Contributor Dossier
Oliver F.S. (Virgo Nocturno)
Independent researcher based in Mexico. Chemical engineer and economist. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Economic Sciences. He is a member of the Laboratory for the Study of Transnational Corporations at the Institute for Economic Research (IIEc), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the seed node of Crítica Acelerada. His research focuses on collapsology, critical accelerationism, and the political economy of data.
Substack: https://substack.com/@virgonocturno
X: @virgonocturno
Instagram: @itsolivergnosis
e-mail: [email protected]
Archival Note
The year 1977 marked the beginning of the “No future” slogan that the Sex Pistols shouted in “God Save the Queen” across every corner of the United Kingdom as a protest against the British monarchy, but also as a sign of a political horizon that seemed to have faded away. Later, Thatcherism would co-opt that slogan, incorporating it into the capitalist machinery and transforming it into yet another slogan under the banner of “There Is No Alternative.” That was the framework for everything that was lumped into the “neoliberal” box—which is nothing more than an economic program geared toward unrestricted free trade, coupled with minimal state intervention. Because there was no alternative other than the anarchy of capitalist competition.
The engine of infinite production devoured formal subsumption and expelled real subsumption
In the decades that followed, that program infiltrated and shaped not only the economic sphere, but also the political and cultural spheres. As Frederic Jameson noted in The Seeds of Time (1994): “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”—a point later taken up by Mark Fisher and Slavoj Žižek to show that capitalism had subsumed even our political and existential imagination. That was the diagnosis.
The future ceased to be a promise.
It became a repetition.
Capitalism had left the past behind.
It controlled the future.
From there, it directed the present.
There is no alternative:
Capitalism or death.
It all seemed to boil down to: “It’s easier to talk about the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Or so they said…
In the 21st century, those suspicions and intuitions began to gain greater critical mass, as the multiple crises we are currently facing—ecological, economic, energy-related, technological, geopolitical, and social—have transformed what for a long time seemed like a philosophical intuition into a genuine research problem.
The system’s many configurations and deviations seem to point toward a return to the fundamental foundations of existence.
We see, then, that labor is not the sole source of the use-values it produces, of material wealth. Labor is the father of material wealth […] and the earth is its mother.
Karl Marx, Capital
The impasse of contemporary society can no longer be reduced to “crisis” as a catch-all category—that concept that once seemed capable of accounting for everything. Perhaps it is precisely this inadequacy that explains why, from very different fields of research, another word has begun to gain traction: collapse.
It is time to step out of our comfort zone.
But what exactly are we talking about when we speak of collapse?
That is the starting point of this special issue.
I. Introduction
A certain flexibility has emerged regarding what precedes the word “crisis” as a way to describe any emergency within capitalism: financial crisis, energy crisis, ecological crisis, migration crisis, social crisis, economic crisis, and so on and so forth. It has become a catch-all term for a recession lasting just a few months—an intellectually convenient category for describing the increasingly inhospitable conditions for living in certain parts of the planet.
It’s not that the definition of the word “crisis” is false. It has fulfilled the criteria for naming certain phenomena. In medical terms, a crisis opens up a field of possibilities and options for recovery. We cannot deny the capitalist machinery’s capacity to turn any event or existence into a zone of valorization. That capacity to reorganize itself—to deterritorialize and reterritorialize—remains intrinsic. The history of this system attests to the perfect machine of action: crises are a mechanism through which the system renews its conditions of accumulation.
But if today we are stuck in the “There is no alternative” mindset, it is precisely because this phrase is no longer sufficient to understand current problems.
Today, it is impossible to understand the problem of water scarcity in certain areas of the Global South without recognizing its connections to large transnational corporations that evade environmental regulations in countries where government laxity is a prerequisite for securing a small slice of the pie of windfall profits. To this we can also add the effects this has on the local market, as well as the population displacement that water scarcity can cause.
No problem exists in isolation.
Each one amplifies the others.
The problem has taken on a new level of complexity. It is no longer enough to identify a single crisis among the many that exist.
It is at this point that one of the most powerful tools regains its relevance: language.
The term “collapse,” once confined to cinematic and doomsday imagery, has been liberated to find its way into the realm of research. The word “collapse” should not be reduced to either the dystopian or the messianic.
In this initial approach, Crítica Acelerada does not intend to make abrupt ethical judgments. Rather, it aims to map out the current state of the system. We do not intend to demonstrate that collapse is inevitable, nor do we seek to defend yet another variation of the doomsday narrative.
Discussing collapse implies, above all, questioning whether the conceptual apparatus through which capitalism has historically interpreted its transformations is still sufficient to explain the contemporary world. Such a question precedes any empirical diagnosis, insofar as it is an ethical judgment.
Before assessing whether collapse will occur, we must consider whether we are thinking about a different reality through categories and concepts inherited from another regime.
Our goal is to reconstruct the conceptual problem that drives us to speak of collapse today.
But what exactly are we talking about when we speak of collapse? Is it a metaphor, a prediction, a political concept, or an analytical category capable of describing the transformations of the 21st century?
At first glance, we sense that the answer depends less on the fate of capitalism than on our ability to understand the nature of the historical era in which we live.
II. The Insufficiency of the Crisis
For nearly two centuries, capitalism found in the word “crisis” one of its most effective categories—not only to describe interruptions in accumulation, but also to explain trade wars, depressions, technological transformations, geopolitical reorganizations, and new spaces of valorization.
That is why it is said that the crisis is not an anomaly of capitalism
…but rather one of its operating mechanisms.
That it was “oozing blood and mud from every pore”
That it is a vampire that drains matter and energy from the organic and inorganic…
The fact that crises destroy capital does not necessarily lead to the destruction of the machinery. Quite the contrary: capitalism needs to destroy capital in order to continue functioning, to create the conditions for a new cycle of accumulation. That is the virtue of this perfectly functioning machine:
The capacity to reorganize after every breakdown
Crisis = the perfect mechanism of violence for recomposition.
Crisis = the capacity to understand
To understand
That there is no alternative
Infinite crisis within a finite planet
The Great Depression gave way to Fordism.
The oil crisis reorganized the industrial landscape.
The crisis of the 1970s engulfed the import-substitution model of the periphery
The 2008 financial crisis accelerated the shift toward the service sector…
…along with the blurring of the lines between “soft” and “hard.”
Each disruption altered the system
It did not call into question its ability to reproduce itself.
It was simply an axiom of capital
It is likely that long before 2026, that axiom would have evaporated once it became clear that the multiple crises were not merely isolated episodes.
The “Great Acceleration” graphs presented by Will Steffen and his team have shown since 2015 that the exponential growth of economic variables—such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)—since the golden age of capitalism is directly proportional to the degradation of the biosphere, ocean acidification, rising temperatures, and water stress, to name a few examples.
Source: Steffen et al. (2015).
The graphs speak for themselves. Inflation can no longer be understood solely through the lens of monetary policy, because there is an energy crisis—and a pending transition—that cannot be separated from the global geopolitical realignment. That soil erosion and the increase in polluting gases disrupt agricultural production. That this disruption leads to urban sprawl, which increases incentives to migrate; that this, in turn, is the raw material that fuels processes of militarization. That militarization reorganizes global supply chains. That these supply chains are served by military, technology, and financial corporations.
Each process alters the conditions of the next
These are feedback loops
An architecture of interdependencies
It erodes economic stability
It undermines the possibility of isolating what we are trying to explain
What happens when the very language we were using to map the present is no longer sufficient?
This is no trivial question. If the system continues to accumulate capital while simultaneously destroying the material, ecological, institutional, and social conditions of its own reproduction, then perhaps we are not simply witnessing a crisis more extensive than previous ones. Perhaps we are facing a phenomenon whose logic can no longer be described using the relics of the past. Because it is not enough to simply state that we are living through “an unprecedented crisis.” Every generation tends to describe its present in those terms. Nor is it enough to compile environmental or economic indicators.
More evidence does not resolve a conceptual problem;
It is a simplification of a particular reality under certain conditions.
It is not the whole picture.
What is at issue is not only the gravity of the events, but also the explanatory power of our concepts and categories.
III. When “collapse” reappears
Those linguistic units are transhistorical
They do not emerge from the brain-system through spontaneous order
They are not static.
They are individuals that come and go
They are born, they die…
They are zombified
They return when entropy increases
When information defies existing categories
The word “collapse” remained on the margins of the social sciences for much of the 20th century. There was no need to even think about it beyond describing the fall of ancient civilizations.
While “cookbook economics” could not even formulate a theory of crisis, Marxist political economy became embroiled in debates between orthodox and heterodox schools regarding the analysis of capitalism through the category of crisis; it ventured a bit further to theorize about a systemic collapse—a theory that lost its validity years later as capitalism demonstrated time and again its capacity for survival. Meanwhile, the other social sciences analyzed the effects of capitalism—even before understanding how it functioned—to discuss processes of modernization, development, institutional change, and much more.
The reason was simple:
The acceleration of climate change
The loss of biodiversity
Increasingly extreme weather events
The hollowing out of democracies
The tyranny of transnational capital
Crises of overproduction and accumulation
The intentional weakness of the financial system
Endless and insufficient talk of crisis
A transhistorical category that is already obsolete
Finally: thinking systemically.
Suspicions
Intuitions
Catastrophism?
The end of technological Prometheanism?
Chronicle of a death foretold?
“Collapse” as a way of designating divergent realities
Crises that feed off and reinforce one another: the quagmire
There is no future in an anthropocentric society that already thinks from the future: incompatible
The message reads:
Reproducibility of society = negative
Under what material conditions does it continue to exist = positive
Mitigation or adaptation
Collapse:
Problem of social complexity
↓
Problem of complex systems
↓
Biophysics
↓
Within capitalism
If capitalism represents a particular historical form of organizing production, then the concepts and categories used to study the decline of previous civilizations do not apply. The capitalist civilizational project is driven by the accumulation of capital. Understanding how it functions is key to avoiding the reduction of its dynamics to mere institutional frameworks or the apparent rationality of textbook economics. Capitalist society is not a civilization trapped in an endless cycle of rises and falls.
Capitalism is a society organized by production and for production. It is a form of social organization shaped by the machine as the criterion for efficiency, profitability, effectiveness, well-being, and success in human existence. It is here that we would question the extent to which free will—or human agency—exists within capitalism. Complexity compels us to begin decentring the subject from the object. This ultimately leads us down the same path:
Capitalism nonetheless depends on the constant transformation of its own conditions of existence. In this sense, what exactly would a collapse entail for a system that survives thanks to constant crises?
The main question is not whether capitalism can collapse.
Using the most obvious logic:
How can we talk about collapse when capitalism continues to produce more technology, more artificial intelligence, more infrastructure, and greater profits? It is an endless crisis, a prison in which all forms of existence are in perfect balance.
Everything seems to point to exactly the opposite:
The machinery continues to expand.
Anthropo-capitalocentric conclusion:
Everything will be fine.
There is no collapse.
Equilibrium no longer consists of suppressing the crisis;
It consists of managing it indefinitely.
Capitalist neo-vampirism continues to believe it can drain Gaia indefinitely.
That is the problem…
…within the problem.
That which survives through chaos
begins to erode the very conditions that made that chaos possible.
The higher singularity that has always surrounded us.
Geotrauma emerges: capitalism’s condition for survival.
Collapse is not the end.
It is a specific form of movement.
There is no opposition between reproduction and destruction;
they operate in coordination—
simultaneous moments of the same logic.