The Weaver Reads reviewed Four Futures by Peter Frase
Goodreads Review of Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
4 stars
This little book isn’t anything too profound, but it did give me some to chew on.
I turned to it because I’m constantly baffled by news headlines, especially as they relate to technology and economics. It feels like a seismic shift is taking place that could decouple us from the capitalist mode of production—and not necessarily in a good way.
Frase’s book speaks to that concern, although it was published nearly a decade ago. I think I hadn’t really caught on to the automation taking place at that point (which is something he argues has been ignored in the beginning of the text, in large part due to cheaper labor after the 2008 Financial Crisis). But, his “ideal types” for the future all come with the assumption that mass automation takes place.
The first chapter, “communism” imagines an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. This is the Star Trek-scenario, and it’s the dream. …
This little book isn’t anything too profound, but it did give me some to chew on.
I turned to it because I’m constantly baffled by news headlines, especially as they relate to technology and economics. It feels like a seismic shift is taking place that could decouple us from the capitalist mode of production—and not necessarily in a good way.
Frase’s book speaks to that concern, although it was published nearly a decade ago. I think I hadn’t really caught on to the automation taking place at that point (which is something he argues has been ignored in the beginning of the text, in large part due to cheaper labor after the 2008 Financial Crisis). But, his “ideal types” for the future all come with the assumption that mass automation takes place.
The first chapter, “communism” imagines an egalitarian, post-scarcity world. This is the Star Trek-scenario, and it’s the dream. If there’s something to aim for, it’s this. But, I had long wondered about the types of alienation that may take place in such a world. For one, many of us derive meaning from our work, and this might mean being deprived of that meaning. I’m not entirely convinced by that argument. What I did find compelling is his argument that smaller hierarchies might form on the basis of reputation, like in high school. Still, in my view, this wouldn’t be grave, because reputation wouldn’t be tied to material existence the way it is today—if people don’t like you, you won’t have a job, so you starve.
The second chapter, on “rentism,” is the one that I found most likely. It basically says, “yeah, there’s no such thing as REAL scarcity, but fuck you, we’ll manufacture it.” Frase comes at this from the angle of intellectual property. In our society, we theoretically have access to all the books, music, films, series, etc. that we want. But, if you pirate it, you risk being hit with heavy fines and then prison time. Obviously, there IS something to be said for paying creators for their work. But, even in 2024, that’s usually not what’s happening. Routledge or Taylor & Francis might sell a book for $150 and the author gets $2 in royalties. If you stream, Spotify takes 70%, the record labels get 29.?%, and the musician gets whatever is left. In many ways, this is the status quo, although obviously physical goods still experience scarcity.
Chapter three is on “socialism.” Scarcity exists but we do what we can to take care of it. This scenario is solarpunk, basically, and that’s all I have to say about it.
Chapter four, “exterminism,” takes seriously the idea that labor and productivity completely decouple. Part of what makes capitalism what is it is that capitalists are just as dependent on the proletariat as proles are on capitalists. In this scenario, capitalists no longer rely on labor, so they can cut it loose. Instead, everything is produced by bots. In the end, we all either starve, or get killed, or smth horrible. At first I thought this was the least likely scenario (I shouldn’t have been so naive). But, then Frase brings up the case of Palestine: Israelis used to use cheap Palestinian labor, but, over the course of the past twenty years, they have “diversified” and now rely more heavily on Asian and African migrants. In the earlier scenario, Palestinians were necessary for the functioning of the Israeli economy (as cynical as that is). Now, no more, and the Israeli state has a carte blanche to commit genocide without jeopardizing its own interests. This is the exterminist scenario.
I think rentism is, by and far, the most likely scenario. It’s a transformation of the status quo into something comparable to it under postcapitalism. Frase’s rendition of ommunism is the least likely, but it’s also the scenario that I pray we achieve. Exterminism or socialism are both toss-ups, but I’d say that exterminism is much more likely.
Frase tries to put us at ease with this state of affairs saying that we might zigzag through multiple of these under postcapitalism. Ok, maybe, but two of these are absolutely dystopian and should never see the light of day.
I went into this without expecting much rigor to it, and I was pleasantly surprised. You aren’t going to find detailed analyses of possible futures here, but this text me gave the sort of material necessary to even imagine a world beyond capitalist-realism, both in terms of options that are worse, and options worth fighting for.
