“As a result, to adapt a claim that Jameson, among others, has recounted about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, at this point it may be easier to imagine the end of capitalism than to imagine the end of work.”
[page 252 in Weeks’ essay “Utopian Therapy: Work, Nonwork, and the Political Imagination" in AN AMERICAN UTOPIA edited by Slavoj Sizek. Weeks is an advocate of the end of work.]
Gene
> On Oct 18, 2016, at 2:17 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> Richard Seymour and Peter Frase at Boston University, October 17.
>
> “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world," theorist Fredric Jameson once remarked, “than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Initially, this imagining took a grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of an anarchic and violent period of misery. However, the spread of global protests from Cairo and Hong Kong to Wall Street and Madrid has shattered this myth of capitalism’s absoluteness by demanding that an alternative is not only necessary, but better.
>
> Peter Frase, author of Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, argues that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. Increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase crafts a balance sheet of communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism — or in other words, the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.
>
> Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics tackles the current growing antiwar and socialist tendencies sweeping the US and the UK. He surveys the makeshift coalitions of trade unionists, young and precarious works and students who are abandoning the dominant narratives of the old parties in favor of explicitly anti-austerity, anti-war and socialist alternatives. From the rise of US third party candidate Jill Stein, challenging the two-party system, to Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension in the British Labour party, dealing a huge blow to the Blairite opposition, radical politics has been forced into the mainstream.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrmCYCtLlac
>
>
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
>
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