Beyond Reform or Revolution

2026-03-11

Reform

Well, you should have voted harder

Existing systems are for the most part good enough, but some tweaks are necessary to their operation. In other words the concept or structure remains untouched, but the execution or realisation requires changing. Messing around too much with the underlying structure could:

be too risky or untested, whether or not it seems like a good idea
be unnecessary, since the fundamental idea is fine it's only the execution which needs to be changed
be desirable, but too impractical or out of reach.

Change can be brought about at the top level by those working within the government, charity organisations, the media, and through small lifestyle choices by individuals.

Revolution

A spectre is haunting Europe

The issues seen by the reformist are not simply accidents which can be tweaked as we see fit, but results produced by the underlying systems (seen here to be the political and economic layout of society). In order to eliminate unwanted outcomes, tweaks to their implementation will not work, because the political and economic layout of society will continue to reproduce those same outcomes on a broad scale. Since those in power are entrenched within those structures, it is necessarily against their interests to work against them. Therefore fixing these issues will require a possibly violent overthrow of those in power by a mass of people. That mass of people are not seen as being also entrenched within those structures, or as somehow being on the "other side" of those structures. History can be seen as a totality of these kinds of events, where the political-economic structure has been overturned by the people on the "other side", who then assume the position of the position of new ruling class, progressing history forwards each turn. Executing this kind of overthrow requires the collective action of a mass of people, which itself requires the "organising" of that mass.

Collapse

The world will not be 'saved'

Like the revolutionary, the underlying political-economic systems are inseparable from the negative outcomes which present. For the revolutionary, the focus is placed on the exploitation of a social class, and that social class's overcoming of it's exploitation. For the collapsist however, the focus is shifted away from the tension or contradiction within the social-economic sphere, towards ecological, geographical, and energetic contradictions. Within this framework, it's not human social groups who will be pushed past their limit and fight back, but the world itself outside of the social which will be and is being placed under tension with the social-economic forms which are transforming it. It's not always that the ecological world will itself collapse, but rather that it will be pushed into a formation which then causes the very forces which pushed it to themselves collapse, no longer being able to function without the environment they relied on. Often this is considered in conjunction with revolution, that this additional environmental strain will produce a resource scarcity that will cause existing frameworks to become outmoded by some other competing social formation. Collapsists also reject the more traditional revolutionary's history, notably ideas of progress, since any supposed "progress" we have seen has come at the expense of creating the conditions for it's own collapse.

Acceleration

Nothing human makes it out of the near future

While collapsists question historical anthropocentrism, accelerationists reject it altogether. Rather than being determined by human social groups, history resembles a process of cybernetic inhuman natural selection, taking on the form of a multiplicity of positive feedback loops. In traditional cybernetics, positive systems are unstable. Imagine a broken thermostat which keeps increasing the temperature. Eventually, something in that system is going to reach it's limit, the boiler is going to break after a certain temperature, and the system will crash back to 0. This is the view of the collapsist. The accelerationist contends that a cybernetically possitive (cyberpossitive) system could theoretically continue ad infinitum if it had a dynamic morphology, that is if the cyberpossitive system itself were constantly splintering, multiplying, and adapting, the result would be a virulent cyberpossitive system which outcompetes or absorbs every cyberstable system. In practice this creates a convergent temporality in which every accelerating system is seen to be running headfirst towards the same outcome, which is seen to be some future system constructing itself in the past. In this context, anything like "the human" or "the social" is subsumed as nothing more than a side consequence or temporary diversion in this retrocausal construction project. "The only way out is through".

Exit

Let's hide out in the woods until this whole thing blows over

Take as a given that something is majorly wrong with society, whatever that something may be, and wherever it may lead is irrelevant. However it reaches it's end state is irrelevant, the primary goal is to get out from it. Sometimes this is considered as one aspect of strategy for a collapse or revolutionary scenario, and here it is sometimes labelled "parallelism", the notion of building parallel systems which run outside but alongside the existing structures even before they are gone, such that the future society is already there waiting for us when needed. Sometimes it's even considered that parallel systems are necessary as a sort of launch pad for something like revolution to take place. Other times, exit is not so much parallelism, it's not so much aimed at changing society, but merely asking "why put in all the effort of overcoming and supplanting one thing, rather than just going off and making the thing you want from scratch". Even if only a small group can feasibly exit, all the better for that group.