Adam, I notice that your FT article today has had the comment section disabled. I know they have been doing it on Israel-Gaza related stories, but yours only touches it on tangentially for a single word? How do you feel about that? The once bulwark of liberal discourse closing its comment sections for less than a complete sentence. Depressing.
1. Detestable as Trump is, the impeccably PMC democrats, with the Biden skinpuppet as official figurehead, were equally all-in for the genocide in Gaza, among other abominations. True, the Biden Administration's glib spokescreeps used more self-serving human rights talk, but the bodies piled up just the same.
What we are seeing now is simply the United States and its catamites shedding any remaining pretense of being anything other than an empire.
2. Pretend that Russia were engaged in one tenth the atrocities that Israel trumpets every day to the world. Yet Russia is ritually condemned.
The Star Trek narrative where the USS Enterprise scours the Universe to find good deeds to do has been replaced with the Star Wars narrative where the Death Star oges out to eliminate "terrorists" in small boats off the coast of Venezuea to defend the Galactic Empire.
The patient is not dead yet but it is demonstrably dying, if by “patient” one means modern industrial civilization. If by “polycrisis” one means the existential threats coming at us from all directions, then the roots of our dilemma can be found in the concept of ecological overshoot and the inability of our Paleolithic brains to deal with it. Let’s take one aspect of overshoot, climate destabilization, which In itself is just one waste problem. It is already causing major disruption of overpopulated countries and is guaranteed to force mass migration as agriculture breaks down. What is the main driver of populist autocratic movements in the US and Europe today? Mass immigration of a few million people. What happens when that number of desperate climate refugees reaches exponential proportions? I could go on but instead refer you to the work of Dr. William Rees. The upshot is we are not facing problems we are capable of solving, but dilemmas with outcomes. None of them good.
What we are seeing is the abuse of power and the misallocation of resources on a gigantic scale. Things are out of balance, the pivot is wobbling… and about to come unhinged. Rationality can no longer account for events.
"It seems reasonable to me to say that unlike 2022, ours is a moment when to talk in terms of abstractions and general forces rings hollow. Netanyahu is not a pandemic. Trump and MAGA are not of the same kind as the “animal spirits” that Keynes invoked to describe investor sentiment. What happens in the bizarre goings-on around the pool at Mar-a-Lago may matter."
Depends on one's class perspective really. If you have benefitted from western style Imperialism prior to Trump and Netanyahoo, then you'd like to see the problem as one of individuals in order to protect the Imperialism that has benefitted you so much. If you never benefit from Imperialism, you'd be more inclined to an analysis of the diseased system that barfed up these two political figures. Perhaps this is why you're uncomfortable with increasingly popular Marxist concepts like Imperialism, the final, most reactionary stage of Capitalism?
The Trump administration's actions are in a real sense a challenge to social science fields as they are even conceivable. "International development," whether one takes a modernisation or neoliberalish view or a variant of dependency theory, has never in any version portrayed the international system as in some manner exploiting America as a country, as Trump claims, and all concepts of the value-chain are thrown into confusion by his worldview's implicit anti-service economy jihad. An entire view among world-systems theorists they posit has applications going back centuries would be upturned. If the tariff plans actually somehow "work" and lead to the "making real" of Trumpianism as the new intellectual orthodoxy essentially just because America is the powerful hegemon, it would be almost a sort of real-world proof of Foucauldian ideas that power controls what is true
I'm just a retired academic of very little brain, and when I first read about poly crisis, I thought you were nuts. I thought that there were plenty of problems in the world we couldn't solve & plenty here at home, too, but that that was just life. Now, I'm sure you're right. From where I sit, Trump is the epicenter of a huge "idea quake" (and I assume there are others); no one has any way of understanding why the ideological/intellectual world has crumbled & is no longer useful or any idea of what to do about it. When he won, I tried to reassure my friends that we were all being drafted into his culture war against good sense & good govt; just as I, drafted into the VN war, had to do whatever I could to get through it as intact in body & mind as possible, we now all had to do the same. Something we all had the resources to do. No longer true. Now the question is what the world will be like after he's gone & whether we can survive that.
Israel holds hostage the civilian populations of occupied territory, and substantially Lebanon (large numbers killed already) and large chunks of Syria?
If Warsaw ghetto Jews surrendered the Germans would have continued to kill. That is exactly the point for if Hamas surrended and returned hostages the war would be over. That is why the Gaza war is not genocide
"... a constitutional crisis in the US and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, all amid escalating climate emergencies. "
Why the "Full Scale invasion" ? It was 120k troops against a Ukrainian army of 700k and only a small amount of Ukraine was taken.
Is this an FT requirement like the BBC which till recently always said in full the "Wholly Unprovoked Full Scale Invasion of Ukraine" but then suddenly dropped the unprovoked bit when Trump said he could see why Russia had been annoyed.
What the fuck are you talking about? Who invaded who? Who targets civilians EVERY NIGHT? Who steals thousands of children? Who demands territory from a sovereign country? And all because Putin is “annoyed “?
Well Ukraine attacked donbass for 8 years, and continued when Russia told them not to. Essentially Ukraine started it - on US & Nato instructions.
No Russia does not target civilians (though Ukraine often does).
That is why there are 1.3 million dead Ukrainian soldiers and only 13k dead Ukrainians (but UN numbers so that no doubt counts a number who consider themselves Russian and were targeted by Ukraine).
Sorry you have a lot to learn.
Not that you responded to my point - it wasn't a full scale invasion at all.
I've certainly been guilty of hoping for a good old bond crisis to bring this to a boil, but really that's more likely to just be an intensifying incident in a currently incomprehensible dialectic. Everything is so more clearer in hindsight, but by then so many of us will be dead. Oh well.
I know this was written some time ago, but recently read Zizek’s “Against Progress” and thought it had some interesting things to say about polycrisis and how to handle it. Here’s my discussion of it on The Antilibrary:
I know this was written some time ago, but recently read Zizek’s “Against Progress” and thought it had some interesting things to say about polycrisis and how to handle it. Here’s my discussion of it on The Antilibrary:
There is a polite but devastating critique of the Adam Tooze ‘polycrisis’ concept in the Past, Present, Future podcast by Cambridge professors, David Runciman & Gary Gerstle. “Pessimistic”, “a substitute for action” and “narcissistic” are amongst their judgements. Worth a listen at
working on a paper/chapter on "Americanism in the Polycrisis" - arguing that scholars of religion ought to set analyses of christian nationalism within a broader network of crises. This update is very helpful in clarifying that polycrisis is not a synonym for any situation with multiple crises and thereby narrowing the question to a particular response and particular fallout from a particular polycrisis
Adam, I notice that your FT article today has had the comment section disabled. I know they have been doing it on Israel-Gaza related stories, but yours only touches it on tangentially for a single word? How do you feel about that? The once bulwark of liberal discourse closing its comment sections for less than a complete sentence. Depressing.
1. Detestable as Trump is, the impeccably PMC democrats, with the Biden skinpuppet as official figurehead, were equally all-in for the genocide in Gaza, among other abominations. True, the Biden Administration's glib spokescreeps used more self-serving human rights talk, but the bodies piled up just the same.
What we are seeing now is simply the United States and its catamites shedding any remaining pretense of being anything other than an empire.
2. Pretend that Russia were engaged in one tenth the atrocities that Israel trumpets every day to the world. Yet Russia is ritually condemned.
Pretence of empire.
The Star Trek narrative where the USS Enterprise scours the Universe to find good deeds to do has been replaced with the Star Wars narrative where the Death Star oges out to eliminate "terrorists" in small boats off the coast of Venezuea to defend the Galactic Empire.
I wasn't going to use the obvious phrasing "evil empire", but since you apparently already are going there...
Did I get it rightly: the concept of polycrisis means, that we can‘t understand, what happens? So it is random if the patient survives or dies?
Ask the good professor.
This is stressing me out
The patient is not dead yet but it is demonstrably dying, if by “patient” one means modern industrial civilization. If by “polycrisis” one means the existential threats coming at us from all directions, then the roots of our dilemma can be found in the concept of ecological overshoot and the inability of our Paleolithic brains to deal with it. Let’s take one aspect of overshoot, climate destabilization, which In itself is just one waste problem. It is already causing major disruption of overpopulated countries and is guaranteed to force mass migration as agriculture breaks down. What is the main driver of populist autocratic movements in the US and Europe today? Mass immigration of a few million people. What happens when that number of desperate climate refugees reaches exponential proportions? I could go on but instead refer you to the work of Dr. William Rees. The upshot is we are not facing problems we are capable of solving, but dilemmas with outcomes. None of them good.
Once you understand that we in the West are ruled by sociopaths,everything they do makes sense.
What we are seeing is the abuse of power and the misallocation of resources on a gigantic scale. Things are out of balance, the pivot is wobbling… and about to come unhinged. Rationality can no longer account for events.
"It seems reasonable to me to say that unlike 2022, ours is a moment when to talk in terms of abstractions and general forces rings hollow. Netanyahu is not a pandemic. Trump and MAGA are not of the same kind as the “animal spirits” that Keynes invoked to describe investor sentiment. What happens in the bizarre goings-on around the pool at Mar-a-Lago may matter."
Depends on one's class perspective really. If you have benefitted from western style Imperialism prior to Trump and Netanyahoo, then you'd like to see the problem as one of individuals in order to protect the Imperialism that has benefitted you so much. If you never benefit from Imperialism, you'd be more inclined to an analysis of the diseased system that barfed up these two political figures. Perhaps this is why you're uncomfortable with increasingly popular Marxist concepts like Imperialism, the final, most reactionary stage of Capitalism?
The Trump administration's actions are in a real sense a challenge to social science fields as they are even conceivable. "International development," whether one takes a modernisation or neoliberalish view or a variant of dependency theory, has never in any version portrayed the international system as in some manner exploiting America as a country, as Trump claims, and all concepts of the value-chain are thrown into confusion by his worldview's implicit anti-service economy jihad. An entire view among world-systems theorists they posit has applications going back centuries would be upturned. If the tariff plans actually somehow "work" and lead to the "making real" of Trumpianism as the new intellectual orthodoxy essentially just because America is the powerful hegemon, it would be almost a sort of real-world proof of Foucauldian ideas that power controls what is true
I'm just a retired academic of very little brain, and when I first read about poly crisis, I thought you were nuts. I thought that there were plenty of problems in the world we couldn't solve & plenty here at home, too, but that that was just life. Now, I'm sure you're right. From where I sit, Trump is the epicenter of a huge "idea quake" (and I assume there are others); no one has any way of understanding why the ideological/intellectual world has crumbled & is no longer useful or any idea of what to do about it. When he won, I tried to reassure my friends that we were all being drafted into his culture war against good sense & good govt; just as I, drafted into the VN war, had to do whatever I could to get through it as intact in body & mind as possible, we now all had to do the same. Something we all had the resources to do. No longer true. Now the question is what the world will be like after he's gone & whether we can survive that.
https://hugoheffer.substack.com/p/optimism-pays?r=6iu4pc&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
Only “genocide”where victim can end it by surrendering and returning hostages
Israel holds hostage the civilian populations of occupied territory, and substantially Lebanon (large numbers killed already) and large chunks of Syria?
So if the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising surrendered, there would be no genocide?
Like telling a rape victim that it's her fault if she is killed for fighting back.
If Warsaw ghetto Jews surrendered the Germans would have continued to kill. That is exactly the point for if Hamas surrended and returned hostages the war would be over. That is why the Gaza war is not genocide
The Israeli leadership have made it plain that they intend otherwise
Anyway, nice job of victim blaming. "It was totally the rape victim's fault for not just giving up!"
From the FT piece
"... a constitutional crisis in the US and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, all amid escalating climate emergencies. "
Why the "Full Scale invasion" ? It was 120k troops against a Ukrainian army of 700k and only a small amount of Ukraine was taken.
Is this an FT requirement like the BBC which till recently always said in full the "Wholly Unprovoked Full Scale Invasion of Ukraine" but then suddenly dropped the unprovoked bit when Trump said he could see why Russia had been annoyed.
What the fuck are you talking about? Who invaded who? Who targets civilians EVERY NIGHT? Who steals thousands of children? Who demands territory from a sovereign country? And all because Putin is “annoyed “?
Well Ukraine attacked donbass for 8 years, and continued when Russia told them not to. Essentially Ukraine started it - on US & Nato instructions.
No Russia does not target civilians (though Ukraine often does).
That is why there are 1.3 million dead Ukrainian soldiers and only 13k dead Ukrainians (but UN numbers so that no doubt counts a number who consider themselves Russian and were targeted by Ukraine).
Sorry you have a lot to learn.
Not that you responded to my point - it wasn't a full scale invasion at all.
Anyone who wants to know about a certain demented fragment of the left just needs to read this post.
Curious - I never knew I was on the left.
Mind if you don't know these things already no wonder you lack judgement.
I've certainly been guilty of hoping for a good old bond crisis to bring this to a boil, but really that's more likely to just be an intensifying incident in a currently incomprehensible dialectic. Everything is so more clearer in hindsight, but by then so many of us will be dead. Oh well.
I know this was written some time ago, but recently read Zizek’s “Against Progress” and thought it had some interesting things to say about polycrisis and how to handle it. Here’s my discussion of it on The Antilibrary:
https://theantilibrary.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-to-be-against-progress?r=blrdt
I know this was written some time ago, but recently read Zizek’s “Against Progress” and thought it had some interesting things to say about polycrisis and how to handle it. Here’s my discussion of it on The Antilibrary:
https://theantilibrary.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-to-be-against-progress?r=blrdt
There is a polite but devastating critique of the Adam Tooze ‘polycrisis’ concept in the Past, Present, Future podcast by Cambridge professors, David Runciman & Gary Gerstle. “Pessimistic”, “a substitute for action” and “narcissistic” are amongst their judgements. Worth a listen at
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/past-present-future/id1682047968?i=1000716613484
working on a paper/chapter on "Americanism in the Polycrisis" - arguing that scholars of religion ought to set analyses of christian nationalism within a broader network of crises. This update is very helpful in clarifying that polycrisis is not a synonym for any situation with multiple crises and thereby narrowing the question to a particular response and particular fallout from a particular polycrisis