by Much, if not most, of the work looking at alternatives to capitalism spends a great deal of time focused on the past. This is important to do. I have an undergrad degree in history and I love and appreciate it. But …
…we can over-do it. Too much work takes the vantage point that the work ahead of us is about fixing the wrongs of the past. In a perfect world, which this one surely is not, we might have the luxury of fixing the past AND building the future. One can certainly make the case that they are inter-twined and that we must fix the past to build the future. I see the validity of this approach. Nonetheless, for After Capitalism, I am advocating that we shift our focus to primarily being on building the future (with the past in mind).
It might seem like a simple thing, but it’s not. From a young age we are taught to look for ideas and validation by looking backward, from legal precedents to benchmarking to case histories. The past has “real” evidence … while the future doesn’t exist.
But in looking backward to build the future, individuals, organizations or even societies are by definition borrowing what futurist Sohail Inayatullah calls used futures. Rather than create a new future of our own, we rely on what someone else has tried before. So we have the boogeymen of socialism and communism put forth as the alternatives, which is unfortunately (and perhaps unfairly) a losing proposition.
The purpose of the Imagining After Capitalism work has been to identify new futures so that we don’t end up recycling used futures, or get stuck in trying to fix wrongs from decades and centuries ago. Our task is one of creating, building, and constructing. Eyes front! – Andy Hines
oh yeah, and when you try to propose a future to people that isn’t recognizable (because it doesn’t reflect the history), you get laughed out of the room…
you also gets the likes of marx, lenin, stalin, mao, et al