One reason it’s easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism is that it was Marx who foresaw the end brilliantly, and then proceeded to domain-squat on the condition after with the dumbest possible totalizing vision of what could/should come after that has brain-rotted 6 generations of people since, and is about to become a deafening, stultifying presence on the American political landscape.

“Post-capitalist” should be a partially-blank canvas for imagination like post-national, able to explore all the potential of the goodies the end-state is blessed with. Instead the whole space is filled with apocalyptically dismal throwing out of the baby and keeping the bath water to be miserable in. No wonder it’s easier to imagine the end of civilization. It’s preferable to socialist utopias.

“Post-national” does inspire a lot of interesting creative political visions in a way “post-capitalist” does not, and one reason is people don’t have as much baggage there and cut loose. If you dropped the baggage of dismal socialist utopias, what post-capitalist conditions might be possible?

Specifically, if you share the concerns but not the models of socialists — environment, poverty, animal rights, “unprofitable” cultural activities, public infrastructure, commons… how could you assemble interesting visions out of these ingredients that are easier to imagine than both the end of civilization, and what’s almost the same thing, socialist utopias?

I’ll give the abundance crowd some props for at least trying to take aim at this, even if they derailed and produced basically a cosmetically tweaked left-center version of American dynamism type thinking that’s managerialized late capitalism at best. So that’s one strawman candidate at least.

I don’t have any candidates myself, but I do have what feels like a promising attack on the question, which is to look for “elegant nonprofit” models. I’m a big fan of going after boil-the-ocean macro-scale problems by looking for the right composable alphabet and grammar at the meso/micro scales. What are the right institution and mechanism models? And perhaps most important, what are relevant new human individual and collective archetypes comparable to “billionaire”, “proletariat”, “worker”, “colonial subject” etc?

To pick up another recent thread, what’s the “invention gap” here (if you think we have all the pieces of the puzzle you’ll produce bad solutions, like pre-Mendeleev periodic tables that didn’t leave gaps for speculative missing elements)?