“HISTORY, THE SOCIAL THEORIST Roberto Unger once observed, is genuinely surprising: it does not just seem that way.”
“A corollary comes from Yogi Berra: it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
“Forecasting from what we do know is a token of false confidence, an epistemic Maginot Line.”
“The critic Peter Frase tries to wriggle out of this conundrum in Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. The result is well worth reading. An energetic blend of polemic, book report, and caffeinated blog post, Four Futures essays more lines of argument in 149 short pages than many respectable op-ed pages manage in a year.”
“Frase aims to make conjecture about the future useful by yoking what may seem to be wild fantasies (read: genuine surprises) to rigorously specified problems.”
“His unconventional pair of tools is science fiction and social theory.”
“As he puts it, in a kind of methodological motto, “Science fiction is to futurism what social theory is to conspiracy theory.””
“Both, that is, aim to look beyond the horizon of the future and the veil of events; but only one recognizes its feral relation to fact, and so remains sane in its partial, probing unreality. With problems like ours, Frase insists, getting real demands a dose of antirealism.”
“The rigor of Four Futures, such as it is, comes from a schema of urgent questions.”
“Frase suggests that two pairs of alternatives combine to point toward four possible worlds: “two socialisms and two barbarisms,” he jokes, adapting Rosa Luxemburg. These are the “four futures” of his title.”
“If we achieve both material abundance and social equality, then we will have communism: a world where our major problem will be how to spend our days, now that we no longer have to barter them for survival.”
“If we achieve equality without conquering scarcity — if we head into the pincer of climate change, soil exhaustion, water shortages, and so forth with strengthened democracy and a strong principle of equal human worth — then we will be living in socialism, an often hard world where both burdens and advantages are shared in ways that people agree to on equal terms.”
“If, on the other hand, we end up in a world where social hierarchy persists or even deepens, the alternatives for most people look much bleaker. In a future of abundance where a small number of people continue to own the 3-D printers, or the raw materials, or the copyrights and patents for the machines and their programs — whatever the bottleneck may be to others’ access to plenitude — we will be in a world of rentism, after “rentier,” the economics term for those who collect wealth just by sitting on valuable resources without actually adding anything of value.”
“Frase’s grimmest future though, combines scarcity and hierarchy. With this pairing, he argues, we might be looking down the barrel of what he calls exterminism: a more or less explicit commitment to the elimination of people who produce no economic value.”
“Another way to understand Frase’s book is as a kind of radical, humanities-inflected foray into the space opened two years ago by the appearance of Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking, best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”
“The great value of Frase’s four rigorously simplified societies (which he calls “ideal types,” borrowing from the sociologist Max Weber) is not that the future will be the pure form of one or the other, but that any future is likely to be a mélange of two or more.”