Frase manages to articulate many, many truths about — or falsifiable perspectives on — the inevitable progression of Capitalism.

His ample citation provide food for thought, his abstract attempt to comprehensively map society's possible outcomes is a good framework on which to shelve others' predictions; Frase may be wrong about the contents of each quadrant, but no future will escape his map.

Perhaps I am too fickle, but when I started reading this book I was mostly disappointed that it included no whole fictions, then I didn't appreciate the block-quoted pieces when they happened. ( )

Smart, thought-provoking look at the political economic paths we might take. The author is a Marxist, and some of his sections make or are based on assumptions I don't share (and sometimes find naive or somewhat inconsistent). But this short, crisp work is very useful for anyone looking for frameworks for better understanding the current moment and where we might be headed. ( )

¿Cómo será la vida después del capitalismo?
Peter Frase imagina cuatro posibles futuros recurriendo a la economía, la sociología y al universo más pop de la ciencia ficción. Y manejando las grandes claves de las que depende todo: ecologismo, trabajo, robotización, lucha de clases. Su idea no es acertar, sino lograr que tomemos conciencia de cómo evitar lo peor de esos cuatro escenarios. De ello depende, sea el que sea, nuestro futuro.

Filled with disclaimers about not being a work of futurism, this is nevertheless a nice piece of speculative fiction (or "speculative social science," to use the Frase phrase). A simple two axes do the job of postulating future political economies: scarcity v. abundance, hierarchy v. egalitarianism. Combining pairs serve to illustrate everything from a Star Trek-style communist utopia of plenty to an immiserated, "exterminist" world of rich enclaves and mass suffering.

Obviously, this isn't meant to be a comprehensive future analysis, but as a starting point for trying to build a better world, it's pretty good. ( )

As current events continue to instill a sense of impending doom over our contemporary lives, seeming to grow every year, I found Peter Frase’s book length essay, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism to be a fascinating and edifying read. In Four Futures, Frase describes the “two specters … haunting Earth in the twenty-first century: the specters of ecological catastrophe and automation,” which while “in many ways diametrical opposites,” exemplify our historic moment, “volatile and uncertain, full of both promise and danger.” A fascinating discussion, in the book Frase attempts to use the “tools of social science” as well as speculative fiction to examine how we imagation our future possibilities and conflicts.

Frase, in the end, envisions four options for the future of our society and uses popular culture as a lens to sketch out how they may operate, to paraphrase a quote Frase includes from Rosa Luxembourg’s 1915 statement regarding the fate of Bourgeois society, “two socialisms and two barbarisms.” Communism, which indicates an abundance of resources thanks to technological advances coupled with a broad equality, Rentism, in which those same technological advances exist but stay shackled to our current economic inequality, Socialism, in which scarcity remains a obstacle but equality maintains society fairly, and Exterminationism, in which the elite finally decide the majority of humanity need no longer exist. All in all this is, I feel, a useful way to look at discussions of imagined futures, and I will be referring back to these “four futures” in my own readings of pop culture dystopias/utopias.

I discuss Four Futures and other books in my latest entry of Harris' Tome Corner, The Anxiety of the Future #1, https://medium.com/@burk0277/anxiety-of-the-future-1-a-future-for-good-or-ill-fb... ( )