🪦 The Elite Death Project: Why Capitalism Is Choosing Collapse
Capitalism is choosing collapse. This is not failure — it is the death wish made systemic.
Every day the political class announces another initiative, pledge, roadmap or “ambitious target.” And every day, the material reality moves closer to total collapse. At some point, we must confront a simple truth: the elites are not failing accidentally — they are participating in a death project. They are driving a system that destroys itself, destroys life, and destroys the conditions for civilisation, even when warned by their own institutions and scientists.
This is not just incompetence. It is not even simple greed. What we are witnessing is something deeper and more pathological — a mixture of elite degeneration, the death wish, and a civilisation unable to confront its own end. This piece gathers my recent reflections on why elites refuse to act, why capitalism is running toward its own destruction, and why the outcome is now structurally revolutionary.
Do we want a place in this miracle?
We live in a universe – do we want a place in this infinite miracle?
Do we want to stand for life?
Do we want to live rather than die?
Because at this point — to repeat a million times — we have become revolutionaries. Not in the neoliberal performative identity-bollocks way.
But actually, literally revolutionary.
Even Colombian President, Petro Gustavo, put it plainly:
“I know that decarbonisation requires a transformation on a global scale, a revolution. But it must be undertaken if humanity is to live on for millennia, or even millions of years, in the universe.”
Reality is no longer ideological.
It is existential.
As COP30 drew to a close, the decisions before me were difficult, and I believe I made the right one, grounded in humanity and in the defence of life, which is the guiding purpose of my political project for a renewed progressivism in the world.
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) November 25, 2025
The climate crisis exposes the…
Gustavo's Full Statement after COP
The death wish: why elites act against their own survival
The biggest misunderstanding in the world is that people act out of material self-interest.
No.
Many people want to die — and want the world to die with them — because they hate themselves and they hate life so much. This is the death wish. It is supported by a century of psychoanalysis, social psychology, and history: under existential threat, societies often choose self-destruction over transformation.
Assemblies must be presented with the evidence of this:
- Freud’s theory of the death drive (Thanatos), first set out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, describes a recurrent human impulse toward self-destruction and repetition even when it leads to harm.
- Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, showed how modern bureaucratic and technocratic elites often develop necrophilic tendencies — an emotional attachment to control, abstraction and death rather than life.
- Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death demonstrated how societies cling to failing “immortality projects” — states, economies, ideologies — even when defending them produces real mass death.
- This insight is reinforced by decades of experimental work in Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon), which shows that under conditions of heightened mortality awareness people become more authoritarian, more aggressive and more willing to support destructive systems, even against their own material interests.
The repeated historical pattern of elites knowingly destroying the very systems they depend on — from late Rome to pre-revolutionary Europe to today’s fossil economy — fits this psychological picture far better than any rational-actor model. What we are seeing is not rational self-interest, but the death wish operating at a civilisational scale.
Why else do capitalists knowingly act in a way that will destroy capitalism?
Gunther Thallinger of Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, spells it out: “The financial system as we know it ceases to exist and capitalism ceases to be viable at 3°C.” A few years ago, I sat down with a director of E3G — a leading climate think tank. Privately, he admitted that the “death project” will destroy the British state. Publicly, he would never say it.
Yet elites continue to accelerate the trajectory toward 3°C.
This is not rational self-interest.
It is civilisation-wide self-destruction.
Damian Carrington
Here's an example of such elite madness: Heathrow’s third runway. The news last week is that it will finally be built by 2035.
Just as the world hits 2°C.
Just as the global economy collapses.
Just as flying becomes impossible.
But don’t worry — there will be a “full public consultation by July next year.”
This is the death wish as public policy.
Gwyn Topham
Even the weather becomes a crime, not a climate
The Irish example illustrates this perfectly. This week, the Irish Refugee Council described government plans to place new obstacles in the path of refugees seeking permanent asylum in Ireland as “deeply alarming.” These moves, flagged by justice minister Jim O’Callaghan, come in the wake of the UK’s newly announced crackdown on asylum applications. In recent weeks, both the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have also hardened their rhetoric, stressing that Ireland must not become an “outlier” within Europe when it comes to accepting refugees.
The unspoken assumption behind all of this is clear: that migration will always be inwards — that Ireland will remain a place of relative safety, while others flee collapse elsewhere.
But this assumption is historically naïve and scientifically reckless.
Ireland’s own history is defined by forced mass migration. After 1845, around two million Irish people fled famine and destitution in just a single decade. Liberal politics likes to treat that as ancient history, something that could never happen again.
But it could — and on current trajectories, it very likely will.
What is barely discussed in Irish political life is the growing risk of a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the massive ocean current that carries heat from the tropics northwards and gives Ireland its temperate climate. Iceland, Sweden and Denmark now openly treat this risk as an existential national security issue. Iceland has formally designated a potential AMOC collapse as a direct threat to the nation.
Ireland, by contrast, relegates it to a footnote.
Yet the science is stark. A growing “cold blob” of fresh meltwater between Greenland and Ireland — caused by accelerating ice loss from Greenland’s glaciers — is disrupting the ocean conveyor. The AMOC has already weakened by around 15 percent, and multiple studies suggest we may be approaching a tipping point. More than 40 international climate scientists have warned that a shutdown would have “devastating and irreversible impacts” across the North Atlantic region.
For Ireland, this would not mean gentle cooling. It would mean rapid temperature drops, the collapse of grass-based agriculture, food shortages, mass livestock culls, superstorms driven by extreme temperature gradients, and potentially months-long semi-frozen conditions. In short: the destruction of the material basis of Irish society.
In such a scenario, millions of Irish people would likely be forced to migrate in search of survival — just as their ancestors did.
And this is the crucial point.
NO, a big freeze would NOT make the Irish “climate refugees.”
They would be victims of an elite-imposed death project — a crime.
Climate is not the murderer.
The elites are.
Climate is the knife; the murderer is the one who uses it.
Decades of political choices — continued fossil fuel expansion, deliberate delay, systematic underinvestment in resilience, and the refusal to act proportionately to scientific warnings — would be what destroyed Irish livelihoods and forced people to flee. Calling that “climate migration” is a moral evasion. It disguises agency. It hides culpability.
This is why John Locke — the idol of the liberal order — justified rebellion against rulers who destroy life. When governments knowingly enact policies that make survival impossible, they dissolve the social contract themselves.
The bitter irony is obvious. Politicians who today posture about “getting tough” on migrants may find that, within a generation, Irish people themselves are knocking on locked borders — wondering who exactly will welcome them.
These are not abstract future questions. They are the logical endpoint of the death project already under way.
John Gibbons
The numbers don’t lie: it’s over 2°C and rising
Here is the most important news in the world right now, from the godfather of climate science, James Hansen:
“The goal to keep global warming under 2°C is now implausible.”
The cost of closing the gap using carbon capture is $2.4–5 trillion per year,
and rising beyond reach. This fact is more important than Trump, more important than COP, more important than any diplomatic process happening today.
It is the mathematical announcement of collapse.
James Hansen
The Iron Law of History
David Lammy’s move to remove the right to trial by jury for thousands of cases is being sold as a technical fix to a technical problem. The courts are clogged. Backlogs are huge. Victims are waiting years. Defendants “game the system.” Something, we are told, simply has to be done.
But this is how the iron law of history actually works. It always presents itself as an administrative necessity, never as a political choice.
Here is the pattern, in four steps.
- The rich get richer because they’re already rich.
Over decades, wealth concentrates. Power follows wealth. This is not accidental; it is the normal functioning of capitalism. - That wealth concentration makes elites powerful enough to stop paying taxes.
Through avoidance, exemptions, deregulation, and political capture, the tax base erodes. The state is deliberately starved of resources. - Which means the state can no longer afford to provide social support or administer justice properly.
Courts are underfunded. Judges are overstretched. Cases pile up. Victims wait years. Defendants rot on remand. Everyone experiences “justice delayed,” because the system has been hollowed out by design. - Which makes people so angry that…
Revolutions happen that destroy the wealth of the rich — because they were pathologically greedy (and dumb).
What we are seeing with jury trials is step three being misdescribed as step one.
The government claims criminals are “laughing in the dock,” exploiting jury trials to delay justice. But this narrative carefully avoids the obvious question: why is the system so broken that justice takes four years to deliver? Why is there a backlog of nearly 80,000 cases? Why are judges demoralised, courts under-resourced, and victims abandoned?
The answer is not juries.
The answer is power.
Rather than taxing wealth, rebuilding public institutions, and restoring the material basis of justice, the state does what late-stage states always do: it removes rights from ordinary people to compensate for elite failure.
Jury trials are not being abolished because they are unjust. They are being abolished because the state no longer has the capacity to sustain them — and refuses to confront why.
This is why 90% of the Criminal Bar Association opposes the change. This is why racial justice groups warn of increased miscarriages of justice. This is why public trust will collapse further. When the state cannot deliver justice, it redefines justice downward.
Jessica Elgot
And history is merciless here.
When states stop administering justice fairly, legitimacy collapses. When legitimacy collapses, people stop consenting. When people stop consenting, repression increases. And when repression increases, revolutions follow — not because people are radical, but because the system leaves them no other route.
Elites always think they are being pragmatic at this stage.
They always say the “stakes are incredibly high.”
They always promise this is temporary, proportionate, unavoidable.
They are always wrong.
Because what they are actually doing is sawing off the branch they are sitting on. The dismantling of jury trials is not a solution to crisis — it is a symptom of terminal decline.
This is how revolutions happen.
Just Do It
The greatest liberal delusion is the idea that pathological power doesn’t exist.
This was on display again at COP30, where we were told that if governments just keep existing promises on renewables, energy efficiency and methane, nearly 1°C of warming could be avoided. Bill Hare summed it up perfectly: "the targets have already been negotiated, they just need to be put into practice."
Just.
As if elites are well-meaning people who have simply not got round to saving the world. As if thirty years of delay were a technical glitch. As if fossil capitalism is waiting politely to be implemented out of existence.
No.
The elites are not failing to act.
They are refusing to act — because the system rewards refusal.
The targets are not new. The science is not new. The technology is not missing. What is missing is conflict with power. And that absence is not accidental.
Liberal climate analysis treats power as an inconvenience, something to be “managed” or “negotiated.” But pathological power does not negotiate itself away. It captures states, disciplines politicians, and ensures that promises substitute for action.
If elites genuinely intended to deliver these targets, they would already be confronting the fossil fuel industry head-on. Instead, they expand oil and gas, approve airports, and celebrate another round of pledges.
“Just do it” is not realism.
It is denial.
The elites are not paralysed.
They are choosing destruction — and the liberal refusal to acknowledge that choice is part of the problem.
Fiona Harvey
CONCLUSION: Revolution or Death
If you follow the logic of all this — the death wish, elite degeneration, intentional refusal, mathematical inevitability of warming — then only one conclusion remains:
The elites will not save us because they cannot save themselves.
Capitalism will not survive because it is choosing not to.
At this point, we have become revolutionaries.
Not because of ideology.
Not because of romanticism.
Because reality itself has become revolutionary.
The system is ending.
The only question left is whether we participate consciously in shaping what comes next — or are dragged into catastrophe by elites who would rather die than change.
For more of my take on the liberal class, you can grab my book, 50 Articles The Media Wouldn’t Publish, which brings together six years of blog posts, prison notebooks and essays from the founding of XR to the last year in prison. It's now available straight from the Rev21 Shop, so no Big Tech or Amazon involved in getting you your radical texts...!
Already, rebels around the world have picked up 200 copies, with every purchase helping spread Rev21's work.
📕 Here’s how you can get a copy of my books:
- Free copies for paid subscribers: All paid subscribers to Roger's blog can receive a free ebook. Download links are at the bottom of this post or on Roger's books page. Thank you for being so supportive! (If you have any problems downloading, email us)
- Print copies for Revolutionary Members: If you donate £20 or more, print copies are now finally available! Sign up to receive your copy. First posting has just begun!
- Or buy it! If you’re a free subscriber, you can grab it here.
- If you know reviewers, journalists, academics, or fellow organisers who should read this book, get them a copy or pass on the links. Personal recommendations are powerful.
If you need any help with this, you can always email us at roger@rev21.earth, and I or one of my team of volunteers will slowly get back to you ❤️