Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility

The following theses represent one effort to theorize revolutionary action in a world shaped by the collapse of liberal institutions, norms, and global networks of trade. They are offered in a spirit of living dialogue that attempts to capture the conversations we are moving through, and should not be construed as a static position.

1. A world is ending. The global order structured around the dense interweaving of carbon-burning (fossil fuels), (neoliberal) capitalism, and colonialism (taken all together: CaCaCo) is staggering into collapse. This does not mean that carbon-burning simply ends, that capitalism goes away, or that colonial violence is over. In many ways, the opposite is likely to happen in the short term as those in positions of power double down on the most destructive aspects of modern capitalism and state violence. Their doubling down itself, however, is part and parcel of a world's ending. The near future, accordingly, will look very different from the present for all but the greatest beneficiaries of violent consolidations of power. The highly complex world of global supply chains and just-in-time delivery, of ever-increasing per capita resource consumption, of continual economic growth, and of commercial and communicative hyper-connectivity is coming to an end.

2. Our rulers are prepping for the end of the world. The ruling class, i.e., a global sociopath class composed of an international consortium of billionaires, CEOs and politicians who are actively wielding their power to reconfigure the conditions for collective political economy, understands that this world is ending and is acting accordingly. They are preparing for societal collapse both individually and collectively, transmuting capitalist relations of production and consumption, circulation and extraction in ways directly opposed to the flourishing — and even the ability to live — of the many. In the face of their reconfiguration of capital, revolution is a matter of survival. For the majority to live and flourish under conditions of diminishing resource availability, we need forms of collective agency that can confront and replace, not merely locally but translocally, the global sociopath class's power to determine political economic conditions. Where the sociopathic beneficiaries of the present order cannot help but act globally in their campaign to develop a new world system, however, our power is realized in the capacity to act and shape conditions in locally disparate and translocally solidaristic ways.

3. The ruling class's preparations for collapse constitute a fundamental transformation of capitalism. This mutation will shift capitalism from a system requiring the continual and endless growth of economies toward new modes of enclosure that include significant long-term destruction of value (i.e., not just periodic market crises). We should expect new amplifications of internecine violence among capitalists as they struggle to develop their own capital "strongholds" in sectors of the economy that are least concerned with a logic of production. The extraction of value via rents and hoarding, as we already see with platform capitalism, will for a time allow elites to maintain positions of relative wealth and power without the need for a large reserve army of labor. AI, at least potentially, has the capacity to further exacerbate this transition by decreasing the need for human labor in the construction of wealth, weakening labor power, and altering the relationship between workers and capital on which older models of revolutionary power (such as proletarian class struggle) are based. At a global level this corresponds to the redevelopment of a "multipolar" world of regional powers and the decline of US hegemony, a move away from globalized systems of trade to more regional networks of autarky, and the end of the liberal norms of human rights, as we have already seen with the genocide in Gaza.

4. Capitalism's transformation will look for most people in most places like "collapse." That is to say, it will feel locally and in specific ways like rapid and significant loss of overall societal complexity and metabolic throughput, as the capitalist political economy gives up on even pretending to respond to climate collapse and other dimensions of our polycrisis. As capital retrenches behind fortified walls, the hinterlands will experience rapid devolution and with that urban centers will confront significant food, energy, housing, and social shocks. Rapid mass migration, often involuntary, will intensify — with corresponding disruptions and political opportunities. The features of collapse will look different from one locale to the next, but in general political systems will decreasingly be maintained through "democratic" institutions. The already weak felt legitimacy of governance, especially central governance of large states, will increasingly be maintained at the barrel of a gun (or by drone-bomb, delivered on the basis of AI analysis of public-private-partnership surveillance data). The violence of policing will intensify and become more militarized, while military rules of engagement loosen to allow for more outrageous infliction of suffering and decreased internal policing of abuses. These repressive developments will accompany sustained losses of infrastructural bases for activity that many currently take for granted (for example, stable power grids and fuel pricing structures, reliable transportation systems, and safe water treatment and delivery). None of the features of capitalism's transformation will be able to solve the crises of collapse, nor will they be meant to. The goal, from the perspective of a global sociopath class, is to protect their way of life and access to power and privilege, the ability to consume metabolic resources uninterrupted while the majority starve, burn, and die in floods — at best. Past large-scale crises of capitalism, such as the Great Depression, saw capitalists protecting their ultraconsumption habits via an agreement between capital and sanctioned labor unions that shared some of a growing pie with the working classes (however unequally still) in exchange for their legitimizing support for the liberal order. By contrast, today's transformation of capitalism requires ever less state legitimacy and ever fewer concessions to workers. Instead a global sociopath class is expanding repressive power at an accelerating rate. But they will be unable to prevent widespread rebelliousness and rejection of state legitimacy from productively taking root in many places, as ordinary people feel the weight of staggered collapse in their own lives.

5. Under such conditions, all liberation work — and that of salvage communism especially — should orient toward the seizure of crises associated with staggered collapse. This work requires both a long- and a short-term horizon. Significant groundwork in the present is necessary, and so too are strategic local analyses of breakdown processes into the future, and larger-scale translocal analyses to coordinate these. As collapse sets in, localized experiences of breakdown or collapse will disrupt currently existing hierarchies of local power and social relations. Such disruptions are essential for the destruction of value and new forms of enclosure entailed by capitalism's transformation (its neofeudalizing, in one turn of phrase). But these disruptions will also open up new opportunities and horizons for local revolutionary possibility. The aim of seizing a crisis, at any level or timescale of action, should be to gain local or regional power to set conditions for collective flourishing in the face of real material and social constraints associated with staggered collapse and diminishing resource availability. A common focus on national-level captures of state power, whether via the liberal political parties or incrementalist communist parties unwilling to acknowledge the global process of staggered collapse, not only recreates a failed logic of "socialism in one state" (at best) but relies on denial of subtending climate and other earth system breakdown processes.

6. Revolutionary possibility must be understood as emerging in relation to collapse processes. Many of these processes of breakdown, especially with respect to fully global earth system breakdown, are novel in the human historical record. So, too, is the pace of technologically feasible labor automation. We cannot count on carrying forward 20th century insights into either revolutionary strategy or the historical materialist analysis of relations of production, consumption, extraction, and circulation — though these still warrant careful study. Useful theories of 21st century revolution must address radical mutations in means of production/consumption relations and their corresponding political forms, as well as the loss of a stable earth system basis for human infrastructure. A novel world requires novel thinking.

7. Seizing the crises of staggered collapse produces power locally, not nationally or globally. The 20th century nation state form is no longer a viable site of revolutionary capture. But this does not mean left revolutions should fail to seek power. Revolutionary seizure of crisis entails both prior preparation for locally immediate action and a larger, translocal orientation. Any translocal orientation (and organization) that would be liberatory must include a loosely shared constellation of principles for pluralistic flourishing, without requiring capitalism's sustaining fantasy of metabolic abundance and never-ending economic growth. Such principles should be iteratively negotiated and cashed out in a collectively coordinating analysis that interprets local/regional actions and local/regional analyses of collapse conditions. This coordinating analysis should, in turn, inform local efforts to seize the many crises to come. Noteworthy in all this is that legacy leadership structures at all levels are already in crisis. The struggle for local power must register and seize upon the destitution of institutions at a local level, further destroying those that impair revolutionary action and capturing in preparatory fashion those that can enable collective determination of the conditions for pluralistic flourishing. At the same time, it requires overarching formations for coordination that are not tied to the nation state. These may be understood as translocal revolutionary organizations.

8. Local action must be both substantially independent from, yet accountable to, translocal revolutionary organizations. While local cadres necessarily operate autonomously in their strategic and tactical judgments, they must be able to account for these in terms shared translocally, at the level of a constellation of principles for pluralistic flourishing. Local actions and analyses are made translocal through collective negotiation of their meanings by translocal revolutionary organizations. But they are undertaken in the first place as preeminently local decisions. The translocal revolutionary organizations should coordinate, above all else, to supply a novel body for meaning-making and coordination of diverse local experiments in revolutionary action to seize and build power. Many gestures in this direction have already been made, and they too must be coordinated.

9. Every local cadre should organize itself in relation to specific local or regional breakdown processes. This means formulating a concrete, locally or regionally specific set of answers to the question "What time is it?", and iteratively revisiting those answers by the light of both local actions taken and analysis- and knowledge-sharing through translocal organization. All this requires critical analysis of local power systems and of how these might shift or fall into crisis as collapse intensifies. Answers to the question "What time is it?" should clarify and motivate durable bets on sites of action that build revolutionary power, i.e., prepare for and accomplish the seizure of crises. At the same time, these wagers should be laid with an eye to the coordinating analyses developed by translocal revolutionary organizations.

10. Translocal organizations must assume that each local cadre is operating with a sound basis in fact and analysis. In judging local relations to staggered collapse or breakdown processes, translocal revolutionary organizations need not affirm all local actions, but should proceed from the assumption that local knowledge and analysis is likely strong and well-founded. This is necessary to maintain respect for both a diversity of tactics and a unity of purpose. Staggered collapse means the splintering of local conditions along increasingly divergent, or perhaps categorically distinct, lines. The role of translocal revolutionary organizations is to offer coordinating analyses, connecting local cadres to both one another and a unifying collection of principles for pluralistic flourishing. The long horizon is a still-more unifying planetary confederation, coordinating across the insuperable differences entailed by real autonomy of local action and strategy.

The world is ending. The worst people in the world understand it well enough. We should, too. Only when we do, developing collective relations to breakdown processes in the shattering of our world, listening still with ear and heart to the horizon of the whole, can we make a better end of the world. Even, perhaps, better next worlds.

November 2025

Images: Andrew Moore