Historian Adam Tooze is questioning the continuing relevance of "polycrisis" to explain today's world of crises
One of the surest guides through the terrifying confusion of the past few years has been the left liberal historian Adam Tooze.
Tooze is particularly sensitive to the different dimensions of crisis -- for example, economic, ecological and geopolitical. He popularised the term "polycrisis" -- which has become very widely used -- as a way of summing this up.
But now, in articles in the Financial Times newspaper and on Substack, Tooze queries the continuing relevance of "polycrisis". He writes, "As a description for the global situation in the first year of Trump 2.0, it seems less apt."
On the face of it, this seems odd. All the figures show climate chaos is accelerating. And there's no relaxation in inter-imperialist rivalries, as China shows off its new weapons systems and Europe rearms.
Tooze's doubts are partly motivated by the thought that it's a mistake to reduce everything to objective processes rooted in the structures of capitalism. "One reason that crisis seems less apt a term in the current moment is that the disruptions are so intentional," he says.
The genocide in Gaza and Donald Trump's power grabs are "deliberate acts of aggression".
Tooze is of course right that history is threaded with intentional human actions. But he wrote an excellent book on the Nazi economy. He knows very well how interwoven ideological imperatives, bureaucratic rivalries and structural pressures were in the crimes of the Hitler regime.
Indeed, Tooze brilliantly sums up the historical fusion of structure and subjectivity when he writes on Substack. "Trump is the personified compression of America's 'polycrisis in one country'. Trump as a one-man polycrisis," he says. But he doesn't sufficiently follow this through.
Tooze's problem is partly with the very idea of crisis. As he points out, it "derives from ancient Greek medical doctrine. It refers to the moment in the course of a disease when the patient reaches a turning point between life and death."
So who is the patient here? For Tooze it's the liberal capitalist "rules-based order", under attack from within by Trump and the far right, and from the outside by China and Russia. He approvingly quotes a description of the idea of polycrisis as "Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome".
Tooze seems puzzled and frustrated by the inability of this order effectively to defend itself. He repeatedly cites the failure of the financial markets to punish Trump for seeking to take control of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve.
And he concludes, "The alarming thing is that things have moved on. After all, crises have two possible endings. In one, the patient recovers. In the other, the patient is dead."
For all Tooze's undoubted brilliance, this seems very confused. For one thing, you don't have to support the neoliberal order to find the idea of polycrisis useful.
I was writing about "the multiple dimensions of crisis -- biological, economic and political" back in 2020. But I located this as a crisis of the entire capitalist system.
I developed this idea in a book, The New Age of Catastrophe. I identified the way out as not a rehabilitated liberalism, but socialist revolution. And Trump hasn't simply killed neoliberalism off.
He's mobilised resentments that neoliberalism helped cause to win the presidency and impose tariffs and greater political control over the economy. But domestically much of what he's done -- tax and spending cuts and deregulation -- is thoroughly neoliberal.
The Financial Times last week quoted "a senior finance executive and longtime Democratic donor". They said, "I find what he is doing abhorrent, but the truth is I've been a huge beneficiary of Trump's policies. The 'big, beautiful bill' cut my taxes, boosted cash flow for my company, and pumped stimulus into the market -- so my portfolio keeps growing."
These policies have kept financial markets soaring. But this is centred on Big Tech and driven by euphoria about the profits that it is hoped artificial intelligence will deliver.
Any doubts that this is a bubble like those associated with railways, auto and the internet should have been removed by the Tesla board's offer of a $1 trillion bonus to Elon Musk.
Bubbles always burst, sooner or later. Has Trump stabilised US capitalism? You cannot be serious.