Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Jacobin)

Capitalism is going to end

Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism might actually entail.

Could the current rise of real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender’s Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there’s no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of “likes,” wouldn’t rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.

• Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
• Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
• The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (Jacobin)
• Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
• Fully Automated Luxury Communism
• Justice and the Politics of Difference
• How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System
• The Millennials' Money: Why the next power generation CAN afford to build a better world
• The New Prophets of Capital (Jacobin)
• The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (Science Masters)