Tribal Anarchy & Action: Lessons For Collapse Without Leadership
Published December 22nd 2025
Edited 17th January 2026
Leadership in Collapse Coaching?, It's All About Trutopian, Collapse Fantasies
'More Than a Mohawk, Why Thrutopian Punks Don't Just Burn It Down"
Feature by Rachel Pryor
Bending The Arc Magazine
Rachel Pryor (MCC 1999 - 2018) is a coach, systemic facilitator and creator of transformative tools that support leadership during collapse and transition
Punk was never a radical counter culture. Claiming it is a crude attempt to overwrite the real counter-culture, out of which leaderless collective grass-roots enviro-anarchism and the Deep Green Resistance were born.
I Have A Problem With Leaders
Anarchy is a philosophy of leaderless organisation, and I have seen it work in small communities. I have seen anarchy bring 1000s of people together to organise and coordinate resistance and the defence of nature in the 1990s.
So, what is "Leadership during collapse" and transition?
"I want to look at what happens when protest matures through collapse, and still doesn’t sell out. I’m a coach, systemic facilitator and creator of transformative tools that support leadership during collapse and transition"
"When protest matures through collapse"
Collapse has become an expression that is bandied about, but not thoroughly thought through. Collapse is a poly-crisis with multiple causes and multiple effects. Fossil fuel carbon and human industrial activity are the drivers, and currently, the frontline of their impact is the Global South. At present, there are, however, hints of what's in the pipeline for the rest of us, but that is not on most people's minds, least of all those people talking about leadership, transition and "utopia".
Thrutopia is that undefined margin between collapse and transition. It's that place where it is forbidden to think the unthinkable.
Every civilisation before this one has collapsed and the process has been messy. This civilisation is possibly the only one to truly understand its predicament. Still, the ruling class would rather go down with the ship than cede anything of their privilege and advantage. Civilisation collapse, political instability consolidated with fascism, is the norm. The Fascist coup in the USA and the enslavement of immigrant workers were entirely predictable and expected. If you are surprised by the cruelty, this is just the beginning.
Civilisation's collapse has primary drivers too. Economic instability and debt occur when industrialised countries go into debt out of fear that their enemy has more weapons than they do. They go arms racing and do proxy wars, all symptoms of a collapsing system.
Overshoot, the climate emergency, rising global temperatures and their impact on our food systems will be profound. Now we are between 1.5° and 2°C. We are in the midst of losing the "Goldilocks" climate niche for agriculture. Increased heat and CO2 are reducing the nutritional value of grain and rice. Increased heat and CO2 are causing rice to absorb more arsenic. Drought, food shortages, and heatwaves at the start of the growing season impact wheat germination and kernel size & weight. A global famine is not inconceivable and is to be expected during a mass extinction event. A global famine could halve the global population. Crop failures, Famine and pandemic are symptoms of terminal collapse.
A global famine will certainly be transformative
Thrutopia is the fantasy that collapse is going to be a breeze led by artists and writers. Thrutopia, as a writing genre about surviving collapse by stepping from one reality to the next as the old system is hospiced is a hopium toke. Inhale deeply, there's not much of that around.
"Collapse is not the end; it's a transition. Communities can adapt, rebuild, and create better
systems."
Source: XReadiness XRs approach to surviving collapse and understanding climate risk.
This Document fails to mention Wet Bulb Global Temperatures and how they kill during heatwaves, and how to survive them. A climate survival manual is missing key data.
When I say we need to talk about collapse, I mean we need to have uncomfortable conversations without being accused of being doomy. These are uncomfortable conversations.
To understand our predicament and what we can do about it during the downwards slide, is to learn survivalism and live survivalism, instead of fantasising that the old system will let us anywhere near so we can hospice it is pure fiction.
The capitalist system monopolises violence and oppression, armed force, MAD & the means of industrial production. It wants you to play the game. Whether you sell mainstream leadership coaching or thrutopian transformative leadership, you are engaging with the system, because leaders are part of the system's hierarchical structure.
Punk as counterculture is mythology, but it never was countercultural; it was a small niche music genre based on shock and a swindle.
Thrutopianism is the new denial of the reality of collapse, because the future is that awful.
The Road protests, reclaim the street were in-your-face rebellion, the likes of which Britain had never seen before. I sat in an interview room as 2 officers asked how much we gave our leader each month, who our leader was, and why we were so secretive! The road protests were leaderless anarchy, mutual aid, mutual respect and a lot of fun.
Dividing the world between 2 opposing philosophical ideas is a device often found in theoretical transformative ideas. It's used in Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)- Leavers and Takers. These ideas are simplistic.
What if there was a completely different approach to collapse? Something really dangerous, requiring every fibre of our being, learning something that fosters an interdependent prosocial approach to life. Something really challenging, dangerous, and ethically sustainable for culture building.
Collapse is happening nowat different rates, chances are we are on the extinction manifest, and if we aren't then our survival in a 4°C world will be a bottleneck. We never evolved for this new climate.
We have a big brain, opposing thumbs, ingenuity, cunning, socialness and the ability to work cooperatively, because it's in our interest to do so from a survival standpoint. Beyond 2°C we lose agriculture, but does that mean we lose food?
That depends on whether we are prepared to learn survival skills now, and I don't mean wishy-washy XReadiness, I mean deeply connected to nature through learning how to survive a collapse and build DiY culture.
Ok But Dont Confuse The Past
Punk was rebellion, and it was in your face, but it was commercial too: Johnson Boots from the King's Road. Worn by rich kids pretending to be punk at public school. Punk sold out fast.
Punk might claim to be DIY, but that's confined to a youth music movement of doing it yourself and the idea that they could make their own music and it didn't matter what it sounded like.
However, it's not the same as DiY culture. "For someone like me—a mid- (okay, late-)thirties academic, with two kids, urban-born and country-raised,
Green Anarchist writer Stephen Booth has observed with some accuracy that, in the Britain of the 1990s, ‘the main area of political dissent and resistance to the state has not been the struggle in the workplace–indeed there has been virtually no struggle there at all beyond tokenistic one-day stoppages, and many people didn't even have a workplace. The main area of dissent has been in the anti-roads movement and in animal rights’.
Not the King's Road or Carnaby Street. Environmental activists widened out by the internationalist perspective offered by Guardian writer John Vidal:
There is increasing evidence that globalism and localism … may be intimately linked, opposite sides of the same coin. The more that corporations obfuscate and lose touch with the concerns of ordinary people, the more that the seeds of grass-roots revolt are sown; equally, the more that governments hand responsibility to remote supranational powers, the leadership loses its democratic legitimacy and alienates people."
Having been in the thick of DiY anarchy, I am increasingly sceptical of the motives of some of the current corners to the green movement today,
Doing something outside of the system is dangerous because it signals noncompliance, and DiY culture is still alive and radical, we didnt sell out, we got old, but we radicalised our children. I'm confused, by the messaging of some activist podcasting on YouTube: Suggesting that middle-aged men with children, interested in how we eat when agriculture collapses are part of the problem, which problem is that exactly? Breeding? overshoot? 300 years of emissions? Not being on the streets demanding government to act?
while imagining we are going to leave a world we could be proud to leave for the next generation. If Ddad's and their kids are part of the problem, why the mantra "A world we could be proud to leave the generations to come"? Because they are our children's children.
Where is Punk now? It sold out to designer clothes from the kings road & Carnaby Street
The Deep Green Resistance is still here, underground.
Collapse doesn't need leaders. It needs people with compassion who can tell it how it is. TELL THE TRUTH is central to XR. Thrutopianism is not telling the truth; it obfuscates the reality of collapse.
Reject learning survival skills ahead of collapse at your own peril "We can learn survival skills from YouTube when we need them" is the most Dunning-Kruger thing I have heard. Much like XReadiness. We look at bits and pieces of survival skills and think we can master them quickly only to be thwarted by inclement weather or not having learned enough of the skill.
You can connect with all my content here https://linktr.ee/SolidarityPrepper
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