It’s actually pretty obvious: the climate catastrophe is escalating, climate collapse has in all probability already begun, all the while fossil fuel infrastructures are being expanded all around the world. More and more people are turning away from climate action, while more and more people, no longer only in the global South, are suffering the consequences of climate chaos.

• Fascism, a permanent social catastrophe, has become a very practical threat to billions.
• The international system is collapsing, the likelihood of armed conflict is increasing and millions and millions of people from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan are suffering from war and inhumanity.
• The next pandemic is bound to hit us soon.

And because all of these crises are intertwined in the ‘polycrisis’, the escalation of one makes it almost impossible to solve the others.

At the global economic level, we are experiencing a radicalisation of capitalist (resource) exploitation, and at the level of everyday life, an increasingly toxic combination of repression, brutalisation and dehumanisation.

The wealthy and privileged are circling the waggons, rights and victories that were fought for and won in the past centuries are being rolled back.

So does that mean that we’re completely screwed, that there’s nothing we can do?

Of course not, because “catastrophe” is precisely the strategic space in which we want to develop new forms of power and agency.

After all, collapse does not mean that everyone just up and dies, it means that what we understand as our ‘everyday life’ is going to become increasingly difficult, even impossible.

If catastrophe becomes more and more permanent, then it is no longer a state of exception, but the new normal within which we now have to locate our justice struggles.

In societies whose understanding of themselves and of the world is increasingly divorced from reality, we need to tell the truth about the climate, about fascism and about collapse – and once we do, we will realise that there are many people who are asking the same questions, far outside of our respective “bubbles”.

We need to prepare for disasters together in order to be in a position to help ourselves and others in an emergency. We need to organise and consolidate the solidaristic impule to help others, an impulse that emerges across time and space whenever catastrophe strikes communities, and to turn it into the basis of a new progressive project: justice within collapse, a kind of climate justice shock doctrine.

It’s important to build, protect and expand spaces of love, light and solidarity, even under these difficult conditions. There are role models and opportunities not to stop at the acceptance of collapse, but to use, politicise and organise it.

Even in collapse, our fight for the best possible world for all doesn’t end, in fact, we need to step it up.

At the collapse camp we will talk, feel, argue, build and make. We want to learn together and from each other how we can act practically in disasters: in the garden and in the street, in floods and in heat waves, in emotional overload and in escalating societal conflicts.

The collapse camp will take place in Kuhlmühle, a progressive collective in a forest right by a lake, between Berlin and Hamburg.

We are putting together a diverse programme for you with numerous practical skill-sharing workshops, discussions, lectures and opportunities for collective emotional work.

• We want to connect existing structures and further the development and expansion of communities and solidarity networks. Present your projects!
• We organise ourselves and take responsibility together, sharing the work (chopping veg, tidying, cleaning, awareness).
• We create a fun place where we answer the darkness of the world with our love and our solidarity.