It feels like the world is heading towards collapse. The signs are all around us: the climate is unravelling, fascists are rising, war has returned to Europe, and a genocide is taking place in front of our eyes. What felt unimaginable a few years ago now feels inevitable. For many, there is a gnawing sense that we are all just sliding down the drain together. Collectively doomscrolling, not just as a reaction to a single crisis, but already in anticipation of the next one. The hopes that we grew up with – the long arc of the moral universe bending towards justice and the good guys always winning in the end – no longer convince anyone. The meme that has come to define our time is a dog drinking coffee in a burning room, saying “This is fine”. (We all know it isn’t, but what can we do about it?)

Nearly a century ago, Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime, wrote about a similar period of upheaval. In his Prison Notebooks, he described the 1930s as a moment when the dominant order had begun to decay, yet no new force had emerged to take its place. It birthed monsters: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Gramsci was writing in the wake of the Great Depression, after the laissez-faire capitalist order had cracked and the communist horizon had dimmed. Fascism was filling the void; war and genocide soon followed. These were not just chaotic times – they were transitional times, when the old system held on with increasing violence while a new world struggled to be formed.

More than a transition, today’s world feels like a spiral without end. With the climate crisis looming over everything, there is no hope of something good emerging from all this bad. Our interregnum does not feel like a bridge between worlds; it feels like a mudslide.

Our interregnum does not feel like a bridge between worlds; it feels like a mudslide.

But Gramsci would not object to the pessimism taking hold of us, provided it helps us to fight for a better world. Imprisoned by his enemies, with his body failing and his comrades in retreat, Gramsci wrote his famous line: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” It is a posture not of denial, but of resolve. If we expect the worst, we can prepare for it. If we face what is coming, we may still find spaces to act, to defend, to reshape – and, perhaps, even to create.

When artist Shepard Fairey put HOPE in capital letters beneath Obama’s face, it captivated the world. It captivated me. I was a student then, standing between the Washington Monument and Capitol Hill on 20 January 2009, the date of Obama’s inauguration. Ten years later, millions of teenagers followed Greta Thunberg – not in a plea for hope, but in a call for action. Today, when I speak to politicians and activists, hopelessness has seeped in. Yet the insistence remains: we must be hopeful, we must offer hope.

We shouldn’t.

Hope, when forced, can become a trap – a reason to wait, and a setup for disappointment. Once we let go of hope, however, we can also let go of hopelessness. Only when we acknowledge that it will not get better do we gain an opportunity to make the most out of what remains. Gramsci’s words were true then. They are even truer now.

The old world is dying

In Gramsci’s time, the old world collapsed almost overnight. The Wall Street crash of 1929 triggered a global depression, sending millions in the US and Europe into unemployment and poverty. People lost their trust in the liberal capitalist system and the political leadership of that time. It was a “crisis of authority”, Gramsci wrote.

“If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer leading but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc.”

What Gramsci learned from that unravelling is that power does not solely rest on coercion; it also relies on consent. When it works, it does not feel like power at all. It feels like common sense. According to Gramsci, hegemony is about assembling a coalition of social forces who believe, or can be made to believe, that the existing order serves their interests. It shapes not only politics, but perception. When that belief breaks down, when consent unravels, all that is left is force.

Our world began to die when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, in 1980, that “There is no alternative” to capitalism, soon followed by US President Ronald Reagan’s claim in 1981 that “Government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem”. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 essay, “The End of History”, argued that events of the late 20th century, notably the collapse of the Soviet Union, were evidence that liberal democracy was “the final form of human government”. Together, the statements of these figures exemplify the “common sense” that has governed for the last decades: markets would bring freedom, globalisation would bring peace, growth would solve everything. Rules would govern the world, and America would lead the way. As a result, society would flourish.

Yet here we are. Not flourishing, but falling apart. The 2008 financial crash exposed the lie at the heart of the neoliberal promise. It had not delivered growth and stability, but speculation, debt, and deepening inequality. When the levees broke, the response was not reform but more of the same: bailouts for the banks, austerity for the many. Since then, one crisis after the other – the eurozone, Covid-19, the cost of living, climate, war, genocide – has chopped away at the consent that people gave to the systems and the leaders that ruled them. What once passed for common sense now increasingly sounds like spin.

This time of converging crises, or “polycrisis”, as historian Adam Tooze calls it, might feel new to us. But in much of the world, a permanent state of crisis has existed ever since Europeans showed up with their muskets and their offer to trade bodies and draw borders. Just as the crisis is not new for much of the world, it is not unexpected for us. The death of our world was prophesied long ago, when Dana Meadows of the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth (1972), showing how complex ecosystems cannot handle endless economic growth and extraction. Some listened to those warnings; many dismissed them as intellectual pessimism that would hinder progress.

As our world buckles under the weight of this polycrisis, the neoliberal system – and those who profit from it – is responding the only way it still can. With the erosion of consent, coercion (and manipulation) has become the primary tool for wielding power. No longer a rules-based order, but one of might-makes-right. Those who dare to protest the violence done to people and the planet are arrested. Evidence of destruction and inequality is dismissed as a lie. And instead of solutions, we’re offered scapegoats such as migrants and other minorities. The old world is dying, but it’s making one last powergrab, before it takes us down with it.

Trump’s first weeks in office offer a vivid representation of this. Palestine solidarity protestors were arrested and threatened with deportation. “Woke” universities lost much of their federal funding. Critical journalists were barred from access to the White House. Those who took part in the 6 January 2021 violence were pardoned. Loyalty tests were enforced across federal departments. NATO partners like Canada and Greenland (Denmark) were threatened with invasion. The global economy was slapped around with the threat of American tariffs.

This is state-capitalist geopolitics, where economic levers such as tariffs are no longer used to serve markets, but to protect regime-aligned capital. It’s illiberal rule, instead of liberal democracy: overriding the separation of powers and democratic integrity using the guise of majority rule. It’s a presidency acting like a cartel boss. India, Hungary, Israel, and others are moving in similar directions. Courts are sidelined, dissenters punished, and public wealth funnelled toward political allies. Power by coercion.

The world that struggles to be born

Collapse is not the end of history – quite the opposite. In Gramsci’s time, the Wall Street crash triggered a radical shift in “conjuncture” – a term Marxists use to refer to the political-economic relations of a specific time in history. Fascists rose to power in Germany and Italy, while left movements entered government in France (the Front Populaire) and the US (the New Deal Democrats). After the destruction of World War II came what the French called the trente glorieuses: 30 years of shared prosperity under a mixed economy, where both labour and capital reaped the benefits. It was also the beginning of the Cold War, and of the end of colonial empires, as global power was restructured along new lines.

Collapse brings a period of realignment. It doesn’t guarantee something better, but it does create openings. The old order weakens, and what comes next depends on who can build a strong enough coalition. That’s true for those clinging to power – and those trying to take it. In the interbellum, just as now, fascists could not seize power alone. They required the support of financial capital and conservative elites as much as they needed to rally the misogynists and racists among working- and middle-class folk.

Collapse brings a period of realignment. It doesn’t guarantee something better, but it does create openings.

Hegemony, just like the climate, is a delicate ecosystem. When Dana Meadows warned us about the environmental risks of growth, she explained that ecosystems have tipping points – moments when pressure builds, feedback loops kick in, and collapse accelerates. Our economic, political, and social systems aren’t so different. Hegemony can seem solid until it suddenly isn’t. Alliances break. Narratives collapse. Interests realign. Power vanishes. The question is whether we know where to push – where to tip the balance.

In recent years, the idea of “social tipping points” has gained traction in movements like Extinction Rebellion. One popular claim within the movement is that if 3.5 per cent of the population join a sustained protest, it will succeed. Whether or not that figure holds up, the logic is compelling. Could 3.5 per cent of us threatening to switch banks or boycott brands – especially those backing fossil fuels or dismantling diversity programmes – be enough to shift behaviour? Could 3.5 per cent walking away from Big Tech’s hold on our digital lives and towards common alternatives start to crack platform monopolies? One thing is certain: in these crisis-ridden times, people are gaining an appetite to hit back at powers that act without our consent.

Some powerful actors might want to start pushing with us. In the interregnum, interests are shifting. What was once a certain opponent could become a reliable ally (and vice versa). “We the people” might suddenly even include unexpected factions of capital. Faced with the financial risk of climate collapse, insurers are now raising the alarm and pension funds are changing their investments – not for moral reasons, but because their portfolios can’t survive another decade of business as usual. Geopolitics, too, is reshuffling: decades-long rivals are now running in each other’s arms, pushed by Trump’s antics and tariffs.

Embracing pessimism

This is where strategic pessimism matters. Not to be able to say “I told you so” and not to sink into despair, but to gain collective agency in times of crisis. The 21st century is not going to be a return to normal. It’s going to be a rolling disaster: economic, ecological, political, psychological. Many of us already know this, even if we don’t know how to carry it. Now is the time to act in a way that expects it. To dare to look deeper into the abyss of collapse and assess its risks and opportunities.

Hope, when detached from reality, becomes a liability. It turns too easily into denial. What we need isn’t more false hope and recurring disillusionment, but the kind of grounded resolve Gramsci described: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Strategic pessimism is where the two meet. Organised pessimism is about coming together and bracing ourselves collectively for tomorrow’s crises.

Such pessimism is not just an intellectual posture – it is a practice. It means organising not only for victory, but for fallout. Not from the hope that things will get better, but from the knowledge that they won’t. We know these crises will not be good for us. But they will reshape the terrain, create new openings, new necessities and new pressure points, new contradictions and new problems, and new coalitions. That means rethinking how we act.

Hope, when detached from reality, becomes a liability. It turns too easily into denial.

We don’t know all the answers yet. We don’t have a map that shows us how to navigate these morbid times and compounding crises. But we need to start building our strategies on the basis of this impending collapse, instead of holding onto hope.

As crises deepen, the powers that be will assert themselves more and more through coercion instead of consent. They are not even nearly done with extracting everything they can from people and the planet in order to increase their power and profit. Much of the damage is already irreversible. But when our conjuncture opens up new opportunities, we should be ready to seize them. When it leads to more collapse, we should be prepared. But we shouldn’t be shocked or surprised because we were still hoping for something better.

Only if we accept that the world is falling apart will we be able to build a new one.