Richard Hames of Novara Media and his colleague Beau-Caprice Vetch, recently wrote an essay on what they call ‘critical collapsology’ to help stimulate collapse-aware innovation on the left of the political spectrum. They write:
“The question is not “when is it appropriate to lose hope once and for all?” But, instead, when are we required to give up on the specific forms of animating hope that structured much of 19th and 20th century left[wing] thought?”
You can read their full essay here. I asked AI for an 800-word summary, including a final paragraph assessing any resonance with the ecolibertarian ideas in my book Breaking Together. It follows below.
I am pleased that Richard will be joining us for one of the first Metacrisis Meetings next week. We will discuss the politics of collapse and the metacrisis. If you want to join but have not subscribed to this initiative, please do so immediately and then return to this page (on jembendell.com) to automatically view your zoom registration link when logged in.
An AI Summary of “Our Theory of Collapse” (August 5th, 2025, Vetch and Hames), with a slight edit from Jem.
Beau-Caprice Vetch and Richard Hames’ essay Our Theory of Collapse explores how the concept of “collapse” has become both an unavoidable horizon of thought and a contested political terrain. They argue that while society has always been organized around expectations of future stability, today’s multiple crises—climate breakdown, AI acceleration, demographic shifts, and capitalism’s ecological destructiveness—make the future feel fragmented and disorienting. This pervasive uncertainty manifests in personal decisions (whether to have children, how to plan for retirement, where to live safely) and political ones (how to govern amidst cascading risks). The authors seek to build a “critical collapsology” that can grapple with this disorientation while providing a usable concept of collapse.
They begin by distinguishing between acute disasters and longer-term systemic tendencies. Events like Lebanon’s 2020 port explosion exemplify how sudden shocks interweave with chronic fragilities, producing crises that are both local and globally entangled. While traditional trends—warming climate, advancing technologies, geopolitical rivalries—are clear, what is missing is a coherent story of how these processes integrate. The “polycrisis” framing has emerged to describe their interconnectedness, but for Vetch and Hames it fails to capture the systemic possibility of collapse, understood as a horizon beyond polycrisis where complexity exceeds institutional capacity.
The essay critiques “traditional collapsology,” which has studied past societal breakdowns through energy limits, moral decay, demographic stress, or conflict (figures such as Tainter, Diamond, and Turchin). While insightful, this literature fails in several ways: it lacks a political account of collapse, an adequate theory of why societies cohere, and an analysis relevant to capitalism, which uniquely thrives on crises. It also neglects what they call “applied collapsology”: the deliberate destruction of societies through colonisation, war, and genocide that has underpinned the modern world. Finally, traditional collapsology provides little ethical guidance about what should be done in the face of collapse.
In contrast, “critical collapsology” centres institutions as the key to understanding social cohesion and vulnerability. Institutions, broadly conceived, are compressions of complexity that channel flows of energy, information, and resources into relatively stable patterns. They function in three ways: compression (simplifying complexity into order), displacement (externalising costs onto others or elsewhere), and the production of complexity (creating new dependencies and needs). Capitalism, they argue, is distinct because it systematises these dynamics under the law of exchange value, making domination itself an institutional principle. The Green Revolution illustrates this triad: new crop technologies compressed agricultural complexity, externalising ecological and social costs, and generated further global dependencies.
Collapse, in this framework, is not mere disruption or even polycrisis, both of which capitalism has historically managed through institutional reconfiguration. Collapse occurs when cascading complexities generalise as unpayable costs, overwhelming institutional resilience and escaping both market capture and state securitisation. Sri Lanka’s 2022 crisis exemplifies how global financial, ecological, and political pressures converged to overwhelm state capacity. More broadly, capitalism’s institutional metabolism produces both resilience and pathology, driving towards a planetary-scale vulnerability.
The authors emphasise that collapse is also a political phenomenon: its anticipation already shapes geopolitics through militarisation, border fortification, and authoritarian responses, while its fear can be weaponised to justify violence. A “politics of collapse” is already with us, ranging from prepping subcultures to military aggression framed as existential defence. Hence, clarifying the meaning of collapse is not an abstract exercise but a necessary intervention to prevent reactionary and destructive appropriations.
Toward the end, Vetch and Hames explore the implications for political agency. Traditional left politics—rooted in the belief that “another world is possible” through modernity’s institutional frameworks—will be undermined if collapse erodes the conditions that sustain those frameworks. Collapse is a crisis of agency itself, in which no actor can coherently steer the social whole. Critical collapsology does not reject values like equality, freedom, and non-domination, but it questions whether they can be realised through inherited utopian projects. Just as the dream of reforming the Roman Empire eventually lost traction, the left’s narratives of guaranteed emancipation may be dissolving. Yet the disappearance of one horizon can open others. Collapse, then, demands not just diagnostics but new ways of orienting hope, action, and solidarity in a world where stability cannot be presumed.
The ‘ecolibertarian’ perspective in Breaking Together (2023) resonates strongly with Vetch and Hames’ “critical collapsology.” Both approaches refuse to treat collapse as an external accident or merely technical failure; instead, they see it as inseparable from the institutional and political logics of imperial modernity itself. Where Vetch and Hames analysis highlights how capitalism compresses, displaces, and multiplies complexity until institutions falter, Bendell’s work stresses how ecological limits and social alienation converge to make collapse inevitable. Moreover, their insistence that collapse must be politicised aligns with Breaking Together’s call for cultivating freedom and dignity amid breakdown rather than deferring to authoritarian “solutions.” The ecolibertarian ethos—fostering autonomy, care, and ecological embeddedness in the cracks of collapsing systems—provides a practical orientation to the crisis of agency that Our Theory of Collapse identifies. Both works challenge the fantasy of control and instead seek pathways of meaning and solidarity in conditions where institutional futures can no longer be guaranteed.
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Please do not quote from the summary as the writing of Vetch and Hames, but refer to the original text, if wishing to do so.
Further background reading for Metacrisis Meeting participants is here (members only).
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