Our theory of collapse

Why the collapse of capitalism is different

If you subscribed a while back and forgot: we’re Beau-Caprice Vetch and Richard Hames. This substack is about collapsology: how societies fall apart, how they stay together, and what we do in the turmoil between the two.

This is an essay about

• The clouded future we face – and how to think through that opacity

• How societies are organised through institutions – but tend towards pathological complex over time.

• Why capitalism’s dynamism makes a new theory necessary.

• Why the prospect of an emancipatory politics for the future will have to be founded on a different sense of history from the socialist movements of the past.

---

The UN issues another dire warning on the fate of the planet. A bullet grazes the ear of one of the most powerful men in the world, narrowly forestalling an orgy of violence for another few months. Israel escalates its genocidal assault on Gaza, reasoning that only in obliteration is there safety. In the American state of North Carolina, a single factory producing most of the world’s high-quality quartz is inundated by Helene, an unprecedented hurricane that has made its way 500 miles inland, threatening to grind global semiconductor production to a halt. Cybersecurity software widely adopted as a box checking exercise breaks on a single update, rendering millions of computer systems worldwide unusable. The life expectancy in the richest country in the world drops by 3 years. The far right rises. Autonomous kill webs emerge as a military paradigm. Sperm counts plummet. A pandemic draws tens of millions into a Millenarian conspiratorial cult. The Sri Lankan economy rapidly collapses, triggered by an investor panic modelling a future collapse based on the military government’s hasty response to spiralling oil prices, itself triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The euphemism of a ‘cost of living crisis’ takes hold in the Global North. 1,300 pilgrims die of heat on Hajj. Nuclear doctrines ratchet. A technical compression of all of humanity’s accumulated text promises to render whole classes superfluous. The society whose expansion entailed global subjugation finds itself faced with the question of its own viability.

The clouded future

We live in the moment of a darkly clouded future. It seems almost impossible to anticipate what life might be like in the medium-term at almost any given scale, from the planetary to the intimate. Modern life is deeply oriented around the promise of future stability, as much as it is intertwined with constant technological transformation, and yet a crisis of the future seems to show up everywhere.

Uncertainty manifests in the capillaries of everyday choices, and as a frantic series of increasingly existential questions about human life: whether to have children, how to save for retirement and whether to bother, where is safe from climate change, what information is true, who is in charge, what is ethical, what can I do, what matters, how can I have a good death?

This essay is about that disorientation of the future, about the prospect of collapse, and about the struggle to construct a meaningful response to that threat. What does it mean to live in a world that remains oriented around the future, and yet in which almost all the stories of a stable future increasingly feel like fantasies?

From the escalations of climate change to the development of AI and from ageing populations across the world to the tendency of capitalism to destroy its environment, and from the global decline in the power of the political left to the proliferation of the dystopian imaginary, each of the strongest tendencies in our present promises to transform our lifeworlds so comprehensively that the future seems to splinter, overwhelmed by a complexity of frames across any given dimension from the political to the economic to the ecological.

In addition to these broad tendencies, seemingly unstoppable, we have grown accustomed to a rhythm of unpredictable disasters that either complicate these tendencies or accelerate them.

Standout instances of acute disaster – the 2020 port explosion in Lebanon, for instance – sit within vast networks of other contexts and historical frames. That explosion further destabilised Lebanese society, already shocked by the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic crisis whose international dimensions threatened to pull the country apart from its fragile post-Civil War settlement, itself a threadbare solution to the contingency of Lebanon’s constitution as a polity at the end of the Ottoman Empire: the run-on quality of the crisis expresses chronic and acute disasters through one another.

However, the future is not obscured because we lack an account of the trends that compose our present; on the contrary, each of these trends presents itself as deep, clear and unstoppable. The world will keep heating. Artificial Intelligence will develop further. Superpower competition will deepen. However, each trend points in a different direction. Climate breakdown points towards heat death, flooding, starvation, migration crises, and deepening global insecurity. Technological acceleration promises, by turns, a utopian future of green energy and human flourishing or deepening unaccountable control over every aspect of life. The prospect of economic growth strains against biophysical limits on energy and materials, but promises to progressively improve quality-of-life for all. What we lack is a plausible story of these tendencies’ integration with one another, at either a local or global scale.

Treated as abstractions, each tendency points towards a particular vision of the future, accompanied by a space of challenges and solutions. What none of these trends promises to uproot are the dynamics that underpin and drive them all: the unequal racialised, gendered and classed social relations that function as the motors of the social process. When linear tendencies are expressed across this structurally uneven landscape, they splinter into a vast array of socially uneven futures: starvation and superprofits, virtual spaces of limitless play and real spaces of destitution, abstract bunkerisation and concrete abandonment.

What do these tendencies have to do with each other? In the unequivocally neoliberal era, crises were managed through a logic of containment. This logic – which we will later describe in terms of what we call the institutional processes of compression, displacement and complexity-production – has, in the last decade, started to falter. The complex unity of the crisis has become evident to its managers, spawning the term ‘polycrisis’: a moment at which competing frames jostle for precedence. This ‘polycrisis’ frame gestures towards the deep entanglement of crises that creates the complex risk landscape shrouding the global future in uncertainty. However, for our purposes here – a theory of collapse and the development of a practice of response – ‘polycrisis’ is not enough. The exponential nature of each tendency, the evident struggles of polycrisis management, the thoroughly heterogenous set of crises – epistemological, planetary, existential – we confront, as well as the deep sensitivity of modern thought to long-term future conditions, requires us to zoom out from individual crises to their combined indiscernible limit: the question of collapse.

The threat of collapse

‘Collapse’ has emerged as a plausible scenario on the shrouded horizon of our global future. It is this question of collapse – both how it might play out in reality and how it might be politicised in advance – that concerns us here.

However, ‘collapse’ as a concept remains elusive: sensationalised as clickbait in the media or, academically, bogged down in untenable comparisons with previously collapsed societies. It remains overawed by its canonical examples and undermined by the apocalyptic tradition that seeps through its supposed empirical foundations.

Despite, or because of, the ambiguity surrounding the term, the fear of collapse is itself emerging as a global risk: the urgency of preventing collapse has already become a driver of geopolitical and economic action. In this way, a politics of collapse is already upon us. A wide and complex set of responses: prepping, a resurgence of military power of the nation state, re-onshoring, disaster profiteering, propositions for geoengineering, border militarisation, and the justification of genocide are already operative in the present as means of forestalling heterogeneous risks deemed existential. To pick only an immediately relevant example, the 2025 bombing of Iran by Israel is comprehensible as the suppression of a perceived threat of collapse, used as grounds for limitless aggression. Unclear, or simply reactionary, concepts of collapse might be weaponised towards more or less any action. To prevent the end of the world, anything is justified.

This weaponisation of the threat of the collapse is nothing new: since at least Edward Gibbon, whose anti-Catholicism motivated his account of the decline of the Roman Empire, collapsology has been freighted with thinly veiled arguments about ‘moral decline’ drawn from the legacy of the apocalyptic tradition. It has also been put to work in the most brutally authoritarian projects: Oswald Spengler’s theory that societies have natural stages they go through were, as is well known, influential on the Nazis’ attempts to escape what they saw as the trap of civilisational decline. Collapse is not a drama limited to ancient empires, nor is it a distant, dystopian prospect lurking in a hypothetical future. It is both an event that could happen in our lifetimes, and also present in the here and now as a space of contestation, demanding our engagement.

Producing a usable concept of collapse is therefore an urgent political task. We cannot dispense with the term simply because it is challenging to pin down. Cutting through the thicket of collapse’s existing uses requires both an analysis of the term itself and clarifying how we got to a world that is vulnerable to collapse. And also for asking: how does society now stay up when it is so regularly challenged by crises?

Traditional Collapsology

A discipline for studying the rapid and severe decomposition of social structure already exists. Although the term is usually reserved for the French school, for simplicity we can call this whole field ‘collapsology’. Dominant schools of thought in this space can be broadly categorised according to energetic and complexity theories (such as those offered by Joseph Tainter), moral theories (such as Edward Gibbon), environmental theories (Jared Diamond), conflict theories (Graham Allison), and structural-demographic theories (Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin), although many voices resist strict partition into a singular domain.

However, the prevailing literature on collapse, to date, while providing much useful insight, does not sufficiently grasp the stakes, dynamics, and scale of the current planetary crisis. ‘Traditional collapsology’ has substantial weaknesses that we aim to overcome with a new paradigm in collapsology that we call ‘critical collapsology’.

Our criticisms of traditional collapsology are several. We argue that it lacks a usefully political concept of collapse, lacks a clear concept of why it is societies stick together in the first place, is inapplicable to the dynamics of our present society – in particular to capitalism’s ability to thrive because of crises – and is blind to what we call ‘applied collapsology’, or the dark tradition of deliberate social destruction and violence as a form of governance that gave rise to our present. Finally, the field as a whole lacks a normative framework for ethical action in the face of collapse. What should we do now? Traditional collapsologists have only ad hoc answers, or answers that are built around the preservation of current society.

Before we lay out our stall, we must address one immediate objection. This is the problem of crankiness. Talk of the end of the world has a hackneyed quality. Historically, at least for the last 120 years, many of the voices claiming that the end is nigh have existed on the periphery, at odds with the dominant paradigm of knowledge production of the time. This situation is now reversed. Today, a major part of the dominant paradigm of knowledge production is empirical science. One of its crowning achievements is climate science, particularly the international collaboration of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For several decades, the loudest voices calling attention to a planet in crisis have been the many thousands of scientists studying the complex systems that sustain life on Earth. Those who are not alarmed, today, are the ones who are at odds with the empirical paradigm, clinging to old beliefs, and engaged in magical thinking.

This invocation of magical thinking is not meant to assert that our adversaries are mired in delusion, and that we happy few see clearly. It is – as voices from inside the discipline have sometimes said – not obvious what our methodology should be. It is certainly not clear that the physical sciences alone suffice for understanding our predicament. Instead, with an object as large and complex as a collapse, we face a problem of methodological indeterminacy: what to include, what to reject, and how to synthesise a picture of the world, of its possible future dynamics, and our necessary actions within it.

Collapse, then is not merely an epistemic question, but also a political and even existential one: collapse, both as a future danger and as something that might actually come to pass, affects us deeply, and reveals a deep crisis of meaning-making that subtends the material crises of our moment. This is what we call the crisis of orientation. Critical collapsology sets out to solve both these problems – the problem of indeterminacy and the crisis of orientation – together. What is society, such that it might collapse, and what should we therefore do? How it does so will emerge from our critique of the construction of the existing discipline.

‘Traditional collapsology’, across its many different theories, solves the epistemic problem of determination by identifying a ‘collapse process’, often with relatively set parameters. A few key tendencies are used to explain collapse as a general phenomenon underpinning multivarious historical examples, from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to The Western Roman Empire. Distinctions between societies are diminished in favour of the sense of a well-worn story, albeit one that has surprising twists and turns in each instance. This is an absolutely necessary stage in the development of any science, and many of the stories here, particularly Joseph Tainter’s and Peter Turchin’s, are highly convincing.

However, when applied to our present predicament, this preemptive determination, this closure of the set of salient parameters, downplays the extraordinary dynamism of capitalism as a social process, obscures those dimensions of the present from which new forms of agency can be sprung, and turns the analyst into a passive witness of a process whose ending can appear inevitable. This, in turn, makes analyses susceptible to moral interpretations leveraged by reactionary politics, such as the aforementioned Spenglerian story, or various forms of Malthusianism.

Without wishing to deny the importance of many of the causal drivers that ‘traditional collapsology’ treats as explanatory, from energy to conflict, complexity and demographic questions, we argue that, as complex systems, that the potential collapse of our society cannot be so quickly or comprehensively explained by a handful of factors. Efforts to transpose lessons from historical, anthropological instances of localised societal collapses onto the contemporary moment are ultimately of limited utility for evaluating the current crisis. Just as each of today's dominant global trends, when treated in isolation, seems to splinter into many different directions, so too do the explanations given from traditional collapsology create a fragmented understanding of the structure of our society and the risks to that structure. This fragmentation shows up in the official reports of bodies from the World Economic Forum to the World Bank and the various national security assessments, which treat each tendency discussed above as separate but interlinked problems, with their own distinct processes of management.

We must instead thread the needle of systemic analysis: understanding at once the diversity of the present and grasping its unifying structure. To do this, we need an account of how capitalism produces the complex social form we see all around us: a unified form of disparity.

None of this is to say that nothing can be drawn from the study of past societies: our society formed itself as much through a long process of suppression of alternative social forms as it did through an internal process of self-construction. The answers to our most essential diagnostic questions – “How did we arrive at this point? What has produced our vulnerable world?” – cannot be simplistically stated. Instead, as we have already intimated, the answer requires a reading of history and confrontation with the multiple scales – from the psychological fibres of everyday life to the planet-consuming processes of modern industry – that compose our present. This is not to surrender to a mere grab-bag methodology of different factors being present at different times. It requires, instead, a historical reading of the specific institutions and norms that compose societies – and the specific institutional forms to which each society gives rise.

So let’s talk about our world.

Institutions make the world cohere – and make it vulnerable

What is an institution? Let's start maximally abstract: societies cohere through a single, very general form of compression and organisation. These material forms of compression and organisation are what we call ‘institutions’.

Taking our cues from complexity science (although the term is inherited from sociology), we argue that institutions encode information into the world and funnel energy, resources, and other systems into a relatively limited set of outcomes. This funnelling process can be modelled as a ‘gully-formation in state space’, conceptually akin to a ‘basin of attraction’ in the language of dynamical systems. Any system that structures an aspect of the world such as to make it ‘work’ or produce a flow of usable resources, can be described as an institution in this framework.

These ‘institutions’, developed conceptually from the history of institutional sociology towards significantly greater generality in complexity science, form the core of our framework of ‘critical collapsology’. We reject, however, the claim typical of structural-functionalist sociology that societies form cohesive unities: capitalist society is consistently integrative, but the form this integration takes is structural disparity.

It is this reading of institutional history (a concept we take extremely broadly) that also solves the most glaring problem of traditional collapsology: that it lacks a well-developed theory of social structure. Why do societies stick together in the first place? Scant attention is given to this question in much of the ‘traditional collapsology’ literature – an oversight conceptually akin to attempting to develop a theory of plane crashes without a theory of flight.

This problem is particularly acute in traditional collapsology’s attempt to apply its findings to capitalism, which it often treats as a mere iteration of a vague and abstract “social,” whose possible collapse can be explained by whichever key factors are favoured by a given thinker’s particular model of collapse. Instead, we argue that a critical collapsology of capitalism requires not simply listing the particular factors that compose societies in general, but an account of the specific dynamic and ongoing processes of integration and disintegration that structure capitalism in its moving totality. It requires not a fixed list of salient factors but a model of how those factors rise and fall in the overall process: an account of capitalism’s metabolism as an endlessly resourceful social process which nevertheless reproduces fundamental sets of classed, racialised and gendered social relations.

Through this institutional framework of ‘critical collapsology’ we are also able to address the dialectical tension between the scales of ‘social history’ and ‘geological history’ that permeates academic discourse surrounding the so-called Anthropocene. Polemically, we might say that the period we are living through is more comparable in magnitude to the Great Oxidation Event than the Fall of Rome. This dialectic, ubiquitously framed in more general terms as the relationship between ‘humanity’ and ‘Earth systems,’ also gestures towards the question of universalism, which is a key theoretical and political concern of ours.

The flexibility of the institutional concept allows it to serve as the backbone for the integration of all the major factors specified by existing schools of collapsology: environmental stability, energy throughput, and social cohesion, while also connecting each of these to the simultaneous production and constraint of a dynamic space of action for agents (themselves ‘institutions’ in that they are also compressions of heterogeneous materials into provisional unities) at a multitude of scales. In order to inform our analysis, we also turn to fields such as ecological science, network theory, and other disciplines that study complexity and collapse as more general systems phenomena, introducing concepts such as resilience, robustness, tipping points, emergence and critical slowing down.

But what is ‘critical’ about this? Why is this not simply a complexity-driven account of the world, at home among the sciences of our day? The answer is the recognition that capitalism does not produce institutions like other social systems, but locks in domination as a principle of social ordering. Drawing from critical theory, we describe institutions by examining the conditions that produce them, their dynamics, and the conditions of possibility they produce for further rounds of institutional development. The kinds of institutions that capitalist institutions, once they have come to predominate, tend to reproduce are those whose dominant function is the production of value and the reproduction of the law of value as a principle of social order. They do this in three, concrete, distinct levels: the organisation, displacement, and production of complexity.

Let’s go through these three functions.

First function: compression

To organise complexity is to compress the heterogeneous into the orderly. This is the ‘funnelling’ process described above. Think of the development of input-intensive monocultural farming through the accumulation and transport of fertiliser from guano and the Haber-Bosch process. The vast simplifications of the global food system produce vastly greater outputs of food, which allow the human population to grow and be fed. It would be hard to think of a more central affordance to the modern world than the development of cheap food.

And here the generality of the theory of institutions becomes evident: the drought-resistant semi-dwarf wheat, developed by Norman Bourlag, and central to the story of the Green Revolution, is itself a kind of ‘institution’. The high walls of its ‘state space’ mean that it is capable of withstanding greater shocks than other variants of wheat. The technological construction of the higher state space wall allows the development of further complexities without requiring endlessly higher levels of human energy. Less work must be done when the wheat itself is more robust – although inputs of fertiliser have hugely expanded. This is an argument against some ‘energy-determinist’ collapsologists, who seem to believe that every level of social structure must be continuously reproduced with the same amount of energy, necessitating exponentially-increasing throughput of energy simply for maintenance. Instead, the development of new technologies sometimes (but not always) reduces previously necessary energy inputs.

Jason Moore and Raj Patel’s theory of the ‘cheaps’ that sustain capitalist growth can, at least in the case of food, be interpreted as the development of naturalised ‘institutions’ (like a specific strain of wheat) whose self-preserving tendencies allow them to persist in a nexus of reduced human labour – vast monocultural farms that require a fraction of the labour inputs. However, all this comes at a cost: the reproduction of this system locks farmers into complex market relations. They must purchase machinery and fertiliser and sell the cash crops produced on volatile food markets. This is how the first function of institutions – compression of complexity into productive homogeneity – turns into their second function, the displacement of complexity, in this case expressed as structural dependency.

Second function: displacement

In being subjected to the demands of the market, producers are locked into the law of one price (the law of value), further requiring them to homogenise and transform their production processes as they chase small advantages. This constant transformation of the world might be experienced by the people affected as ‘collapse’ – but on a wider social scale, it is an essential element of the complex metabolism of capitalist society.

The story therefore cannot end there, with the production of an orderly system of encapsulating institutions neatly reducing the world to stable resource flows.

The second level of institutional function consists in the displacement of complexity. Some of this is what’s known as ‘externalisation’ in ecological economics. The ecological destruction of input-intensive farming, in terms of topsoil erosion, the reduction of ecological robustness, and the forced displacement of rural populations to the cities around the world all express this second function of institutional operation. The Green Revolution was at once a compression of complexity and a displacement of it.

Third function: production of complexity

This temporal and spatial displacement of costs, and the production of vastly differentiated zones of producers and consumers, owners and workers, enslaved and free, further entails a third level of institutional production: the production of complexity. Dependency is a relationship that at once displaces and produces complexity, because it requires more and more parts to become involved in the satisfaction of a need. People’s needs become more complex, requiring ever-more-variegated kinds of inputs to the production processes that sustain them. This is not an intrinsically bad thing, by any means – the organisation of a complex society has become the condition for the forms of human flourishing we have come to expect. But it gradually, and then in fits and starts, encloses the whole of the human endeavour: institutional mediation becomes more and more totalising, more and more inescapable, and in many cases more brutalising.

The motivation for the Green Revolution was as much anti-Communism as food production. In this way, the third form of institutional functioning must cycle back to the first – homogenisation. As people become more dependent on their relation to capitalism, and more disparate in their experience, they start to revolt. Ideological processes homogenise the idea of the ‘good life’ start to take shape, but also push together homogenised workers and oppressed people whose labour remains essential to the system’s function. They form bonds of solidarity, autonomous institutions of their own, and develop collective power on the basis of violently homogenised shared experience.

The powerful operators of institutions must fight to contain these demands of the oppressed – for survival, recognition, and flourishing – and preserve their access to the institutional spoils. Although violence is a major part of traditional collapsology, particularly in its various conflict theories, no existing account that we know of is entirely explicit that the foundations of the modern world were built in part on processes of colonisation, expropriation and genocide, experienced from the side of the target societies as collapses. For our society to come into being, other societies had to fall apart. There are many accounts of exactly these processes of accumulation by dispossession, expropriation and the comprehensive reformatting of the world, such as Nick Estes’ Our History is the Future, Jairus Grove’s Savage Ecology, but they are outside the collapsological canon. However, to synthesise a global history of collapse, and its role in making the modern world that is now vulnerable to collapse risk, we must bring them into the literature on current collapse risk.

Applied Collapsology

From the genocide of the Indigenous Americans to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the genocide in Gaza, we can point to a developing set of techniques of governance-by-collapse that have contributed to the construction of the modern world, which we call ‘applied collapsology.’

The development of a homogenous capitalist world is therefore not a simple process, but a complex circuit of the compression, displacement and production of complexities that involves all three institutional functions simultaneously. This process of the production of complexity – dependency, trauma, and ever-more elaborate forms of need – also homogenises the world in a more abstract way into one in which the law of value comes to predominate across all forms of life.

To take one recent example of a sudden economic and political collapse: Sri Lanka. Having first ordered the farming systems of Sri Lanka through the development of monocultural farming, and then having organised the space of global food production to lock in dependency via cash crops, the third level of institutional functioning mediates that production through vast global flows of finance and natural gas. It is this trio of abstract processes that produces the dependencies and vulnerabilities (as well as the pathologies of a brittle state structure formed through the brutal homogenisation of the country in the war against the Tamils), that produced the conditions for the government’s collapse in 2022.

A dialectic emerges: the dynamics that drive and sustain modern institutional robustness are, simultaneously, structurally and functionally pathological. In the microcosm of Sri Lanka, these are clearly visible, but on a wider scale they have created a planetary-scale risk landscape that, we argue, is increasingly susceptible to collapse. This context allows us to pose the question of contemporary collapse as a crisis of institutional reproduction, cohesion and maintenance; a crisis likely to exacerbate the pathological aspects of capitalist modernity that our notion of ‘institution’ also brings into view.

What, then, is collapse?

So what, then, is ‘collapse’ in this institutional framework? It is not the overflowing of the gullies of institutions: the production of new forms of complexity. This is what we might call ‘disruption’, and is part and parcel of the institutional churn of capitalism’s endless revolutionising of the means of production and the creation of new needs and new markets.

It is not even the process of producing a crisis that requires a new institutional composition: this rather broader process has happened multiple times, in the transitions between multiple stages of capitalism (imperial, social democratic, neoliberal and beyond). The institutional composition of the postwar period was overwhelmed by inflationary pressures, the demands of organised labour, and the integration of the global economy. We could describe this anachronistically as a ‘polycrisis’. The managers of capitalism responded by reorganising the global economy into the organised disparities of the neoliberal era. This is a key tipping point, from the everyday process of capitalist ‘disruption’ into what we might call ‘polycrisis’, but it is not the same as collapse.

Instead, ‘collapse’ is the process of the production of cascades of unmanageable complexity that exceeds the capacity of any historically feasible institutional composition, from the point of view of the path-dependent history of that composition, to manage it. It consists in the production of cascading complexities that are not recaptured by marketisation or effectively managed, however brutally, by state securitisation, but remain as costly externalities imposed, first of all, onto those most excluded from the wealth of capitalism and then eventually onto everyone.

Our future may well contain forms of radical innovation that keeps the capitalist show on the road, or, instead, produces the conditions for an off-ramp to capitalism entirely. But we cannot be certain.

From ‘disruption’ to ‘polycrisis’ and from ‘polycrisis’ to ‘collapse’, we have a series of qualitatively distinct escalations in the depth of crises. The key ratio to observe is that between the production of forms of capturable complexity and the speed and scale of cascading complexities that move from system to system and eventually generalise. Collapse is a process of the generalisation of unpayable costs.

A Collapse Left?

How do we derive a political theory from this? Traditional collapsology has also been, albeit unevenly, detached from the question of agency. Although its theorists have sometimes offered recommendations for avoiding a similar fate as the societies it studies, and have even been highly opinionated about what those should be, it is not often an explicitly agentic or normative discipline. We can have no such ivory-tower isolation when faced with the prospect of collapse in our immediate future. What happens to our societies is deeply bound up with what happens to us and everything we care about. Collapse threatens the very material conditions of caring. At the same time, given the history of destruction that formed our present world, and the ongoing forms of domination that structure it, the prospect of collapse pushes us to engage substantially with that history. After all, it made us.

Engaging with collapse therefore cannot only be diagnostic. It will require the development of a program for responding politically, viscerally, and emotionally to the symptoms of social disintegration. This program must be at once committed to the project of liberation and alive to the dimensions of unknowability, confusion, risk and disorientation that lie necessarily in the collapse process. In a sense, collapse names the moment at which no agent can cohere the social whole. It is the moment of a crisis of agency. Political agency has splintered – it will splinter still further.

One, highly complex, internally differentiated, answer to the question of what to do is supplied by left politics. However, the left is a project of the society that is threatened with collapse. In short, much of the left is identifiable with the unfolding of modernity. If collapse threatens to terminate the modern world, then the coherence of the left’s project is in question. We argue that the critical universalism espoused by left politics today is historically contingent on what we call the ‘modern institutional composition’. There can be no naive embrace of collapse.

Marx and Engels neatly defined the project like this: “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” What if those premises disappear?

Polemically put: without the prospect of instantiating in a future society the communist values speculatively claimed by the left in the present, the claims of those politics lose force. Critical collapsology concerns the challenges that collapse poses both to ‘modernity’ at-large, as a planetary-scale paradigm, and specifically to the utopian trajectories of the modern left. The complex contingencies upon which the modern institutional composition depends to maintain its coherence as an operating space for the modern left are precisely the loci of its vulnerability to collapse.

It is no longer evident that another world is possible, at least at the scale that such a proclamation is often made. However, other things are possible – at the very very least, things will keep happening. Other worlds will continue to be made.

As Barnaby Raine has written, “Our aim, like Marx’s, should be a form of critique capable of grasping the conditions in which a given idea feels plausible.“ Responding to the possible end of this world does not – and probably cannot – consist of simply abandoning the values of the left because they are not yet instantiated in this world, because this was never the claim of the left. A more serious problem is that they do not seem possible to instantiate in the future world either. In left politics, as much as in the capitalism it opposes, the future dominates the present.

Nevertheless, values that seem worth defending: the freedom of life and the corrigibility of history, a society of non-domination, and an equality of personhood shared among all people and the more than human world alike emerged through tensions in the institutional composition that made us, which is now threatened. Nevertheless, they still have force. We must nevertheless ask, what force? And if their complete realisation in the world is no longer a foreseeable prospect, if the agents (the global working class) that were supposed to bring them about are no longer operative, if history is not, in fact, cresting towards a communistic end point, is there some other project we should feel ourselves part of instead?

This is a question of deep personal significance to me. I have often thought of myself as a communist – committed to the dignity of everyone, committed to a politics in which everything really should be everyone as the slogan (”everything for everyone”) says, and I have cultivated in myself a burning hatred for the forms of separation and violence that endlessly prevent that from coming into being. I want to find some new way of relating to this project that doesn’t implicitly rely on a world whose stability we can no longer rely on.

The question is not “when is it appropriate to lose hope once and for all?” But, instead, when are we required to give up on the specific forms of animating hope that structured much of 19th and 20th century left thought?

In the middle ages, the widely-held dream of reforming the Roman Empire gradually lost force. This made other things possible. In the same way, we are no longer in the world in which much of the left’s desires seem possible to realise. In the late 19th century, the ultimate guarantor of the value of life – God – died. Far from being the end of the question of meaning, it was arguably the start of its maturity. At present, the left remains, despite critiques from Stuart Hall and the immense failures of the projects of 20th century socialism, oriented around the seeming guarantee of a radically different society to come. Any version of socialism that places its bets in a story about History that guarantees anything in particular about the future seems increasingly illusory.

This might make other things possible. We have to find out what they are.