Four Futures: Life After Capitalism Summary

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase touches on four futures we could see in our near future. Although we are rapidly moving away from industrial capitalism, there is a little chance we’ll move back in that direction. But the direction we moving into has an uncertain future. The two factors that control the future we could enter are automation and climate change. The automation factor includes moving into a world where technology takes over human muscle. The climate change factor has to do with the fact that we need to change our ecological system so we can survive.

The four scenarios Peter Frase breaks his book down into, includes Communism: Equality and Abundance; Rentism: Hierarchy and Abundance; Socialism: Equality and Scarcity; Exterminism: Hierarchy and Scarcity.

In this scenario, machine automation will have entered all industries, taking over our work. This would lead to increased leisure time within society. This is scary to me. The thought of not having to work because machines can do it more efficiently than us is crazy. While this type of work is slowly emerging, it is something we will have to get used to. For instance, farming, before it was essentially all done by hand and hard labor, now today, you can sit in a tractor that drives itself. Before you’d have to get up early and go milk the cows, now there are machines that do it for you. We are slowly moving into this automation idea in all industries. The part I get caught up in is having increased leisure time. I’m a type of person that always has to be doing something, I truly believe I’d get bored not having to work. But I after thinking about it, it is because it was the way I was raised and it wasn’t normal for us to not be doing anything, but for the next generation, having increased leisure time will be the norm for them and won’t know