June 28, 2026
Helena Sheehan
How to explain the cascading crises of our time? What are the most striking indicators of crisis? What causes are put forward? What solutions are proposed? Is there an underlying dynamic generating the many manifestations of destruction, decadence, and despair in contemporary society? Is there some kind of connective tissue running through the chaos, the craziness, the injustice, the myopia, and the deception that unfold before us daily? Why do so many attempts at explanation fall so far short? Why is academe such a theoretical wasteland? Is there a systemic explanation of a world that systemically disempowers systemic thinking? Does the concept of polycrisis capture the connections? What is the impact of capitalism on the production of meaning? What does Marxism have to offer in this scenario? Is it a worldview that explains these crises and opens an alternative path?
Helena Sheehan
How to explain the cascading crises of our time? What are the most striking indicators of crisis? What causes are put forward? What solutions are proposed? Is there an underlying dynamic generating the many manifestations of destruction, decadence, and despair in contemporary society? Is there some kind of connective tissue running through the chaos, the craziness, the injustice, the myopia, and the deception that unfold before us daily? Why do so many attempts at explanation fall so far short? Why is academe such a theoretical wasteland? Is there a systemic explanation of a world that systemically disempowers systemic thinking? Does the concept of polycrisis capture the connections? What is the impact of capitalism on the production of meaning? What does Marxism have to offer in this scenario? Is it a worldview that explains these crises and opens an alternative path?
When we look around
the world, we see the world on fire with brutal wars; reckless environmental
destruction; oligarchy brazenly flaunting its wealth and power amidst
escalating economic inequality; election of politicians who are blatantly
corrupt and hostile to the class interests of those who elected them; news
reporting that is narrow, deluded, or deceitful; universities dominated by
myopia, conformity, and cowardice; popular culture obsessed with celebrity
narcissism, superhero fantasy, and murderous gaming; supermarkets stacked with
junk food; rampant drug addiction; mass shootings; rising rates of suicide and
other indicators of mass mental illness; swelling levels of homelessness;
crumbling public infrastructure; dismantling of the public sphere; extreme
individualism; breakdown of social discipline; and erosion of community.
In attempting to explain these phenomena, there are a variety of causes put forward and solutions suggested. Here are some instances.
On a street in Philadelphia, where people were staggering around drugged, destitute, and deranged, the scene was captured on a phone and uploaded to X. On the X thread that followed, some blamed the individuals themselves, whereas others accused drug dealers or politicians of either party or even China (for producing fentanyl). Still others perceived that the American dream has transmuted into a zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, in Texas, teachers are preoccupied with not getting shot, as students sit in their classes openly brandishing guns. News reports regularly feature mass shootings in streets, malls, and schools. Liberals believe that the problem is lack of gun control legislation.
Elsewhere in the same country, workers who monitor air quality, drinking water, and air traffic are being fired. The state is being used to dismantle the state, except for what serves oligarchic interests. Many see it as caused by a rogue regime and think a change in administration will fix it. Elsewhere in the world, there are many manifestations of mental disturbance. In one academic institute in India, a postgraduate there told me, there were five suicides in eight months. One wrote a note saying he had “nothing to hold on to.” Media discussions of mental health issues often blame technology and advocate stopping scrolling on social media and taking up yoga, growing a garden, or joining a choir. On Irish radio, a doctor advised parents whose children committed suicide not to ask why. Exactly the wrong advice, in my opinion.
There are so many scenes of social disintegration, so many and so severe as to suggest that they are symptoms of civilizational decay. Rather than face this, there are so many contributing factors mistaken for ultimate causes, so many small answers to big questions, so many facile, false, and futile solutions.
Does contemporary culture offer any insight? Much of it is evasion and nonsense, but there are also attempts to articulate the existential experience of this crisis and to probe its meaning. At the same time, there is puzzlement and paralysis about any way out of this morass. Here are some passages from recent novels:
Sally Rooney in Intermezzo: “And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? The meaningless lives people live. And afterwards, oblivion, forever. Futile rage at nothing. Directed one way or another, what’s the difference?”1
Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Where Are You?: “The present has become discontinuous.… Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?… It seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent…when human civilisation is facing collapse…civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase…neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilisation as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes.”2
Elizabeth Strout in Tell Me Everything: “When Bob thought about the state of the country these days, he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.”3
Elizabeth Strout in Lucy by the Sea: “there was deep, deep unrest in the country and the whisperings of a civil war seemed to move around me like a breeze…. We are all standing on shifting sand.”4
Sigrid Nunez in The Vulnerables: “With the world on fire and its systems collapsing, here, there, and everywhere—with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope…. We are now a world that is defined by continuous disaster.”5
Russell Banks in Foregone: “Almost from the start, he perceived the contingency and randomness even of the earth itself, the lack of any inner necessity for its or his existence.”6
Lee Cole in Groundskeeping: “You millennials have nothing you believe in. You have no values…the whole shitty slow-motion apocalypse of late capitalism.… A litany of mass murder and bad weather, of war and betrayal and vanity,”7
Annie Ernaux in The Years: “The profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs.”8
Ian McEwan in Lessons: “In our household there were no beliefs, no principles, there were no ideas that were valued.… He had nothing to judge her by, no scale of values. No proper measure…. The decline of mobility, reason fading in and out like short-wave radio, the trickle of minor ailments that fed a deeper river.”9
Zhang Yueran in Cocoon: “The times were changing so quickly, one false step and you’d find yourself no longer on solid ground, plummeting into the abyss. Going with the flow was actually very difficult…. I have no worldview. I’m just getting through life one day at a time…. It wasn’t as simple as unhappiness. His whole body reeked of decay. Something had died—his passion, faith, fighting spirit. Irreversibly gone.”10
Wang Anyi in Fu Ping: “Truth is, the girls lacked a solid foundation…they were exposed day and night to the sights and sounds of urban petty bourgeois life, making it difficult to live by any set of rules.”11
Aube Rey Lescure in River East River West: “They were so many people in the city, but did they feel as she did, floating atoms never a part of anything real?”12
I could give many more examples. A blurb for a forthcoming book in 2026 called Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling by Ed Simon refers to “what it’s like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization.” Its promise is that perhaps “literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning and generate a spark in the darkness.”13
Most people are caught up in these phenomena, experiencing them one by one, living disconnected lives amid these seemingly disconnected phenomena. Some people, such as these writers, struggle to articulate some pattern, even wondering if there might be some underlying force powering this confluence of forces.
Traditional institutions, customs, and worldviews have collapsed with nothing comparable to replace them. In Ireland, for example, the intellectual, cultural, and moral authority of Catholicism is gone, but there is nothing commensurate in its place. Some cling to the faith of our fathers in near empty churches, while others look to westernized eastern religions, modernized primitivism, or unhinged esotericism to fill that space. It is emptiness and not enlightenment. It is resignation at the status quo and not a movement to transform it.
Otherwise, there is a barrage of noise, celebrity gossip, computer gaming, escape-from-reality reality television, body enhancements, sports obsession, and pornography galore. Spectacles such as the Eurovision Song Contest are a blast of sounds, lights, and gyrations, signifying nothing. In film and television, there are endless remakes and reboots, prequels and sequels—Superman, Star Wars, and James Bond on a loop forever—suggesting a deeper exhaustion of cultural imagination. The prevalence of violent, supernaturalist, and dystopian elements are symptomatic of a pervasive helplessness and hopelessness in contemporary experience. People are scrolling on their phones and flitting around from one thing to another with no means to navigate it all.
There is so much nonsense that clutters the space where sense needs to be. There is so much debris. There are so many people flailing about in a sea of confusion. They either splash in the shallows or drown in the depths.
“Beneath all the specific noise, there is a deeper discordance: a dissolution of social bonds and norms, an unprecedented collapse of meaning, a monumental eclipse of hope, a palpable wave of unease spreading across a wide spectrum of society. It is a malaise, a sense of things coming apart, of social problems becoming intractable, of a crisis too deep to be corrected by any upturn in the economy or change of government.” I wrote these words in 1992 in an article entitled “America: Symptoms of Decline.”14 This is so much truer now than it was then.
Is there connective tissue binding these phenomena? There are many connections on many levels. Some are obvious, while others are not. People in Gaza suffer extreme physical and mental distress as a direct result of death, disability, destruction, and genocide. Youth hear predictions of ecological catastrophe and feel anxiety about having a future.
However, there are deeper connections indicating that they are rooted in a common cause. Epidemiological studies, as in the Mental State of the World Report (2024) by Sapien Labs, indicate that affluent capitalist nations register the worst global mental well-being scores, underscoring systemic roots, suggesting that capitalism itself undermines psychosocial well-being at population scale.15 It is not only material deprivation but also material abundance that produces mental alienation and even psychic despair.
It is necessary to go beyond specific conditions and consequences to address the depths of epistemological paralysis, of ontological despair, of psychosocial breakdown. It seems obvious that there is a systemic crisis that connects the crisis of meaning to all the other cascading crises of our time.
Do universities offer spaces where these questions are asked and answered? Are they shedding light on these crises? Are they explaining the connections? Are they addressing the systemic dimensions?
When intellectuals face up to this at all, and mostly they do not, they often echo novelists in articulating lack of meaning and even admit defeat. For example, for Ulrich Beck, “The world is unhinged…this is true in both senses of the word: the world is out of joint, and it has gone mad. We are wandering aimlessly and confused, arguing for this and against that. But a statement on which most people can agree, beyond all antagonisms and across all continents, is: I don’t understand the world anymore.”16
At the level of theory, academe is generally a wasteland. Aside from some notable exceptions, there is an avoidance of theoretical discourse or even an aversion to all -isms. Many academics have never worked out a coherent worldview, so there is an emptiness, an incoherence, at the core of their work. They lack foundations. They are unmoored. Although rarely articulated or argued, most academic work is grounded in implicit assumptions that are reducible to varieties of positivism or postmodernism. Although they are opposite in many ways, from the plodding particularity of one to verbose exotica of the other, they are both pluralistic, renouncing grand narratives and comprehensive worldviews.
Sometimes they produce empirical knowledge in a limited domain and sometimes even analysis of limited phenomena with limited validity. However, much of it is useless trivia dressed up as if consequential or, at the other extreme, convoluted theory that obfuscates the reality of the world while bluffing at significance. These ways of thinking are both generated by a system that systemically constrains systemic thinking. Academics produce specific results according to agendas of capital without critical reflection or intellectual integration in institutions hollowed out of intellectual or moral purpose.
Nevertheless, there are some attempts to conceptualize the multiple crises of this conjuncture. Here the concept of polycrisis is gaining ground. It articulates the multiplication of crises, their entanglement with each other, their acceleration in scale, time, and space, and the emergence of impacts irreducible to particular factors. However, instead of following the logic of this trajectory, it tends to back away and asserts an absence of common causes or solutions. It not only displays a resistance to organizing concepts, but actively embraces ambiguity and declares systemic analysis impossible. This produces a breakdown of meaning that intensifies the crisis of meaning. For Adam Tooze, for example, the crises are disparate but interact in such a way that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. These multiple sources of systemic risk amplify each other, bring a diversity of challenges but without a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction.17
In contrast, there is Marxism. Perry Anderson sees Tooze as treating politics as elite agency, episodic decision-making, and institutional contingency rather than in terms of the structural contradictions of capitalism.18 The editors of Monthly Review note that “Tooze delights in creating flow charts of polycrises consisting of numerous free-floating signifiers of crisis with arrows pointing in each and every direction, lacking any center, thus presenting a perfect prescription for paralysis…. In contrast, fundamental explanations of the overarching economic, social, and ecological crises are present within contemporary Marxist analysis.”19
Tooze explicitly rejects such an analysis, accusing Marxists of “capitalocentrism.” He acknowledges Marxism’s strength in diagnosing the inherent crises caused by capitalism but argues that it fails to account for the scale, speed, and complexity of contemporary crises. He insists on the impossibility of identifying a common cause or solution to these crises. He accuses Marxism of structural determinism that cannot capture the complexity of contemporary crises. He opts for pluralism and ambiguity in analysis and liberal technocratic governance in practice as offering the only hope.20 This positivist-postmodernist, but nearly a priori, refusal of systemic analysis leads to a flailing inability to grasp our situation or move beyond it, leaving us to live with the “loose ends of history” and lack of hope.
So, even when intellectuals attempt to connect the crises, unless they name the system, they fail to discern the deeper dynamism generating the cascading crises. The system operates in such a way as to generate multiple crises that cannot be resolved within the system. This produces a crisis of meaning, due to fragmentation and disarray of a system in the process of disintegration. This crisis of meaning produces paralysis of efforts to come to terms with all the other crises.
The production of meaning is shaped by the mode of production of everything. Every mode of production produces a whole mode of civilization. The capitalist mode of civilization is in a degenerate phase, riddled with contradictions, at war with itself as well as with countervailing forces. I think of it as a series of wrecking balls swinging at each other and leaving vast populations to make our way in the debris. Some fall by the wayside, while others struggle to cope with the unprecedented challenges of these times. Only those of us who can see the pattern of the forces in motion can chart a path through it and beyond it. In this, we find meaning and purpose.
The chaos and confusion of this conjuncture produce much of the pathology of our time and also subvert efforts to deal with it. The dominant discourses on mental health and clinical treatment of mental distress tend to be individualistic and myopic and aggravate a crisis in mental health, which is a crisis of meaning, and which is a crisis of worldview. These discourses and practices have been formed under capitalism and conform to its structures of conceptualization, failing to probe causes and solutions beyond its boundaries.
Marxist approaches to everything from political economy to psychology have been downplayed or denied in favor of mainstream approaches compatible with the dominant system. Even within Marxism, there has sometimes been an underemphasis or even denial of the necessity to address the psychological, cultural, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of human experience, which has left Marxism less developed in these areas than it has the capacity to be.
There is nevertheless a strong tradition in conceptualizing the relation of psyche to society. Soviet psychologists, such as Lev Vygotsky, Alexei Leontiev, and Alexander Luria, are still influential in the mainstream field of pedagogical theory, although their connection to Marxism is often sidelined or erased.21 Similarly, Erich Fromm and Frantz Fanon are still widely referenced, although the full relevance of their positions is understated.22 Not so referenced as they deserve to be are such thinkers as Lucien Sève and Adam Schaff, who developed Marxist philosophical psychology.23 There are also a number of contemporary thinkers, such as Mark Fisher and James Davies, who have focused on the role of capitalism in creating mental distress, individualizing and medicalizing its symptoms and suppressing social analyses and solutions.24 Meanwhile, mainstream psychology prioritizes either empirical neuroscience or an eclectic range of theories and therapies that do not get to the core of the problem.
A sound psychology must be grounded in an integral and materialist philosophy and political economy, an analysis of the system in which the psyche is formed and navigates the whole terrain of sociohistorical experience. It must go beyond even the focus on deprivation, alienation, individualism, consumerism, and medicalization and go deeper into how the very structure and trajectory of capitalism in its decadent decline shapes intellectual, psychological, and cultural life and subverts the drive for meaning by colonizing consciousness itself.
In response to the constant parade of professionals advising people on their mental issues in a way that is individualistic and opaque, we need to expose the social dimensions of mental distress, from the obvious cost-of-living pressures to deep confusion about the very nature of reality. In schools and universities, in publications and media, we need to articulate outright that problems and solutions must be addressed in terms of basic worldviews. This involves excavating the hidden assumptions, arguing against them and for our alternative worldview as the most appropriate for comprehending what needs to be comprehended.
As capitalism has evolved, the contradictions have escalated to the point of profound turbulence and intractability. Every morning begins with news broadcasts that seem more absurd and alarming than the day before. The air reeks of decadence. It throbs with dislocation and distress. It pulses with arrhythmic violence across a whole range of phenomena, from global trade to personal well-being. The crisis of meaning subverts efforts to deal with all these other crises.
The consequences are constant and conspicuous. I see many symptoms of social disintegration, of civilizational decline, many times a day. It is not only in scenes of the abject wretchedness of drug addiction or the brazen menace of imperial rampage. It is also in the deep structure of contemporary thought, culture, and behavior, spontaneously giving rise to Love Island, Eurovision, Traitors, Mortal Kombat, the surreality of political discourse, the barrenness and bittiness of academic publication, the influence of influencers, the everyday individualism and social indiscipline of random vandalism, coughing on crowded buses, and taking children out of school to go on holidays.
Capitalism is a system that systemically obstructs systemic thinking, undermining coherent consciousness, purposive activity, and progressive politics. Only a philosophy with a critique of capitalism can break through this and can generate a coherent vision.
This is what Marxism brings to this scenario. It brings meaning, perspective, foundations, purpose, a worldview encompassing all forces at play within a unified framework. For Marxism, all these crises are rooted in a systemic crisis demanding systemic analysis. These cascading crises do not come from a random convergence of disasters. They are the logical outcome of the contradictions of capitalism in its decadent phase. We offer not only analysis of the nature of the system generating the most basic problems, but also a solution, which is an alternative system, which is socialism. Moreover, we have a movement striving for more than a century to bring this alternative into being—a movement that has achieved stunning victories as well as bitter defeats, but a movement still in play. It is time for a new surge.
Educators at all levels have a great responsibility. Knowledge itself is under attack. In defending it, it is vital to expose the deeper processes of knowledge production and to open a vista of liberated knowledge, rather than fighting simply for the status quo. There are strong and still developing Marxist approaches to every area of knowledge—from philosophy to physics and everything in between. They are too marginalized and need to be propelled into the mainstream, especially in universities, where they once exerted a more powerful presence.
Students see what a mess the world is. They sense their horizons shrinking. When they are asked the systemic question, do they think capitalism is a good system, large numbers, sometimes a majority, say no. However, when asked if there is an alternative, they rarely have any sense of that. They often have no awareness of what socialism is, neither what it has been nor what it could be for them. We offer them entry into an alternative narrative, a new story about the history that has led their lives to this moment, including the dissenting ideas, movements and states challenging capitalism and creating socialist spaces, a moving story in which they could play a part and find meaning and purpose.
Capitalism of its very nature creates and intensifies economic injustice and political corruption. It also poisons culture, education, and everyday life. Capitalism colonizes not only land, economies, and governments. It colonizes schools, universities, mass media, and social media. It colonizes psyches. It subverts logic. It undermines evidence. It breeds irrationality and madness. Our task is to expose this modus operandi, to break its grip and to struggle for alternative approaches at every level.
Because these cascading crises are generated by a crisis in capitalism, they are everywhere. Where there is capitalism, there are manifestations of these crises. There is a spectrum, with the United States and China at opposite ends of it, with other countries, such as Ireland, where I live, somewhere in the middle. The United States is where we see a society plunging downward as the warring factions shout accusations without grasping underlying causes or consequences. Basically, it is capitalism eating itself. There is a different trajectory in China. There is a sense of a society moving forward while the rest of the world is struggling not to fall backward. However, the borders are far from airtight. We live in a world system where capitalism, although decadent and disintegrating, is still dominant.
China is also caught up in these crises, both through pressures exerted through its integration into global systems and through the presence of capitalism within its own borders. Chinese literature also expresses experiences of psychic distress and social dislocation. So do everyday conversations with Chinese people articulating their anxieties. However, China is governed by a party with a critique of capitalism and promise of a path beyond these crises to socialism. China can do this by carrying forward the intellectual tradition and political movement that is Marxism, which involves challenging the non-Marxist positions that reform and opening up has brought into the universities, the party, and other institutions of the society. There is a struggle here too.
So, capitalism is the problem and socialism is the solution. That is so clear. What is not so clear, however, is how do we get from here to there.
In this complex world of financialized and globalized capital, it is not so obvious as it was in earlier revolutions how to expropriate the expropriators, even when left governments achieve state power. We need to figure that out and to do so within a broad social process of convincing people of the need for it and engaging them in forging that path. The Occupy movement in 2011 was one such moment of addressing the nature of the system and enacting dissent from it, even if this semi-spontaneous mass movement could not sustain itself. This pushed participants to seek forms of mobilization that would not demobilize so quickly, embodied best in the “Syriza, Podemos, Venceremos” moment, which also demobilized too quickly.25 We need to push ahead to combine long-evolved socialist traditions with mass mobilizations that can be sustained.
The task is to persuade people that the problems are systemic and to form movements to move to an alternative system that could be possible. Part of this is to have a clear narrative of socialist movements past and present and to defend what has been achieved by socialist movements and states while not defending the indefensible.
It is most essential to induce people to see how the system structures their lives. Capitalism is responsible for the terrible injustices of the world, the ecological destruction of the world, and the cultural decadence and psychological disorder of the world. We need to take every discussion within the public discourse and raise it to a higher level. For example, everywhere in the world so much daily talk is about Donald Trump, giving us the opportunity to raise consciousness from the details of the narcissism, deceit, and brutality of the day to the trajectory of the process making this possible, to move from Trump to the system producing Trump, from a monster wrecking an otherwise good system to a rotting system that will continue to rot even if he were to exit office. We need to get them to move beyond the details in the Epstein files to a conceptualization of oligarchy and its inherent corruption. We need to pull people away from the now romanticized image of previous presidents and to remind them of how all of these phenomena were already building.
We need to incite people to see the difference between contributing factors and ultimate causes. For example, we need actively to support gun control legislation, drug treatment programs, progressive candidates, environmental regulation, public health initiatives, ICE monitoring, No Kings marches, and many other practical reforms and mobilizations, while inciting others also active on these fronts to see that the logic inherent in capitalism is antithetical to the logic of ecology, public health, and democratic governance. In Ireland, we need to move from necessary defense of Irish neutrality to questioning the whole geopolitical positioning of Ireland in the emerging multipolarity. Those who become active on one issue can often be persuaded to go from there to connect with the many other issues, to see an underlying pattern and build a broader resistance.
It has been interesting witnessing on Red Note the interactions between American and Chinese young people talking about their lives, moving from granular detail to sometimes systemic conclusions. One Chinese young man, summarizing what he learned from American friends, reflected, “The system was not built for you. It was built on you.” There are many discussions of capitalism versus socialism on this platform. Social media are vital arenas of struggle.
We need to step up our participation in every arena of public discourse. Every day there are Marxists writing books, editing journals, teaching courses, organizing conferences, creating blogs and podcasts, updating on social media, and sometimes even having a voice in mainstream media. Beyond this, there are other activities, less highlighted, but nevertheless important. When we are at protests or even when we are engaging in conversations that begin on buses or on the streets or in gyms, we can turn them from specific issues into revelations of the systemic dimensions and the ongoing struggles pushing against the systemic consequences. When we articulate this, there is often assent. When we say it, people do see it.
Those who are engaging in naming the system, analyzing its decline, and organizing movements against it are not experiencing a crisis of meaning.
We have not only the most compelling analysis but a purposeful movement for advancing that analysis. It is often marginalized, at odds with itself, often weak, and far from what we need it to be, but it is nevertheless a movement with an inspiring history of world historical consequence with the potential to reshape the world yet again. It is this movement that offers the most positive force to facilitate the creative capacity of our species to overcome the destructive turmoil of our times.
In a world beset by cascading crises, we open up a vista of clarity, confrontation, and forward movement. We offer meaning, purpose, and values in a world starved for them. We need to make that case far more effectively than we are doing so far.
Only Marxism grasps that all these crises are rooted in a systemic crisis demanding systemic analysis. Only Marxism has the capacity to provide real meaning, perspective, foundations, and purpose, because it is a coherent, credible, and comprehensive worldview capable of grasping the causes and connections of cascading crises. Other attempts at explanation mistake contributing factors for ultimate causes, giving small answers to big questions and offering only facile, false, or futile solutions. Marxism is the only sound basis for a meaningful analysis of the current conjuncture.
Marxism is the unsurpassed horizon.
Notes
1. Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (London: Faber & Faber, 2024), loc. 674, 927. All quotes from cited novels refer to locations in Kindle e-books.
In attempting to explain these phenomena, there are a variety of causes put forward and solutions suggested. Here are some instances.
On a street in Philadelphia, where people were staggering around drugged, destitute, and deranged, the scene was captured on a phone and uploaded to X. On the X thread that followed, some blamed the individuals themselves, whereas others accused drug dealers or politicians of either party or even China (for producing fentanyl). Still others perceived that the American dream has transmuted into a zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, in Texas, teachers are preoccupied with not getting shot, as students sit in their classes openly brandishing guns. News reports regularly feature mass shootings in streets, malls, and schools. Liberals believe that the problem is lack of gun control legislation.
Elsewhere in the same country, workers who monitor air quality, drinking water, and air traffic are being fired. The state is being used to dismantle the state, except for what serves oligarchic interests. Many see it as caused by a rogue regime and think a change in administration will fix it. Elsewhere in the world, there are many manifestations of mental disturbance. In one academic institute in India, a postgraduate there told me, there were five suicides in eight months. One wrote a note saying he had “nothing to hold on to.” Media discussions of mental health issues often blame technology and advocate stopping scrolling on social media and taking up yoga, growing a garden, or joining a choir. On Irish radio, a doctor advised parents whose children committed suicide not to ask why. Exactly the wrong advice, in my opinion.
There are so many scenes of social disintegration, so many and so severe as to suggest that they are symptoms of civilizational decay. Rather than face this, there are so many contributing factors mistaken for ultimate causes, so many small answers to big questions, so many facile, false, and futile solutions.
Does contemporary culture offer any insight? Much of it is evasion and nonsense, but there are also attempts to articulate the existential experience of this crisis and to probe its meaning. At the same time, there is puzzlement and paralysis about any way out of this morass. Here are some passages from recent novels:
Sally Rooney in Intermezzo: “And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? The meaningless lives people live. And afterwards, oblivion, forever. Futile rage at nothing. Directed one way or another, what’s the difference?”1
Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Where Are You?: “The present has become discontinuous.… Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?… It seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent…when human civilisation is facing collapse…civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase…neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilisation as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes.”2
Elizabeth Strout in Tell Me Everything: “When Bob thought about the state of the country these days, he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.”3
Elizabeth Strout in Lucy by the Sea: “there was deep, deep unrest in the country and the whisperings of a civil war seemed to move around me like a breeze…. We are all standing on shifting sand.”4
Sigrid Nunez in The Vulnerables: “With the world on fire and its systems collapsing, here, there, and everywhere—with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope…. We are now a world that is defined by continuous disaster.”5
Russell Banks in Foregone: “Almost from the start, he perceived the contingency and randomness even of the earth itself, the lack of any inner necessity for its or his existence.”6
Lee Cole in Groundskeeping: “You millennials have nothing you believe in. You have no values…the whole shitty slow-motion apocalypse of late capitalism.… A litany of mass murder and bad weather, of war and betrayal and vanity,”7
Annie Ernaux in The Years: “The profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs.”8
Ian McEwan in Lessons: “In our household there were no beliefs, no principles, there were no ideas that were valued.… He had nothing to judge her by, no scale of values. No proper measure…. The decline of mobility, reason fading in and out like short-wave radio, the trickle of minor ailments that fed a deeper river.”9
Zhang Yueran in Cocoon: “The times were changing so quickly, one false step and you’d find yourself no longer on solid ground, plummeting into the abyss. Going with the flow was actually very difficult…. I have no worldview. I’m just getting through life one day at a time…. It wasn’t as simple as unhappiness. His whole body reeked of decay. Something had died—his passion, faith, fighting spirit. Irreversibly gone.”10
Wang Anyi in Fu Ping: “Truth is, the girls lacked a solid foundation…they were exposed day and night to the sights and sounds of urban petty bourgeois life, making it difficult to live by any set of rules.”11
Aube Rey Lescure in River East River West: “They were so many people in the city, but did they feel as she did, floating atoms never a part of anything real?”12
I could give many more examples. A blurb for a forthcoming book in 2026 called Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling by Ed Simon refers to “what it’s like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization.” Its promise is that perhaps “literary expression can endow a meaningless world with meaning and generate a spark in the darkness.”13
Most people are caught up in these phenomena, experiencing them one by one, living disconnected lives amid these seemingly disconnected phenomena. Some people, such as these writers, struggle to articulate some pattern, even wondering if there might be some underlying force powering this confluence of forces.
Traditional institutions, customs, and worldviews have collapsed with nothing comparable to replace them. In Ireland, for example, the intellectual, cultural, and moral authority of Catholicism is gone, but there is nothing commensurate in its place. Some cling to the faith of our fathers in near empty churches, while others look to westernized eastern religions, modernized primitivism, or unhinged esotericism to fill that space. It is emptiness and not enlightenment. It is resignation at the status quo and not a movement to transform it.
Otherwise, there is a barrage of noise, celebrity gossip, computer gaming, escape-from-reality reality television, body enhancements, sports obsession, and pornography galore. Spectacles such as the Eurovision Song Contest are a blast of sounds, lights, and gyrations, signifying nothing. In film and television, there are endless remakes and reboots, prequels and sequels—Superman, Star Wars, and James Bond on a loop forever—suggesting a deeper exhaustion of cultural imagination. The prevalence of violent, supernaturalist, and dystopian elements are symptomatic of a pervasive helplessness and hopelessness in contemporary experience. People are scrolling on their phones and flitting around from one thing to another with no means to navigate it all.
There is so much nonsense that clutters the space where sense needs to be. There is so much debris. There are so many people flailing about in a sea of confusion. They either splash in the shallows or drown in the depths.
“Beneath all the specific noise, there is a deeper discordance: a dissolution of social bonds and norms, an unprecedented collapse of meaning, a monumental eclipse of hope, a palpable wave of unease spreading across a wide spectrum of society. It is a malaise, a sense of things coming apart, of social problems becoming intractable, of a crisis too deep to be corrected by any upturn in the economy or change of government.” I wrote these words in 1992 in an article entitled “America: Symptoms of Decline.”14 This is so much truer now than it was then.
Is there connective tissue binding these phenomena? There are many connections on many levels. Some are obvious, while others are not. People in Gaza suffer extreme physical and mental distress as a direct result of death, disability, destruction, and genocide. Youth hear predictions of ecological catastrophe and feel anxiety about having a future.
However, there are deeper connections indicating that they are rooted in a common cause. Epidemiological studies, as in the Mental State of the World Report (2024) by Sapien Labs, indicate that affluent capitalist nations register the worst global mental well-being scores, underscoring systemic roots, suggesting that capitalism itself undermines psychosocial well-being at population scale.15 It is not only material deprivation but also material abundance that produces mental alienation and even psychic despair.
It is necessary to go beyond specific conditions and consequences to address the depths of epistemological paralysis, of ontological despair, of psychosocial breakdown. It seems obvious that there is a systemic crisis that connects the crisis of meaning to all the other cascading crises of our time.
Do universities offer spaces where these questions are asked and answered? Are they shedding light on these crises? Are they explaining the connections? Are they addressing the systemic dimensions?
When intellectuals face up to this at all, and mostly they do not, they often echo novelists in articulating lack of meaning and even admit defeat. For example, for Ulrich Beck, “The world is unhinged…this is true in both senses of the word: the world is out of joint, and it has gone mad. We are wandering aimlessly and confused, arguing for this and against that. But a statement on which most people can agree, beyond all antagonisms and across all continents, is: I don’t understand the world anymore.”16
At the level of theory, academe is generally a wasteland. Aside from some notable exceptions, there is an avoidance of theoretical discourse or even an aversion to all -isms. Many academics have never worked out a coherent worldview, so there is an emptiness, an incoherence, at the core of their work. They lack foundations. They are unmoored. Although rarely articulated or argued, most academic work is grounded in implicit assumptions that are reducible to varieties of positivism or postmodernism. Although they are opposite in many ways, from the plodding particularity of one to verbose exotica of the other, they are both pluralistic, renouncing grand narratives and comprehensive worldviews.
Sometimes they produce empirical knowledge in a limited domain and sometimes even analysis of limited phenomena with limited validity. However, much of it is useless trivia dressed up as if consequential or, at the other extreme, convoluted theory that obfuscates the reality of the world while bluffing at significance. These ways of thinking are both generated by a system that systemically constrains systemic thinking. Academics produce specific results according to agendas of capital without critical reflection or intellectual integration in institutions hollowed out of intellectual or moral purpose.
Nevertheless, there are some attempts to conceptualize the multiple crises of this conjuncture. Here the concept of polycrisis is gaining ground. It articulates the multiplication of crises, their entanglement with each other, their acceleration in scale, time, and space, and the emergence of impacts irreducible to particular factors. However, instead of following the logic of this trajectory, it tends to back away and asserts an absence of common causes or solutions. It not only displays a resistance to organizing concepts, but actively embraces ambiguity and declares systemic analysis impossible. This produces a breakdown of meaning that intensifies the crisis of meaning. For Adam Tooze, for example, the crises are disparate but interact in such a way that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. These multiple sources of systemic risk amplify each other, bring a diversity of challenges but without a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction.17
In contrast, there is Marxism. Perry Anderson sees Tooze as treating politics as elite agency, episodic decision-making, and institutional contingency rather than in terms of the structural contradictions of capitalism.18 The editors of Monthly Review note that “Tooze delights in creating flow charts of polycrises consisting of numerous free-floating signifiers of crisis with arrows pointing in each and every direction, lacking any center, thus presenting a perfect prescription for paralysis…. In contrast, fundamental explanations of the overarching economic, social, and ecological crises are present within contemporary Marxist analysis.”19
Tooze explicitly rejects such an analysis, accusing Marxists of “capitalocentrism.” He acknowledges Marxism’s strength in diagnosing the inherent crises caused by capitalism but argues that it fails to account for the scale, speed, and complexity of contemporary crises. He insists on the impossibility of identifying a common cause or solution to these crises. He accuses Marxism of structural determinism that cannot capture the complexity of contemporary crises. He opts for pluralism and ambiguity in analysis and liberal technocratic governance in practice as offering the only hope.20 This positivist-postmodernist, but nearly a priori, refusal of systemic analysis leads to a flailing inability to grasp our situation or move beyond it, leaving us to live with the “loose ends of history” and lack of hope.
So, even when intellectuals attempt to connect the crises, unless they name the system, they fail to discern the deeper dynamism generating the cascading crises. The system operates in such a way as to generate multiple crises that cannot be resolved within the system. This produces a crisis of meaning, due to fragmentation and disarray of a system in the process of disintegration. This crisis of meaning produces paralysis of efforts to come to terms with all the other crises.
The production of meaning is shaped by the mode of production of everything. Every mode of production produces a whole mode of civilization. The capitalist mode of civilization is in a degenerate phase, riddled with contradictions, at war with itself as well as with countervailing forces. I think of it as a series of wrecking balls swinging at each other and leaving vast populations to make our way in the debris. Some fall by the wayside, while others struggle to cope with the unprecedented challenges of these times. Only those of us who can see the pattern of the forces in motion can chart a path through it and beyond it. In this, we find meaning and purpose.
The chaos and confusion of this conjuncture produce much of the pathology of our time and also subvert efforts to deal with it. The dominant discourses on mental health and clinical treatment of mental distress tend to be individualistic and myopic and aggravate a crisis in mental health, which is a crisis of meaning, and which is a crisis of worldview. These discourses and practices have been formed under capitalism and conform to its structures of conceptualization, failing to probe causes and solutions beyond its boundaries.
Marxist approaches to everything from political economy to psychology have been downplayed or denied in favor of mainstream approaches compatible with the dominant system. Even within Marxism, there has sometimes been an underemphasis or even denial of the necessity to address the psychological, cultural, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of human experience, which has left Marxism less developed in these areas than it has the capacity to be.
There is nevertheless a strong tradition in conceptualizing the relation of psyche to society. Soviet psychologists, such as Lev Vygotsky, Alexei Leontiev, and Alexander Luria, are still influential in the mainstream field of pedagogical theory, although their connection to Marxism is often sidelined or erased.21 Similarly, Erich Fromm and Frantz Fanon are still widely referenced, although the full relevance of their positions is understated.22 Not so referenced as they deserve to be are such thinkers as Lucien Sève and Adam Schaff, who developed Marxist philosophical psychology.23 There are also a number of contemporary thinkers, such as Mark Fisher and James Davies, who have focused on the role of capitalism in creating mental distress, individualizing and medicalizing its symptoms and suppressing social analyses and solutions.24 Meanwhile, mainstream psychology prioritizes either empirical neuroscience or an eclectic range of theories and therapies that do not get to the core of the problem.
A sound psychology must be grounded in an integral and materialist philosophy and political economy, an analysis of the system in which the psyche is formed and navigates the whole terrain of sociohistorical experience. It must go beyond even the focus on deprivation, alienation, individualism, consumerism, and medicalization and go deeper into how the very structure and trajectory of capitalism in its decadent decline shapes intellectual, psychological, and cultural life and subverts the drive for meaning by colonizing consciousness itself.
In response to the constant parade of professionals advising people on their mental issues in a way that is individualistic and opaque, we need to expose the social dimensions of mental distress, from the obvious cost-of-living pressures to deep confusion about the very nature of reality. In schools and universities, in publications and media, we need to articulate outright that problems and solutions must be addressed in terms of basic worldviews. This involves excavating the hidden assumptions, arguing against them and for our alternative worldview as the most appropriate for comprehending what needs to be comprehended.
As capitalism has evolved, the contradictions have escalated to the point of profound turbulence and intractability. Every morning begins with news broadcasts that seem more absurd and alarming than the day before. The air reeks of decadence. It throbs with dislocation and distress. It pulses with arrhythmic violence across a whole range of phenomena, from global trade to personal well-being. The crisis of meaning subverts efforts to deal with all these other crises.
The consequences are constant and conspicuous. I see many symptoms of social disintegration, of civilizational decline, many times a day. It is not only in scenes of the abject wretchedness of drug addiction or the brazen menace of imperial rampage. It is also in the deep structure of contemporary thought, culture, and behavior, spontaneously giving rise to Love Island, Eurovision, Traitors, Mortal Kombat, the surreality of political discourse, the barrenness and bittiness of academic publication, the influence of influencers, the everyday individualism and social indiscipline of random vandalism, coughing on crowded buses, and taking children out of school to go on holidays.
Capitalism is a system that systemically obstructs systemic thinking, undermining coherent consciousness, purposive activity, and progressive politics. Only a philosophy with a critique of capitalism can break through this and can generate a coherent vision.
This is what Marxism brings to this scenario. It brings meaning, perspective, foundations, purpose, a worldview encompassing all forces at play within a unified framework. For Marxism, all these crises are rooted in a systemic crisis demanding systemic analysis. These cascading crises do not come from a random convergence of disasters. They are the logical outcome of the contradictions of capitalism in its decadent phase. We offer not only analysis of the nature of the system generating the most basic problems, but also a solution, which is an alternative system, which is socialism. Moreover, we have a movement striving for more than a century to bring this alternative into being—a movement that has achieved stunning victories as well as bitter defeats, but a movement still in play. It is time for a new surge.
Educators at all levels have a great responsibility. Knowledge itself is under attack. In defending it, it is vital to expose the deeper processes of knowledge production and to open a vista of liberated knowledge, rather than fighting simply for the status quo. There are strong and still developing Marxist approaches to every area of knowledge—from philosophy to physics and everything in between. They are too marginalized and need to be propelled into the mainstream, especially in universities, where they once exerted a more powerful presence.
Students see what a mess the world is. They sense their horizons shrinking. When they are asked the systemic question, do they think capitalism is a good system, large numbers, sometimes a majority, say no. However, when asked if there is an alternative, they rarely have any sense of that. They often have no awareness of what socialism is, neither what it has been nor what it could be for them. We offer them entry into an alternative narrative, a new story about the history that has led their lives to this moment, including the dissenting ideas, movements and states challenging capitalism and creating socialist spaces, a moving story in which they could play a part and find meaning and purpose.
Capitalism of its very nature creates and intensifies economic injustice and political corruption. It also poisons culture, education, and everyday life. Capitalism colonizes not only land, economies, and governments. It colonizes schools, universities, mass media, and social media. It colonizes psyches. It subverts logic. It undermines evidence. It breeds irrationality and madness. Our task is to expose this modus operandi, to break its grip and to struggle for alternative approaches at every level.
Because these cascading crises are generated by a crisis in capitalism, they are everywhere. Where there is capitalism, there are manifestations of these crises. There is a spectrum, with the United States and China at opposite ends of it, with other countries, such as Ireland, where I live, somewhere in the middle. The United States is where we see a society plunging downward as the warring factions shout accusations without grasping underlying causes or consequences. Basically, it is capitalism eating itself. There is a different trajectory in China. There is a sense of a society moving forward while the rest of the world is struggling not to fall backward. However, the borders are far from airtight. We live in a world system where capitalism, although decadent and disintegrating, is still dominant.
China is also caught up in these crises, both through pressures exerted through its integration into global systems and through the presence of capitalism within its own borders. Chinese literature also expresses experiences of psychic distress and social dislocation. So do everyday conversations with Chinese people articulating their anxieties. However, China is governed by a party with a critique of capitalism and promise of a path beyond these crises to socialism. China can do this by carrying forward the intellectual tradition and political movement that is Marxism, which involves challenging the non-Marxist positions that reform and opening up has brought into the universities, the party, and other institutions of the society. There is a struggle here too.
So, capitalism is the problem and socialism is the solution. That is so clear. What is not so clear, however, is how do we get from here to there.
In this complex world of financialized and globalized capital, it is not so obvious as it was in earlier revolutions how to expropriate the expropriators, even when left governments achieve state power. We need to figure that out and to do so within a broad social process of convincing people of the need for it and engaging them in forging that path. The Occupy movement in 2011 was one such moment of addressing the nature of the system and enacting dissent from it, even if this semi-spontaneous mass movement could not sustain itself. This pushed participants to seek forms of mobilization that would not demobilize so quickly, embodied best in the “Syriza, Podemos, Venceremos” moment, which also demobilized too quickly.25 We need to push ahead to combine long-evolved socialist traditions with mass mobilizations that can be sustained.
The task is to persuade people that the problems are systemic and to form movements to move to an alternative system that could be possible. Part of this is to have a clear narrative of socialist movements past and present and to defend what has been achieved by socialist movements and states while not defending the indefensible.
It is most essential to induce people to see how the system structures their lives. Capitalism is responsible for the terrible injustices of the world, the ecological destruction of the world, and the cultural decadence and psychological disorder of the world. We need to take every discussion within the public discourse and raise it to a higher level. For example, everywhere in the world so much daily talk is about Donald Trump, giving us the opportunity to raise consciousness from the details of the narcissism, deceit, and brutality of the day to the trajectory of the process making this possible, to move from Trump to the system producing Trump, from a monster wrecking an otherwise good system to a rotting system that will continue to rot even if he were to exit office. We need to get them to move beyond the details in the Epstein files to a conceptualization of oligarchy and its inherent corruption. We need to pull people away from the now romanticized image of previous presidents and to remind them of how all of these phenomena were already building.
We need to incite people to see the difference between contributing factors and ultimate causes. For example, we need actively to support gun control legislation, drug treatment programs, progressive candidates, environmental regulation, public health initiatives, ICE monitoring, No Kings marches, and many other practical reforms and mobilizations, while inciting others also active on these fronts to see that the logic inherent in capitalism is antithetical to the logic of ecology, public health, and democratic governance. In Ireland, we need to move from necessary defense of Irish neutrality to questioning the whole geopolitical positioning of Ireland in the emerging multipolarity. Those who become active on one issue can often be persuaded to go from there to connect with the many other issues, to see an underlying pattern and build a broader resistance.
It has been interesting witnessing on Red Note the interactions between American and Chinese young people talking about their lives, moving from granular detail to sometimes systemic conclusions. One Chinese young man, summarizing what he learned from American friends, reflected, “The system was not built for you. It was built on you.” There are many discussions of capitalism versus socialism on this platform. Social media are vital arenas of struggle.
We need to step up our participation in every arena of public discourse. Every day there are Marxists writing books, editing journals, teaching courses, organizing conferences, creating blogs and podcasts, updating on social media, and sometimes even having a voice in mainstream media. Beyond this, there are other activities, less highlighted, but nevertheless important. When we are at protests or even when we are engaging in conversations that begin on buses or on the streets or in gyms, we can turn them from specific issues into revelations of the systemic dimensions and the ongoing struggles pushing against the systemic consequences. When we articulate this, there is often assent. When we say it, people do see it.
Those who are engaging in naming the system, analyzing its decline, and organizing movements against it are not experiencing a crisis of meaning.
We have not only the most compelling analysis but a purposeful movement for advancing that analysis. It is often marginalized, at odds with itself, often weak, and far from what we need it to be, but it is nevertheless a movement with an inspiring history of world historical consequence with the potential to reshape the world yet again. It is this movement that offers the most positive force to facilitate the creative capacity of our species to overcome the destructive turmoil of our times.
In a world beset by cascading crises, we open up a vista of clarity, confrontation, and forward movement. We offer meaning, purpose, and values in a world starved for them. We need to make that case far more effectively than we are doing so far.
Only Marxism grasps that all these crises are rooted in a systemic crisis demanding systemic analysis. Only Marxism has the capacity to provide real meaning, perspective, foundations, and purpose, because it is a coherent, credible, and comprehensive worldview capable of grasping the causes and connections of cascading crises. Other attempts at explanation mistake contributing factors for ultimate causes, giving small answers to big questions and offering only facile, false, or futile solutions. Marxism is the only sound basis for a meaningful analysis of the current conjuncture.
Marxism is the unsurpassed horizon.
Notes
1. Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (London: Faber & Faber, 2024), loc. 674, 927. All quotes from cited novels refer to locations in Kindle e-books.
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