The Mirage of Polycrisis: A symptomatic reading of Tooze

The concept of the ‘polycrisis’ is communicatively potent. That potency partially explains why the term has made its way to the fore in debate after debate since its use by the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker in 2015. But it also owes its prominence to its political function. This article uses a symptomatic reading of Adam Tooze to demonstrate that the concept replaces structural explanations with a profusion of empirical data; perceives that data from the implicit standpoint of the bourgeois state; imagines this state as a universal objectivity without a class basis and, as a result, implies a political programme based on the stabilisation of the existing social relations of production.