24 Comments

I suspect that upon close analysis, most major historical events would turn out to be a polycrisis. Weather turns bad, crops fail, hunger increases, social divisions intensify and a revolution breaks out. Variations on this happen over and over, but we usually choose a simplified version for easier digestion.

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For the most part I agree but I feel you have omitted one critical set of actors -- multinational corporations. I think one could argue that for the half century or so after World War II, MNC's were the principal actors and nation states/superpowers were largely facilitators. I think part of what is driving the identity crisis of powerful states is the extent to which their raison d'être has been usurped by MNC's and part of the escalation is in opposition these actors.

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Allow me to focus on the narrow proposition that none of the three major powers (at least in military terms), namely, US, China, Russia, can feel it has time on its side.

Arguably the situation is instead one in which the strongest and hence, typically, status quo power can feel it has time on its side relative to the revisionist powers.

In terms of demography (uncontroversially), global military reach (most probably, in particular, control of sea lanes) and productivity growth (probably but more controversially) the US enjoys better prospects than China, while Russia does not even remotely compare.

This would explain how the US apparently feels it can take on Russia and China simultaneously (instead of having to seek to divide them). It would also suggest that Russia and China feel they need to accelerate their attempt to overthrow the post-Cold-War status quo. This is almost self-evident in the case of Russia: in every domain the country is bound to be weaker in ten years than it is now. The case of China is more controversial. There are however clear signs that Xi Ping feels that Deng’s strategy of gaining strength while maintaining a low profile has run its time.

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Unapologetically, I’ll stick with a Marxist analysis that attributes each of your ‘Polycrisis’ to a putrid capitalism divested of any resources beyond the drive to create absurd wealth for a tiny, tiny minority at the expense of all, even themselves. That includes China, a state monopoly capitalist formation that mirrors its Stalinist predecessor. Disparagement of a ‘grand unified’ position seems like one more avoidance of the obvious, one more example of academia scrambling to provide excuses for not addressing the necessity of class struggle to bring about the end of capitalism.

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I find the concept useful as a summation of the overdetermined (Althusser) interaction of the multitude of social, economic, natural, political, ideological and other processes that produce the current (constantly evolving) moment. Identifying processes as "crises" that merit analysis as defining features of the whole - i.e., the "poly's", is the challenge. Nationalisms seem to result from the intensification of poly crisis at the same time as they seem to blur their transnational natureand lead to knee jerk simplification that is the breeding ground for the lurch to fascism.

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While similar confluences of crisis have occurred in history: Plague of Justinian (collapse of empire); Black Death (collapse of European social structures), our current polycrisis involves massive changes in climate ratcheting up the volume on everything else. William Gibson predictively described this as, “The Jackpot,” in the Peripheral.

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The problem is that any real reform would necessarily infringe upon entrenched interests.

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Over intellectualizing as you have done here, is a core problem that you have missed in the analysis of your “poly crisis”. The world is always in some kind of poly crisis. You seem to be creating new language to explain away and almost forgive the liberal imbeciles that have governed since the Wall collapsed. Credit Crisis. Covid. Climate Change. All hysterical liberal conceits that are fundamentally massive errors of judgment, and intellectual failure. Reinstall empirical rigour in the academy, instead of the low standards over the past 40 years, and our poly crisis might abate to the usual existential poly crises we’ve had over the centuries.

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Nov 1, 2022·edited Nov 1, 2022

This is basically re-inventing the wheel. Karl Marx historical materialism and its key elements - nature, technology, labor, society, social relations, the state and mental conceptions of the world along with dialectic interactions between these elements is theoretically covering any of the listed aspects of polycrisis. Besides, contrary to what the article says, marxist theory of crisis never has been a monistic theory of crisis. Crisis of capitalism is many-faceted - it is always a mixture of overproduction/underconsumption combined with over-accumulation and disproportionality.

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"What is characteristic of the current moment, and symptomatic of the polycrisis, is that the decisive actors in Russia, China and the United States, the three greatest military powers, are all defining their positions as though their very identities were on the line. "

Because the US wants/intends to force change in Russia and China, their identity is on the line.

The desperate, unyielding and powerful belligerence of the US is an existential threat to Russia and China.

Only if US identity is defined by its domination of the world is the US identity threatened.

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Highly relevant to this is the consensus statement "An Urgent Need for COP27: Confronting Converging Crises" (https://www.stsforum.org/racc2022/pdf/statement.pdf). The statement is by 22 eminent scientists, arises from a Symposium in Kyoto at the beginning of October, is in press for Sustainability Science, and will be presented at a side-event in the Japanese Pavilion at COP27 on 8 October.

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Seems to me that this is a Panchreston.

Nice try but doesn't really help.

For the rest - keep on trowing ideas and facts to us the readers

GG

Belgium

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Seems like it’s pretty simple, although, ironically, the definition I attempt below may sound convoluted.

Poly crisis is the overdetermined sum of multiple identifiable crises. In other words, the intersection and thus feedback loops of a plethora of social, geo-political, economic, cultural, military, environmental, and other events and processes, with some more determinative than others in a particular (overdetermined) conjuncture. The mistake is looking for an essential driver - e.g. the “falling rate of profit,” “overproduction” or “over-accumulation,” if, in fact, one or more of these concepts are valuable at all as a final analysis “cause.” Identifying the “spark” that turns a particular conjuncture into a world historic one, e.g., world war, global depression, GFC, is therefore endogenous to the poly crisis. The only certainty in all of this is uncertainty.

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On one level, I feel inclined to agree with Tim below -- "most major historical events turn out to be a polycrisis." Events are usually overdetermined, the world has been global for longer than we typically think, culture and economy are always mutually implicated. (And imbricated! English is fun.) Perhaps it is even the nature of crisis itself to be 'complex' enough to have no singular (linear) cause or fix.

On the other level, I think history exists; and there is a reading of what is happening here which our Chartbooker nods to -- is it perhaps the scale of development which has changed the nature of crisis. I know I just said that 'we have always been global,' in the way of Graeber who loved writing about this. But perhaps there is a horizon -- defined ecologically, maybe, or economically, or at the intersection of the two -- which we have surpassed, which dramatically lowers the threshold at which one crisis begets another, or becomes global. You may also define this horizon in terms of certain characteristics from network theory.

An appealing way of thinking about this horizon from me comes from Marx via David Harvey, in terms of how capital deals with the falling rate of profit.

https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/david-harvey-michael-roberts-michael-heinrich-and-the-crisis-theory-debate/

One of the main ways it does this is by just expanding, e.g. primitive accumulation -- which is hard to do now in the Earth system given how far we've taken development. So instead we get a certain valorization of destruction, which then re-opens areas for capital to seep back into, as in the way that state services are subtracted from urban areas which then recommodified and gentrified etc. We also just get very weird kinds of primitive accumulation, as in commodification of cultural systems, as parts of your behavior which were previously outside commodity exchange enter it -- e.g. gossip, which on Twitter becomes something else.

The ways this point to polycrisis for me are: a) in a money system all commodities are in communication with one another, therefore things are interconnected and a crisis in one part of a system will be more likely to spread domino-wise, and b) the Earth system limits mean that there is nowhere to "put" a crisis. Not necessarily to say that there has ever been a true "away" but you could send someone to a different system, or a part of the system where the Earth could regenerate faster than your problem deteriorated it, etc. Can't do that anymore! Carbon being the easiest example to point to.

Latour has interesting non-definitive things to contribute on either sides of this thinking.

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Feels very much like the idea of the three-body problem - both the famous novel and the actual mechanical problem. The rate of technological change has set too many divergent, potentially clashing problems off on what seem to be independent orbits (your idea that everyone is talking past each other), and there's no solution that doesn't end in collision or rearrangement of the rules of the system. Interesting post - and I will hold back criticism of 'so what' until you post more! Thanks for the post!

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Thank you for addressing the question I posed to you about your usage of a term used in very small circles. However, you did not address your connection to the moneyed NGO Omega which uses “Polycrisis” as a precursor to apocalypse. I see you are quoted on Omega at the newly designed webpage. I recommend all readers go to the current omega.ngo site, read the archived site and watch the associated YouTube videos. What exactly is your connection to Omega? Who are the past and present members of the board? Not the advisory board, the actual board.

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