In the Financial Times,
has a short, punchy, and admirably self-critical confrontation with the concept of the polycrisis that he popularized a few years ago.“Polycrisis” captured the rich-people zeitgeist. It spoke to the moment we were living in post-pandemic, where, for a person of means in the global North, it felt like everything—climate, inequality, race relations, public health, democracy—was on the verge of breaking. The ruling class—specifically elite liberals and capitalists—glommed onto this term, in part, because they felt this way. As Tooze says,
One of the jibes against the original idea of “polycrisis” was that it was a reflection of the panic of liberal elites. We Davos folk needed a term to register the fact that we were losing our grip. The “body” that was suffering the crisis comprised all those invested in some sense of coherent global governance, a rules-based order, or western hegemony.
Tooze, perhaps the only living person who has both read Marx deeply and also has the ear of central bankers, met the post-2020 moment with a term that people wielding power could get on board with. But Davos Man—the archetype, not Tooze per se—confused a description with a diagnosis. He drew comfort from having a term to describe the moment, even though it included no account of why things were the way they were. And that too was part of the “polycrisis” appeal.
At its worst, “polycrisis” was a term that gave license to policy improvisation without serious reflection about its causes. It obscured or justified attempts by powerful people to claw a greater share of power from [insert their antagonists and victims].
Defense of a rules-based order may have been a justification for improvisation in Ukraine—meeting the circumstances that the polycrisis meted out to us—but it sure wasn’t in Gaza.
Global governance was not on the minds of the politicians who forsook it to do “great-power competition” with China more aggressively than their predecessors.
Hegemony cannot be taken seriously as a priority when the hegemon embraces state capitalism for wealthy nations and greater unequal exchange with poorer countries. The very idea of reshoring supply chains and restoring manufacturing in America—which gained traction in the polycrisis moment—spat on the faces of the global South, where manufacturing is the only plausible development ladder.
Elites wanted comfortable lives in a world that their choices were making increasingly uncomfortable. That’s what the Biden presidency offered so many—a kayfabe of normalcy in a world where that pretense was clearly unsustainable.
I’m generally a big Tooze Stan, but I was also one of the jibers he refers to in the piece. Although I did find myself using “polycrisis” from time to time as convenient shorthand for what was basically a shit world situation, I did so for the opposite reason that the Davos elite did. Where they avoided any diagnosis of the world’s plight that didn’t reduce down to blaming China or social media, I saw the polycrisis as calling out for a more totalizing way of navigating our historical moment.
We were living through a prolonged crisis of capital accumulation and its symptoms were everywhere. The hegemon’s obsession with its own power was eroding it. The technological basis of military power was inevitably diffusing. And the tendency of the falling rate of profit was pushing capitalists and the national security state toward a mutual embrace at the expense of our shared humanity.
Tooze believes that polycrisis is no longer the best description of the situation we face, and in a way he’s right: The fever of crisis did not break in the direction we might’ve hoped. The system has failed us, and the urgency of now is not about staving off a terrible future but rather responding to the terrible future we’re already living through. We were at war the entire time, but our traditional opinion-makers thought we were only in a crisis. Now they confront the fruits of their non-diagnosis, but have yet to shift their mindsets from crisis to war.
