By Peter Frase
Capitalism goes to end
Peter Frase argues that expanding automation and a starting to be shortage of assets, because of weather swap, will carry all of it tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist global may well glance, deploying the instruments of either social technology and speculative fiction to discover what communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism could really entail.
Could the present upward push of real-life robocops bring in an international that resembles Ender’s Game? and certain, communism will carry an finish to fabric scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there’s no be sure that social hierarchies, ruled through an economic climate of “likes,” wouldn’t upward thrust to take their position. A whirlwind travel via technology fiction, social thought and the hot applied sciences already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a stability sheet of the socialisms we might achieve if a resurgent Left is profitable, and the barbarisms we will be consigned to if these pursuits fail.
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Additional resources for Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
Sample text
And that remains true whether you work for a capitalist boss or a worker-owned cooperative. The space of work is still the realm of necessity and not of freedom. Elsewhere, Marx even suggests that one day we may be able to free ourselves from the realm of necessity altogether. ” We’re used to having bosses who devise plans and then instruct us to carry them out; what Marx is suggesting is that it is possible to erase the barriers between those who make plans for their own benefit and those who carry them out—which would of course mean erasing the distinction between those who manage the business and those who make it run.
The former exists only for its characters and its mythic narrative, while the latter wants to root its characters in a richly and logically structured social world. This is related to, but transcends, a distinction that is customarily made among science fiction fans, between “hard” and “soft” science fiction. The former is supposed to be more plausible by way of its grounding in present-day science. But this distinction reflects the biases of the genre’s traditional fan base and its fetishization of the natural sciences.
Nevertheless, it should be clear that the possibility of rapid further automation in the near future is very real. Brynjolfsson and McAfee are perhaps the best-known prophets of rapid automation, but their work fits into an exploding genre. 8 He relies on much of the same literature and reaches many of the same conclusions about the pace of automation. His conclusions are somewhat more radical—a guaranteed universal basic income, which will be discussed later in this book, occupies a place of prominence; much of the rival literature, by contrast, offers little more than bromides about education.
