Post-Capitalist Futures: A Report on Imagination

Abstract

In light of the past decade’s upsurge in literary and critical treatments of a post-capitalist future, this chapter investigates the link between writing and theorising epochal crisis. For some thinkers on the left, the years since 2008 have seen a reinvigoration of formerly dormant utopian imaginings; for others, climate breakdown and related crises have prompted a reassertion of the need for sober if not dystopian realism. Lawrence argues that these responses themselves manifest a fundamental crisis over the stakes and meanings of realism itself, at precisely the moment when “capitalist realism” has come under renewed attack. Reviewing both theories and fictions of post-capitalism, the chapter gauges the resources available to writers, thinkers and activists at a historical moment of exceptional volatility and threat.