Following on from Stephen McBride’s article last week, John Clarke, author of The Battle for Britain, offers more thoughts on the value and dangers of the idea of ‘permacrisis’.
Another day, another crisis. Small wonder that new ways of thinking about crises have emerged – notably ideas of permacrisis or polycrisis. But what ways of thinking and feeling about crisis do these ideas invoke?
Where to begin? The imminent collapse of the planetary environment, the cost-of-living crisis, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Metropolitan Police’s descent into misogyny and racism, the austerity-fuelled wreckage of public services, the failures of social care, the corruption of political life, the betrayals of the future? Each day, another drama, another sea of troubles and another day without solutions. The sense of crisis is all pervasive.
Each of these crises has its own distinctive trajectory, its own conditions and causes and its own consequences. Nevertheless, the coining and wide circulation of new terms – permacrisis and polycrisis, for example – point to something more. They suggest that the current crisis is not singular, but multifaceted, entwined, hydra-headed. These terms point to some fundamental features of human society: its multiple activities are interconnected, it works in messy, intersecting and multiscalar ways (such that crises do not stay within tidy local or national boxes) and it appears to be increasingly unstable – threatening misery and devastation at every turn.
In the UK, waiting in an emergency for an ambulance reveals the ‘poly’ character of the current moment. Ambulances are backed up outside A&E departments which are overflowing with patients. Some of these are awaiting beds in other parts of the hospital, beds which are occupied by people who cannot be discharged because no social care arrangements can be made for them. Social care is in a crisis of its own – driven by low pay, exacerbated by the impact of Brexit on recruiting and retaining migrant care workers, combined with the underfunding of care places (and the extraction of profits in the largely privately owned sector). Meanwhile, those crewing the ambulances are currently taking strike action over pay and working conditions, reflecting the systematic decline of wages and conditions in many public service organisations since the arrival of the Conservative ‘solution’ to the global financial crisis – austerity and the squeezing of public finances.
In this example, different scales, places and causes are entangled – from the global financial system through the actions of successive UK governments to the dynamics of local care homes and hospitals. This may not be much comfort as you wait for – or even in – your ambulance. But this is a tangle that underpins much of the anger and frustration currently being felt by both users and workers across a range of services that increasingly seem unable to serve their publics.
The value of the ideas of permacrisis and polycrisis is that they draw our attention to these entangled processes and relationships. They move us past the way of thinking that identifies and names singular crises as though they are separate and distinct things. Here we have an economic crisis, a political crisis, an environmental crisis, a crisis of the financial system, a cost-of-living crisis, a moral crisis and so on. The idea that such crises are independent things, each with its own location (the economy, politics, etc), always involved a rather odd view of societies, treating them as though they were made up of separate fields with their own independent principles of action. The ideas of permacrisis and polycrisis point to the limitations of thinking about crises and their resolution in such narrow and bounded terms.
When thinking about crises, I have often returned to Antonio Gramsci’s 1971 observation that economic crises do not ‘produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions’. The point extends well beyond economic crises. Crises are, indeed, not just events or triggers in any simple sense: rather, they are enmeshed in narratives, ideas and ‘ways of posing and resolving questions’. Crises teach us – or are used to teach us – about how our world works, fails to work or might be made to work better.
In this light, ideas of permacrisis and polycrisis invite us to think differently about crises, not least by indicating the limitations and failures of technocratic approaches. Both ideas highlight the resistance of contemporary crises to the technical fix, the managerial correction or the established solution – precisely because they are entangled, complex and recalcitrant. And yet, I find both terms problematic: they lean towards an institutional viewpoint, asking what governments or states might do to deal with these new forms of crisis. In the same moment, they tend to ignore or downplay the contribution that governments and states have made to our present troubles.
They also teach us troubling ways of thinking and feeling about our current problems. The sense of permanence and intractability they invoke tells us two things. First, they invite us to think that the permacrisis or the polycrisis may be beyond our capacities to control or direct: we may lack the capacities to escape them. Second, these ideas teach us how to feel: they invite us to feel immobilised or frozen in the face of their sheer scale and complexity. These are dangerous lessons to learn: ways of thinking and feeling that depoliticise both us and the crises that confront us. We need to find collective ways – to borrow a phrase – to take back control.
John Clarkeis Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, The Open University, UK.
The Battle for Britain by John Clarke is available to pre-order here for £24.99.
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