OTR—Navigating The Polycrisis
On The Radar—short posts bringing crucial ideas to your attention.
Navigating the Polycrisis—Mapping the Futures of Capitalism and the Earth
The Polycrisis is the breakdown of our future.
It represents the end of established narratives and understandings, stretching from geopolitical rules to the biophysical basis of the planet itself. With old trajectories seemingly out of reach, speculation about the future has enjoyed a Renaissance — predicting everything from an AI utopia to a climate apocalypse.
Into this setting emerges Navigating the Polycrisis by Michael J. Albert. His new work proposes multiple pathways upon which the Polycrisis may take us — from utopia to apocalypse, socialism to capitalism, and the many winding possibilities in between. But beyond these scenarios, it also shows us how change occurs in tumultuous times, where new futures can emerge out of the breakdown of old ones.
Through interlocking explorations of climate change, existential crisis, class conflict, mass extinction, and granular insights into energy and resource availability, this book lives up to its name. It is not just an explication of potential futures but a guide to how we might navigate them.
An innovative work of realism and utopianism that analyzes the possible futures of the world-system and helps us imagine how we might transition beyond capitalism.
The world-system of which we are all a part faces multiple calamities: climate change and mass extinction, the economic and existential threat of AI, the chilling rise of far-right populism, and the invasion of Ukraine, to name only a few. In Navigating the Polycrisis, Michael Albert seeks to illuminate how the “planetary polycrisis” will disrupt the global community in the coming decades and how we can best meet these challenges. Albert argues that we must devote more attention to the study of possible futures and adopt transdisciplinary approaches to do so. To provide a new form of critical futures analysis, he offers a theoretical framework—planetary systems thinking—that is informed by complexity theory, world-systems theory, and ecological Marxism.
Navigating the Polycrisis builds on existing work on climate futures and the futures of capitalism and makes three main contributions. First, the book brings together modeling projections with critical social theory in a more systematic way than has been done so far. Second, the book shows that in order to grasp the complexity of the planetary polycrisis, we must analyze the convergence of crises encompassing the climate emergency, the structural crisis of global capitalism, net energy decline, food system disruption, pandemic risk, far-right populism, and emerging technological risks (e.g. in the domains of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nuclear weapons). And third, the book contributes to existing work on postcapitalist futures by analyzing the processes and mechanisms through which egalitarian transitions beyond capitalism might occur.
A much-needed work of global futures studies, Navigating the Polycrisis brings together the rigor of the natural and social sciences and speculative imagination informed by science fiction to forge pathways to our possible global future.
Can we have an alternative system to Capitalism that enhances global sustainability? Is it possible to have capitalism that is not built on never ending capital growth? Michael J. Albert is a lecturer at SOAS university where he is an expert in the field of International Relations. His work is at the intersection of International Relations, Political Theory, and Sustainability Studies. In this episode Hussain Ayed explores with Michael the alternative system to capitalism that can enhance global sustainability.
