The Politics of Collapse: uncommon conversations for unprecedented times

“Are you leaving just before the election in case there is trouble?”

I was asked this a couple of times in San Francisco, during the week before the US election. That told me of the anxiety that some people were feeling in the run up to the vote. Nearly every time my conversations turned to politics, I heard people express their incomprehension about others supporting a candidate that they do not. I did not hear merely a concern about different priorities. Rather, I heard the belief that other people are stupid or bad. The anti-Trump voters focused on the bad things about him and ignored the real grievances that were motivating people to vote Republican. The pro-Trump voters focused on the bad things that the current US administration has done and ignored the real concerns about the former President. In both directions there appeared to be a belief that they had superior information, intelligence and ethics. When I noted that people are demonising those they disagree with, in ways that ignore real concerns, everyone I chatted with agreed that such negativity towards fellow citizens is not helpful, and that the political situation in the USA is depressing. That got me thinking about how more of us need to be if we are to develop new forms of politics suited to an era of societal disruption and collapse.

Like most of us, Americans have been coaxed, for years, to demonise people whom they disagree with. Matt Taibi explained in well in his book Hate Inc. Now in various countries this process of polarisation has been shrinking the political debate down to championing either authoritarian centrists or right-wing reactionaries. Neither ‘side’ of that binary poses any significant challenge to the ongoing trashing of our planet to serve capital. The binary squeezes out room for open and generative dialogue about the kind of politics that could help in this age of consequences. That needs to be a dialogue on what a politics of local and international solidarity during societal disruption and collapse could involve: a politics that might soften the collapse and plant the seeds of the new. Without that, ‘nostalgia politics’ and ‘disaster nationalism’ will continue to be the only offers to fill the void. And that is what we have been seeing around the world since 2016, where political opportunists who claim to be able to put the clock back to when things were great, at least for some. It is for that reason that I wrote the book Breaking Together.

I didn’t leave the US to escape the potential aftermath of a potentially contentious election, but to travel to France to launch the French edition of my book S’Effondrer Ensemble. Although I wasn’t seeking to talk about politics in the US, I was keen to do so at the launch in the city of Grenoble. Thanks to Pablo Servigne, I knew that the field of ‘collapsology’ is now almost a decade old. Therefore, I sensed that the discussion is mature enough to move beyond important matters of emotional support, personal transformation, and practical local action. Although I am grateful for the people I have met and the initiatives undertaken on such matters, whether under the umbrella of Deep Adaptation or not, there is still a need for more political discussion, free of the polarisation that infects public discourse today.

I arrived in Grenoble a week after the French government published their adaptation plan. It recognises a need to prepare for 2.0C by 2030, 2.7C by 2050 and 4C in metropolitan areas by 2100. That’s above a baseline of 13.8C around 1890. For people who know what such figures mean, that is a shocking admission of massive difficulties ahead. Even then, it is somewhat misleading, as the current global 1.64C increment in 2024 translates into about 3C overland already – and even higher in metropolitan areas. Already we are witnessing the huge damage that can come from major increases in extremes of temperature and precipitation, as we have seen with recurrent deadly flooding.

But that’s only one part of the picture. In my book, I talk about the broader problems of poisoning the planet and overshooting its carrying capacity. I point to various data sets which show that in the majority of countries on all populated continents, the average standard of living is in decline. That includes economically advanced countries. For instance, 90 percent of countries since 2019 have a declining Human Development Index. The World Bank reported recently that world poverty has not decreased for the past 5 years. Those are global trends that can’t be explained as the result of a bad politician or event. Instead, in the book I connect these trends to fractures in the foundations of modern societies – energy, agriculture, biodiversity, natural resources, and a previously stable climate. Because those trends can’t be reversed, I argue this is best understood as a creeping collapse of modern societies.

Although the French government’s new plan for climate adaptation is more honest and bolder than most other countries, it does not factor in how conditions are deteriorating already. It focuses on topics like state-subsidised corporations providing weather insurance and insultation. Instead, we need to get real about the disruptions to all aspects of society that are spreading already.

To see that deeper policy agenda, there will need to be a political movement. So what might this new politics look like? It must start with honesty about the precarity of humanity, the limits of technology and the impossibility of a managed transition that maintains life-as-we-know-it in high consumption societies. It will need to recognise that neither big corporations nor big governments are going to deliver for us as societies are further disrupted. Then it must advance a re-localisation of production, trade and consumption, in solidarity with those suffering the most. That is a kind of ‘glocalisation’ with our collective resilience to disruption being a central aim. That politics is distinctive to the ecomodern, technocratic, and proto-authoritarian approach being advanced by many people in the environmental profession today, or the latecomers to this agenda amongst multinational corporations and financial institutions – the ‘globalists’ as some like to label them. This distinction in political approach is fundamental and must no longer be sidestepped by those of us who care about the environment. For if we conclude that the economic systems have taught us to be acquisitive, competitive, defensive and numb to the damage, then we can seek freedom from such systems, so that we can try to rebalance relationships without each other and wider nature. That is the ‘ecolibertarian’ spirit, which doesn’t blame human nature for the predicament we face today (and which I describe in Breaking Together).

In the book I don’t offer a full policy agenda. That’s because we are entering unchartered territory. And each location, each bioregion, each culture, is different. Instead, I know that people will develop ideas over time from this new honesty about the reality we are experiencing and are going to face in the future. Nevertheless, there are some strategic questions we could ask ourselves. Where might the greatest potential for largescale change be found? Where will international influence emerge from? For reasons that my friends and I can’t fathom, and are awful to watch, the West is in turmoil and stoking resentment, internationally through its violence. Meanwhile growing collection of BRICS nations are currently sounding uninteresting on the environment. From their recent Kazan declaration, they define their approach in opposition to any global imposition and they maintain a growthist agenda, that serves the power of their elites. So, currently, it doesn’t look promising for an alternative model of human development. But we ‘doomsters’ don’t need fairytales of success to motivate us to do the right thing. And developing political ideas and narratives to enable collaboration to reduce harm is good work to do.

The common language between France and much of Africa could help in the development of this new politics for an era of collapse. As I noted already, ‘collapsology’ is quite advanced amongst scholars and social activists in France. That was illustrated to me by the attendance of Antoine Back at my book launch. He is the Deputy Mayor of Grenoble, in power with the Green Party since 2014, and working now on what he calls ‘territorial resilience.’ Meanwhile, internationally, there is a revived anti-imperialist politics in much of Francophone Africa. If there could be more open and generative dialogue between people from these different perspectives and life experiences, then there could be something powerful to emerge, geopolitically. For such dialogue to occur, people in France will need to be open to learning from the movements in Africa, rather than ignoring or deriding them, as the establishment wishes us to do. Obviously, solidarity with people in Francophone Africa is justified because they will suffer a lot, and unfairly, due to environmental degradation. Solidarity with anti-imperialists in Africa is even more sensible, as their efforts to secure a better deal in trading and financial arrangements could also drive the need for re-localisation and redistribution in the West. Likewise, in the other direction, more people in Africa could benefit from being informed about analysis of the sad trajectory that humanity is on, and learn from the insights of the French collapsologists. To enable international discussion, I am delighted to make the French ebook free to download.

This kind of engagement between people with different life experiences but a shared sense of undiscovered potential and power, is necessary. Unprecedented times call for uncommon conversations amongst people who have been pushed apart by systems of power. The political polarisation that has become endemic in the US, and elsewhere, is what we must avoid as we consider a wide variety of ideas. Some of those ideas may come from political traditions in other parts of the world. That is why last month I launched the Spanish edition of Breaking Together in Mexico (Cayendo Juntos), with the focus on it being distributed across Latin America. Like many, I am interested in how the various traditions there, including both indigenous cultures and liberation theology, could help inform a new politics of collapse.

Let’s not allow the future of politics to be defined by authoritarian centrists and their lie of betterment through conformity, or right-wing reactionaries and their lie of betterment through reversal. Instead, there can only be betterment through liberation from oppressive economic systems and through regenerating community. If we could give as much attention to that as we do the electoral circuses and dramas of competing elites, then we might get somewhere.

If you are interested in this topic, please consider joining the ‘Leading Through Collapse’ short courses with me, either online (twice a year) or in person (only once a year).

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