The End of Capitalism: Exploring the Emerging Future with Peter Frase and Richard Seymour

“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.

Join us for a presentation followed by a Q&A moderated by Nicole Aschoff on the the current state of radical politics and the emerging futures that may result.

Richard Seymour is the author of The Liberal Defence of Murder (2008), Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (2012), and Against Austerity (2014). He currently presents a programme, ‘Media Review’, for TeleSur, and has previously appeared on BBC, Al Jazeera and C-Span. He is finishing a PhD at the London School of Economics, where he also teaches.

Peter Frase is an editor at Jacobin magazine, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and has written for In These Times and Al Jazeera. He lives in New York City.

Nicole M. Aschoff is the managing editor at Jacobin and the author of The New Prophets of Capital.

This event takes place as part of a new initiative entitled "Interferences," a series of events on issues pertinent to democratic politics in the US and Europe. Organized as part of EU Futures, a series of conversations exploring the emerging future in Europe. The EU Futures project is supported by a Getting to Know Europe Grant from the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC.