Polycrisis
has become a widely used concept. Politicians, public intellectuals and
academics alike are drawing on it when describing our current global situation.
In my article ‘Dissecting
the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry’, recently
published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, I explore
how we can distinguish between fundamental crises on one hand, and crises,
which are simply the concrete manifestations of those deeper, structural crises
on the other. In this blog post, I summarise the main conceptual and empirical
findings of the article.
‘Polycrisis’
is generally defined as a cluster of distinct, yet interrelated crises which
reinforce each other (Lawrence,
Janzwood and Homer-Dixon 2022). There is, however, little consensus on its
constituent parts. Helleiner (2024),
when assessing economic globalization’s polycrisis, includes the US-Chinese
trade war, a global health crisis around Covid-19, an international security
crisis due to the Ukraine war, an environmental crisis and a crisis of
democracy. Re the EU, Nicoli and Zeitlin (2024)
identify a first polycrisis around the sovereign debt crisis (2009–2016)
and the migration crisis (2015–2016) and a second polycrisis brought about by
the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2021) and the Ukraine war (since 2022).
As I
argue in the article, the problems with these analyses of the multiple global
crises we are currently confronting are two-fold. First, they are empiricist.
See, for example, the way Adam Tooze (2022)
counts seven radical challenges and then maps them and their potential
interaction in what he calls crisis pictures. ‘To try and summarize these
effects I compiled the following, entirely provisional and highly debatable
matrix of interactions between the different macroscopic risks facing us over
the next 6-18 months.’ It is difficult to think of a more purely empirical
engagement with the current situation. What such empiricism does not allow us
to do is to distinguish between structural crises and their mere appearances.
Second,
these accounts of polycrisis are ahistoric in that they treat our current
crisis ridden period as exceptional. Thereby, they completely overlook that capitalism
has always been characterised by crisis. As a result, they miss completely the
root causes of our current crises. Inevitably, these analyses remain within the
given historical context. They are all about adjustments, changes, crisis
responses within the existing system. The historical specificity of our
capitalist epoch is overlooked.
By
contrast, I draw on a historical materialist approach to grasp the historical
specificity of capitalism. Starting from the way the capitalist social
relations of production are organised around wage labour and the private
ownership or control of the means of production, it becomes apparent why the
economic and the political appear to be separate in our capitalist epoch.
Unlike in feudalism, exploitation is not directly politically enforced. Rather,
because workers do not own their own means of reproduction, they are
indirectly, economically compelled to sell their labour power in order to
ensure their survival.
Through
a Marxist focus on the historical specificity of capitalism and its
interrelations with patriarchy, racism and the relentless expansion into
nature, I argue that we can identify four structural crises. These include a
crisis of overaccumulation within global capitalism, a crisis of global gender
relations around the drastic increase in violence against women, a crisis of
global race relations as visible in the way surplus populations such as the
Palestinian people are dispatched through abject violence, and a crisis of
global ecology with humanity running up against environmental limits.
Identifying
these four structural crises indicates that trade wars and the Ukraine war, for
example, are consequences of the crisis of overaccumulation as well as the
scramble for critical minerals related to the crisis of global ecology.
Equally, the GFC is an appearance of the crisis of overaccumulation and the
pandemic can be regarded as resulting from capitalism’s relentless expansion
into nature, facilitating the spread of illnesses from wildlife to human
beings. Moreover, it can be demonstrated how a response to the crisis of global
capitalism, inevitable is conditioned by patriarchal and racist forms of
oppression. In short, if we want to understand the current polycrisis and go
beyond brute empiricism, we need to go beyond simply engaging with what we see
in front of us.
Despite
the dramatic impact of these crises on humanity, people are never only victims.
It is in moments of utmost terror that viable alternatives to global capitalism
may emerge. The genocide of the Palestinian people perpetrated by Israel has to
be understood as related to struggles against fossil fuel capitalism and for
climate justice. ‘In this sense, the extraordinary battle for survival waged by
Palestinians today in the Gaza Strip represents the leading edge of the fight
for the future of the planet’ (Hanieh 2024).
Andreas Bieler
20 February 2026
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