Why do 'smart' people make it so difficult to understand their ideas? Too many references to other people and their theories and jargon here. Who is the intended audience? I feel it's not me
It’s not even about audience, it’s just jargon. It is a utopian and egoistic and arrogant assumption to believe that all people have the same background. Even among quote on quote experts there is no homogeneity in educational backgrounds. Second thing, there is an evident overuse of complex syntax and language which devises completely the purpose of the message. This is just a self celebrating exercise of style. Sometime “experts” are so trapped in their own mini bubbles that they are blind to reality. P.s I think that even though I understood a good 90% of the reading and I also agree in part with the notions he discusses, matter of fact I find some of them brilliant. Regardless, I still find this gothic style of writing useless.
I'm with you. We're being told here that we are facing a crisis of such huge proportions that a new word has to be added to the English language in order to describe it, and so we need to start calling it "polycrisis." Never mind it is simply a technical term which academics can use to fight each other over. Why can't they discuss these issues in common language with the wider society in which they live? Isn't this something everyone should be discussing? If not, why? But if so, why is a crisis of such proportions simply a place to 'reinvent sociology' instead of trying to figure out, not only how society can provision itself against catastrophe (to use such an obsolete word), but also -- and more importantly -- how to get to such a political state where we could actually do so? In other words, what about practice? In the face of real catastrophe we need to be practical, above all. Is catastrophe not the issue we are facing? My first impulse is that involves steeping ourselves in learned lessons -- experience of how to prepare for catastrophe is key, and history has many lessons. If I'm wrong, please tell me, but I'm of the persuasion we are better served by what we already know about survival right now, rather than what we might learn exclusively in the future.
I also take issue with Tooze's theory overall. What was so "groundbreaking" in the nineties that wasn't already "groundbreaking" in the seventies? I would argue not much, the great theoretical waves of the 90's seemed only to be relitigating battles lost the decade before, and Tooze seems to be arguing that he simply wants to relitigate them again. The year today is 2025, and he can't see that our problems have only accelerated since the left discovered 'antifoundationalism?' We can't relive that mistake again, particularly if Tooze is right about the catastrophe we face, and I think he is.
To put it simply, Tooze has not made a strong case that the theories he has brought up, Historical Materialism as one example, need to be replaced with something entirely new. It's hard to escape the feeling academia has abandoned the society which they initially sough to enrich, and to be left to feeling the only thing that seems certain these days is there are no "authorities" who can be turned to in order to deal with increasing societal-wide structural problems. To make it even shorter: markets can't deliver, and "the left" can no longer answer.
I'm just a retired English professor of very little brain. So I want to ask a stupid question. I get the possibility of catastrophe. What about the possibility of either muddling through or even a good outcome?
This was an interesting article. Thank you. I am not an economic theorist and much of the terminology in this article is inscrutable. Nonetheless, I would like to hear a more detailed explanation of why Marxist economic theory is somehow useless, merely because the contradictions of late capitalism have been raised to unprecedented heights? That seems to be a mere quantitative change when you consider the continued existence of class conflict, wage slavery and concentration of capital. Ultimately, the lack of a Lenin or other Marxists "on the move" as you say is not proof the theory is no longer valid, but rather that since the 60s and 70s a false revolutionary politics often calling itself Marxism was deliberately developed by a handful of intellectuals and promoted to this day in every university in the west. This false revolutionary politics is extremely familiar to all. Using Marxist phraseology and imagery it centers races, the environment, homosexuals, really every possible subgroup as the revolutionary subject while totally abandoning the essential revolutionary class: the wage slaves, under which all other categories are subsumed today. On this point, your idea of centering the environment is really just more of the same 60/70s intellectual subversion of Marxism. Under capitalism, destroying the environment offers the ruling class or the bourgeoisie or the oligarchs (whatever) a tremendous economic benefit. Plastic bottles can be replaced by glass, but this hurts their individual profits, so humanity gets water, wildlife and beaches drowning in dangerous plastic waste. This is only one example where the interests of the bourgeoisie are at odds with that of humanity in environmental terms. There are many more. To center the environment without recognizing the class interests behind it's destruction is to subvert any effective struggle to improve our human environment.
Again, please think harder about Marxism. Your treatment of it in this essay is very vague and gives the impression of dismissing something merely because it's "old". Nonetheless, I agree Marxism should be applied to the new circumstances. Sadly, there are very few intellectuals prepared or willing to do that. Why? The same reason the world is choked with plastic bottles: it's in their economic interest to ignore Marxism and promote a false class consciousness.
I've been thoroughly enjoying your thoughts as of late (do you not bloom with fire? Attacks from PA, attacks on your theories, attacks from your own heart!)
Perhaps you can tolerate one more? Biased, yet perhaps a fruitful intrusion:
The three points you make that outline our current predicament are issues of scale, as in to say, they have always existed (in us) but now they have reached such a magnitude that the very drive which put our species where we are, will also destroy us and/or the rock we float on. We are finding common ground with the type of dog that will eat itself to death if put in front of enough food. Nuances withstanding (especially concerning the wild new horizon that the internet has opened), I find the problem we face, that you have outlined, a very ‘human problem’.
Its not that the tools we have no longer suit the task at hand (Marx, Keynes etc are as useful as ever, Nancy Fraser, and her rebuttal to you, while predictable, is in some way warranted), it would be closer to say, that ‘we don’t fit the tools’ (or to point out again, that theoretical Marxism is not going to in itself stop ourselves eating a whole pantry of dog food).
It should be telling that the sacred cow across all walks of life and disciplines, is that human subjectivity coincides with itself, that a human is like any other object that can be worked and tinkered on (which is why a podcast like yours can run adds for Better Help, and why Joe Rogan’s podcast also runs adds for Better Help. The legitimacy and dogma of western ego psychology is taken as much of a given as the theory of gravity).
The question regarding PA’s attack on you requires a third point, and Varoufakis will do. Are you not somewhere in between? Generally wading in the numbers (a soothing pool), between rigid Marxist theorising (a soothing structure), and engaged political action (a soothing crowd).
As in, where are you Adam? You do not gain peace from theoretical orthodoxy or political heterodoxy. Is that not in the end the basis of the attacks against you? That you are too interesting for a technocratic liberal, so pick a lane?
Varoufakis and Zizek sat down recently, and the spirits being high enough, Yannis felt he could finally corner Slavoj on an issue that had always been a pet peeve of his: Why Lacan?
Slavoj’s answer, typical of his live enunciations, was lacking, though after reading this article I will profer at least a cheeky reply: Why Lacan? To stop Adam Tooze going down an Althussian rabbit hole.
In the introduction to Zizek’s first book he notes that at the time of printing (1989), the primacy of the theoretical rivalry between Althusser and Lacan has been replaced by Focault/Habermas.
If we are now looking back at the 90’s and remember it as a muddled time for theorising, it would seem the same fate has befallen Slavoj himself.
What about Joan Copjec? Did those essays she wrote that were collected in the book “Read my Desire” (1994) that were the death knell for Derrideans/Foucauldians/Butlerians never exist?
To be talking about Althussian overdetermination in 2025 as if Slavoj and friends have not written book after book after book on the nature of subjects/signification seems akin to “rediscovering the long-lost-sport of boxing, and, who is this Mike Tyson fellow?”.
Why are we acting as if theory is still some smorgasbord that we can all pick and choose our favourite flavours from, instead of a body of work, like a genealogical tree, that very much by now has dead branches, and was given an enormous amount of fertilizer in this 90s period?
Your concept of polycrisis seems refreshingly Hegelian (not Marx’s Hegel or Adorno’s Hegel or Kojeve’s Hegel, but the Hegel that came about starting with Gillian Rose and then was cemented with Slavoj, and then furthered by other fellow travellers, of whom I know you are at least tangentially familiar with as you also listen to the ‘Crisis & Critique’ podcast) but what exactly would you like done with it?
Another replier brought up the owl of Minerva, which the Blyth quote always reminds me of: we are always in one way traffic to the unknown, one can only map society/history from the present epoch, a constant kneading and re-evaluation of the past, similar in fashion to how T.S Eliot said we only now 'see what we see in' Dostoevsky because we have Kafka; its a retroactive action (what was in Dostoevsky was never there until Kafka, the future informs on the past, not the other way around).
It should come as no surprise to you then, that this concept is attacked from across the board, from leftists to Niall Ferguson, it is only going to appeal to certain theorists who will now baulk as you tie it to outmoded Althussian ideas (GKK’s work is laudable, but to be harsh, certain aspects (like the ones quoted by you) seem dead in the water by 1996 due to the aforementioned work (and all that has followed in that field since then)).
To cut a long story short, why are you playing with ephemeral concepts such as “society being at loose ends with itself”, when if anything it is us who are at loose ends with OURSELVES, that there is something that enters the signifier (and fixes it/stops it sliding, how else do we all communicate exactly? No, Derrida never had a good answer for this), that ultimately creates our freedom, politics, and societies (Zizek’s first 7 books painstakingly work through this).
You seem to inhabit an odd space: You don’t want to rely on the old but faithful structures, nor do you want to throw the papers to the fire, take the Leninist leap, and form a political party. You seem to be sailing on a vaguely ‘new Hegelian wind’ with polycrisis, but do not take up the general gambit of the Hegelio-Lacanians (myself, my bias), that it is ourselves, our psyche, our ontology, that need to be taken, for the first time in our history, seriously, lest we die like dogs in plentiful pantries. Why would one even expect Marx to help here? The pertinent aspects of Hegel he got wrong, and he died before Freud made his Copernican discovery of the unconscious.
To re-iterate, there is nothing wrong or lacking with the Marxist (or other) tools, but one should not expect them to be of great aid when you are making your timely insights on our predicament (one needs to focus on the THIRD (and most influential) aspect of a human being (nature, nurture(culture), AND THE UNCONSCIOUS).
Or in other words (to finally get to the meat of my criticism), as sublime as your “garbage time of history” power point slide was, unless you are going to do more then dip your toes fancifully into ‘theory’, what is left to you other then to go back to the explanatory structures we already have or start a political movement or continue in your belief in liberal technocratic schemes? I do not forget your repeating of Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables line’ at a conference shortly after the pro-Palestinian camps were wrecked by politicians and police at Columbia, as in to say, if any knowledge, including technocratic knowledge was the answer, had any real legs to it (as everyone from every side continuously bleets), one would not be impotently chiding the riff-raff (I mean this as no insult, it was a genuinely endearing moment).
A tweet you made years ago that made me cringe:
“Annus mirabilis: 1966 saw the publication of Lacan's Écrits, Foucault's The Order of Things, Althusser's Reading Capital and the first volume of Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics”
These thinkers are not compatible with each other, unlike art, they are not all welcome in the same space, they do not all add to the diversity of life (thats not philosophies job, as much its its not the job of physics). Even when I take my line of thinking (Lacan), to celebrate the printing of the Ecrits is akin to celebrating a convoluted engineering manual - it is an almost a meaningless document in and of itself outside those who want to consider themselves experts on Lacan’s most arcane of thoughts (and it is next to unintelligible outside being read between ones first and second readings of his seminars).
Someone as serious as yourself should not see theory akin to how one ranks their top 10 albums of the 60s.
Forgive me, as I understand all that I have said comes close to a stranger rapping on your door at 2am to berate you, and it certainly is not an imposition to “read the same books as I”.
Myself, and many others, follow your writings because you don’t seem to fit into any neat box (not to disregard the quality of said writings of course), and one is always excited to see what you have up your sleeve next.
As said at the start, you seem to, like the native flora of my country, flower from fire.
So take this intrusion as an already burning box of matches.
Hope your recovery is going well, thank you for the heterodox economist series, it certainly filled in some gaps for me, please continue and extend it.
Very pointed comments YF. Sound critique. Most helpful to my own line of intellectual response. I hope this may open a communication channel - as I am (rather slowly) putting together a response to AT. MV
Why move from one corsetted thought pattern to another and to another.
Why not employ common sense basic economics, natural sciences, menschliche Denken/thinking, social interrelationship ideas (not materialistic Hegeluan/Marxian), etc. to arrive at a completely new way of looking at how humanity evolves over time, including major erogenous chocs???
All these ideologies are just overdeveloped intellectual constructs that most often ignore the underlying human being.
Read Jacob the Liar and see real humanity at work.
Maybe I’m simple but we’re seeing nothing new. It’s just the sweep of capital doing its thing - exploiting new markets, reinforcing political structures which serve it, generating environmental externalities, fighting within itself (green tech vs fossil fuels), and - most prominently in high income countries - fusing politics and culture in the form of grievance aggregation.
The past is always unknowable, and the future always bears the possibility of being better or worse. But over the long term, the future has always been better than the past (so far). Why not pose simple questions, like how do we make political decisions that are more likely to make the future better rather than worse? History suggests we have a good chance of success, if we do that.
Yes, environmental issues are more universal than most others that have come in earlier times and pose significant dangers, Yet the world is always looking for more energy and those who best control and use the energy are likely to be dominant. Thus, as usual, everything is interconnected. Those interconnections have to be part of the political calculus. That is realistic, not theoretical.
Translation: Old theories don't work any more (although, if by "work" we mean "give us some comfort that we can explain what's going on around us and some range of probabiliites about where we're headed," they never did before either). We're driving blind. We need new theories to clear the windshield and make us feel we have some visibility ahead of us. But it's all guess work now, and we have to choose. So, let's take the road marked climate change. Maybe that's the main road, the one that can get us through the maze -- the one that lead to who knows what.
The US is no longer in control of the world, in fact it no longer controls the US, though it does still control European politicians.
Economically the world is now dominated by China.
Militarily - by equipment it is Russia, by man power it is China, by vast overspend on F-35s and carriers neither or which have any relevance against hypersonics US has collapsed its own power
Soft Power is all China now.
As a result in order to maintain some credibility it has financed the destruction of the nation of Ukraine, supported an obvious genocide and backed Turkey's terrorist army (largely supplied by the efforts of CIA and MI6 from Xinjiang and other Asian Muslim groups) to destroy Syria,
To anyone looking objectively the US has truly revealed itself as a monster>
This is the crisis - it is a US/Europe crisis. Rest of world is getting on nicely (or will do soon when the likes of Pakistan and SK finally shake off their US dictatorships.
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) totally failed.
Oh I agree - we are seeing an angry loser throwing its diminishing weight around because it knows exactly what it has become. But the "Polycrisis" is actually a Unicrisis for US, the EU countries it controls and its victims.
On balance the world in 2050 looks better to me if Russia and China don't intervene to beat up the dangerous loser than if they do.
No sorry, but your casual devaluation of what older thinkers said because they wrote when CO2 levels were lower is deeply disturbing. William Blake wrote about "dark satanic mills" in 1804, while William Nordhaus (probably the least deserving Nobel Prize EVER) wrote in 2018 that +3C warming was going to shave 2.1% from world GDP.
Modern idiots remain idiots.
And humanity would be much better off if it heeded poets and philosophers (not of the analytical persuasion) and stop giving all the power to economists
We've almost reached the climax of post-1971 financialization/monetization, which contain the assumptions that more money solves all problems and that money is the most impartial and rational rationing tool. Like all serious addictions, financialization won't end until the addict hits bottom. Polyani pointed out that low-wage societies, so useful for outsourcing repetitive tasks, were low-wage because their individual needs were historically met not by money but by collaboration. In the U.S., we are at the other extreme. The risk of not having necessities (healthy food, shelter, education, health care, old-age pensions) is not pooled today but is purposely concentrated on the individual. Necessities and pseudo-necessities (alcohol, nicotine, sugar, caffeine, illegal and maintenance drugs) by nature bring the highest prices and most consistent consumption. Necessities are purposely, or by force of habit, or by incentive patterns, put out of reach of at least a third of the US population. Hence massive frustration and hopelessness. Follow the money! It's been captured and is being held for ransom. Yadda yadda.
It's very difficult to articulate what it is like being caught in this "in-between" moment, but you continue to be the best at sketching its contours. Beyond Marxism and Fascism, beyond optimism and pessimism as traditionally understood, beyond Good and...?
Hope this helps Lizzy. Basically we are talking about the disintegration of a social order. "Critical Theory" classically stated that what ordered it was capitalism. Hence the classics would state that what we are experiencing socially are determinations of the disintegration of capitalism, of the "epoch of capitalist decay" as late classical Marxism announced it 1917-1935.
Tooze appears to say that the concept of "polycrisis" already supersedes the classical "capitalcentric" explanation. However this could also mean that the decay of capitalism produces as its epiphenomena "non-capitalist, post-capitalist" processes that in themselves are inexplicable by the classical logic of capital. As real processes, they react in turn upon "the whole" (a totality we may not grasp at present) so as to decenter capitalism itself. That would be the real meaning of "post-capitalism" and therefore of "post-Marxism".
However I think that such "post-capitalism" does not have to necessitate "post-Marxism". I fall in with Position 2, and see no reason why the thread of this neo-classical Marxism can't be picked up again from where it was dropped at the end of the 1970's, especially as "2008" is a call for its reemergence from a post-structuralist underground.
No more space here, suffice to say that the neo-Marxist concept of "social reproduction", this I interpret to encompass all necessary social processes not reducible to capitalist production, are in themselves, non-capitalist social processes. Capitalism of course "invades" social reproduction, and this generates all sorts of "extra-capitalist" phenomena, of which the climate crisis is one, writ most large.
Finally, we can draw on history for lessons, to say that capitalism itself emerged as a "post-feudal epiphenomenon" of the disintegration of feudalism.
Why do 'smart' people make it so difficult to understand their ideas? Too many references to other people and their theories and jargon here. Who is the intended audience? I feel it's not me
It’s not even about audience, it’s just jargon. It is a utopian and egoistic and arrogant assumption to believe that all people have the same background. Even among quote on quote experts there is no homogeneity in educational backgrounds. Second thing, there is an evident overuse of complex syntax and language which devises completely the purpose of the message. This is just a self celebrating exercise of style. Sometime “experts” are so trapped in their own mini bubbles that they are blind to reality. P.s I think that even though I understood a good 90% of the reading and I also agree in part with the notions he discusses, matter of fact I find some of them brilliant. Regardless, I still find this gothic style of writing useless.
I'm with you. We're being told here that we are facing a crisis of such huge proportions that a new word has to be added to the English language in order to describe it, and so we need to start calling it "polycrisis." Never mind it is simply a technical term which academics can use to fight each other over. Why can't they discuss these issues in common language with the wider society in which they live? Isn't this something everyone should be discussing? If not, why? But if so, why is a crisis of such proportions simply a place to 'reinvent sociology' instead of trying to figure out, not only how society can provision itself against catastrophe (to use such an obsolete word), but also -- and more importantly -- how to get to such a political state where we could actually do so? In other words, what about practice? In the face of real catastrophe we need to be practical, above all. Is catastrophe not the issue we are facing? My first impulse is that involves steeping ourselves in learned lessons -- experience of how to prepare for catastrophe is key, and history has many lessons. If I'm wrong, please tell me, but I'm of the persuasion we are better served by what we already know about survival right now, rather than what we might learn exclusively in the future.
I also take issue with Tooze's theory overall. What was so "groundbreaking" in the nineties that wasn't already "groundbreaking" in the seventies? I would argue not much, the great theoretical waves of the 90's seemed only to be relitigating battles lost the decade before, and Tooze seems to be arguing that he simply wants to relitigate them again. The year today is 2025, and he can't see that our problems have only accelerated since the left discovered 'antifoundationalism?' We can't relive that mistake again, particularly if Tooze is right about the catastrophe we face, and I think he is.
To put it simply, Tooze has not made a strong case that the theories he has brought up, Historical Materialism as one example, need to be replaced with something entirely new. It's hard to escape the feeling academia has abandoned the society which they initially sough to enrich, and to be left to feeling the only thing that seems certain these days is there are no "authorities" who can be turned to in order to deal with increasing societal-wide structural problems. To make it even shorter: markets can't deliver, and "the left" can no longer answer.
I'm just a retired English professor of very little brain. So I want to ask a stupid question. I get the possibility of catastrophe. What about the possibility of either muddling through or even a good outcome?
Muddling through is by far the most likely outcome. And least sexy.
This was an interesting article. Thank you. I am not an economic theorist and much of the terminology in this article is inscrutable. Nonetheless, I would like to hear a more detailed explanation of why Marxist economic theory is somehow useless, merely because the contradictions of late capitalism have been raised to unprecedented heights? That seems to be a mere quantitative change when you consider the continued existence of class conflict, wage slavery and concentration of capital. Ultimately, the lack of a Lenin or other Marxists "on the move" as you say is not proof the theory is no longer valid, but rather that since the 60s and 70s a false revolutionary politics often calling itself Marxism was deliberately developed by a handful of intellectuals and promoted to this day in every university in the west. This false revolutionary politics is extremely familiar to all. Using Marxist phraseology and imagery it centers races, the environment, homosexuals, really every possible subgroup as the revolutionary subject while totally abandoning the essential revolutionary class: the wage slaves, under which all other categories are subsumed today. On this point, your idea of centering the environment is really just more of the same 60/70s intellectual subversion of Marxism. Under capitalism, destroying the environment offers the ruling class or the bourgeoisie or the oligarchs (whatever) a tremendous economic benefit. Plastic bottles can be replaced by glass, but this hurts their individual profits, so humanity gets water, wildlife and beaches drowning in dangerous plastic waste. This is only one example where the interests of the bourgeoisie are at odds with that of humanity in environmental terms. There are many more. To center the environment without recognizing the class interests behind it's destruction is to subvert any effective struggle to improve our human environment.
Again, please think harder about Marxism. Your treatment of it in this essay is very vague and gives the impression of dismissing something merely because it's "old". Nonetheless, I agree Marxism should be applied to the new circumstances. Sadly, there are very few intellectuals prepared or willing to do that. Why? The same reason the world is choked with plastic bottles: it's in their economic interest to ignore Marxism and promote a false class consciousness.
I've been thoroughly enjoying your thoughts as of late (do you not bloom with fire? Attacks from PA, attacks on your theories, attacks from your own heart!)
Perhaps you can tolerate one more? Biased, yet perhaps a fruitful intrusion:
The three points you make that outline our current predicament are issues of scale, as in to say, they have always existed (in us) but now they have reached such a magnitude that the very drive which put our species where we are, will also destroy us and/or the rock we float on. We are finding common ground with the type of dog that will eat itself to death if put in front of enough food. Nuances withstanding (especially concerning the wild new horizon that the internet has opened), I find the problem we face, that you have outlined, a very ‘human problem’.
Its not that the tools we have no longer suit the task at hand (Marx, Keynes etc are as useful as ever, Nancy Fraser, and her rebuttal to you, while predictable, is in some way warranted), it would be closer to say, that ‘we don’t fit the tools’ (or to point out again, that theoretical Marxism is not going to in itself stop ourselves eating a whole pantry of dog food).
It should be telling that the sacred cow across all walks of life and disciplines, is that human subjectivity coincides with itself, that a human is like any other object that can be worked and tinkered on (which is why a podcast like yours can run adds for Better Help, and why Joe Rogan’s podcast also runs adds for Better Help. The legitimacy and dogma of western ego psychology is taken as much of a given as the theory of gravity).
The question regarding PA’s attack on you requires a third point, and Varoufakis will do. Are you not somewhere in between? Generally wading in the numbers (a soothing pool), between rigid Marxist theorising (a soothing structure), and engaged political action (a soothing crowd).
As in, where are you Adam? You do not gain peace from theoretical orthodoxy or political heterodoxy. Is that not in the end the basis of the attacks against you? That you are too interesting for a technocratic liberal, so pick a lane?
Varoufakis and Zizek sat down recently, and the spirits being high enough, Yannis felt he could finally corner Slavoj on an issue that had always been a pet peeve of his: Why Lacan?
Slavoj’s answer, typical of his live enunciations, was lacking, though after reading this article I will profer at least a cheeky reply: Why Lacan? To stop Adam Tooze going down an Althussian rabbit hole.
In the introduction to Zizek’s first book he notes that at the time of printing (1989), the primacy of the theoretical rivalry between Althusser and Lacan has been replaced by Focault/Habermas.
If we are now looking back at the 90’s and remember it as a muddled time for theorising, it would seem the same fate has befallen Slavoj himself.
What about Joan Copjec? Did those essays she wrote that were collected in the book “Read my Desire” (1994) that were the death knell for Derrideans/Foucauldians/Butlerians never exist?
To be talking about Althussian overdetermination in 2025 as if Slavoj and friends have not written book after book after book on the nature of subjects/signification seems akin to “rediscovering the long-lost-sport of boxing, and, who is this Mike Tyson fellow?”.
Why are we acting as if theory is still some smorgasbord that we can all pick and choose our favourite flavours from, instead of a body of work, like a genealogical tree, that very much by now has dead branches, and was given an enormous amount of fertilizer in this 90s period?
Your concept of polycrisis seems refreshingly Hegelian (not Marx’s Hegel or Adorno’s Hegel or Kojeve’s Hegel, but the Hegel that came about starting with Gillian Rose and then was cemented with Slavoj, and then furthered by other fellow travellers, of whom I know you are at least tangentially familiar with as you also listen to the ‘Crisis & Critique’ podcast) but what exactly would you like done with it?
Another replier brought up the owl of Minerva, which the Blyth quote always reminds me of: we are always in one way traffic to the unknown, one can only map society/history from the present epoch, a constant kneading and re-evaluation of the past, similar in fashion to how T.S Eliot said we only now 'see what we see in' Dostoevsky because we have Kafka; its a retroactive action (what was in Dostoevsky was never there until Kafka, the future informs on the past, not the other way around).
It should come as no surprise to you then, that this concept is attacked from across the board, from leftists to Niall Ferguson, it is only going to appeal to certain theorists who will now baulk as you tie it to outmoded Althussian ideas (GKK’s work is laudable, but to be harsh, certain aspects (like the ones quoted by you) seem dead in the water by 1996 due to the aforementioned work (and all that has followed in that field since then)).
To cut a long story short, why are you playing with ephemeral concepts such as “society being at loose ends with itself”, when if anything it is us who are at loose ends with OURSELVES, that there is something that enters the signifier (and fixes it/stops it sliding, how else do we all communicate exactly? No, Derrida never had a good answer for this), that ultimately creates our freedom, politics, and societies (Zizek’s first 7 books painstakingly work through this).
You seem to inhabit an odd space: You don’t want to rely on the old but faithful structures, nor do you want to throw the papers to the fire, take the Leninist leap, and form a political party. You seem to be sailing on a vaguely ‘new Hegelian wind’ with polycrisis, but do not take up the general gambit of the Hegelio-Lacanians (myself, my bias), that it is ourselves, our psyche, our ontology, that need to be taken, for the first time in our history, seriously, lest we die like dogs in plentiful pantries. Why would one even expect Marx to help here? The pertinent aspects of Hegel he got wrong, and he died before Freud made his Copernican discovery of the unconscious.
To re-iterate, there is nothing wrong or lacking with the Marxist (or other) tools, but one should not expect them to be of great aid when you are making your timely insights on our predicament (one needs to focus on the THIRD (and most influential) aspect of a human being (nature, nurture(culture), AND THE UNCONSCIOUS).
Or in other words (to finally get to the meat of my criticism), as sublime as your “garbage time of history” power point slide was, unless you are going to do more then dip your toes fancifully into ‘theory’, what is left to you other then to go back to the explanatory structures we already have or start a political movement or continue in your belief in liberal technocratic schemes? I do not forget your repeating of Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables line’ at a conference shortly after the pro-Palestinian camps were wrecked by politicians and police at Columbia, as in to say, if any knowledge, including technocratic knowledge was the answer, had any real legs to it (as everyone from every side continuously bleets), one would not be impotently chiding the riff-raff (I mean this as no insult, it was a genuinely endearing moment).
A tweet you made years ago that made me cringe:
“Annus mirabilis: 1966 saw the publication of Lacan's Écrits, Foucault's The Order of Things, Althusser's Reading Capital and the first volume of Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics”
These thinkers are not compatible with each other, unlike art, they are not all welcome in the same space, they do not all add to the diversity of life (thats not philosophies job, as much its its not the job of physics). Even when I take my line of thinking (Lacan), to celebrate the printing of the Ecrits is akin to celebrating a convoluted engineering manual - it is an almost a meaningless document in and of itself outside those who want to consider themselves experts on Lacan’s most arcane of thoughts (and it is next to unintelligible outside being read between ones first and second readings of his seminars).
Someone as serious as yourself should not see theory akin to how one ranks their top 10 albums of the 60s.
Forgive me, as I understand all that I have said comes close to a stranger rapping on your door at 2am to berate you, and it certainly is not an imposition to “read the same books as I”.
Myself, and many others, follow your writings because you don’t seem to fit into any neat box (not to disregard the quality of said writings of course), and one is always excited to see what you have up your sleeve next.
As said at the start, you seem to, like the native flora of my country, flower from fire.
So take this intrusion as an already burning box of matches.
Hope your recovery is going well, thank you for the heterodox economist series, it certainly filled in some gaps for me, please continue and extend it.
Todd McGowan?
Go Bengals!
No I'm not Todd, he is a gem though. As is Ryan.
Very pointed comments YF. Sound critique. Most helpful to my own line of intellectual response. I hope this may open a communication channel - as I am (rather slowly) putting together a response to AT. MV
Why move from one corsetted thought pattern to another and to another.
Why not employ common sense basic economics, natural sciences, menschliche Denken/thinking, social interrelationship ideas (not materialistic Hegeluan/Marxian), etc. to arrive at a completely new way of looking at how humanity evolves over time, including major erogenous chocs???
All these ideologies are just overdeveloped intellectual constructs that most often ignore the underlying human being.
Read Jacob the Liar and see real humanity at work.
Maybe I’m simple but we’re seeing nothing new. It’s just the sweep of capital doing its thing - exploiting new markets, reinforcing political structures which serve it, generating environmental externalities, fighting within itself (green tech vs fossil fuels), and - most prominently in high income countries - fusing politics and culture in the form of grievance aggregation.
I wish that Prof. Tooze would put things “crudely” more often.
The past is always unknowable, and the future always bears the possibility of being better or worse. But over the long term, the future has always been better than the past (so far). Why not pose simple questions, like how do we make political decisions that are more likely to make the future better rather than worse? History suggests we have a good chance of success, if we do that.
Yes, environmental issues are more universal than most others that have come in earlier times and pose significant dangers, Yet the world is always looking for more energy and those who best control and use the energy are likely to be dominant. Thus, as usual, everything is interconnected. Those interconnections have to be part of the political calculus. That is realistic, not theoretical.
I concur but our politicians don't live in reality. They absolutely cannot see the direct consequences of their actions.
Okay, but political decisions are not made only by politicians. It is up to the rest of us to project reality.
Agreed.
Sorry, typo: The future is always unknowable.
Translation: Old theories don't work any more (although, if by "work" we mean "give us some comfort that we can explain what's going on around us and some range of probabiliites about where we're headed," they never did before either). We're driving blind. We need new theories to clear the windshield and make us feel we have some visibility ahead of us. But it's all guess work now, and we have to choose. So, let's take the road marked climate change. Maybe that's the main road, the one that can get us through the maze -- the one that lead to who knows what.
This was… disappointing. All that and a single misleading graph to try and convince himself and us the failed narrative just needs a new wrapper.
Isn't it all a bit simpler.
The US is no longer in control of the world, in fact it no longer controls the US, though it does still control European politicians.
Economically the world is now dominated by China.
Militarily - by equipment it is Russia, by man power it is China, by vast overspend on F-35s and carriers neither or which have any relevance against hypersonics US has collapsed its own power
Soft Power is all China now.
As a result in order to maintain some credibility it has financed the destruction of the nation of Ukraine, supported an obvious genocide and backed Turkey's terrorist army (largely supplied by the efforts of CIA and MI6 from Xinjiang and other Asian Muslim groups) to destroy Syria,
To anyone looking objectively the US has truly revealed itself as a monster>
This is the crisis - it is a US/Europe crisis. Rest of world is getting on nicely (or will do soon when the likes of Pakistan and SK finally shake off their US dictatorships.
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) totally failed.
Yeah, tell that to the folks in Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Pakistan.
Oh I agree - we are seeing an angry loser throwing its diminishing weight around because it knows exactly what it has become. But the "Polycrisis" is actually a Unicrisis for US, the EU countries it controls and its victims.
On balance the world in 2050 looks better to me if Russia and China don't intervene to beat up the dangerous loser than if they do.
No sorry, but your casual devaluation of what older thinkers said because they wrote when CO2 levels were lower is deeply disturbing. William Blake wrote about "dark satanic mills" in 1804, while William Nordhaus (probably the least deserving Nobel Prize EVER) wrote in 2018 that +3C warming was going to shave 2.1% from world GDP.
Modern idiots remain idiots.
And humanity would be much better off if it heeded poets and philosophers (not of the analytical persuasion) and stop giving all the power to economists
It's definitely dusk, but I can't see Minerva's owl anywhere.
We've almost reached the climax of post-1971 financialization/monetization, which contain the assumptions that more money solves all problems and that money is the most impartial and rational rationing tool. Like all serious addictions, financialization won't end until the addict hits bottom. Polyani pointed out that low-wage societies, so useful for outsourcing repetitive tasks, were low-wage because their individual needs were historically met not by money but by collaboration. In the U.S., we are at the other extreme. The risk of not having necessities (healthy food, shelter, education, health care, old-age pensions) is not pooled today but is purposely concentrated on the individual. Necessities and pseudo-necessities (alcohol, nicotine, sugar, caffeine, illegal and maintenance drugs) by nature bring the highest prices and most consistent consumption. Necessities are purposely, or by force of habit, or by incentive patterns, put out of reach of at least a third of the US population. Hence massive frustration and hopelessness. Follow the money! It's been captured and is being held for ransom. Yadda yadda.
It's very difficult to articulate what it is like being caught in this "in-between" moment, but you continue to be the best at sketching its contours. Beyond Marxism and Fascism, beyond optimism and pessimism as traditionally understood, beyond Good and...?
Hope this helps Lizzy. Basically we are talking about the disintegration of a social order. "Critical Theory" classically stated that what ordered it was capitalism. Hence the classics would state that what we are experiencing socially are determinations of the disintegration of capitalism, of the "epoch of capitalist decay" as late classical Marxism announced it 1917-1935.
Tooze appears to say that the concept of "polycrisis" already supersedes the classical "capitalcentric" explanation. However this could also mean that the decay of capitalism produces as its epiphenomena "non-capitalist, post-capitalist" processes that in themselves are inexplicable by the classical logic of capital. As real processes, they react in turn upon "the whole" (a totality we may not grasp at present) so as to decenter capitalism itself. That would be the real meaning of "post-capitalism" and therefore of "post-Marxism".
However I think that such "post-capitalism" does not have to necessitate "post-Marxism". I fall in with Position 2, and see no reason why the thread of this neo-classical Marxism can't be picked up again from where it was dropped at the end of the 1970's, especially as "2008" is a call for its reemergence from a post-structuralist underground.
No more space here, suffice to say that the neo-Marxist concept of "social reproduction", this I interpret to encompass all necessary social processes not reducible to capitalist production, are in themselves, non-capitalist social processes. Capitalism of course "invades" social reproduction, and this generates all sorts of "extra-capitalist" phenomena, of which the climate crisis is one, writ most large.
Finally, we can draw on history for lessons, to say that capitalism itself emerged as a "post-feudal epiphenomenon" of the disintegration of feudalism.