Social Movement Appreciation Project
In our rapidly destabilising world, it's clear that nothing will get better without large numbers of people working together. But social movements remain mysterious and under-studied creatures: the Social Movement Appreciation Project aims to shine a warm and loving light on today's many efforts at collective agency and system transformation.
Social Movement Appreciation Project
What is Kollapscamp
Collapse – what’s the pitch?!
Kollapscamp was a summer gathering of 900 people in Brandenburg, Germany. It has clear roots in the climate movement, but represents a very novel tendency within – or break from – that movement. The key shift being an assessment that some level of societal upheaval is now unavoidable (thanks in part to world leaders’ failure to limit carbon emissions), and that this has deep implications for all our movements’ strategies going forwards.
The German ‘Just Collapse’ scene is one of several independently emerging scenes in Europe – but it’s the first to run a camp! The programme spanned a broad range of collapse-type classics: from the stereotypical ‘hard’ skills like martial arts and first aid training, through to emotional work, at least one very cool ‘organising in a crisis’ scenario training, and panels on/from specific issues from ‘Internationalism in Collapse’ to British flood management (see next episode). Plus all the usual and essential off-programme action of meals, parties, and formal and informal networking.
If that sounds like a lot: it was!
I sat down with Scully, one of the camp’s two key organisers, to discuss the ideas and intentions behind the camp.
We cover:
Quick intro from me on the broader context of collapse politics
Why Kollapscamp?
Ambitions for building up networks
Building Collapse as a movement
Who’s turned up to KC
How Collapse relates to climate movement strategies
Building alternative economic structures
The content of KC
The reality-breaking outcome of How to Defend a Pride March
How KC relates to the UK’s Deep Adaptation
Snippets:
‘We won’t find the button to save the world or making everything perfectly fine again, so we have to deal with things getting worse’
Tadzio Mueller's ultimate collapse pitch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODlnqPvpv8
Kollapscamp’s programme:
https://kollapscamp.de/en/program/
End music from a spontaneous performance at Les Résistantes by what I think was La Criée, a feminist choir Montreuil in Paris. Embarrassingly I don’t know the name of this song but will update when I have it!
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