Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and an evergrowing scarcity of resources, thanks to weather change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both cultural technology and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism could actually entail.

Could the existing rise of real-life robocops usher in a global that resembles Ender’s Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to materials scarcities and inequalities of wealth-but there is no assure that public hierarchies, governed by an overall economy of ‘enjoys,’ wouldn’t rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through research fiction, cultural theory, and the new technologies currently shaping our lives, Four Futures is certainly an equilibrium sheet from the socialisms we might reach if a resurgent Left is successful, as well as the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.