On the 'Polycrisis': Part II
Philosophies of History & Crises in Political Thought
I.
To conclude Part I, I suggested that a more interesting way for critics of capitalism to think about the ‘polycrisis’ debate is less in terms of the question, "why the term capitalism and not the term polycrisis" but rather, "of what use is the term polycrisis to an analysis of capitalism?" or, in particular, "what might the popularity of polycrisis say about the weaknesses of current critical analyses of capitalism?” Answering the latter demands a symptomatic reading, especially if the conceptual breadth of both terms represents a broader crisis of reference in the concept ‘crisis’. Importantly, this includes a crisis in the Marxist concept of a ‘capitalist crisis’, such that simply replacing ‘polycrisis’ with ‘capitalism’ risks being not as analytically helpful as critics of capitalism imagine it to be.
However this is not an issue that can be resolved by simply returning to Marx and finding a ‘theory of crisis’. That Marx’s writing does not actually contain a unitary, systematic, or explicit ‘theory of crisis’ is surprisingly agreed upon, even amongst Marxists. For James O’Connor, “no single or dominant concept or theory of crisis may be found in Marx’s own works.”1 For David Harvey, "how to understand crisis formation remains ... by far the most contentious issue in Marxian political economy.”2 For Simon Clarke, “Marx does not offer a theory of crisis as such…this makes it impossible to extract and present ‘Marx’s theory of crisis.’”3 “It is a remarkable feature of Marxist crisis theory,” Clark writes, “that orthodoxy should shift so fundamentally and yet so unselfconsciously:”
“At the turn of the century the orthodoxy was a rather vague disproportionality theory, with crises being attributed to the anarchy of the market. By the 1930s Marxist orthodoxy had become rigidly under-consumptionist. During the 1970s the theory of the falling rate of profit had become the canonical theory of crisis. At each stage it was generally assumed that the dominant theory was the authentic theory of Marx.”4
“To each crisis,” as Peter Osborne puts it, “its own revival of Marx’s ‘theory of crisis.”5 So it seems. Each moment of seeming instability in global capitalism becomes, “a window onto the permanent crisis of Marxist political thought;” an expression of a relentless, “desire to displace the politics of social transformation onto economic events.”6 Except only in the latest iteration, the response seems to be arguably less productive than a return to primary sources. Adopting an impulse to classify crises into types almost ad infinitum, the recent reaction to the supposed economism of traditional or orthodox Marxism7 has largely been the vast pluralization of types of capitalisms (‘surveillance capitalism', ‘fossil capitalism,’ ‘disaster capitalism,’ ‘carceral capitalism,’ etc.), one which bears a striking formal resemblance to the fragmentation of academic social science which, as James O’Connor has argued, “fatally weakens its ability to develop a ‘unified field theory’ of the modern crises of capitalism.”8
II.
Of course one way to resolve a permanent crisis at the level of thought is to claim the crisis is permanent in actuality; to propose that capitalism has itself entered a state of ‘permanent crisis.’ This type of formulation however manages to rob the term ‘crisis’ simultaneously of its Greek etymological roots in the concept krinõ (meaning to cut, select, decide, or judge), its roots in medicine (where it implies the life-or-death stage in the development of a disease, at which point a decision had to be made), but also, most importantly, “the politically crucial aspect of the traditional idea of crisis: namely, the conception of crisis as a decisive turning point in a process, a point at which a decision must be made.”9 Never mind that, for Marx, “permanent crises do not exist.”10
This idea that economic crises in turn expose a broader crisis in Marxist political thought will be explored in future entries—in particular Osborne’s idea that, “the historical concept of crisis registers an aporia in the historical concept of politics;” one which, “runs far deeper than Marx’s work, down to the bedrock of all philosophico-historical concepts of political practice.”11 The debate over ‘polycrisis’ would therefore register in miniature and in a more contemporary fashion a broader and older issue about the fundamentally historical character of the concept of ‘crisis’, as well as its relation to the possibility of acting politically in a historically meaningful way, one which Marxism has inherited as well.
For now though, as it relates to the conceptual origins of ‘polycrisis’, there are some (thankfully) simpler subtending issues that should be addressed about the Marxist philosophy of history and its relation to the term’s conceptual origins, at least vis a vis its usage by Tooze. This is particularly important insofar as a critique of a specific conception of the Marxist philosophy of history seems to have motivated his turn to the concept of ‘polycrisis.’ “A concept of polycrisis that is not merely redundant,” as he recently put it, “must rest on a more or less explicit philosophy of history.”12
Indeed, a disinterest in the philosophy of history is not an uncommon one amongst historians of a certain sort and generation. Arguably what makes Tooze a particularly insightful and interesting contemporary historian is his particular concern for it. Two notable papers here come to mind. The first is from 2012 and written with Stefan Eich.13 This is a critique of Max Weber’s ahistorical and formalistic concept of history in the classic ‘Politics as a Vocation’ essay, as well as an account of the broader crisis of German Historicism in the 1920s. The second is a 2015 lecture by Tooze on Foucault’s Security, Territory, and Population.14 The essay on Weber is particularly interesting for its reference to otherwise arcane debates within Neo-Kantianism, to which I will very likely have to return in future entries; however, my interest here for the moment is more basic and connects to Tooze’s concern with the philosophy of history in writing of a less formal and academic kind.15
III.
In Chartbook 165, after offering a summary explanation of the Marxist philosophy of history and its possible role in explaining the current, as it were, ‘polycritic conjuncture,’ Tooze writes, “Marxist friends will no doubt be tempted to say that it all boils down to capitalism and its crisis-ridden development. But, by the 1960s at the latest, sophisticated Marxist theory had abandoned monistic theories of crisis.”16 Guney Isikara’s reading is that Tooze is, “explicit that one should avoid the use of grand narratives, or, in line with that, the designation of the capitalist mode of production as the root cause of the radical challenges upon us.”17 Positioning himself as the defender of a certain Marxist orthodoxy, ‘polycrisis’ for Isikara arrives to displace ‘postmodernity’ as the successor to a series of modern conceptions of history defined by linear developmental conceptions of temporality. So for Tooze, whereas the crisis of the 1970s could at least be explained with reference to a single cause, “it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause”18 for today’s crisis/crises; hence, ‘polycrisis.’
Importantly, Tooze is more ambivalent and refuses to offer anything close to a blanket rejection, writing rather suggestively that, “this isn’t to say that Marxist theory might not be able to offer an answer, but, to be convincing, it would be a Marxist theory of complexity and polycrisis, something towards which thinkers like Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall pointed the way.” An essay by Tooze on Althusser would certainly be an interesting intervention.19
Indeed, one way to frame Marxism as an intellectual tradition has been as a species of modernism from which we have now departed (for we have moved forward, rather linearly one is tempted to add, into ‘postmodernity’)20, thus leaving it perhaps insightful, but cordoned off politely alongside other dated evolutionary conceptions of unilinear temporal development. Modernity according to this understanding is too complex – both as a concept and as a historical phenomenon – to be reducible to dynamics determined by the logic of capital.
To say this reading is wrong in any kind of straightforward sense would be too simple, however the exact extent of its accuracy aside—according to this understanding, Marx is a thoroughly modern theorist, and his materialist and 'stagist' philosophy of history resolutely modern in the sense that it provides a grand narrative based on the crisis-ridden development of the capitalist modes of production.
Arguably the most radical version of this view is that of Moishe Postone. For Postone, the retrospective projection of a specific temporality of linear development to History in general is itself specific to capitalism; one determined by the paradigm of infinite growth it poses. "History, understood as an immanently driven directional dynamic, does exist, but not as a universal characteristic of human social life. Rather, it is a historically specific characteristic of capitalist society that can be, and has been, projected onto all human histories."21 The discipline of history is in a way defined by this homogenous and blank form of chronological temporality (the 'time of historicism'), which imposes a form of empty time (understood as the succession of the new) onto collective forms of otherwise subjective (and socially determined) forms of temporality.22
To put this in an even more jargonistic fashion—the subject of the structure of History in any kind of universal sense is necessarily not actually human subjects (either as individuals, peoples, nations, or states—precisely because these are not universal) but rather Capital, because Capital simply is and historically has functioned as that unique force constituting the entire world (and therefore ‘humanity’ in a universal sense) as a subject of a (singular) movement of historical development, a terrain of politics (geopolitically), as well as an object of experience (phenomenologically).23
These are themes I will inevitably return to, however in Part III I’ll explore a different avenue; one that has already been explored not by a figure associated with post-60s Marxism or ‘neo-Marxism,’ but rather an earlier figure with whom Tooze is certainly familiar given his role in Tooze’s 2015 book on the interwar period The Deluge: Leon Trotsky.24 Specifically at issue is his concept of ‘combined and uneven development’ as explored in Michael Lowy’s 1981 The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution.25
James O’Connor, The Meaning of Crisis, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987): 59.
David Harvey, “Introduction to the 2006 Verso Edition,” Limits to Capital, (London: Verso, 2006): xxii.
Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis, (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1994): 11.
Simon Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis, 9.
Peter Osborne, “A Sudden Topicality,” Radical Philosophy 160 (March/April, 2010): 19. My thinking here in general owes much to Osborne and can be thought of essentially as, at best, a commentary on it.
Ibid
Usually understood as ‘pre-1960s,’ because for some reason in the popular-intellectual imagination thats approximately the date when orthodox Marxists stopped writing.
James O Connor, The Meaning of Crisis, 47. One of the most interesting results of ‘the Polycrisis’ series published by Phenomenal World is its interdisciplinary (or perhaps, ‘poly’-discliplinary) emphasis, which brings experts from different academic silos together in conversation. This I think is extremely encouraging. It is also a catholic (small c) outlook Tooze himself seems to share and represents a significant departure for mainstream social science that those who consider themselves more critical should take very seriously.
Osborne, “A Sudden Topicality,” 23.
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, p. 497. Quoted in Osborne, 23.
Osborne, “A Sudden Topicality,” 23.
Stefan Eich, Adam Tooze, “The Allure of Dark Times: Max Weber and the Crisis of Historicism,” History and Theory (52: 2, 2017): 197-215. See also
“Adam Tooze on Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population, https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/2015/12/01/foucault-713-adam-tooze-on-security-territory-and-population/. The relationship between Kant and Foucault in the Security, Territory, Population lectures specifically is also explored here:
In a recent new entry on the topic (the proliferation of which is getting slightly exhausting) John Ganz asks whether the concept is, “really of a qualitatively higher order than previous conceptions of post-history or post-modernism? Those also question the possibility of a single, overarching explanation of the world and talk about the exhaustion and frustration of our self-conceptions.”
‘Polycrisis’ is I think a much more interesting concept than ‘postmodernism’, if only because ‘crisis’ is a better term through which to read the specific temporal and historical structure of modernity than the term ‘modernity,’ and certainly crude understandings of ‘modernism’. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
https://mronline.org/2022/11/28/beating-around-the-bush/
In particular, regarding Althusser’s interpretation of the concept ‘mode of production,’ which is a concept Tooze is eager to distinguish from the concept ‘the economy’ in his first book Statistics and the German State. As early as the introduction he defines the new 19th century national conception of the economy as, “a separate system, distinct, for instance, from, ‘the social,’ ‘the cultural,’ or ‘the political’” as being different from, “Marx’s totalizing conception of the mode of production:” “Taken together these interrelated statistical innovations constituted a new matrix of economic knowledge, which gave substance to a new conception of the economy. First of all `the economy' was envisioned as a separate system, distinct, for instance, from `the social', `the cultural', or `the political'. It was a measurable entity, a `thing'. This conception of `the economy' as an autonomous social system was more restricted than that embodied in eighteenth-century ideas of a commercial society, or Marx's totalizing conception of the mode of production. But it was also more concrete than those earlier formulations” (9). Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Postmodernity, postcolonialism, post-left, etc. The general analytical weakness of the prefix ‘post’ is that the term it amends inevitably comes to stand for a temporal departure beyond or past that which the very term finds itself defined in relation to. This inevitably raises questions about the actual success of that departure.
‘Moishe Postone, ‘Critique and Historical Transformation’, Historical Materialism (12: 3, 2004): 55.
In his Politics of Time, Osborne describes historicism as, “a functional replacement within the amnestic temporality of modernity for the continuity of historical time previously established by tradition;” one which, “regulates interruption as series by the generalized projection of the abstract temporality of the new onto history as a whole” (Osborne, 139). Osborne, Politics of Time, (London: Verso, 2011). The critique of historicism is fundamental to the thought of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Althusser. All three seem in historicism this imposition of empty homogenous time onto collective forms of subjective time. This is certainly interesting to compare to comments on Foucault in Tooze’s 2015 lecture. Tooze quotes the following from Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended: “One could also demonstrate that when history, or the historical discipline, has recourse to either a philosophy of history or a juridical and moral ideality, or to the human sciences (all of which it finds so enchanting), it is trying to escape its fatal and secret penchant for historicism…One could also demonstrate that when history, or the historical discipline, has recourse to either a philosophy of history or a juridical and moral ideality, or to the human sciences (all of which it finds so enchanting), it is trying to escape its fatal and secret penchant for historicism” (172-174).
See also Giacomo Marramao, The Passage West: Philosophy After the Age of the Nation State, (London: Verso, 2012).
Adam Tooze, The Great Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, (New York: Penguin Press, 2015).
Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution, (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011). Originally published in 1981.