The decisive moment
Rosa Luxemburg and the threshold events of history
Collapsology is a discourse about the future - one that predicts that whatever we currently have will not hold. Here, I start from one of the 20th century’s most famous acts of futurological bifurcation to ask about the traps into which collapsology might be falling.
Collapse joins revolution in a small class of ‘threshold events’: moments in time that obscure what lies beyond them, obliterating or diverting all the gradual tendencies of normal historical time. In these threshold events, when something new finds its agency expressed globally, uncertainty about what follows is roughly proportional to the violence of the conflagration.
The time-worn adage ‘socialism or barbarism’ radically underestimates both the stakes of the present and the variety of futures it might produce. Rosa Luxemburg, the communist revolutionary, noted that, even in 1916, it had become a mantra repeated unthinkingly, an ossified chunk of dialectic regurgitated at appropriate moments. This condition has only worsened.
Why are there only two distinct futures offered in this phrase as opposed to a trillion different possibilities? For Luxemburg, it was because revolution was the decisive event. It would either happen or it wouldn’t. And, if it didn’t, then capitalism was such that it would necessarily tend towards barbarism. It could do nothing else, even though it had not always been barbaric in the same way. She believed this because of her specific model of how capitalism worked.
We’re not directly involved in thinking about the end of capitalism here (except indirectly), so I will pose a more general question. What, in general, gathers social processes up into these decisive moments? What brings all the disparate parts of society together in such a way as there even could be such a decisive moment of systemic transformation as a revolution? More abstractly, what is the dimensionality of the world and how can one dimension (for Luxemburg, the power of the self-conscious working-class) become globally determinative?
For Luxemburg, what compresses social reality into a single globally-salient event is the work of historical contradiction. Social tendencies are in contradiction. They grind against each other, producing friction and tension, and gathering together all the other parts of the complex world into weapons salient for the fight over the now-central contradiction. And then there is a decisive moment when the tension is released and a new order is established. Stronger: the apparent unitariness of historical events like ‘a collapse’, ‘a revolution’ and so on is a consequence of prior contradictory processes operating across society. The future is decided by a crest of decisive events that emerge from the swelling of broad, contradictory, trends.1
The question then, if we also adopt this model, is what are contradictory processes around which something like a unitary notion of ‘collapse’ might form?
To get to the point where contradictions can have global ramifications, collapsology would need to do something seemingly quite simple but in practice flooded with complications. It must establish an idea of agency.
In Luxemburg’s time, the decisive political agents were clear - the event around which the famous phrase ‘socialism or barbarism’ revolves is the result of the struggle between classes going one way or another. Either the self-conscious class of workers would seize the means of production and therefore abolish themselves as a class or they wouldn’t. As it turns out, they wouldn’t.2
By comparison, collapsology now is a discourse in which the actors are unclear. We live under the auspices of another equally frustrating cliché: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The world appears as a sprawling mass of things operating at all manner of scales. Just look around you. What, given this seemingly intractable complexity to it all, might even make it possible to conceive of a single decisive moment in social history when capitalism might end, if not by posing something almost religious, a messiah? 3
We can, of course, imagine such a thing in the distant future. Unlike right now, it is not difficult at all to imagine a moment in 2100 when everything might shift one way or another. That is at least the prediction of Construal Level Theory, relayed by the always interesting Robin Hanson. It’s a theory about the effects of psychological distance on the way we imagine things in the future. In short, the future is ‘far away’ psychologically speaking, and therefore appears simpler, bluer, more abstract, and so on.4 Think of the striking simplicity of 1960s sci-fi images of the year 2022 and then look around and see what it is actually like.
Importantly for us, the future is also ‘decisive-coded’. And it is coded like this at all scales. You justify putting things off partially because you implicitly believe that tomorrow-you will be more self-controlled.
What does this tell us about the way we are likely to imagine collapse? It would predict that we hunt for monocausal explanations and also, arguably, that we are given to underestimating the number of countervailing tendencies to whatever grand changes we are imagining. In short, it underestimates the likelihood of ‘muddling through’.
Luxemburg is arguably guilty of both, we might say. What is striking, however, is that she is not speaking about a future event, but trends developing at that exact moment. For her, let us write this anomaly up to the exceptional times in which she was living, as well as to a particularly stark view of history.
Is the apparent decisive simplicity of ‘threshold events’ like revolution and collapse just caused by our psychological distance from them? Perhaps, perhaps not. But maybe we can develop a view of collapse that does not rely on this kind of simplification, but a more subtle view of the dynamics between simplification and complexification that structure the whole social world around us.
Collapse is the moment at which whatever had held the social world together no longer can. It, therefore, marks the decline of the agency of any one agent. In that sense, it is also the recognition that the forms of agency that compose the world now are more interrelated than they had largely been thought of as. And it brings to the fore all the kinds of grey agents who do not make historical change, but instead keep things functioning just how they are.
In modernity, institutions of all forms provide interfaces - at once simplifying and obscuring - to the vast complexities of the world. Such is the elegance, if not the mercy, of the price signal. While the complexities of the interface are continually rising (just ask anyone who has had to do something even slightly unusual in a modern bureaucracy), they do so at a slower rate than the total social complexity. Take the unsexy world of waste management: the linear addition of a new set of bins into which the correctly sorted recycling must go is only the mundane front end of a sprawling system of regulations, workers, buildings, public information campaigns, machines, norms, and values with which you only need to deal with a part. Part of the justification for the level of complexity that the user of the system still faces is that the alternative is much more complex in other, unpredictable ways: the alternative to waste management is sickness, overflowing dumping grounds, or a deforested planet.
What sustains it? And what might its rapid disencapsulation produce? It is treating systems like this - dense, complexly interrelated, somewhat grey - as the constitutive agents of modernity that might allow for a view of collapse at once less decisive and more adequate to this particular world.
Such a view of collapse, however undramatic the atrophying of these institutions seems, would have some broad consequences we can predict. It would cause the rapid reappearance of natural systems in the rarified terrain of politics. Having been previously excluded from ‘politics’ proper, they might once again become openly antagonistic to humans as they turbulently break down and break the bounds of their encapsulating institutions, plausibly precipitating a wider-scale social collapse. In short: climate change disaster.
Luxemburg rolled a similar ‘collapse’ possibility and her ‘barbarism’ into one: “the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery.” Depending on the timeframe we allow for this ‘and’ to take place, this is either a catastrophizing conflation or astonishingly prescient. However, the endless period of ‘unlimited wars’ she foresaw did not take place.
What did take place after Luxemburg was a form of barbarism so stark - the industrialised murder of Nazism - that it was arguably unthinkable from Luxemburg’s vantage. What is the content of the future ‘barbarism’ invoked by the phrase then, if barbarism has so often exceeded what can be imagined before its arrival? What does it mean to unspool all the dimensions of a future barbarism?
The catastrophising futurist, we can see from this admittedly rather idiosyncratic example, has a few traps they can fall into. Luxemburg was at once too catastrophist (she underestimated the stability of capitalism as a whole) and, we must presume, not quite catastrophist enough (she could scarcely have predicted Auschwitz). Collapsology as a set of predictions might face a set of similar problems, a problem given that its central claim is precisely about the stability of social systems as a whole.
Are we doomed to merely extrapolate from a mere local trend (escalating imperial wars in Luxemburg’s case, failing ‘crisis management’ and its endless social polarisations in ours), without being able to get ready for the qualitative leaps that mark history’s disjunct flow?5
Perhaps not. Perhaps we can identify particularly central agents who undergird even these grey institutions and sketch the consequences of their breakdown.
Much of the political stakes of collapse (and therefore politics in the interim) will be dominated by the question of exactly what is failing. Although various vacuous reactionaries (most importantly right now Douglas Murray) will ascribe the doom of the West to left-wing groupthink and other relatively superficial phenomena, often drawing on spurious ancient history while doing so, there are other plausible causal drivers. As we wrote in our book on ‘ecofascism’, (you will be shocked to discover that the one-star review comes from someone arguing in favour of ecofascism), one of the central struggles of the 21st century will be to articulate a political aesthetics of disaster.
One major modern institution has often been taken to be more fundamental to social reproduction than others - the energy system. Not an agent in any clear way, it nevertheless exerts influence over everything in the encapsulated manner described above and suffers from spasmodic contradictions of the kind discussed at the top. The collapse of the energy system would almost certainly produce the decisive moment we’ve been circling around.
It will be our topic next time.
Naturally, the appearance of this kind of globally-structuring tension in a single dimension of the world, the resolution of which will affect every other aspect of the system, is a rare event. Were it not, complex systems would be undergoing continual phase transitions. Indeed, for a system to be relatively robust, the ramifications of any one contradiction should, in general, be only local in scope.
Today, there are at least two other outlandish but concrete possibilities for the future that demand serious consideration. The first is the dominance of some kind of artificial intelligence. To fold this possibility back into the Marxist parlance that Luxemburg would understand even as she would find the specific prediction perplexing, we might call it a kind of non-human ‘revolution’ carried out by the mode of production itself. This would neither evidently be socialism nor barbarism. It might not even had a coherent ‘political’ form in any sense recognisable to us. But this future is not our concern here (or at least not yet). The second possible outlandish future is the topic of this newsletter.
Future newsletters on Walter Benjamin in the works. Is the messiah the ultimate countervailing tendency?
Hanson says there are further associations with the far future: that it will be happier, higher status, shinier, and filled with higher levels of clarity. It is here that the collapsological worldview differs. It predicts a future less happy, more immediate, less abstracted, and also in some crucial sense more opaque.
Such disjunction is crucial for collapse: for us, collapse is not barbarism for the reason that barbarism implies a stick to measure with, and collapse dispenses with those. It opens up a new ethical era of our collective inhabitation of the earth.