles Stevenson
As COP30 closes in Belém, serious engagement with climate action appears to have receded over the horizon. Meanwhile, discussions on halting biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, plastics, nitrogen and phosphorus use, or land-use change had never made it out of the harbour.
In the eddies of the climate movement’s latest and largest wave—from 2018 to the pandemic—ecological activists in the North have quietly been turning towards narratives of societal collapse. For some, the failure to make good on the demand for system change, not climate change meant that winning on this scale had become an impossibility.
Parts of the movement have always tended to believe that climate collapse was inevitable and the best we could hope for was preparing to deal with the wreckage. With the rise of the far right, the reelection of Trump, and the total defeat of the United Nations Conference of the Parties process, these stories are finding new audiences. More worryingly, some began to centre collapse in their political strategy and theories of transition. As things fall apart, the theory goes, the world for which we have always fought will come within reach.
Fetishising collapse has long been popular in France, where the European climate movement’s centre of gravity is currently shifting. This tendency has been fueled by the work of authors like Raphaël Stevens and Pablo Servigne, who published How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times. These climate preppers never seem to include those communities already on the frontlines of the climate crisis in the world’s peripheries in their plans for survival.
Misrepresenting the scientific consensus on climate
While collapse fetishists are right to fear the cascading effects that result from pushing past ecological tipping points, they are far too confident about when it becomes impossible to mitigate these feedback loops. No viable pathway exists for humanity to respect the 1.5°C target enshrined in the Paris Agreement. Does that mean that we should bow to 2°C of warming? Of course not: it entails fighting for 1.51°C, then 1.52°C. Applying the precautionary principle would involve decarbonising as quickly as possible—as firefighters pour water on a house in flames—not setting a target to have the house out by 08:00 the following morning.
Climate doomists often argue that because we have failed to get serious about mitigation until now, it’s too late to try, and that we should focus instead on adaptation. This thesis not only lacks any scientific grounding, it is meaningless given that what we need to adapt to depends on when we stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Following this perspective, the Salvage Collective collapses the distinction between mitigation and adaptation: “To close the fossil fuel plants, to destroy a planet of value, or even, dare we hope, the value-form itself: are these not adaptations?”
A common refrain within the climate movement is to call for an all-out offensive in this crucial decade. Extinction Rebellion’s original demands included decarbonisation by 2025. Today, in 2025, we have not yet begun a transition away from fossil fuels.
Nonetheless, the uncertainty inherent in modelling Earth systems can provide a source of hope. On a social level, the world system is also too complex for anyone to predict what the next decade holds, let alone the next century. In his appeal to fight despair, How to Blow up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm draws on the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In April 1943, anti-fascist Jews, many of them socialists and communists still in their teens, led an insurrection against the Nazis. In the heart of the Third Reich, they fought without hope of external support in the streets of a ghetto from which they had no means of escaping. As Richard Seymour argues, having hope is like being in love: you cannot bully someone into it.
The cruel optimism of Rebecca Solnit
Those who believe that collapse can yield positive outcomes rely on the thesis advanced by Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell and Hope in the Dark. Solnit’s argument is that disasters can bring out the best in people. She uses examples ranging from earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City to the 1917 Halifax explosion and Hurricane Katrina to bolster her case. She shows that contrary to popular myths of disasters unleashing chaos, these events channeled a collected response anchored in altruism and care: “The rescuer’s sense of purpose and belonging, the community’s sense of connection and generosity, the civic spirit that arises in disaster—these are like brief glimpses of a lost paradise, a model of what society could become.”
This belief is the central premise of novels like Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072 by Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien. This work of science fiction explores how compounding crises—inequality, war, climate breakdown, and AI creating mass unemployment—lead to fragmentation and loss of control by the US state. From the wreckage, the self-governing “Grid” emerges in Lower Manhattan and expands to the rest of liberated New York City. Shockingly, this premise appears to constitute a core tenet of the politics of more and more European climate activists.
Anyone who has tried to start their own commune under capitalist hegemony knows how difficult a task that is. What comes after a collapse or any other event is shaped by the material conditions in which it occurs and the ideas that are dominant at that time. In this sense, if we want to create the conditions for the kinds of responses to disaster described by Solnit, we must start building alternative forms of common sense today. Antonio Gramsci’s work on hegemony remains as pertinent today as it was a century ago. He argued that a revolution in advanced capitalist societies can only take place following a “war of position” in which capitalist “common senses” are dismantled and replaced with “good sense” that aligns with the interests of the working class. Collapse in a society in which social-industry algorithms push hate and misogyny is unlikely to result in the emergence of The Grid.
Rather than argue that catastrophe never brings out the best in people, however, we should recognise that the empirical evidence is much more mixed. Kai Erikson’s work on the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia shows that disaster did not lead to tighter community bonds. Rather, the 1972 catastrophe hit coal-mining towns that were already struggling from some of the most severe social deprivation in the United States. In these communities, neighbourliness and kinship had been strong, but the disaster led to their erosion, coupled with disorientation and hopelessness. It could be that Solnit’s hopeful thesis is less likely to apply to communities that have experienced decades of dedevelopment and emiseration.
Moreover, through works like Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, we know how capital has exploited disasters in the past and continues to organise in the present. Klein also looks at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but draws different conclusions to those of Solnit. She shows how the chaos was used by the right to privatise public schools and dismantle public housing. Katrina created an opportunity to get rid of the old welfare city and replace it with a corporate playground. Similarly, Davis argues that the famines engineered by imperial powers—notably the British in nineteenth-century India—laid the groundwork for dismantling local food systems, and creating export-led, import-dependent economies in the global South.
This blueprint is more pertinent to a climate crisis that hits poor countries hardest. Dondo, Mozambique, became known as the first city to be completely wiped off the map by climate breakdown after cyclone Idai displaced 17,000 families there. Arguing that such an event does not constitute collapse is just another example of Eurocentrism.
Barbarity in the 21st century
It is hard to fathom a deeper form of collapse than what Gaza has gone through since October 7th. Seventeen months ago, an estimate published in the Lancet put the death toll around 186,000; infrastructure was levelled; and people report that limbs litter the streets. Despite enforced starvation and extreme uncertainty, life there goes on—as does resistance to genocide.
Even in the global North, collapse will be unevenly distributed. Next summer, the abnormal heat hitting cities that have not adapted to a warmer climate will kill hundreds of people. Those who die will be unhoused or working class and elderly, living in buildings that are not designed to withstand 40°C temperatures. The rich have unparalleled resources to retreat into their air-conditioned, gated mansions—as their guards sweat on the street. These localised instances of collapse, endogenous to the capitalist world system, will continue to be livestreamed to the phones of European organisers for a long time before many of us experience them first-hand.
““It is hard to fathom a deeper form of collapse than what Gaza has gone through since October 7th.””
Collapse will never constitute a unified global phenomenon. Our imaginaries have been so colonised by biblical stories transmitted through films like 2012 that we fail to recognise that collapse is baked into the dynamics of capital accumulation. Given the relatively safe climate scenarios of places like Switzerland and Scandinavia, coupled with these regions’ ability to militarise their borders and to expropriate food, labour, energy, and resources from the global South, it will likely take them decades to experience any kind of collapse. To believe that climate-induced crop failures will induce famine amongst Europe’s labour aristocracy anytime soon is to forget the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Covax was a global initiative to ensure equitable access to vaccines for lower and middle-income nations. The goal was to pool resources and distribute jabs to the most vulnerable first. What actually transpired was that rich countries outbid poor ones for vaccines as soon as they were made available, meaning that many healthy Europeans had several shots before frontline workers in the global South had received one. In addition, Switzerland, alongside other countries that are home to the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, blocked a patent waiver tabled by countries in the global South. As a result, southern countries were prevented from manufacturing their own versions of the vaccines that were generating tens of billions of dollars of profits for Pfizer and Moderna.
In the past months, many of us have felt that it is seconds to midnight. These metaphors convey how disconnected we are from the lives of the Majority World. It has been past midnight in much of the periphery of the world system for five hundred years. The indigenous genocide carried out by European colonisers in the Americas resulted in a Great Dying on such a scale that it altered the carbon composition of the atmosphere. Whole ways of life, cultures, and languages continue to be wiped out today. Collapse.
Ecosocialist strategy in times of collapse
As new military conflicts and ecological breakdown reinforce one another, stubborn defenses of capitalism are likely to be accompanied by opportunities for breaks with the status quo. While collapse creates windows of opportunity, we only end up with that which we are organised to take, and capital is always organising. Both Jodi Dean and Vincent Bevins have pointed out that while the 2010s generated outpourings of collective anger—as we have witnessed against the genocide in Gaza—a lack of structure and organisation has resulted in little corresponding social progress. What we need are parties and organisations with the power to capitalise on coming instances of collapse. As Lenin scribbled in the margins of Hegel’s The Science of Logic: “Breaks in gradualness... Gradualness explains nothing without leaps. Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!” History is just as non-linear as the climate crisis.
““While collapse creates windows of
opportunity, we only end up with that which we are organised to take, and capital is always organising.””
In these times of inchoate fascism, Rosa Luxemburg's famous dictum has come back into fashion: “socialism or barbarism”. As Kai Heron has argued, ecosocialist strategy must move beyond this dichotomy. Watching Palestinians get shot while trying to access food and the perpetrators of the opioid epidemic enjoy lives of opulence made clear that we live in barbaric times. Nonetheless, instances of collapse created by capitalism and imperialism result in opportunities for advancing something new.
If we view class struggle as the motor of history, if we believe that change has only ever come from mass movements of ordinary people, then the time to organise our workplaces and our communities is now. Waiting for collapse to make things easier is nothing but cruel optimism.
As internationalist ecosocialists, we share the desire with the proponents of collapse to build resilience in the face of war and mounting instability. But we aim to take humanity as a whole with us, not just the privileged few with the resources to dig bunkers.
Charles Stevenson is a PhD candidate at Autonomous University of Barcelona researching the political economy of sustainability transitions.
This article was originally published in Rupture Issue 17. Get a copy today!
