Who Survives and Who Does the Work

On warehouse fires, Molotov cocktails, and the unpaid labor that holds the world together when everything else falls apart

In the span of five days in April 2026, a warehouse worker in Ontario, California set fire to 1.2 million square feet of Kimberly-Clark inventory while filming himself saying the words that would ricochet across every platform in the country: “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” Three days later, a twenty-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the man who may be building the machine that makes all of us redundant. The same week, Amazon completed approximately 30,000 corporate layoffs, the largest in the company’s history, while announcing $200 billion in AI infrastructure spending for the year.

These were not coordinated acts. They did not emerge from a single ideology or a unified movement. But they shared a week. And a pressure system. And a question that has been gathering mass for years: what happens when the structure crumbles?

If your instinct is to look at this week and see the beginning of a revolution, I understand. If your instinct is to look at it and see desperate, unorganized acts of individual destruction that will change nothing, I understand that too. Both of those readings are partially correct, and neither is sufficient.

What I want to talk about is the part that almost no one is talking about: collapse is gendered. It has always been gendered. And if we do not name that, clearly, loudly, and now, then the people who bear the cost of structural failure will, once again, be the people who were already doing the most invisible, uncompensated, and essential work.

The Model That Won’t Stop Being Right

In 1972, a team of MIT researchers published a systems dynamics model through the Club of Rome, known as Limits to Growth. It simulated five interacting forces: population, industrial output, food production, resource use, and pollution, on a finite planet. The model projected multiple scenarios, and two of its three core pathways showed industrial civilization entering overshoot and decline within the twenty-first century.

The model was widely mocked. It was called alarmist, simplistic, ideologically motivated. And then reality kept tracking its projections.

In 2020, Gaya Herrington, then Director of Sustainability Services at KPMG, published an update in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology comparing the World3 model against fifty years of empirical data across ten key variables: population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint. Her conclusion: the current business-as-usual trajectory is heading toward terminal decline of economic growth within this decade, and at worst, could trigger broader societal collapse by around 2040.

A 2025 recalibration by Nebel et al., using vastly improved data and computing power, reached the same qualitative conclusion: the overshoot and collapse mode persists. Industrial output begins its decline in the mid-2020s. Population follows in the mid-2030s.

Herrington was careful to note that “collapse” does not mean extinction. It means that economic and industrial growth stops and then reverses, degrading food production and standards of living. The people don’t disappear. The structure does. And that distinction matters enormously, because it forces us to ask: when the structure goes, who catches what it drops?

The Gendered Architecture of Collapse

The answer, across every historical precedent we have, is women.

This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable, documented, and repeated pattern.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, women bore the brunt of the adjustment. As living standards fell throughout the 1990s, women worked long hours in the informal economy while maintaining the full range of household duties. Their wages, which had been 70 percent of men’s in the late Soviet era, dropped to 40 percent by 1995. Social protections that had supported women’s participation in the formal economy eroded as budgets went unfunded. Medical care deteriorated. Domestic violence increased. The birth rate dropped to 1.25, well below replacement, because women could not afford to reproduce in an economy that had failed them. Researchers at the World Bank documented what they called “the feminization of poverty in Russia,” concentrated among single mothers and elderly women living alone.

But here is the detail that doesn’t make it into most accounts: while men experienced what researchers called the “biggest psychological impact” of the collapse, a surge of alcoholism, stress, illness, and death that dropped male life expectancy by nearly five years, women organized. They formed networks of resource sharing and emotional support. They seized control of failing collective farms. They built the informal care economy that kept families and communities alive while the formal economy disintegrated around them.

This is not a story about women’s resilience as a virtue. It is a story about women’s labor as an uncompensated structural subsidy.

The same pattern repeated during the 2008 financial crisis. The same pattern repeated during COVID-19. McKinsey found that women made up 39 percent of global employment but accounted for 54 percent of overall job losses during the pandemic, driven in large part by the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work. The World Economic Forum documented that the pandemic reversed years of progress on gender parity in labor force participation. The OECD found that unpaid household work performed by women, if properly accounted for, represents between 15 and 69 percent of GDP depending on the country and methodology, an enormous economic contribution that remains structurally invisible.

Every crisis follows the same script. Institutions contract. Services disappear. And women absorb the cost, in unpaid caregiving, in informal labor, in physical and emotional toll, while the accounting frameworks that measure “recovery” don’t even register what they’re doing.

This Week’s Fires and What They Illuminate

Chamel Abdulkarim, the warehouse worker who allegedly set fire to the Kimberly-Clark distribution center, was making somewhere around $18 an hour. He was employed not by Kimberly-Clark directly but by NFI Industries, a third-party logistics company, a layer of corporate abstraction designed to externalize risk and suppress wages. He had a previous wage complaint in a class-action lawsuit against a former employer. He carried a credit card debt of under $3,000 that had gone to collections. He compared himself to Luigi Mangione.

His act endangered twenty coworkers, required 175 firefighters, blanketed a residential neighborhood in toxic ash, and will result in a prison sentence of ten years to life. Kimberly-Clark will file an insurance claim. NFI will hire replacements at the same rate or lower. Nothing structural will change.

The Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman’s house landed four days after OpenAI published a 13-page policy blueprint proposing robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and four-day workweeks, not as a response to violence, but as pre-IPO positioning for a company approaching a trillion-dollar valuation. Altman posted a photo of his husband and baby and asked for de-escalation. The policy paper, whatever its merits, was authored by the company most responsible for accelerating the displacement it proposed to cushion.

What no one asked, in any of the coverage, in any of the commentary, is what happens to the women in these stories. Who is caring for Abdulkarim’s family while he faces federal charges? Who are the warehouse workers, disproportionately women, who staffed the overnight shift and are now unemployed because their workplace burned down? Who will absorb the caregiving load when Amazon’s 30,000 layoffs hit families where both partners were working to stay afloat? When AI displaces the administrative, customer service, data entry, and human resources roles that women disproportionately occupy, who catches what falls?

The fires illuminate what is already burning: a system that has externalized its costs onto women’s bodies and women’s time for so long that the ledger is invisible.

What Collapse Actually Looks Like (And Who Does the Work Inside It)

If the Limits to Growth trajectory is approximately correct, and five decades of empirical data say it is, then what we are facing is not a single dramatic rupture but a grinding process of institutional erosion. Supply chains become less reliable. Public services contract. Wages buy less. Infrastructure deteriorates faster than it gets repaired. Institutions lose legitimacy. The distance between what the system promises and what it delivers grows until the gap becomes the defining feature of daily life.

We are arguably already inside this process. The fires and the Molotov cocktails are not the beginning. They are symptoms of a system that is generating more pressure than its release valves can handle.

Inside that process, women become the unpaid infrastructure of continuity. This is not because women are “naturally” more nurturing or communal or resilient. It is because the gendered division of labor—the expectation that women will perform caregiving, household management, emotional labor, community maintenance, and informal economic activity, means that when formal systems fail, the work doesn’t disappear. It is transferred to bodies that were already doing it.

This is the feminist analysis that collapse discourse almost universally lacks. The preppers talk about stockpiling ammunition. The accelerationists talk about burning it down. The techno-optimists talk about robot taxes. Almost no one talks about who will be raising the children, feeding the elderly, tending the sick, and holding communities together while the systems that were supposed to do those things evaporate.

And until that question is centered, every conversation about collapse, revolution, and what comes next is incomplete.

What Actually Works: Building Structures That Don’t Replicate the Extraction

If you’re reading this and feeling the pull toward action—good! That’s the correct response. But the kind of action matters enormously, and history is brutally clear on which kinds produce durable change and which produce martyrs.

Individual acts of property destruction are asymmetrically costly to the person who commits them and trivially absorbed by the institutions they target. Abdulkarim will spend decades in prison. Kimberly-Clark will rebuild. The twenty coworkers are out of work. No demands were made, no concessions won, no organization exists to follow up. The catharsis was real. The strategic value was zero.

What actually scares capital, what has always scared capital, is organized, sustained collective action that imposes ongoing costs that cannot be absorbed by an insurance payout or a PR campaign. Strikes. Unionization. Supply chain disruption. Tenant organizing. Consumer boycotts with teeth. These are the mechanisms that built the eight-hour day, the weekend, workplace safety standards, and the American middle class. They work because they create leverage at the point of production, and they endure because they build organizational infrastructure that survives any individual action.

But a feminist analysis adds something critical: the alternative structures we build must not replicate the gendered extraction of the systems they replace. If mutual aid networks depend on women’s unpaid labor to function, they are not alternatives, they are miniature replicas of the problem. If cooperative economics models don’t account for care work as real work, they will reproduce the same invisibility. If community resilience depends on “women’s natural” capacity for emotional labor and relationship maintenance, it is not resilience, it is exploitation with better branding.

This is the hard part. And it is where feminist analysis becomes not just relevant but essential.

Mutual Aid That Accounts for Care

Mutual aid networks have a long and powerful history, from the Black Panther breakfast programs to ACT UP’s response to the AIDS crisis to the explosion of community support networks during COVID-19. The Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) has documented feminist economic realities across the globe: women farmers in West Africa building agroecology movements, the Usha Cooperative in India founded when banks refused services to sex workers, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi building community land trusts and cooperative ownership. These are not utopian dreams. They are operating systems.

The key principle: care work must be visible, valued, and equitably distributed within any alternative structure. Time-banking systems that count an hour of childcare as equal to an hour of carpentry. Cooperative governance that explicitly addresses the gendered distribution of organizational labor. Mutual aid frameworks that don’t assume women will do the coordinating, the cooking, the emotional holding, and the follow-up while men do the “real” work of strategy and logistics.

Food Sovereignty as Feminist Practice

If food production declines, as the Limits to Growth model projects, then food sovereignty becomes a survival issue, not a lifestyle choice. Community gardens, seed libraries, cooperative agriculture, and local food distribution networks are not quaint. They are infrastructure. And historically, women have been the backbone of subsistence agriculture and food preservation worldwide. A feminist approach to food sovereignty means ensuring that this work confers power—decision-making authority, land ownership, economic return, rather than being treated as invisible domestic labor.

Financial Resilience Outside of Institutions

Community land trusts, cooperative housing, credit unions, lending circles, and solidarity economy models all offer alternatives to institutional dependence. LGBTQ+ communities have practiced these forms of collective economics for generations—shared housing, pooled resources, rotating caregiving, out of necessity, when institutions excluded them. These are proven models. They work. And they must be built with gender equity embedded in their governance, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Political Power That Starts Local

If federal institutions lose capacity, and they are already losing capacity, then the governance that still functions will be closer to the ground: city councils, school boards, county commissions, mutual aid collectives, union locals. Women are underrepresented at every level of political power, and this underrepresentation becomes more dangerous as the locus of functional governance shifts downward. Running for local office, supporting women candidates, and building political infrastructure at the community level isn’t just good politics. It is collapse preparedness.

The Tipping Point Question

People keep asking: are we past the tipping point? Is this the beginning of the revolution?

The honest answer is that tipping points are visible only in retrospect. We cannot know, standing inside this week, whether the warehouse fire and the Molotov cocktail are the opening acts of a structural transformation or the kind of desperate, unconnected eruptions that a failing system produces periodically without changing course.

What we can know is this: the model says the trajectory bends. The data confirms it. The question is not whether the structure changes, but who shapes what comes next.

If we leave that question to the people who are currently building the machines that displace us, they will answer it with policy blueprints designed to preserve their position. If we leave it to individual acts of rage, it will be answered with prison sentences and insurance claims. If we leave it to the preppers and the accelerationists, it will be answered by people who have never once asked who does the dishes.

The feminist answer is different. It starts with naming the labor. It continues with building structures that value it. And it insists, loudly, unapologetically, and without apology, that no vision of what comes next is credible if it does not center the people who have always held the world together when everything else falls apart.

That’s us. That has always been us. And it’s time we built for it on our own terms.

References and Further Reading

Herrington, Gaya. “Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 Model with Empirical Data.” Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology, November 2020.

Meadows, Donella H., et al. The Limits to Growth. Universe Books, 1972. Published by the Club of Rome.

Nebel, Arjuna, et al. Recalibration of the World3 Model (2025). Confirms overshoot-and-collapse trajectory with updated parameter sets.

McKinsey Global Institute. “COVID-19 and Gender Equality: Countering the Regressive Effects.” July 2020.

World Economic Forum. “Global Gender Gap Report 2022,” Chapter 2: Gender Gaps in the Workforce.

OECD. “Gender Equality in a Changing World.” 2025. Chapter on persistent gender gaps in paid and unpaid work.

UN Women. “The Global Economic Crisis and Gender Equality.” 2014. Feminist analysis of finance, production, and unpaid care interconnections.

Ashwin, Sarah, ed. Gender, State, and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Routledge, 2000.

McKinney, Judith. Russian Women and the End of Soviet Socialism: Everyday Experiences of Economic Change. Springer, 2019.

Danilova, Maria. Wilson Center interview on post-Soviet transition and women’s experiences. 2020.

Jamestown Foundation. “Russian Women: A Mixed Record.” On the feminization of poverty in 1990s Russia.

NBER. “The Role of Women’s Employment in Recent Recessions.” 2023.

PMC/NIH. “Gender Differentiated Economic Responses to Crises in Developing Countries.” 2020.

ScienceDirect. “Gender Gaps from Labor Market Shocks.” 2023. On the 2.5x amplification of unemployment risk for women with children.

AWID. “Feminist Economic Realities: Building the Worlds We Need.” 2020.

Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Verso, 2020.

Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. 1902.

Gordon Nembhard, Jessica. Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State University Press, 2014.

OpenAI. “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” April 6, 2026.

IMF Staff Discussion Note. “Women, Work, and the Economy: Macroeconomic Gains from Gender Equity.” 2013.

— feministreclamation.com