December 21, 2025 – No society can live indefinitely in strategic uncertainty. Therefore, the shock and social unease must eventually be abruptly followed by a cognitive readiness to discard old narratives and embrace new ones—whatever they may be—as long as they offer solutions to the anxieties and needs that weigh heavily on society.
Economic crisis. Stagflation. Geoeconomic fragmentation. Tariff wars. Deglobalization. Decline of unipolarity. Climate crisis. Democratic disaffection. All of this is happening simultaneously in the world today, with varying intensities and combinations depending on the country we choose.
How can we understand what is happening? Is it the “end of times”? Of civilization? Several supporting concepts have emerged to help us understand what is happening.
Polycrisis
Revisiting a term coined by Morin in the 1990s, Professor A. Tooze proposed the category of polycrisis to describe the exceptional and chaotic moment the world is currently experiencing. Subsequently, the World Economic Forum in Davos and the World Bank adopted the term for their assessments of the current global situation.
Polycrisis refers to the convergence of many independent crises occurring simultaneously, overlapping, and feeding back into each other.
In its simplest sense, polycrisis refers to the convergence of many independent crises occurring simultaneously, overlapping, and feeding off one another. Specifically, it describes the general bewilderment these disturbances cause and the loss of confidence in the existing knowledge systems used to predict the future. However, as Tooze himself acknowledges, it is a “weak theory” that does not allow us to “specify the factors driving” the crises, much less “the specific weight” of each one. This ultimately proves “confusing and useless” (Chartbook 407).
Interregnum
It was Gramsci who revived this category, used to designate the complex and irregular periods that emerge from the end of one sovereign to the enthronement of a new one (from the Latin “inter,” between; “regnum,” reign), to designate that historical interim of the “death of the old ideologies” that maintained the social consensus of the dominant classes. Therefore, it is the time when these classes cease to be leaders and remain only as dominant; as holders of the “sheer force of coercion” (Notebook 3, 34).
The interregnum signals a “crisis of authority” but one whose historically normal resolution remains “blocked”
While this is a transitional period from one form of legitimation to another, the interregnum signals a “crisis of authority” whose historically normal resolution remains “blocked.” The popular masses “separate” from the dominant ideology, not to immediately embrace another, but to immerse themselves in a “generalized skepticism” toward all “general theories and formulas.” Thus, amidst this “death of the old ideologies,” what prevails as social cohesion is the bond of “pure economic fact” and stark “cynicism” in politics.
While “the old dies and the new cannot be born,” it is precisely then that the conditions for the “formation of a new culture” necessarily arise. And he believed that it would be socialist.
The problem with this powerful concept is that it leaves economics out of the equation.
Liminal time
Initially, liminality was proposed by anthropologists Gennet and Turner to study the transition to structural states in the life of a people, such as war or scarcity. It is a time of dissolution and decomposition of prevailing norms in which the old and the new “are neither alive nor dead, on the one hand, and at the same time both alive and dead, on the other” (Turner, 1964).
Liminal time marks the end of one era and the beginning of a new one, but not as a gradual transition, nor as a peaceful, amphibious mixture; but as a void, a desperate, intimate absence
We use the concept of liminal time to characterize the subjective and collective way in which all social actors experience the direction of historical time in their lives during moments of transition from one global regime of economic accumulation and political legitimation to another.
It signals the end of one era and the beginning of a new one, not as a gradual transition, nor as a peaceful, amphibious blend, but as a void, a desperate, intimate absence. It is an abrupt break in the experience of the sense of time, leaving people without an imagined substitute or plausible premonition for several years, perhaps decades.
This liminal time has 4 structural components:
1. General economic crisis
There is no decline in social beliefs without a deterioration of the economic support that sustained it. When the economy grows, monetary incomes improve, social mobility, whether rapid or slow, is verifiable, and hierarchies of recognition are strengthened; moral allegiances between rulers and the ruled are stable. This dissipates when there is a paralysis of social mobility, a decline in status, a reduction in spending power, or a slowdown in the affordability of socially available goods. In other words, when an economic crisis emerges.
2. Elite divergence
When economic stagnation persists, business and political elites break the agreements that had previously fostered prosperity. They diverge on how to overcome the crisis, leading to a transformation of power blocs with hegemonic tendencies.
The right wing is veering towards the extreme right, proposing a return to the pure neoliberal “loyalty” of “macroeconomic adjustments” and the disciplining of the working class. Others will advocate erecting tariff barriers to regain manufacturing prominence, while maintaining the neoliberal use of public resources within the country. The left and progressive movements will emerge from their marginalization and find a receptive audience by implementing new approaches to improve the economy and people’s incomes: raising taxes on large corporations, stimulating demand through public spending, deploying neo-industrialist policies, and so on.
If the first group fails, left-wing policies may come to power. But if the left fails, the retaliation will be fierce, and the vengeful right will seek to eliminate any trace of popular opposition. Therefore, it is highly likely that we will witness simultaneous waves and counter-waves of opposing projects.
3. Suspension of historical time
Amid this decline and general malaise, the old systems of legitimation are collapsing and fragmenting in slow motion.
Since there is no tomorrow that might imagine an improvement on the present, there is also no path, straight or winding, to resolve the present’s dilemmas in relation to that imagined well-being. Historical time then disappears, for it presupposes a flow, turbulent or discontinuous, but directed toward a horizon, a goal, a destiny. Faced with this void of future, society is immersed in the bodily experience of a suspended time, devoid of any flow toward any end; adrift in a meaningless present stretched to infinity.
4. Social availability
However, no society can live indefinitely in strategic uncertainty.
Therefore, the shock and social unrest must eventually be abruptly followed by a cognitive readiness to discard old narratives and embrace new ones—whatever they may be—as long as they offer solutions to the anxieties and needs that weigh so heavily. This will be the moment when a new belief system crystallizes, accompanied by a new model of economic accumulation that lends credibility to its expectations.
Cognitive openness has no predetermined course or date. It can take conservative paths, such as post-fascist variants; or reformist or even revolutionary ones. The political struggle of that moment, how and with what political and economic forces have contributed to this cognitive openness in society, will influence the nature of the new cycle of historical time.
But that will come later. For now, the world is merely in the midst of this liminal maelstrom.
Álvaro García Linera is one of the most important intellectual figures in Latin American Marxism. A mathematics student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he participated in the founding of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army (EGTK) and spent several years as a political prisoner in La Paz’s Chonchocoro prison. He was elected Vice President of Bolivia in 2006 and re-elected until the 2019 coup that forced him into exile along with President Evo Morales. Author of more than twenty books, his latest work, “The Concept of the State in Marx: The Commons through Monopolies” (Akal, 2025), explores the theoretical proposals on the state from Marxist and critical thought perspectives, as well as Marx’s position on the matter.
