This is very well done. I arrived here from Jem Bendell's email promoting it, and his 800 word AI summary of it. As someone who has written on the meta-crisis and collapse multiple times, I think this one brings a very important perspective. I know you will be participating in his Meta-Crisis/collpasology meetings upcoming.
To the question of "What Then Should We Do? - individually, everyone should harden themselves in preparation for the breakdown of an irrisilient system and culture. Pursue personal anti-fragility.
I will promote a personal developent course I myself have not taken and have not enrolled in, but it is framed around preparing for the slings and arrows of the coming collapse or as Robb Smith has written, "Great Release." It comes from the Flow Genome Project, link here.
I very much like your definition of an institution. However, if a kind of wheat can be described as an institution, I suspect it is liable to overly loose usage. There are masses of natural phenomena that also would fit this definition (e.g., gravity), and that would reduce the analysis to nonsense.
On the other hand, it is not clear why capitalist institutions are generating collapse. The phenomena you describe (compression, etc.) are historically quite general. Surely the problem is not so much with capitalist institutions as with capitalism itself, with its accelerating and inescapable expansion, which is expressed through the progressive recapture and subsumption (ie, collapse) of its own superstructures/institutions for the purposes of profit-maximisation.
I would be interested to hear your view of the relationship between your institutions and capitalist superstructures (which they seem to resemble), and how they relate to capitalism's underlying economic base.
I would suggest a few terms that need inserting into any Left theory of collapse:
- Class in general and proletariat (not the same as the working class) in particular
Thanks for the comment. I think the point of the theory is that compression is only the first stage we outlined – the importance is in the chain of entailments: the capacity to also displace work onto another structure and the way that that displacement further entails the production of new complexities, which are the further submitted to a new form of compression and homogenisation under the law of value, which is uniquely capitalist. This chain of entailments forms a particular institutional composition.
I don't think my account of institutions necessarily specifically resembles superstructures – indeed, the possibly excessive breadth of the concept you point out before means that they describe also the things you might call 'base'.
Yes, I think those terms are central to politics now, and would also argue that they can be expressed in the institutional framework as well. However, they are historically contingent social arrangements. One consequence of collapse is that it dissolves the historical centrality of those categories. The question I'm posing is whether we can think coherently about a 'left' politics existing beyond the frame of those categories.
This is excellent. Thanks for writing it. You might like my recent book *Panic Now?*, which treats collapse as a function of the deferred costs of a carbon-capitalism-colonialism assemblage currently beginning to fall due as polycrisis: https://utpress.org/title/panic-now/. Send me a dm if you want a copy.
Here is another take on the same topic. As a fan and student of history, here is my killer quote: “History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.” This is a review of a book by a British historian looking at the history of 5,000 years of collapsing societies. The historian featured look at the history of collapse and came up with the three Goliath fuels: Grain, advanced weaponry, Dark-Triad Elite control. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse
For sure – I think it's the least well-developed both in the literature and in my head.
Essentially the argument is that there's a struggle over hegemony between an incumbent power and a rising one and this gives rise to conflicts that plausibly destroy the existing political order (although I wouldn't say that mostly they end in collapse). Examples are the Athens-Sparta wars, the struggle for hegemony between the UK and France in the 19th century (in which neither collapse), the transfer of hegemony from the UK to the US in the 20th (meditated through wars with an ascendent Germany and in which also neither collapse) and now the emerging US-China competition. There are probably better examples in Chinese history but I don't know that so well.
It doesn't seem (at least in those examples) to tend towards collapse, but I've included it because I see it as a major part of the current frame of the New Cold War, in which the fear of Chinese hegemony is understood as a kind of decline-risk which gets extrapolated in our feverish context to collapse.
The rest of the discourse happens mostly not in books or journal articles but in the security briefings of various defense think tanks. Here's an example from the Atlantic Council, although references are quite brief and underexplored (as is typical in this think tank literature in my experience) https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/global-risks-2035-update/
No problem! My sense is that because of the shallowness with which it is often invoked, it doesn't really constitute a theory per se, although many people have pointed out that in some hegemonic transitions open conflict does not arise, or is more complicated (such as the Glorious Revolution aligning the Dutch and British against the French after a period of trade wars between the former). I guess that's a useful test of the theory.
I'd also be interested if you had any feedback on the theory of institutions – it's more abstract than most of the theories you discuss and I worry that it somehow lacks an explanatory grip on collapse. I think its virtue is that it explains why a sense that crisis is actually a to some extent what keeps capitalism going and that not all crises are collapses.
I felt it a bit hard to grasp what you see as the actual mechanism of collapse. The way I understood it is that you are saying that collapse happens when the current set of institutions is overwhelmed.
And I would tend to agree with you assessment that many of the problems we experience is actually capitalism working as intended.
Where I get lost a bit is the question how this actually differs from the mechanisms explored like the one by Kemp or by Tainter. I feel they would pretty much agree with you. The main difference I see is that you more explicitly highlight capitalism as the present day culprit.
This is very well done. I arrived here from Jem Bendell's email promoting it, and his 800 word AI summary of it. As someone who has written on the meta-crisis and collapse multiple times, I think this one brings a very important perspective. I know you will be participating in his Meta-Crisis/collpasology meetings upcoming.
To the question of "What Then Should We Do? - individually, everyone should harden themselves in preparation for the breakdown of an irrisilient system and culture. Pursue personal anti-fragility.
I will promote a personal developent course I myself have not taken and have not enrolled in, but it is framed around preparing for the slings and arrows of the coming collapse or as Robb Smith has written, "Great Release." It comes from the Flow Genome Project, link here.
https://www.flowgenomeproject.com/antifragile-you?vgo_ee=98p1jX0H0K7SShr%2BhEtFiEJlpJPbmZhB2uVo3RzO4uA%3D%3AaEjeLxOWrxleAhZ7Y38daDTK10PQDTy%2B
I very much like your definition of an institution. However, if a kind of wheat can be described as an institution, I suspect it is liable to overly loose usage. There are masses of natural phenomena that also would fit this definition (e.g., gravity), and that would reduce the analysis to nonsense.
On the other hand, it is not clear why capitalist institutions are generating collapse. The phenomena you describe (compression, etc.) are historically quite general. Surely the problem is not so much with capitalist institutions as with capitalism itself, with its accelerating and inescapable expansion, which is expressed through the progressive recapture and subsumption (ie, collapse) of its own superstructures/institutions for the purposes of profit-maximisation.
I would be interested to hear your view of the relationship between your institutions and capitalist superstructures (which they seem to resemble), and how they relate to capitalism's underlying economic base.
I would suggest a few terms that need inserting into any Left theory of collapse:
- Class in general and proletariat (not the same as the working class) in particular
- Capital (as opposed to capitalism) and profit
- Private property in the means of production
Thanks for the comment. I think the point of the theory is that compression is only the first stage we outlined – the importance is in the chain of entailments: the capacity to also displace work onto another structure and the way that that displacement further entails the production of new complexities, which are the further submitted to a new form of compression and homogenisation under the law of value, which is uniquely capitalist. This chain of entailments forms a particular institutional composition.
I don't think my account of institutions necessarily specifically resembles superstructures – indeed, the possibly excessive breadth of the concept you point out before means that they describe also the things you might call 'base'.
Yes, I think those terms are central to politics now, and would also argue that they can be expressed in the institutional framework as well. However, they are historically contingent social arrangements. One consequence of collapse is that it dissolves the historical centrality of those categories. The question I'm posing is whether we can think coherently about a 'left' politics existing beyond the frame of those categories.
This is excellent. Thanks for writing it. You might like my recent book *Panic Now?*, which treats collapse as a function of the deferred costs of a carbon-capitalism-colonialism assemblage currently beginning to fall due as polycrisis: https://utpress.org/title/panic-now/. Send me a dm if you want a copy.
Here is another take on the same topic. As a fan and student of history, here is my killer quote: “History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.” This is a review of a book by a British historian looking at the history of 5,000 years of collapsing societies. The historian featured look at the history of collapse and came up with the three Goliath fuels: Grain, advanced weaponry, Dark-Triad Elite control. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse
Could you elaborate what you see as the collapse view from conflict theories (Graham Allison)?
For sure – I think it's the least well-developed both in the literature and in my head.
Essentially the argument is that there's a struggle over hegemony between an incumbent power and a rising one and this gives rise to conflicts that plausibly destroy the existing political order (although I wouldn't say that mostly they end in collapse). Examples are the Athens-Sparta wars, the struggle for hegemony between the UK and France in the 19th century (in which neither collapse), the transfer of hegemony from the UK to the US in the 20th (meditated through wars with an ascendent Germany and in which also neither collapse) and now the emerging US-China competition. There are probably better examples in Chinese history but I don't know that so well.
It doesn't seem (at least in those examples) to tend towards collapse, but I've included it because I see it as a major part of the current frame of the New Cold War, in which the fear of Chinese hegemony is understood as a kind of decline-risk which gets extrapolated in our feverish context to collapse.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation. Could you recommend papers/books about this?
Allison's original article is here: https://tripoetry.com/BEING-BLACK/FACTS/DESTINED-FOR-WAR-Thucydides-Trap-The%20Atlantic.pdf and the fuller book is 'Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?' It was widely panned.
The rest of the discourse happens mostly not in books or journal articles but in the security briefings of various defense think tanks. Here's an example from the Atlantic Council, although references are quite brief and underexplored (as is typical in this think tank literature in my experience) https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/global-risks-2035-update/
Thank you!
No problem! My sense is that because of the shallowness with which it is often invoked, it doesn't really constitute a theory per se, although many people have pointed out that in some hegemonic transitions open conflict does not arise, or is more complicated (such as the Glorious Revolution aligning the Dutch and British against the French after a period of trade wars between the former). I guess that's a useful test of the theory.
I'd also be interested if you had any feedback on the theory of institutions – it's more abstract than most of the theories you discuss and I worry that it somehow lacks an explanatory grip on collapse. I think its virtue is that it explains why a sense that crisis is actually a to some extent what keeps capitalism going and that not all crises are collapses.
I felt it a bit hard to grasp what you see as the actual mechanism of collapse. The way I understood it is that you are saying that collapse happens when the current set of institutions is overwhelmed.
And I would tend to agree with you assessment that many of the problems we experience is actually capitalism working as intended.
Where I get lost a bit is the question how this actually differs from the mechanisms explored like the one by Kemp or by Tainter. I feel they would pretty much agree with you. The main difference I see is that you more explicitly highlight capitalism as the present day culprit.