The Spectre of Collapse, or: the Collapsist Manifesto

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16/03/2026

Dear friends,

springtime is book-writing-time, and I have to start devoting more time to writing my second book - like the first one together with the Austrian mandelbaum Verlag, the current working title The Just Collapse Movement: Solidarity Against Fear – I continue to be deeply involved in organising our Future Training Camp, and this week a third major project might be added on top, a possible publication of my first book in English (Live Update: Zero Books wants to publish my book, so that's awesome :)), so I need to start economising on my labour times a bit, and link this blog more closely to the work on my second book. Meaning: today's text is simultaneously a first draft of one of the introductory chapters, which is why the content in it probably won't be entirely new for you. I do though that it makes you a little curious about the new book.

The spectre of collapse

A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of collapse. All the powers of the old world have allied to ignore this spectre – the centrists and the fascists, the greens and, sadly, the left as well.

We stand at the cusp of a new, historically unprecedented phase in human history: we are currently experiencing the beginning of global ecological, and deriving from and in turn reinforcing accelerating it, societal collapse. Fossil fartoolatealready capitalism has finally brought the world to the point where Rosa Luxemburg's old question "Socialism or barbarism?" is being answered with a resounding "duh - barbarism, of course!" – and faced with this challenge, mainstream German society is responding with ever more ferocious suppression of reality.

It's 2026, the years keep getting hotter, the hurricanes ever more destructive, the heatwaves ever more deadly, every climate-catastrophe-induced danger that we were ever warned about is hitting us faster and more catastrophically than even the most pessimistic doomers would have dared to fear. But instead of actually engaging in climate action on any meaningful scale – by "structurally decarbonising" and shrinking the German economy and mode of living, both of which would be sine qua non conditions for genuine, sustainable climate action – the country (in concert with the European Union) is actively pushing ahead with the expansion of fossil gas infrastructure designed to burn dirty, often fracked liquefied natural gas (LNG) for the next 50 years. Instead of sounding the societal alarm, instead of having more conversations about climate action and the complicated trade-offs and global justice questions it would entail, about the social conflicts it would trigger, “the climate” is either not a topic at all in the many election campaigns of this "super election year", or, when it does surface, it doesn't mobilise voters towards parties that at least nominally take climate protection a little seriously – it's used to give precisely those parties a good walloping: "anyone who votes Green is voting for the nanny state in their basement!" Rather than engaging with the central, the defining question of the present, we prefer to keep shtum about it, mock those who are "still going on about this climate stuff", dismiss them, look away, lock away our own fears ever deeper inside ourselves.

So climate collapse is here, right here and now, and as I predicted a few years ago, the causal relationship isn't "more (exposure to more) climate catastrophe leads to more climate rationality", but rather "more climate catastrophe leads to more ignorance, irrationality and stupidity." But climate collapse is by no means the only aspect of global ecological collapse, because at its core, it isn't driven by fossilism, but by global growth capitalism, whose optimal form of organisation has until now been fossil mass-production capitalism. To trot out the old enviro-saw here once more: on a finite planet, an economic system that must produce infinite growth or else fall apart represents quite a spectacular act of stupidity and self-harm. Capitalistically turbo-charged humanity is therefore currently ploughing through multiple "planetary boundaries" at once – not only those of the climate system, but also biodiversity, ocean acidification, freshwater, etc.

Here too the rule applies: the closer we get to catastrophe, the fewer options for action we have, the more insoluble the problem becomes – the more we turn away from it, the less we want to engage with it, the deeper we slide into collective repression. Except in popular culture, where series like The Walking Dead, games like The Last of Us, and movies like One Battle After Another and Don't Look Up are addressing ecological and societal collapse with increasing frequency and often unflinching honesty – there are essentially no political narratives with any significant reach that address collapse head-on, and ask in any realistic way how one might sensibly respond to this entirely new societal situation. Which is precisely why engagement with the topic has shifted into (pop) culture, because that's the societal subsystem that exists, among other things, to discuss things that would challenge us too much in any other form.

In this sense and for this reason, the central political, economic, psychological, ecological, personal, collective etc. fact of the present remains a kind of spectre in most political discussions – a burdensome, tormenting presence, a haunting that we can never quite become fully conscious of, never directly observe, but which makes us permanently afraid without us ever really being able to admit that fear to ourselves or to others: I mean, who's afraid of ghosts? You'd have to be crazy, wouldn't you? And nobody wants to be crazy, above all they don't want Others thinking that.

"I ain't afraid of no ghost"

What might at first glance look like an intellectually and morally inadmissible reduction of a complex social situation to a problem of individual psychology – collapse is here, but hardly anyone dares to address it openly, because nobody else is addressing it, and the first person who were to do so could hardly expect a positive social response – can easily be illustrated by looking at the political stories that are currently being told about "the climate."

From right to left across the spectrum of political narratives:

The far right fantasises that climate collapse doesn't exist at all, it's all "a Chinese hoax", as per Trump, or, as articulated in the farmers' protests that shook Germany a few years back, a problem that only exists because the Greens and the climate lot keep banging on about it. This is the equivalent of the partner who tells you that the problems in the relationship only exist because they're being talked about ("Stop it – with your constant nagging you're just creating the problems!"). The central fact of "collapse" – central in terms of causal relevance compared to other causes – doesn't appear here at all; it's merely a figment of the imagination of hysterical climate activists.

Staunch conservatives like chancellor Merz do formally acknowledge the reality of the climate problem and the general desirability of climate action, but then subordinate such action to all manner of other, far more important social questions and goals: stability, social peace, and of course above all lots of growth, high profits, and alongside that a few taxes for the state and a few (ever fewer) tax-funded services for the rest of society. Here too, collapse is completely unnamed – the end of the perpetual cycle of "more stuff" is decreed impossible par ordre de mufti, denounced as the ramblings of deranged eco-apocalypticists.

The "centre" – ranging from Merkel through to the Greens, with the Social Democrats somewhere in the middle – constructs the climate question as something from which a new, green, renewable, sustainable, fundamentally good (in the socio-ecological sense) growth cycle could emerge. What's interesting about this perspective is that it doesn't entirely un-name collapse; it's quite aware of its general possibility, but then tries to channel the energy arising from engagement with the topic, from the attempt to avoid collapse, into a new social and economic "growth cycle." This assumption lay at the core of the "critique of green capitalism" that some on the left articulated towards the end of the noughties (e.g. Brand and Wissen, Passadakis and myself). We can see that this is already the... more sophisticated form of Verdrängung: the psychological object "collapse", or as it tends to be framed among the centrist Greens, "climate catastrophe" (which is never actually imagined in its real magnitude) is downgraded from an existential threat to a new engine for the old system. Psychologically that's extremely clever, we must remember this mechanism – but in reality even the Merkelian-Green "centre" completely represses the real dimension of "climate catastrophe." The Climate Catastrophe That Will Change Everything becomes the engine for a mere "carry on as before, but with electric cars." As if someone were trying to power a small hatchback with a nuclear bomb.

Last but... well: last – the left. Not The Party, but the entire left: social, activist, party, academic, cultural. Since I was but a wee young lefty lad, I've always seen the left as a kind of ethico-political Ghostbusters, capable of dispelling with the light of criticism the intellectual and psychological obfuscations that must necessarily appear in the discourse of a late-imperial bourgeois-capitalist societ. Except: in collapse, the left is also among those who are frightened of the spectre. Because a large part of the German left still has no relevant political horizon beyond "good industrial jobs", and the reality of climate collapse would mean there simply isn't time left to wait for a "just transition" or some magical "industrial conversion" in every heavy industrial region or coal district that saves each and every job exactly as it exists today – same wage, same social "value", same history, same dignity, same... total unwillingness to change, as with everyone else.

For leftists, a socio-ecological collapse simultaneously means the end of our utopias (for instance, a "fully automated luxury communism for all", as demanded by certain left tendencies, is now simply materially impossible). Which is why we're now witnessing the emergence of what gets called "climate populism" on the left: here it's the "super-rich", the "billionaires" and other capitalist riffraff who are responsible for all the problems (psychologically they function as precisely the kind of "fetish" that "foreigners" represent for the right), and once they've been done away with, everything will sort itself out in terms of social participation for all – even if the consumption norms we'd be universalising nationally through this approach would represent a global catastrophe. The left reacts to the collapse spectre with the same fear as the rest of society, and in this debate is not one iota more rational.

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The Irrationality of Capitalist Modernity

That the left, in this situation, holds no more rational a position than the rest of society is, for me as a leftist, admittedly a little disappointing – but not in the slightest surprising. I've had unrealistic expectations of my partners in all my relationships, so naturally that applies to my relationship with the left as well. Because all left narratives, at least those arising and being told in the global North, are modern narratives in the sense of capitalist modernity, within which – and only within which – it became possible to tell stories in which everything could turn out well for everyone, in which a finite world could convince itself of the fantasy of infinite growth and wealth, and therefore at least the possibility of a decent life for all. Capitalist modernity is therefore no age of Enlightenment; it merely replaced one form of magical, religious thinking, with another – the structurally religious faith in eternal progress that animates all the great political currents of modernity.

Which is why all the political narratives listed above share one thing in common: the more. All modern political narratives told from a Europe that had already subjugated a large part of the world – and later from its genocidal settler colonies – whose (first mercantile, then industrial) capitalist "take-off" would not have been possible without the labour and resources stolen from the rest of the world, contain the idea that capitalist modernity possesses a magic capable of overriding all manner of previously true things. Limits, boundaries become barriers to be leapt over, after which "more for everyone" suddenly becomes a possibility, if only Everyone does Everything right (conservatives and liberals too argue that Everything would be good and even better for Everyone, if only, take your pick, we liberalise the markets, invest correctly, and don't question the rich and powerful).

If we look back at the intellectual and cultural history of capitalist modernity in its imperial centres, we see a fundamental assumption – that Everything would get better for Everyone, or at least could – running through all manner of products, from theoretical texts to pop songs. Kant's philosophy of Enlightenment describes itself as the emergence from self-imposed immaturity, and postulates a teleology of "upward": detached from the rather cyclical conceptions of time held by indigenous and agricultural societies, capitalist modernity – in Hegel and in Marx too – imagines a world that frees itself from its bondage to nature (magical thinking, because that's simply impossible), thereby enabling an "always more, always better, always less conflictual." And this doesn't stop at theory: since the beginning of global mass-production capitalism (a term I like to use to point to the mode of social integration of the "masses" as consumers), assumptions about "normal" life trajectories have also been oriented towards a constant "more" – 40-year-olds expect to be able to consume more than 20-year-olds. Then popular culture: the German punk band Ton, Steine, Scherben knew they would win "the final battle", Chumbawamba knew that "I'll get knocked down, but I get up again", and Martin Luther King assumed that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Leftists in Collapse

Collapse – well: global ecological collapse and the global societal collapse directly triggered by it – is in this sense true post-modernity. Political narratives in collapse – at least those not saturated with suppression and self-serving comfort bullshit – must be narratives that accept that the arrow of history will henceforth only ever point downward. Which is what makes it so difficult to develop, on the one hand, left narratives and strategies that are adequate to collapse, that can produce real emancipatory effects in this new world-historical phase, and on the other hand, to avoid falling into the usual tedious tropes of left magical (movement) thinking, which flatters itself about its own perpetual defeats, and therefore can only ever lead to frustration and depression.

This book is an attempt to tell such a story: a left story, a story about a left practice that takes collapse seriously, that can convey meaning and courage and community despite the coming defeats and the disappearance of the great left utopias – a story about the development of a just collapse politics.

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I'll leave it there for now, it's already late, gone 9 on a Thursday, at which point I get compulsive twitchiness if my text hasn't been posted yet. Feedback is very welcome – though you probably also know that the introduction to a long text always changes in the course of writing it. So... be gentle, I needed a way into the book-writing, and I've found it now. The horses are on the tracks (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) :)

With happy authorial greetings,

Tadzio