Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry ¹

‘Polycrisis’ is generally defined as a cluster of distinct, yet interrelated crises which reinforce each other. There is, however, little consensus on its constituent parts. Helleiner, 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 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). They say little, however, about the importance of either or their interrelations.In this paper, 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. 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, i.e., the crises of global capitalism, global gender relations, global race relations and global ecology, all internally related and reinforcing each other.