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Peter Frase: Four futures (2016) 4 stars

Review of 'Four futures' on 'GoodReads'

4 stars

Super super short. So there's a lot of places where Frase simplifies or skips things, not least in the framing of "there are Two Crises, automation and climate change, and I'm gonna analyze them along these two axes." But given the limitations/focus I think this book does a pretty good job of imagining and contrasting different societies we could be living in.

Some of the key assumptions that the book rests on:
- automation will dramatically reduce the need for human labor
- capitalism will end, in the sense that it will stop being the basis for a functional society
Which I find mostly compelling, though I'm not sure how much our automation trajectory will be affected by ecological collapse (which are two crises he treats as orthogonal).

There's also some pretty fun stuff that's basically like, "hey, realistically we are kind of far away from seizing the state & the means of production. So in the meantime we can build strength by 'building alternatives to capitalism' and help people exist without depending quite so much on wage labor." Which is a kind of hopeful message, I think. In addition to avoiding the trap of "all we need is revolution," he also avoids a few others:
- ending capitalism will end sexism & racism
- ending capitalism will end hierarchies in general
- automation will mean people work less

And one final note: the four futures he envisions aren't end-points but different states that we can transition between. One could imagine a "rentist" future, with abundance and hierarchy, sliding into an "exterminist" future which then eventually transitions into "communism" for the surviving elite. Room for hope...?