Por Adam Aron – Tadzio Müller
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Mass arrest of Earth First! protesters in Seattle. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. |
Adam Aron: I want to start with your views on the climate struggle then and now. A few years ago, you were in Germany’s lignite pits trying to stop the coal industry. But more recently, you’ve said ‘the climate ship has sailed.’ What do you mean by that?
Tadio Müller: We were an extremely well-organized anti-coal movement. We were fighting a declining industry, and we managed to convene some of the biggest demonstrations in German history. And yet, with everything we brought to the table, great actions, huge demonstrations, an enemy who was behaving stupidly, all we got in the end was a coal phase out in 2038. Now that’s like 15 to 20 years after the world starts burning. So the first thing was that our struggle wasn’t victorious from a climate perspective – which is relevant insofar as the German climate movement was one of the strongest, if not the strongest in the world, and we still lost.
Secondly, the problem is the one we can feel all around us: the climate is in fact collapsing. We built the anti-coal movement to contribute to the struggle against climate collapse. And clearly that struggle has been lost because the climate is collapsing.
But the last sense in which the ship has sailed, I think, is the more controversial one. Society, which was always our main point of leverage, is tired of hearing about the climate. In rich countries—the UK, the US, France, Germany, Sweden—societies are done with this climate stuff. In those societies we thought about changing our ways, realized it’s too difficult and expensive and makes us face questions of guilt, shame and fear. We don’t want to hear about it anymore. So our protests have lost their point of leverage. Society, says, much like an abusive boyfriend, honey, I’ve heard enough of your critiques, now shut the fuck up. There’s simply no realistic path towards ‘climate majorities’ anywhere in the global North, possibly anywhere in the world.
AA: Could opinion change in rich countries? Look at the multiple heat waves in Europe in 2026. Two hundred thousand people had to evacuate near Bordeaux. Does the moment just pass without gaining political traction?
TM: All environmentalists in the global North have operated from the same strategic assumption: the more the climate crisis hits us, the more climate rational we’ll become. But the last few years have falsified that hypothesis. In fact, the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we want to look at it. Shit has gotten worse. But shit getting worse in a way that reminds us of all the changes we should have made over the last 30 years doesn’t make us more rational, it makes us more ashamed. The more we’re reminded of our decades of inaction and centuries of exploitation, the more we’re going to turn away.
AA: How does your view that the climate ship has sailed square with the mainstream climate policy view these days which is basically: hey, modulo the wrong politicians, victory is around the corner on climate with cheap solar, batteries, electric cars, and heat pumps?
TM: It’s a mélange of magical thinking designed to make us feel less bad. I used to work as an energy policy expert, and one thing that’s obvious when you look at the history of energy is that there has never been an energy transition. There have only ever been energy additions. Fun fact: at the height of the coal age, we burnt more biomass than ever before. At the height of the oil age, we burnt more coal than ever before. And at the height of the gas age, we’re burning more oil than ever before.
So all these people saying that adding renewable energy will mean fewer fossil fuels being burnt, that’s simply not true. In a world where the hunger for energy rises faster than energy production, renewables simply add more energy to the system. And if you imagine a green capitalist round of growth kicking off, you’d have to reconfigure the entire system, requiring enormous productive effort, all run from a fossil-fuel energy system. So basically, more renewables does not mean less fossils, it just means more energy in the mix.
AA: Is one response to your concern that renewables simply add more energy to the mix, rather than displacing fossil fuels, to fight for governments to reduce material and energy use? That is, to implement policies for degrowth or post-growth?
TM: Well, it would, except it’s not happening, and as far as I can tell, it’s not really possible. From an ecological perspective, the degrowth argument is simple. We are living beyond our ecological means. Fact. But what do societies want? We want jobs, lower prices, lower taxes. And of course, capitalists want higher profits. So societies are addicted to growth. Growth is how we deal with social conflicts because there’s more to distribute, to grease the wheels of compromise. Which government is going to say, guys, we’re going to cut off growth because it’s ecologically bad? You’ll pay higher taxes, have lower profits, fewer jobs and higher prices. How about that? No government that relies on votes or legitimacy from the population is going to go for a degrowth strategy.
AA: Just to be clear about characterizing the degrowth position. They’re not arguing for a recession or an overall contraction whatsoever. It should really be called “selective degrowth”. They’re saying some things need to go down, other things need to go up.
TM: A degrowth position that takes itself seriously would have to support an absolute reduction in material throughput in the world economy. And that is simply not going to happen. Degrowthers might say, well, we’re going to grow renewables a bit, shrink fossils a little bit, and end up with a net reduction in material throughput. But the main critique of capitalist growth is not that some sectors grow too fast; it’s the two to three percent compound growth on which global capitalism relies. And that has got to end somehow. But how? Nobody knows, certainly not the degrowth school. You’d also have to redistribute to countries that have not enjoyed hundreds of years of imperialist profits. They would need huge resources in order not to grow.
We also had an interesting experiment in what degrowth looks like. During the first corona lockdown, the virus forced governments to implement a kind of managed degrowth. But most societies seem to remember that lockdown as a trauma. There was much less freedom of movement, fewer consumption opportunities, and basically we don’t want to go back there.
AA: Your new book is about collapse. What do you mean by collapse? And what kind of journey do you take the reader on?
TM: The usual understanding of collapse comes from movies like The Day After Tomorrow and things like St. John’s Revelation and Hieronymus Bosch. That’s where everything collapses and everybody lives in hell. But from the perspective of us living in society, collapse is actually just the disappearance of normality. Imagine a collapse in the agricultural or food delivery system. That wouldn’t mean nobody has food, but that there’s less food at higher prices, creating all sorts of social conflicts. Or, since I’m HIV positive, a collapse in the distribution system for those meds wouldn’t affect folks who aren’t HIV positive. So collapse isn’t the immediate end of the world. In the short term, it’s the disappearance of normalities we’ve gotten used to.
On a longer timeline, collapse is the end of the world of more. In a world of more, if we are defeated in our struggles for justice, we can win the next round, or the next. Martin Luther King said the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. In collapse, the moral arc of the universe is short and it bends towards fascism.
And so you asked about the journey in my book. To talk about the end of the comfort of constantly accumulating more, that’s a conversation we don’t want to have. So I’ve constructed the story like an intervention with a drug addict. I start by creating emotional resonances, not throwing lots of facts at people. I’m saying, I know we’re all scared of the future, and we’re not really acknowledging that fear. So how about we start talking about it? And then I say, now that we’ve accepted the fact of collapse, let’s try and find, if not hope—because shit is just dark and I don’t want to sell people more false hope—then meaning.
Can we find meaning in a world that is constantly becoming worse? My argument is yes. Catastrophes escalate existing injustices and create fear and suffering. So coming from a climate justice movement, I think there is a lot for us to do in a future where the climate is collapsing. Preparing for these moments of catastrophe together with other people can give you meaning. That’s the important point I want to get people to. Acknowledging a future of collapse does not mean living a life of permanent depression. It means adjusting your expectations and working from there to create moments of agency and spaces of solidarity, love, happiness and, again, meaning. Because people can live without hope, that is proven, but they cannot live without meaning
AA: You’ve said that people are becoming more ready to talk about collapse. Who do you mean, and what are you seeing that tells you that?
TM: I really mean about two to three, maybe five percent of the population. My overall analysis is that we live in a society of denial. Whether it’s war, climate collapse, COVID or AI, we don’t have a realistic discourse about the dangers we’ve created. Most people, at least in the Global North, will continue living relatively comfortable lives because that’s easier than facing what’s coming down.
But denying reality takes energy. And the more catastrophic shit happens, the harder it becomes. Every catastrophe creates a window of opportunity for a few days or weeks. We can use those windows to talk to people who are done with the denial and false hope being peddled by our political system. I don’t think preparing together for catastrophe will be a majority movement. But you don’t need a majority in the beginning. You need groups with agency in those moments of catastrophe, and then you start thinking from there.
AA: There are suggestions that framing the ecological crisis in terms of inevitable collapse can play into authoritarian, nationalist, exclusionary, and even ecofascist politics. Are you concerned that framing our predicament in terms of ‘collapse’ could contribute to these tendencies?
TM: I think this infantilizes people. It’s an active anti-Enlightenment position, and the start of a slippery slope that ends in the full-blown denial of reality we see from actual climate deniers. First of all, global ecological collapse is inevitable. That’s a fact. And the response—oh no, don’t say that, because acknowledging how bad things look might lead people to think stuff we don’t want them to think—that seems crazy to me.
That’s precisely how today’s climate deniers started out. They wanted to view reality in a way that didn’t scare them too much, that didn’t force them to reckon with how our mode of production and living is making the planet unlivable for large-scale human civilization. So we get this discourse that people are too dumb, immature, or fragile to confront reality. But the truth is the opposite: only by facing reality without comforting emotional blinders can we start developing actual agency for the future that’s coming.
AA: Collapse has been part of the climate and environmental conversation for more than a decade. How does your idea of collapse, and what we should do about it, differ from collapsology, the Deep Adaptation movement, and climate doomism?
TM: Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, who wrote the first collapsiologie book in France, helped us understand what collapse means and how unavoidable it is. But that remains a largely academic discourse. Then a few years later, Jem Bendell writes his paper, Deep Adaptation, and starts a project very much about doing the emotional labor of accepting that collapse is going to come, which is a super important step. But we collapse folks, at least here in Germany, come from a much more activist background. Our story about collapse is not just about acceptance or understanding, it is about agency and practical solidarity. And I think it’s the most energizing of the collapse discourses because it brings the dynamic of the powerful anti-coal and climate movement we had in Germany.
We bring that fire to the collapse discourse because we’re not done fighting for justice. The important issue is: where is the point of leverage? How do we develop agency and make the world less shit? And my short argument is the point of leverage is going to be the moment of catastrophe. Folks have probably read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, where she explains how the right uses moments of catastrophe to further their agenda. And in that sense, we on the left are developing disaster communism or disaster anarchism or whatever you might call it, against their project of disaster capitalism and, increasingly, disaster fascism. Disaster is going to be the new normality. And we’re among the first left-wing and climate actors saying: let’s look at this, let’s not push it away, let’s not tell ourselves comforting stories about how the next windmill is really going to change it. Let’s look at this realistically and do what we’ve always done: identify points of leverage.
AA: During Occupy Sandy in New York, 50,000 people mobilized after the hurricane struck, and there are many other inspiring examples after catastrophes. But you’re talking about building a collapse movement before catastrophe strikes. Isn’t that an enormous challenge?
TM: Yes, it’s a challenge. But Occupy Sandy is a spectacular example of how these solidarity networks can work. It started small and became larger than the American Red Cross and FEMA. It was inspired by people who organized the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That was also organized after the catastrophe. But the people around Katrina had previously organized the 1999 Seattle protests against the WTO. So there is always a pre-organized core. And in a catastrophe, even a small group can develop outsized agency because so few other actors can fill that political space.
Honestly, it was also very difficult to create a climate movement in Germany. We worked for years. Our initial climate camps were like 50 people, with hardly any attention for five years. Then the Paris summit happened, we had this great idea with Ende Gelände and these disobedience actions, and we exploded from there.
Imagine small nuclei of folks organized and capable of intervening in floods or heat waves. And, by the way, my notion of catastrophe is both political and ecological. A Nazi attack on a Pride March is as much a catastrophe to me as a fascist party getting 44% in part of Germany. These are all catastrophes. So we pre-organize nuclei of people, and catastrophes will come. If the right nucleus meets the right catastrophe, you can get an expansive dynamic: people saying, wow, that looks really cool, let’s do that. I think it’s a better bet than organizing the kinds of demonstrations nobody cares about anymore.
AA: I get your idea of a loose network of motivated people ready to step up during catastrophes. But what are they doing in between? What kinds of projects could such a movement pursue—food sovereignty, building local resilience?
TM: Let’s call it solidarity prepping right now. Solidarity prepping is different from individualistic prepping in that it focuses on social relations. And this is not just a bunch of anarchists saying that. A general in the Swedish military said exactly the same thing: in a catastrophe, the most important thing is social relations. So anything that builds resilient social relations is a step towards having agency in a catastrophe.
I’ll stick with my example of being HIV positive. Right now I don’t have a problem, my medication gets delivered when I need it. But cutbacks are plausible, and in Germany these would probably first be applied to folks without German passports. So intensifying connections between sectors of the HIV-positive community, between those who do and don’t have a German passport, would be an important step towards having agency when the enemy or a supply disruption strikes.
I’m not much of a neighborhood activist guy. I’m somewhat too abrasive and impatient for community activism. But I understand that I have to make some changes. Like I want to get to know the people who live in this house. In Berlin, I mostly meet my neighbors when we pick up parcels from each other. The mailman brought this, hi, bye. But that’s not enough. I want to know who needs what and who can do what in a crisis. There’s an old lady living a few floors above you and it’s 38 degrees Celsius, maybe she can’t walk to the store. Figure out what she needs, and create the dynamic where she is fine saying, Hey, would you go shopping for me? Intensifying relations this way is not easy for activists who come from event activism—big demos, big actions—but it’s the absolute core of prepping together.
Beyond that, anything that increases community autonomy, whether around food or energy, is a good step towards that future. Struggles for communalization of energy or food sovereignty have been going on for a long time. They should continue, but it’s important to recognize the context and have a story about collapse in those struggles so we don’t just keep doing the same thing as before.
Maybe a good way to think about it is this: if you’re setting up a political or social project, even if it’s not specifically related to “collapse” or “catastrophe,” ask three questions. First, does it increase collective agency in a catastrophic situation? A community replacing a big fossil-fuel power plant with locally controlled renewables, for example, has more energy autonomy and more agency in a blackout. Second, does it increase the density of social relations? This is a central principle of “prepping together”: relationships come before supplies, whatever the catastrophe. And third, the climate and disaster justice question: does it increase not just your own agency or that of your immediate community, but the agency of marginalized folks who are likely to suffer most in any catastrophe, much more than those who caused it?
AA: So I’m involved in a struggle here in Southern California to take the electric grid from an investor-owned utility and put it under not-for-profit public ownership. For you, does that make sense if it’s also about resilience—local generation instead of long-distance power lines through wildfire territory, and a less centralized system vulnerable to cyber-attacks?
TM: For sure.
AA: Here and in other parts of the US, there is much local organizing to try to defend our black and brown neighbors from being snatched off the streets. And that fits some of your criteria. But I see a challenge which is that those spaces may have little climate or ecological consciousness. People are focused on everyday issues. How do we make people cognizant of what collapse means in the wider ecological sense?
TM: One of the catastrophes I’m very focused on is the way fascists are increasingly closing spaces for queers and trans people—for the latter in particular. And when I look at what I’ve been calling for in organizing queer self-defense, it’s very much inspired by how folks acted in LA and later in Minneapolis in the face of the ICE attacks. Now, how do you add the story about ecological collapse to that? On some level you probably won’t have a major opening until the next heat wave strikes. But then you have to use that opening. That’s basic political organizing: you have to use windows of opportunity. Germany and Europe experienced five huge heat waves this summer, and between 30 and 40,000 people died prematurely. And that is still kind of rocking around in social common sense and public discussions.
This is all, as we say in German, music for the future. I don’t know if the story we’re telling about this collapse movement will resonate. I hope it will. I think it’s the important next step for many progressive movements.
My comparison in the book is when Marx in the 1850s was looking at factories in England and saying they are going to shape life in a really powerful way. Do you know how many factories there were in the world at that time? A vanishingly small number, employing a vanishingly small proportion of global labor power. But Marx said that’s where the future is going to be made. And my argument is to look at the moment of catastrophe, which we’ve traditionally ignored as political movements: you call FEMA, you call the cops, and then you resume your political work once normality is restored. And I’m saying no. We have to turn this around. Catastrophe is going to be the new normality. We have to understand catastrophe as a political space with pitfalls, stakes, allies, enemies, levers. And once we’ve done that, we can create a new type of progressive movement that starts out in catastrophe and says: this is our new normality.
AA: So we’re up against capitalism’s expansionary compulsion, pushing us deeper into ecological overshoot, of which carbon pollution is just one part, while also fueling neofascism. As Naomi Klein says, fascism is a protection racket for capital. We’re probably not going to have a revolution tomorrow, storming anything. So I’m interested in your PhD work on eroding capitalism from within by building alternatives in its cracks—akin to Erik Olin Wright’s interstitial strategy. Do you still believe in that approach?
TM: For my dissertation the question was: how do we fight capital in a way that’s effective? And the first thing I understood was that you can’t imagine some sort of revolution happening. As you said, there is no Winter Palace to storm. Where would you even go? Goldman Sachs? The White House? And if you were there, do you control global capitalism? No. There’s no switch-off point for capitalism, no one place we can occupy to turn it off.
That leads to the next possibility: slowly building alternative modes of living in the cracks left by capitalism. Then, when an existential crisis comes together with a powerful movement, we might topple capitalism and live in those expanded interstitial spaces. That was all well and good as long as we had infinite time. Martin Luther King: the moral arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice. We rely on time being infinite to make sense of our defeats. You’re defeated today, but you know you’re gonna win tomorrow.
But once you start looking at ecological collapse, the timeline changes. Things are going to get worse very quickly. And you pointed to Naomi Klein, her line about the protection racket. I would go a step further. Fascism is a liberation movement. And what does it liberate you from? From ethics, from reality, and from other people. In a world that’s going to shit, ignoring reality is quite a powerful suggestion. You can ignore other people, ignore reality, and do whatever the fuck you want, because you’re a white cis dude and you’ve always been allowed to do whatever you want.
So I think the more privileged the part of the world you live in, the more likely it is to become fascist. Because fascism is a defense of the privileged, not just of capitalists. This is where I think Naomi is a little unclear. You and I, and most of our friends, are part of that privileged set. So I don’t expect any majority to come our way in our struggle against capital.
And as the world gets uglier, we’re going to turn away from it and become essentially dumber societies. We’ve been seeing that. The US is obviously an outlier and leader in that project. But Germany is hard on its heels, and let’s not call that race yet—we still might catch the crown for biggest assholes on the planet again.
So we don’t have the time and leisure to build these alternative spaces. We’ve been running that strategy for decades, since the late 60s. If somebody suggests a strategy we’ve been pushing for decades, I’m gonna say, well, maybe it hasn’t worked. At that point, the interstitial spaces discourse becomes another type of hopium, another type of magical thinking—ultimately no different from emissions trading saying, let’s create a weird little market and it’s gonna solve fossil capitalism.
AA: But interstitial spaces—workers’ cooperatives, commons projects, eco-villages—these still fit your overall approach, provided they’re reframed as preparation for unfolding catastrophes, building the social solidarity we’ll need, correct?
TM: Exactly. These spaces are still what it’s about. Temporary Autonomous Zones. It was very popular in the 90s. That’s still what we’re talking about. I’m just not assuming they’ll come together like an archipelago that grows into a continent and displaces capitalism. I’m imagining, at best, an archipelago of solidaristic spaces you can hop between without your foot touching fascist ground. Spaces where life can still be lived the way it should be lived, in solidarity and freely. It’s the same strategy, but with a different goal. That requires adjusting our expectations to the new reality.
AA: I want to get to a comment you’ve made that how we organize has to fit the society we actually live in. What do you mean by that today?
TM: So left social movements have always organized in ways that almost mirror our opponent. When capitalism organized itself in big factories with huge production lines, the mass union and large-scale Social Democratic Party became possible. Later, with neoliberalism enclosing more and more parts of the world, social movements shifted from the point of production to defending those spaces against enclosure. Our strategies have to match the social processes around us, or they’ll be irrelevant. And I’m saying the new central dynamic is collapse, which I define as the end of the world of more.
I grew up politically in the anti-globalization movement. One thing we said was: one no, many yeses. You don’t have to coordinate between struggles; everybody fights where they are, and together we have an anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist effect. Now I think we need to adjust to a reality where we don’t have the luxury of not coordinating or making decisions. We need to triage. More and more huge fucking problems are gonna come down the line. Fascism is gonna become more powerful, environmental problems are gonna escalate. We need ways of organizing where we can actually talk to each other and say, hey, we’ve got these resources to fight the fascists, you’ve got those resources to prepare for catastrophe. Which catastrophe is more likely? Which will cause more injustice? Let’s put our resources there.
I don’t know what type of organization will emerge. I do know that the modes of organization we’ve used for decades were appropriate to another age, an age that has ended.
AA: I could imagine there’s probably a sector of the mainstream climate movement that might see you as defeatist, with your language of the climate ship has sailed?
TM: Well, basically, I don’t think we have any real points of leverage to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The last few decades have shown that. But this is not about giving up. It’s about continuing the struggle. The less your strategies are adjusted to reality, the more they’re based on magical thinking, the less useful you are—and the more bullshit you’re gonna do and the more frustrated you’ll become with people doing the real hard work.
If you think you just need to point a pane of glass at the sun and everything will be fine, you might not be my ally. But if you believe the most important thing we can do now is create powerful, resilient communities that aren’t in hock to the fossil fuel industry, then let’s talk.
AA: You’ve presented a vision that is both very dark about what is happening to the world, especially the rich countries, and also very inspiring about the social action we can and should now do. What kind of evidence would change your mind about collapse, climate majorities in the Global North, and so on?
TM: If I saw a genuine decoupling of economic activity from ecological destruction, I might change my mind about capitalism. If I saw real pushback in rich societies against fascism—not just turning out for the odd rally, but the ‘silent majority’ actually standing up for those the fascists target. If I saw US society responding to ICE killings before they started killing white people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti—if I knew the names not only of the white folks killed by ICE, but all of them. If I saw governments around the world coming together to press pause on a whole bunch of insane, destructive processes.
AA: Talk about your feelings and how coming to terms with your feelings was critical to arrive at these new insights and to move forward with your new plan.
TM: When I realized the things I’ve just said—that we were defeated, the climate movement was defeated, the climate catastrophe was coming—I fell into a deep, deep depression. And in that sense, it’s a warning to people. The path I’m suggesting has its pitfalls. Confronting the reality of how shit things are can really bowl you over. And one important point is: do that with other people.
I’ll tell you when the turning point came for me, when I found meaning in catastrophe. It was in the autumn of 2000, when at a Pride March, a steward was attacked and beaten to death by a right-wing assailant. That was a deeply shocking moment. And out of that came this idea that, okay, no matter how catastrophic things are, if the fascists are attacking my community, I want to organize the self-defense of my community. Fighting Nazis to defend my community is not an idea that gives me happiness or joy, but it gives me meaning and a function. It tells me who I’m gonna be when that shit happens. It isn’t the sense that we’re gonna win all these struggles, but that in these struggles I know who I will be, or who I want to be, and with whom I will be there.
Tadio Müller: We were an extremely well-organized anti-coal movement. We were fighting a declining industry, and we managed to convene some of the biggest demonstrations in German history. And yet, with everything we brought to the table, great actions, huge demonstrations, an enemy who was behaving stupidly, all we got in the end was a coal phase out in 2038. Now that’s like 15 to 20 years after the world starts burning. So the first thing was that our struggle wasn’t victorious from a climate perspective – which is relevant insofar as the German climate movement was one of the strongest, if not the strongest in the world, and we still lost.
Secondly, the problem is the one we can feel all around us: the climate is in fact collapsing. We built the anti-coal movement to contribute to the struggle against climate collapse. And clearly that struggle has been lost because the climate is collapsing.
But the last sense in which the ship has sailed, I think, is the more controversial one. Society, which was always our main point of leverage, is tired of hearing about the climate. In rich countries—the UK, the US, France, Germany, Sweden—societies are done with this climate stuff. In those societies we thought about changing our ways, realized it’s too difficult and expensive and makes us face questions of guilt, shame and fear. We don’t want to hear about it anymore. So our protests have lost their point of leverage. Society, says, much like an abusive boyfriend, honey, I’ve heard enough of your critiques, now shut the fuck up. There’s simply no realistic path towards ‘climate majorities’ anywhere in the global North, possibly anywhere in the world.
AA: Could opinion change in rich countries? Look at the multiple heat waves in Europe in 2026. Two hundred thousand people had to evacuate near Bordeaux. Does the moment just pass without gaining political traction?
TM: All environmentalists in the global North have operated from the same strategic assumption: the more the climate crisis hits us, the more climate rational we’ll become. But the last few years have falsified that hypothesis. In fact, the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we want to look at it. Shit has gotten worse. But shit getting worse in a way that reminds us of all the changes we should have made over the last 30 years doesn’t make us more rational, it makes us more ashamed. The more we’re reminded of our decades of inaction and centuries of exploitation, the more we’re going to turn away.
AA: How does your view that the climate ship has sailed square with the mainstream climate policy view these days which is basically: hey, modulo the wrong politicians, victory is around the corner on climate with cheap solar, batteries, electric cars, and heat pumps?
TM: It’s a mélange of magical thinking designed to make us feel less bad. I used to work as an energy policy expert, and one thing that’s obvious when you look at the history of energy is that there has never been an energy transition. There have only ever been energy additions. Fun fact: at the height of the coal age, we burnt more biomass than ever before. At the height of the oil age, we burnt more coal than ever before. And at the height of the gas age, we’re burning more oil than ever before.
So all these people saying that adding renewable energy will mean fewer fossil fuels being burnt, that’s simply not true. In a world where the hunger for energy rises faster than energy production, renewables simply add more energy to the system. And if you imagine a green capitalist round of growth kicking off, you’d have to reconfigure the entire system, requiring enormous productive effort, all run from a fossil-fuel energy system. So basically, more renewables does not mean less fossils, it just means more energy in the mix.
AA: Is one response to your concern that renewables simply add more energy to the mix, rather than displacing fossil fuels, to fight for governments to reduce material and energy use? That is, to implement policies for degrowth or post-growth?
TM: Well, it would, except it’s not happening, and as far as I can tell, it’s not really possible. From an ecological perspective, the degrowth argument is simple. We are living beyond our ecological means. Fact. But what do societies want? We want jobs, lower prices, lower taxes. And of course, capitalists want higher profits. So societies are addicted to growth. Growth is how we deal with social conflicts because there’s more to distribute, to grease the wheels of compromise. Which government is going to say, guys, we’re going to cut off growth because it’s ecologically bad? You’ll pay higher taxes, have lower profits, fewer jobs and higher prices. How about that? No government that relies on votes or legitimacy from the population is going to go for a degrowth strategy.
AA: Just to be clear about characterizing the degrowth position. They’re not arguing for a recession or an overall contraction whatsoever. It should really be called “selective degrowth”. They’re saying some things need to go down, other things need to go up.
TM: A degrowth position that takes itself seriously would have to support an absolute reduction in material throughput in the world economy. And that is simply not going to happen. Degrowthers might say, well, we’re going to grow renewables a bit, shrink fossils a little bit, and end up with a net reduction in material throughput. But the main critique of capitalist growth is not that some sectors grow too fast; it’s the two to three percent compound growth on which global capitalism relies. And that has got to end somehow. But how? Nobody knows, certainly not the degrowth school. You’d also have to redistribute to countries that have not enjoyed hundreds of years of imperialist profits. They would need huge resources in order not to grow.
We also had an interesting experiment in what degrowth looks like. During the first corona lockdown, the virus forced governments to implement a kind of managed degrowth. But most societies seem to remember that lockdown as a trauma. There was much less freedom of movement, fewer consumption opportunities, and basically we don’t want to go back there.
AA: Your new book is about collapse. What do you mean by collapse? And what kind of journey do you take the reader on?
TM: The usual understanding of collapse comes from movies like The Day After Tomorrow and things like St. John’s Revelation and Hieronymus Bosch. That’s where everything collapses and everybody lives in hell. But from the perspective of us living in society, collapse is actually just the disappearance of normality. Imagine a collapse in the agricultural or food delivery system. That wouldn’t mean nobody has food, but that there’s less food at higher prices, creating all sorts of social conflicts. Or, since I’m HIV positive, a collapse in the distribution system for those meds wouldn’t affect folks who aren’t HIV positive. So collapse isn’t the immediate end of the world. In the short term, it’s the disappearance of normalities we’ve gotten used to.
On a longer timeline, collapse is the end of the world of more. In a world of more, if we are defeated in our struggles for justice, we can win the next round, or the next. Martin Luther King said the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. In collapse, the moral arc of the universe is short and it bends towards fascism.
And so you asked about the journey in my book. To talk about the end of the comfort of constantly accumulating more, that’s a conversation we don’t want to have. So I’ve constructed the story like an intervention with a drug addict. I start by creating emotional resonances, not throwing lots of facts at people. I’m saying, I know we’re all scared of the future, and we’re not really acknowledging that fear. So how about we start talking about it? And then I say, now that we’ve accepted the fact of collapse, let’s try and find, if not hope—because shit is just dark and I don’t want to sell people more false hope—then meaning.
Can we find meaning in a world that is constantly becoming worse? My argument is yes. Catastrophes escalate existing injustices and create fear and suffering. So coming from a climate justice movement, I think there is a lot for us to do in a future where the climate is collapsing. Preparing for these moments of catastrophe together with other people can give you meaning. That’s the important point I want to get people to. Acknowledging a future of collapse does not mean living a life of permanent depression. It means adjusting your expectations and working from there to create moments of agency and spaces of solidarity, love, happiness and, again, meaning. Because people can live without hope, that is proven, but they cannot live without meaning
AA: You’ve said that people are becoming more ready to talk about collapse. Who do you mean, and what are you seeing that tells you that?
TM: I really mean about two to three, maybe five percent of the population. My overall analysis is that we live in a society of denial. Whether it’s war, climate collapse, COVID or AI, we don’t have a realistic discourse about the dangers we’ve created. Most people, at least in the Global North, will continue living relatively comfortable lives because that’s easier than facing what’s coming down.
But denying reality takes energy. And the more catastrophic shit happens, the harder it becomes. Every catastrophe creates a window of opportunity for a few days or weeks. We can use those windows to talk to people who are done with the denial and false hope being peddled by our political system. I don’t think preparing together for catastrophe will be a majority movement. But you don’t need a majority in the beginning. You need groups with agency in those moments of catastrophe, and then you start thinking from there.
AA: There are suggestions that framing the ecological crisis in terms of inevitable collapse can play into authoritarian, nationalist, exclusionary, and even ecofascist politics. Are you concerned that framing our predicament in terms of ‘collapse’ could contribute to these tendencies?
TM: I think this infantilizes people. It’s an active anti-Enlightenment position, and the start of a slippery slope that ends in the full-blown denial of reality we see from actual climate deniers. First of all, global ecological collapse is inevitable. That’s a fact. And the response—oh no, don’t say that, because acknowledging how bad things look might lead people to think stuff we don’t want them to think—that seems crazy to me.
That’s precisely how today’s climate deniers started out. They wanted to view reality in a way that didn’t scare them too much, that didn’t force them to reckon with how our mode of production and living is making the planet unlivable for large-scale human civilization. So we get this discourse that people are too dumb, immature, or fragile to confront reality. But the truth is the opposite: only by facing reality without comforting emotional blinders can we start developing actual agency for the future that’s coming.
AA: Collapse has been part of the climate and environmental conversation for more than a decade. How does your idea of collapse, and what we should do about it, differ from collapsology, the Deep Adaptation movement, and climate doomism?
TM: Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, who wrote the first collapsiologie book in France, helped us understand what collapse means and how unavoidable it is. But that remains a largely academic discourse. Then a few years later, Jem Bendell writes his paper, Deep Adaptation, and starts a project very much about doing the emotional labor of accepting that collapse is going to come, which is a super important step. But we collapse folks, at least here in Germany, come from a much more activist background. Our story about collapse is not just about acceptance or understanding, it is about agency and practical solidarity. And I think it’s the most energizing of the collapse discourses because it brings the dynamic of the powerful anti-coal and climate movement we had in Germany.
We bring that fire to the collapse discourse because we’re not done fighting for justice. The important issue is: where is the point of leverage? How do we develop agency and make the world less shit? And my short argument is the point of leverage is going to be the moment of catastrophe. Folks have probably read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, where she explains how the right uses moments of catastrophe to further their agenda. And in that sense, we on the left are developing disaster communism or disaster anarchism or whatever you might call it, against their project of disaster capitalism and, increasingly, disaster fascism. Disaster is going to be the new normality. And we’re among the first left-wing and climate actors saying: let’s look at this, let’s not push it away, let’s not tell ourselves comforting stories about how the next windmill is really going to change it. Let’s look at this realistically and do what we’ve always done: identify points of leverage.
AA: During Occupy Sandy in New York, 50,000 people mobilized after the hurricane struck, and there are many other inspiring examples after catastrophes. But you’re talking about building a collapse movement before catastrophe strikes. Isn’t that an enormous challenge?
TM: Yes, it’s a challenge. But Occupy Sandy is a spectacular example of how these solidarity networks can work. It started small and became larger than the American Red Cross and FEMA. It was inspired by people who organized the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. That was also organized after the catastrophe. But the people around Katrina had previously organized the 1999 Seattle protests against the WTO. So there is always a pre-organized core. And in a catastrophe, even a small group can develop outsized agency because so few other actors can fill that political space.
Honestly, it was also very difficult to create a climate movement in Germany. We worked for years. Our initial climate camps were like 50 people, with hardly any attention for five years. Then the Paris summit happened, we had this great idea with Ende Gelände and these disobedience actions, and we exploded from there.
Imagine small nuclei of folks organized and capable of intervening in floods or heat waves. And, by the way, my notion of catastrophe is both political and ecological. A Nazi attack on a Pride March is as much a catastrophe to me as a fascist party getting 44% in part of Germany. These are all catastrophes. So we pre-organize nuclei of people, and catastrophes will come. If the right nucleus meets the right catastrophe, you can get an expansive dynamic: people saying, wow, that looks really cool, let’s do that. I think it’s a better bet than organizing the kinds of demonstrations nobody cares about anymore.
AA: I get your idea of a loose network of motivated people ready to step up during catastrophes. But what are they doing in between? What kinds of projects could such a movement pursue—food sovereignty, building local resilience?
TM: Let’s call it solidarity prepping right now. Solidarity prepping is different from individualistic prepping in that it focuses on social relations. And this is not just a bunch of anarchists saying that. A general in the Swedish military said exactly the same thing: in a catastrophe, the most important thing is social relations. So anything that builds resilient social relations is a step towards having agency in a catastrophe.
I’ll stick with my example of being HIV positive. Right now I don’t have a problem, my medication gets delivered when I need it. But cutbacks are plausible, and in Germany these would probably first be applied to folks without German passports. So intensifying connections between sectors of the HIV-positive community, between those who do and don’t have a German passport, would be an important step towards having agency when the enemy or a supply disruption strikes.
I’m not much of a neighborhood activist guy. I’m somewhat too abrasive and impatient for community activism. But I understand that I have to make some changes. Like I want to get to know the people who live in this house. In Berlin, I mostly meet my neighbors when we pick up parcels from each other. The mailman brought this, hi, bye. But that’s not enough. I want to know who needs what and who can do what in a crisis. There’s an old lady living a few floors above you and it’s 38 degrees Celsius, maybe she can’t walk to the store. Figure out what she needs, and create the dynamic where she is fine saying, Hey, would you go shopping for me? Intensifying relations this way is not easy for activists who come from event activism—big demos, big actions—but it’s the absolute core of prepping together.
Beyond that, anything that increases community autonomy, whether around food or energy, is a good step towards that future. Struggles for communalization of energy or food sovereignty have been going on for a long time. They should continue, but it’s important to recognize the context and have a story about collapse in those struggles so we don’t just keep doing the same thing as before.
Maybe a good way to think about it is this: if you’re setting up a political or social project, even if it’s not specifically related to “collapse” or “catastrophe,” ask three questions. First, does it increase collective agency in a catastrophic situation? A community replacing a big fossil-fuel power plant with locally controlled renewables, for example, has more energy autonomy and more agency in a blackout. Second, does it increase the density of social relations? This is a central principle of “prepping together”: relationships come before supplies, whatever the catastrophe. And third, the climate and disaster justice question: does it increase not just your own agency or that of your immediate community, but the agency of marginalized folks who are likely to suffer most in any catastrophe, much more than those who caused it?
AA: So I’m involved in a struggle here in Southern California to take the electric grid from an investor-owned utility and put it under not-for-profit public ownership. For you, does that make sense if it’s also about resilience—local generation instead of long-distance power lines through wildfire territory, and a less centralized system vulnerable to cyber-attacks?
TM: For sure.
AA: Here and in other parts of the US, there is much local organizing to try to defend our black and brown neighbors from being snatched off the streets. And that fits some of your criteria. But I see a challenge which is that those spaces may have little climate or ecological consciousness. People are focused on everyday issues. How do we make people cognizant of what collapse means in the wider ecological sense?
TM: One of the catastrophes I’m very focused on is the way fascists are increasingly closing spaces for queers and trans people—for the latter in particular. And when I look at what I’ve been calling for in organizing queer self-defense, it’s very much inspired by how folks acted in LA and later in Minneapolis in the face of the ICE attacks. Now, how do you add the story about ecological collapse to that? On some level you probably won’t have a major opening until the next heat wave strikes. But then you have to use that opening. That’s basic political organizing: you have to use windows of opportunity. Germany and Europe experienced five huge heat waves this summer, and between 30 and 40,000 people died prematurely. And that is still kind of rocking around in social common sense and public discussions.
This is all, as we say in German, music for the future. I don’t know if the story we’re telling about this collapse movement will resonate. I hope it will. I think it’s the important next step for many progressive movements.
My comparison in the book is when Marx in the 1850s was looking at factories in England and saying they are going to shape life in a really powerful way. Do you know how many factories there were in the world at that time? A vanishingly small number, employing a vanishingly small proportion of global labor power. But Marx said that’s where the future is going to be made. And my argument is to look at the moment of catastrophe, which we’ve traditionally ignored as political movements: you call FEMA, you call the cops, and then you resume your political work once normality is restored. And I’m saying no. We have to turn this around. Catastrophe is going to be the new normality. We have to understand catastrophe as a political space with pitfalls, stakes, allies, enemies, levers. And once we’ve done that, we can create a new type of progressive movement that starts out in catastrophe and says: this is our new normality.
AA: So we’re up against capitalism’s expansionary compulsion, pushing us deeper into ecological overshoot, of which carbon pollution is just one part, while also fueling neofascism. As Naomi Klein says, fascism is a protection racket for capital. We’re probably not going to have a revolution tomorrow, storming anything. So I’m interested in your PhD work on eroding capitalism from within by building alternatives in its cracks—akin to Erik Olin Wright’s interstitial strategy. Do you still believe in that approach?
TM: For my dissertation the question was: how do we fight capital in a way that’s effective? And the first thing I understood was that you can’t imagine some sort of revolution happening. As you said, there is no Winter Palace to storm. Where would you even go? Goldman Sachs? The White House? And if you were there, do you control global capitalism? No. There’s no switch-off point for capitalism, no one place we can occupy to turn it off.
That leads to the next possibility: slowly building alternative modes of living in the cracks left by capitalism. Then, when an existential crisis comes together with a powerful movement, we might topple capitalism and live in those expanded interstitial spaces. That was all well and good as long as we had infinite time. Martin Luther King: the moral arc of the universe is long and bends towards justice. We rely on time being infinite to make sense of our defeats. You’re defeated today, but you know you’re gonna win tomorrow.
But once you start looking at ecological collapse, the timeline changes. Things are going to get worse very quickly. And you pointed to Naomi Klein, her line about the protection racket. I would go a step further. Fascism is a liberation movement. And what does it liberate you from? From ethics, from reality, and from other people. In a world that’s going to shit, ignoring reality is quite a powerful suggestion. You can ignore other people, ignore reality, and do whatever the fuck you want, because you’re a white cis dude and you’ve always been allowed to do whatever you want.
So I think the more privileged the part of the world you live in, the more likely it is to become fascist. Because fascism is a defense of the privileged, not just of capitalists. This is where I think Naomi is a little unclear. You and I, and most of our friends, are part of that privileged set. So I don’t expect any majority to come our way in our struggle against capital.
And as the world gets uglier, we’re going to turn away from it and become essentially dumber societies. We’ve been seeing that. The US is obviously an outlier and leader in that project. But Germany is hard on its heels, and let’s not call that race yet—we still might catch the crown for biggest assholes on the planet again.
So we don’t have the time and leisure to build these alternative spaces. We’ve been running that strategy for decades, since the late 60s. If somebody suggests a strategy we’ve been pushing for decades, I’m gonna say, well, maybe it hasn’t worked. At that point, the interstitial spaces discourse becomes another type of hopium, another type of magical thinking—ultimately no different from emissions trading saying, let’s create a weird little market and it’s gonna solve fossil capitalism.
AA: But interstitial spaces—workers’ cooperatives, commons projects, eco-villages—these still fit your overall approach, provided they’re reframed as preparation for unfolding catastrophes, building the social solidarity we’ll need, correct?
TM: Exactly. These spaces are still what it’s about. Temporary Autonomous Zones. It was very popular in the 90s. That’s still what we’re talking about. I’m just not assuming they’ll come together like an archipelago that grows into a continent and displaces capitalism. I’m imagining, at best, an archipelago of solidaristic spaces you can hop between without your foot touching fascist ground. Spaces where life can still be lived the way it should be lived, in solidarity and freely. It’s the same strategy, but with a different goal. That requires adjusting our expectations to the new reality.
AA: I want to get to a comment you’ve made that how we organize has to fit the society we actually live in. What do you mean by that today?
TM: So left social movements have always organized in ways that almost mirror our opponent. When capitalism organized itself in big factories with huge production lines, the mass union and large-scale Social Democratic Party became possible. Later, with neoliberalism enclosing more and more parts of the world, social movements shifted from the point of production to defending those spaces against enclosure. Our strategies have to match the social processes around us, or they’ll be irrelevant. And I’m saying the new central dynamic is collapse, which I define as the end of the world of more.
I grew up politically in the anti-globalization movement. One thing we said was: one no, many yeses. You don’t have to coordinate between struggles; everybody fights where they are, and together we have an anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist effect. Now I think we need to adjust to a reality where we don’t have the luxury of not coordinating or making decisions. We need to triage. More and more huge fucking problems are gonna come down the line. Fascism is gonna become more powerful, environmental problems are gonna escalate. We need ways of organizing where we can actually talk to each other and say, hey, we’ve got these resources to fight the fascists, you’ve got those resources to prepare for catastrophe. Which catastrophe is more likely? Which will cause more injustice? Let’s put our resources there.
I don’t know what type of organization will emerge. I do know that the modes of organization we’ve used for decades were appropriate to another age, an age that has ended.
AA: I could imagine there’s probably a sector of the mainstream climate movement that might see you as defeatist, with your language of the climate ship has sailed?
TM: Well, basically, I don’t think we have any real points of leverage to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The last few decades have shown that. But this is not about giving up. It’s about continuing the struggle. The less your strategies are adjusted to reality, the more they’re based on magical thinking, the less useful you are—and the more bullshit you’re gonna do and the more frustrated you’ll become with people doing the real hard work.
If you think you just need to point a pane of glass at the sun and everything will be fine, you might not be my ally. But if you believe the most important thing we can do now is create powerful, resilient communities that aren’t in hock to the fossil fuel industry, then let’s talk.
AA: You’ve presented a vision that is both very dark about what is happening to the world, especially the rich countries, and also very inspiring about the social action we can and should now do. What kind of evidence would change your mind about collapse, climate majorities in the Global North, and so on?
TM: If I saw a genuine decoupling of economic activity from ecological destruction, I might change my mind about capitalism. If I saw real pushback in rich societies against fascism—not just turning out for the odd rally, but the ‘silent majority’ actually standing up for those the fascists target. If I saw US society responding to ICE killings before they started killing white people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti—if I knew the names not only of the white folks killed by ICE, but all of them. If I saw governments around the world coming together to press pause on a whole bunch of insane, destructive processes.
AA: Talk about your feelings and how coming to terms with your feelings was critical to arrive at these new insights and to move forward with your new plan.
TM: When I realized the things I’ve just said—that we were defeated, the climate movement was defeated, the climate catastrophe was coming—I fell into a deep, deep depression. And in that sense, it’s a warning to people. The path I’m suggesting has its pitfalls. Confronting the reality of how shit things are can really bowl you over. And one important point is: do that with other people.
I’ll tell you when the turning point came for me, when I found meaning in catastrophe. It was in the autumn of 2000, when at a Pride March, a steward was attacked and beaten to death by a right-wing assailant. That was a deeply shocking moment. And out of that came this idea that, okay, no matter how catastrophic things are, if the fascists are attacking my community, I want to organize the self-defense of my community. Fighting Nazis to defend my community is not an idea that gives me happiness or joy, but it gives me meaning and a function. It tells me who I’m gonna be when that shit happens. It isn’t the sense that we’re gonna win all these struggles, but that in these struggles I know who I will be, or who I want to be, and with whom I will be there.
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