More Reading

For the third month running, the clicks have hit more than 100,000 and threaten to be more than the 154k of last month!

As I insert a list of the books I’ve been reading in recent days, I thought it would 
be useful to remind people of what you gain from reading – and this post puts it 
rather nicely

The Complete Notebooks Albert Camus (2025)
Camus was not only a famous French writer – author of L’Etranger – but the 
keeper of notebooks in which he scribbled his thoughts on various matters, 
including other booksThe Fight of Our Lives – my time with Zelensky, Ukraine’s battle for democracy 
and what it means for the world Iuliia Mendel (2022)
A book by someone who was Press Sec to Zelensky for a couple of years (just before 
the Russian invasion of the country) which is very positive about the experience but 
has now turned into one of Zelensky’s sharpest critics but spoiled by petty wrangling 
amongst the press corpsNotes from an Apocalypse – a personal journey to the end of the world and back 
Mark O’Connell (2020) I’m always a sucker for books about journeys and this is no exception – being a text 
about one man’s coping with climate change. Be warned, it’s a bit journalistic. Let’s 
start with the intro -
This book is about the idea of the apocalypse, but it is also about the reality of 
anxiety. 
In this sense, everything in these pages exists as a metaphor for a psychological state. 
Everything reflects an intimate crisis and an effort at resolving it. I went out into 
the world because I was interested in the world, but I was interested in the world 
because I was preoccupied with myself. 
A final disclaimer: though this book might seem to be about the future, its true 
concern is the present moment. I offer no visions of what the future might be like
—partly because I claim no authority from which to do so, but mostly because the 
future interests me only as a lens through which to view our own time: its terrors, 
its neuroses, its strange fevers. 
Either we are alive in the last days or we are not, but the inarguable thing in any 
case, the interesting thing, is that we are alive.
The text then starts with the preppers with a trip to the Chernobyl disaster zone thrown 
in for good measure

Navigating the Polycrisis – mapping the futures of capitalism and of the earth 
Michael Albert (2024). Not so sure about this book, having read the introduction. 
Its a bit too academic for my taste – see, for example, this excerpt - 
The key goals of the theoretical framework that I call “plan­etary systems thinking.” 
This approach falls under the broad umbrella of what is often called “complexity theory.” 
But we should emphasize that there is not one single form of complexity theory, 
but rather a set of related approaches aiming to transcend the analytic reductionism, 
disci­plinary isolationism, human/nature dualisms, and assumptions of linear change 
and causality that dominate the Newtonian scientific worldview. 
Planetary systems thinking can thus be considered a variant of complex­ity theory—
one that is particularly inspired by world-systems theory, eco­logical Marxism, 
Manuel Delanda’s framework of “assemblage theory,” Edgar Morin’s notion of 
“planetary thinking,” and the neo-Gramscian “complex hegemony” approach 
developed by Alex Williams. 

Planetary systems thinking is the subject of chapter 3, but for now I’ll briefly 
elabo­rate two of the key concepts that form the foundation of this approach. 
The first is the concept of a complex system: an open and dynamic system that 
emerges from a set of feedbacks between component parts but with­out negating 
the autonomy of the parts. Rather than the closed or tightly controlled homeostatic 
systems conceived in the traditions of cybernetics, Parsonian social theory, and 
Hegelian Marxism, complex systems should be understood as open systems 
or “dissipative structures” that are con­tinuously exchanging matter and energy with 
their surrounding environ­ments. They exhibit provisional and often fragile forms of 
stability that are reproduced through negative feedback mechanisms, though they 
are able to rapidly shift between alternative states in response to external shocks 
or slow shifts in key system parameters. Complex systems also range on a spectrum 
of systematicity from more heterogeneous and net­worked “assemblages” on one 
side, in which the parts retain a high degree autonomy (eg ecosystems) to more 
tightly integrated and hierarchically ordered systems on the other (eg biological 
organisms). Throughout this book I often use the term assemblage to refer to 
complex systems that are on the more loosely integrated and heterogeneous side 
of the spectrum (such as when I speak of security and ideological assemblages). 
But all complex systems in reality fall somewhere between these two poles, and 
over time they may shift in one direction or other. The capitalist world-system, 
for instance, became a more tightly integrated global system dur­ing the 
corporate-led hyperglobalization drive of the 1990s, though rising geopolitical 
tensions and calls for “decoupling” between the US and Chi­nese economies may 
be starting to reverse this trend. The second key concept is less familiar but equally 
important to the argument of this book as a whole. 
This is the concept of the problematic, which refers to a nexus of problems that 
shape and constrain the possible trajectories of a complex system. 
My use of this concept comes from the work of Manuel Delanda though he borrows 
it from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I am interested in how Delanda’s reworking 
of this con­cept can deepen our understanding of the widely used but undertheorized 
notion of “problematique.” The Club of Rome, for instance, in its infamous Limits to 
Growth report spoke of a “World Problematique”: a conjunction of intersecting 
ecological and economic problems that constrains the possible trajectories of the 
world-system. As William Watts wrote in his foreword to the report, “We continue to 
examine single items in the problematique without understanding that the whole is 
more than the sum of its parts, that change in one element means change in the 
others.” 
Edgar Morin shares this notion of problematique when he writes that there 
“is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex 
intersolidar­ity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the 
gen­eral crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.” 
Following Delanda, Morin, and the Club of Rome, the concept of the problematique 
or problematic gives us a way to think about problem-spaces composed of numerous 
reciprocally determining dimensions. This is exactly the sort of concept we need 
to analyze the unfolding polycrisis and understand the constraints it places on the 
possible futures of global capitalism and the earth system. The planetary polycrisis—
or what I later call the “planetary problematic”—is the simultaneously singular and 
mul­tiple crisis that emerges from the interlocking challenges we confront. 
It is the field of problems that collectively structure the future possibility space, 
though the future that ultimately emerges will be determined by struggles between 
competing hegemonic projects to frame, narrate, and pro­vide “solutions” to the 
problematic. Like the Marxist concept of “totality,” the planetary problematic is an 
abstraction that can guide theoretical and empirical analysis, though its substantive 
content can emerge, as in Marx’s method, only by “ascending from the abstract to 
the concrete,” thereby elaborating the problematic as a “rich totality of many 
determinations and relations.” This book will illuminate the intricate architecture 
of the plan­etary problematic in order to inform a counter-hegemonic praxis of 
navi­gation. The point is not to try to include everything in our analysis, but rather 
to highlight the key dimensions of the problematic that are most causally relevant 
to the planetary future, analyze the positive and negative feedbacks between them, 
and explore future trajectories that are “coher­ent” in the sense of following the 
feedback structure that entangles them.