Four Futures ─ Visions of the World After Capitalism

“It’s easy to imagine the end of the world,” Fredric Jameson has remarked, “but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” Jacobin editor Peter Frase argues that technological advancements and environmental threats will inevitably push our society beyond capitalism, and Four Futures imagines just how this might look. Extrapolating possible futures from current changes the world is now experience, and drawing upon speculative fictions to illustrate how these futures might look, Four Futures examines communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism—or in other words, the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.

Peter Frase is an editor at Jacobin magazine, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has written for In These Times and Al Jazeera. He lives in New York City.