The Mirage of Polycrisis

Today I’ve published a new open access article in Capital and Class on the concept of ‘polycrisis’. The article uses an Althusser-inspired symptomatic reading approach to dig into a concept that has gained widespread usage without any real theoretical development. My conclusion is that the concept, particularly as it is articulated by the prominent left-liberal historian Adam Tooze, has embedded within it three key elements that render it actively harmful to a radical analysis: it replaces structural explanations with a profusion of empirical data; perceives that data from the implicit standpoint of the bourgeois state; imagines this state as a universal objectivity without a class basis and, as a result, implies a political programme based on the stabilisation of the existing social relations of production.

The idea behind the article came out of some work I was doing during my postdoc at the Oxford Internet Institute on theories of crisis and social collapse. Initially I wanted to interrogate the catastrophist visions of AGI that formed an increasingly important plank of Silicon Valley ideology, and then I ended up interested in Cliodynamics and so on from there. (I am hoping to write up some of the Cliodynamics literature on here in the future - fingers crossed.) During this work, polycrisis initially seemed like an interesting avenue to explore, but then pretty rapidly turned into a dead end. The idea of the article is to elucidate how and why it was a dead end on a larger scale.

I hope it’s useful to readers.