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.
