Writing in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, Barry K. Gills argues that the world is actually in “a multidimensional set of simultaneous and interacting crises on a global scale” that he terms a “triple conjuncture.” It involves:
- A capitalist crisis of over-accumulation that includes the externalities of neoliberalism.
- A world system crisis involving a geographic shift of the center of economic power alongside a hegemonic transition in the international system.
- A civilizational crisis in which environmental degradation indicates the incoherence between material production (which has grown unsustainable and self-undermining) and the ideational and institutional structures that continue to support the status quo.
“What this crisis may require for its ultimate resolution is no less than a global revolution, a shift to a new paradigm, not only of the economic system, but of the understanding of human life, society, their making, and their relation to all other life in nature” (pp. 181-2).