Faith in Collapse. Marx, the Politics of Doom, and Prudence as Antidote.

There are few sentences in political thought as confident as those Karl Marx wrote in 1859, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… Then begins an era of social revolution.”

In these spare lines, Marx condensed his philosophy of history into an iron law. The great drama of human societies, he claimed, unfolds not through moral persuasion or divine will, but through the necessary collision between material forces and social structures. Capitalism, by its very dynamism, would generate contradictions so acute that they would destroy it from within. The end of the old order was inevitable; the only uncertainty was the date of its funeral.

That claim of inevitability was an act of transfiguration. It replaced the theological drama of salvation with a secular one: the apocalypse of history. The dialectic, not Providence, would redeem mankind. Within this wager lay a new kind of faith: the conviction that history’s meaning is revealed through collapse.

Even after the ruins of Marxist states, that metaphysical faith survives, now diffused through the rhetoric of modern crises. Open any newspaper: we are told the planet has twelve years left, that artificial intelligence will soon surpass its makers, that capitalism is devouring both the biosphere and the soul. Each alarm has empirical substance, yet the tone is unmistakably eschatological.

Each alarm has empirical substance, yet the tone is unmistakably eschatological.

The vocabulary of catastrophe—tipping points, singularities, extinction—echoes Marx’s promise of an inescapable end. The political imagination, unable to trust in deliberation, in Popperian piecemeal reform, has sought refuge once again in the consolations of doom.

The political imagination, unable to trust in deliberation, in Popperian piecemeal reform, has sought refuge once again in the consolations of doom.

This faith in collapse is not merely an inheritance of Marxist determinism; it is a modern form of an ancient temptation. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn chronicled how, in times of unrest, millenarian sects across medieval Europe fused economic grievance with apocalyptic prophecy. The poor and dislocated, seeking justice, were promised a final convulsion of history that would sweep away the corrupt and inaugurate the Kingdom of the Righteous. Each crisis was a sign of the coming purgation; each prophet, a herald of the end. Marx’s narrative replicated that structure with secular precision. His proletariat inherited the mantle of the elect; the bourgeoisie became the Antichrist; the final judgment was the revolution.

Yet what distinguished Marx’s vision from older prophecies was not its content but its form. He re-dressed millenarian longing in the language of science. The apocalypse became “dialectical necessity.” The revolution would no longer descend from heaven—it would arise from the self-destruction of economic relations. This scientific apocalypse, as Raymond Aron later could have called it, endowed despair with rigor. It was not a relief more than a simple prediction: if collapse is inevitable, then the burden of choice is lifted. The agonizing responsibility of prudence, reform, and compromise yields to the serenity of destiny.

It was not a relief more than a simple prediction: if collapse is inevitable, then the burden of choice is lifted. The agonizing responsibility of prudence, reform, and compromise yields to the serenity of destiny.

Marx’s critics have long pointed out that his determinism was as much rhetorical as theoretical. The Communist Manifesto, which proclaimed that “what the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers,” was not an academic treatise but a call to arms, a political pamphlet designed to turn fatalism into energy. The prophecy of inevitability was itself a tool of mobilization. The paradox is instructive: the revolution required believers in collapse to make it happen. The myth of historical necessity was a political instrument from its inception.

The myth of historical necessity was a political instrument from its inception.

That instrument has proved durable. Whenever societies lose faith in the possibility of reform, the old Marxian structure—crisis, necessity, redemption—resurfaces. From fear, the idea of collapse becomes hope: the purification of a world too corrupt to repair. In our own time, the apocalyptic idiom has migrated into environmental and technological debates, where it functions as moral posture.

The climate movement, for instance, has often oscillated between stewardship and prophecy. The 2018 IPCC report, a meticulous study of probabilities and emissions targets, became in the popular retelling a countdown to planetary extinction: “twelve years to save the world.” What had been a policy horizon turned into a secular Judgment Day. The nuance of scientific uncertainty gave way to the absolutism of revelation. To warn became to prophesy; to doubt became to sin.

This dramatization of crisis has political consequences. It turns deliberation into emergency, and emergency into justification for extraordinary measures. “I don’t want your hope,” said Greta Thunberg. “I want you to panic.” Her plea captured the moral purity of youthful revolt—and also its peril.

Panic, by its nature, suspends debate. Once the situation is defined as terminal, compromise becomes complicity.

Panic, by its nature, suspends debate. Once the situation is defined as terminal, compromise becomes complicity. The same logic animates the radical edge of environmental thought: in Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), ecological sabotage becomes the rational corollary of apocalypse. If the end is certain and imminent, law itself becomes an obstacle to salvation. The Schmittian “state of exception”—the moment when ordinary rules are suspended for the sake of survival—returns, now clothed in new colors.

The same theological form governs the new religion of technology. In the writings of Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the “longtermist” movement, humanity stands at the threshold of a “singularity,” where artificial intelligence will either deliver immortality or annihilation. The vocabulary is metaphysical. Recursive self-improvement replaces the dialectic; machine consciousness replaces the proletariat; the apocalypse becomes digital. The faithful, gathered in research institutes and venture funds, labor to avert the coming judgment through their own priestly rituals—alignment protocols, value learning, safety labs. The moral arithmetic of longtermism elevates this vision to cosmic scale: preventing a one-in-a-million extinction scenario is declared more important than alleviating any suffering in the present. Thus the concrete injustices of the machine age—exploited data labor, surveillance, bias—are eclipsed by the contemplation of an infinite future. Once again, the politics of prudence is displaced by the metaphysics of destiny.

To see the continuity between these secular creeds is to recover what Burke and Aron, each in his century, understood: that the most seductive substitute for politics is prophecy.

To see the continuity between these secular creeds is to recover what Burke and Aron, each in his century, understood: that the most seductive substitute for politics is prophecy. Burke, writing against the revolutionaries of 1789, warned that abstractions armed with moral fervor are more dangerous than tyrants. His defense of “the little platoons” of society—the habits, institutions, and affections that bind people to one another—was realism. A state, he wrote, “without the means of some change, is without the means of its conservation.” He did not oppose reform; but he opposed the intoxication of finality.

Raymond Aron, facing the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, made the same argument in a different idiom. The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) diagnosed Marxism as a secular religion that abolished prudence from politics. Its power lay not in its economics but in its eschatology: the conviction that history itself had a side. That belief, Aron wrote, “permits the justification of all infractions in the name of the correct ideology.” The true task of the intellectual, he insisted, is not to foresee the end of history but to think within it—to remain, as he called himself, a “committed observer.”

Both Burke and Aron recognized that the idea of collapse is not neutral; it is the emotional foundation of despotism.

Both Burke and Aron recognized that the idea of collapse is not neutral; it is the emotional foundation of despotism. The moment politics is defined as an emergency, sovereignty seeks its savior. Carl Schmitt captured that temptation with chilling clarity: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The history of revolutions—Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s vanguard, Mao’s Cultural Revolution—reads as a succession of men claiming the right to decide when law must yield to necessity. Each justified the suspension of liberty by invoking the imminence of salvation. The logic endures wherever catastrophe is proclaimed absolute.

The contemporary faith in collapse thus serves both psychological and political functions. It flatters despair, offering meaning to disillusionment; and it authorizes control, concentrating power in the name of survival. The cost is always the same: the erosion of prudence, that unheroic virtue which sustains free societies through uncertainty.

But to resist this fatalism is not to deny the gravity of our crises. Climate change and artificial intelligence are real and formidable.

But to resist this fatalism is not to deny the gravity of our crises. Climate change and artificial intelligence are real and formidable. But they require precisely what apocalyptic rhetoric forbids: negotiation, adaptation, compromise, innovation—the slow arts of politics. “The idea of a final solution,” Aron warned, “is the negation of politics.” So is its emotional twin, the hope for collapse.

The alternative is what Burke called “the politics of prudence,” a politics that accepts imperfection as the human condition and deliberation as its remedy. True prudence is not timidity; it is courage under uncertainty. It asks us to govern without guarantees, to reform without illusions, and to act without prophecy.

The danger is not simply that Marx was wrong about capitalism’s crises (and he was very wrong), but that he taught us to find in crisis a substitute for conscience. Doom remains an intoxicant polarizing agent because it promises purity without responsibility, clarity without politics.

Marx believed that history’s contradictions would one day free us. The tragedy is that his faith in collapse still imprisons us—in our environmental rhetoric, our technological fears, our appetite for apocalypse. The danger is not simply that Marx was wrong about capitalism’s crises (and he was very wrong), but that he taught us to find in crisis a substitute for conscience. Doom remains an intoxicant polarizing agent because it promises purity without responsibility, clarity without politics.

To resist the politics of collapse is not to deny the gravity of our crises; it is to preserve the very possibility of freedom. Climate change and artificial intelligence demand action, but action rooted in deliberation, not prophecy — in prudence, not panic. True prudence, as Burke called it, is the “conciliating, arranging, cementing virtue,” the courage to act amid uncertainty and the patience to manage imperfection. Its opposite is the apocalyptic reflex that mistakes fear for clarity and fatalism for moral insight.

Every age faces the temptation to exchange the burdens of politics for the comforts of destiny — to see in catastrophe a kind of cleansing, in collapse a counterfeit grace. Yet the dignity of politics lies precisely in its endurance of imperfection, in the unending labor of reconciling freedom with necessity.

To surrender that endurance for the illusion of inevitable ruin is to mistake history’s weight for its mercy, and to trade the hard discipline of freedom for the soft sleep of fate. ◳