dg12357262 's review for:

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

3.5

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

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Four Futures was a good book overall. I enjoyed it. It was thought-provoking, definitely academic in the way that it speaks and portrays its ideas, but that is to be expected with a political science book like it is. It proposes four futures. A communist utopia, where we enter into a post-scarcity world in an egalitarian way. A rentism, which is entering into a post-scarcity world with the kind of ruling elite capitalist class that is currently existing. Socialism, which is entering into a world of scarcity in an egalitarian way. And exterminism, which is entering into a world of scarcity with the 1% of society controlling most of the wealth and so on. I thought the way that the author presented each of these ideas wasn't as compelling as the introductory chapter led me to believe it would be. They seemed more like it was going to kind of tell a story in each of the chapters, but ultimately each chapter felt like a rambling set of extrapolating current market and political relationships in our current world. But ultimately when you took each chapter as kind of the face value of the future that it was proposing, it was a quite interesting thought experiment of the path from our current present to each of the futures and then potentially the path from each of those futures to each other. I like the author's point of the reason of proposing four futures is if you propose one, then that will seem inevitable. But if you propose four, then there's different paths to each and only through action can we reach those different paths. And I thought the author continued to nail that point home consistently through the book. I did feel some of the points felt a little dated, but not hugely. But it is also nearly a decade on from when this book was published. But each of the points were fairly poignant for each future, I felt. Especially from a left point of view, the futures where there was a 1% or a ruling class. The rentism allowing intellectual property, which is fundamentally different from how normal property functions, allowing that idea to perpetuate and continue consistently is a dangerous path forward because everything can be commodified and controlled. And as the author put it, not only can I sell you a cup of coffee, I can then tell you how you are allowed to drink that cup of coffee, which is an interesting point, which I think will be a strong debate in the future. And then for exterminism, a future where, which feels like the most compelling future, unfortunately, in the book is where through climate change become more resource limited and the rich. And silo themselves off into smaller communities and hide themselves away through guard labor from the rest. It feels like the most compelling, it feels like the path that we're on the most, even between 2016 and 2025. But those critiques and those versions of the future felt more compelling and more lived in or explained, whereas the communist and socialist utopias that were proposed felt very hand wavy for every problem that could possibly come up. Especially the communist one. But a lot of the assumptions that came from the communist one were also held true for all of the other futures. It was just the communist future was proposed first. Overall, I enjoyed this book. I thought it was interesting. I thought it definitely made me think a bit, and I'd like to explore more literature in this genre. But I don't know if it changed my mind on a lot of things or really fleshed out any of the individual futures that it proposes enough for me to be compelled by them.