Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

A great, quick-and-easy read. Peter Frase takes the "specters of ecological catastrophe and automation" (p. 1) as the motivation for his four futures. These futures are "deliberately hyperbolic, sketching out simplified ideal types to illustrate fundamental principles" (p. 9). (Interestingly, I used the words "hyperbolic" and "ideal types" to describe my own project on the future of migration.) His contribution to the debate is "politics, and specifically class struggle" (p. 21). This is a perspective that I welcome, given the oddly apolitical discussions of automation (reskilling, upskilling, etc. is completely absent of discussions of ownership and worker power).

Frase assumes, for the purposes of the exercise, that automation will completely do away with the need for human labour; "automation is the constant, ecological crisis and class power are the variables" (p. 28). With these variables Frase creates a two-by-two grid, with Abundance and Scarcity (ecological crisis) on the one side and Equality and Hierarchy (Class Power) on the other.

Frase calls the combination of equality and abundance "Communism." In this world, everyone is free from the compulsion of meaningless work, and "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want" (p.41). Frase has an interesting discussion on how this world (under his assumptions of abundance) could be created. Going beyond the dichotomy of reform or revolution, he talks about "non-reformist reforms," which would gradually subvert the power relations in the system. One example of a non-reformist reform is Universal Basic Income. If a Universal Basic Income program is designed so that it would free people from meaningless work, it would drive wages up for meaningless work, leading to automation by capitalists, leading to abundance and the eventual disappearance of the money economy. Frase does not believe that status hierarchies will disappear. He likens the capital relation as "a kind of social magnet, with capital on one end and labor at the other, that tends to align all other social hierarchies with the master hierarchy based on money" (p. 59). In this world, "a hundred status hierarchies [will] bloom."

The combination of abundance and hierarchy leads to the scenario of "Rentism," where capitalists own the means to producing abundance (patents and copyrights). The key to understanding this scenario are the laws of intellectual property, which "dictates not only rights to the possession of physical objects but also over the copying of patterns" (p. 71). In this world, the economic system has changed from production of commodities (capitalism) to extraction of rents. In this world, automation will have rendered people useless as labour, but necessary as consumers. The only jobs that might exist are creators (of IP), lawyers, marketers (as there is a limited number of consumers to buy IP), and guards (to protect owners of IP), and all of these jobs could be rendered superfluous as well.

The next two scenarios take into account the climate crisis, which will impose a condition of scarcity and limits on consumption. Socialism is what Frase calls the scenario with equality and scarcity. This scenario will require a radical rethinking between the relationship between human beings and nature. Frase comments that this will involve more human interference with nature instead of the opposite; there is no pure and pristine state of nature in balance, nature just is, and humans are a part of it. This scenario is called socialism because a state will be necessary to organize the large transformations in infrastructure and energy systems, and because wealth equality will ensure that all people survive through climate change, not just the most wealthy. This does not mean that economic activity will rely solely on central planning: the state can use production targets and let market mechanisms go to work to determine an efficient outcome.

Finally, the scenario Exterminism combines hierarchy and scarcity. In this scenario, only a small privileged few are able to enjoy a high standard of living (so this is a situation of communism for the few) and automation has made the poor masses superfluous as producers of economic value, but potentially dangerous for the rich. The "solution" for the elite class? Extermination of the masses. Frase discusses the trends that are already happening, there is our heavily militarized society, the militarization of the police, walled off enclaves for the rich, the surveillance state, and a prison system that, in the United States, "now incarcerates 2 million people" (p. 135). Like the other scenarios, there are already signals that point to a possible emergence of elements of this scenario.

Frase is completely ignorant of foresight and future studies--he does reference about "futurism," which he describes as works "that attempt to directly predict the future" (p.26) and puts himself in the lineage of world building and speculative fiction instead. However, this book was one of the best and most provocative futures-related works I've read this year. (Perhaps it is because he also speaks the language of the social sciences?) I think that his example shows  the importance of multidisciplinarity, good scholarship, and good thinking in the space. Futurists need to be more than mere technicians or technology geeks--futurists need to be thinkers.

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