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Noam Chomsky has warned that the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history owing to the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and rising authoritarianism. In an exclusive interview with the New Statesman, the 91-year-old US linguist and activist said that the current perils exceed those of the 1930s.

“There’s been nothing like it in human history,” Chomsky said. “I’m old enough to remember, very vividly, the threat that Nazism could take over much of Eurasia, that was not an idle concern. US military planners did anticipate that the war would end with a US-dominated region and a German-dominated region… But even that, horrible enough, was not like the end of organised human life on Earth, which is what we’re facing.”

The world is slowly recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. But the blow it struck to the rule of law remains persistent and widespread, according to fresh survey data collected in 140 countries. While declines in performance were not as extreme as in 2021, this year’s findings from the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index underscore the alarming drops in nearly every rule of law factor measured, especially in fundamental rights and checks and balances, which are two critical pillars of the rule of law.

Overall, these trends toward authoritarianism and away from rules-based liberal democracy portend dark trouble ahead. As big-power geopolitical competition continues to heat up, the differences in how states govern themselves will have outsized influence in shaping solutions to some of our most intractable problems – digital disruption and disinformation, corruption and illicit trafficking, and outright war. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and its sophisticated disinformation tactics, shows just how dangerous this divergence has become.

In addition, sunsets on constitutionality will promote several Rule of Law virtues that allow private actors across the nation to comply with the Constitution’s requirements more efficiently. If the Court can clearly announce that a particular government policy will remain constitutional for at least an extended sunset period, citizens will not need to be experts at parsing divided opinions in order to understand the current state of constitutional law. This added clarity in our nation’s foundational norms will in turn enhance their public accessibility, and will also render the law of the Constitution more predictable and thus a more useful edifice upon which citizens can order their private affairs.

First, there is significant Rule of Law value to a legal regime that is clear. Such clarity is needed to guide the actions of citizens, provide fair warning if life, liberty, and property are at stake, and protect expectations of how others, including the state, will behave.148 Sunsets will allow the Court to specify a period during which a policy will remain constitutional while delineating precisely how and when the Court is willing to revisit the issue, rather than leaving it open to conjecture when the Court might again see fit to issue new edicts on the topic that unsettle vast swathes of the legal regime.

Another consideration is that many utopian narratives appear to be unstable and liable to re-inscribe themselves as dystopias, under the very weight of the privileged regulation required for their preservation. The Garden of Eden and Shakespeare’s The Tempest constitute such cases, and these shifts merely perpetuate the utopia/dystopia binary. Terry Eagleton, too, views utopian discourse as tending to disrupt its own fabric: Utopia is the most self-undermining of literary forms. If an ideal society can be portrayed only in the language of the present, it risks being betrayed as soon as we speak of it.. . . All utopian writing is also dystopian, since, like Kant’s sublime, it cannot help reminding us of our mental limits in the act of striving to go beyond them. (24) On the other hand, the willing and conscious reconsideration of utopian norms also causes a loss of utopian stasis/status, but it allows for more flexible alternatives, breaking the utopia/dystopia binary by suggesting that disrupted utopian narratives do not have dystopia as their only alternative. Among the other alternatives are the heterotopian narratives,

Utopian discourses are essentially frameworks for alternative communities, but are almost entirely theoretical in nature, involving discursive constructions. The question of the presumption, privilege or authority governing such discourses is central, since notions of utopia and dystopia are not merely mythical constructs, but lie at the extremes of a continuum of possible communities, aspects of which often offer aims and reference points for the construction of actual flesh-and-blood community. There is no shortage of cases in which regimes (in countries 20 ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA48.1 such as the Soviet Union and Albania) have incorporated aspects of utopian theory into their political structures, often with disastrous results: It is precisely because our gods, kings, presidents and scientists have dreamed of order and purity that we have tried to organize the world according to a grand plan, whether it be Versailles or trains that run on time. The tragedy that endlessly follows from such hubris should surely teach us that such dreams are dangerous. (Parker 1)

But prioritizing profit is a double-edged sword that can hamper innovation. Owning the proprietary rights allows private firms to block workers—through anti-competitive tools like non-compete agreements, patents, and licenses—who put labor into the innovation process from applying the extensive technical expertise and intimate understanding of the product to improve the innovation substantially. This becomes especially relevant once the workers leave the firm division in which they worked, or leave the firm altogether. Understandably, this lack of control and ownership will cause some workers, however passionate they may be about a project, to be less willing to maximize their contribution to the innovation.

Of course, the so-called nimbleness that allows firms to make drastic changes like mass layoffs is extremely harmful to the workers. This is no fluke. The capitalist economy thrives on a reserve army of labor. Inching closer to full employment makes workers scarcer, which empowers the labor force as a whole to bargain for higher wages and better work conditions. These threaten the firm’s bottom line. So, the capitalist economy is structured to maintain the balance of power towards the owners of capital. Positions that pay well (and less than well) come with the precariousness of at-will employment and disappearing union power. A constant pool of unemployed labor is maintained through layoffs and other tactics like higher interest rates, which the government will compel to help slow growth and thereby hiring. This system harms the potential for innovation, too.

The technological dynamism of capitalism has always been a powerful argument in its defense. But one of its secrets is that at the heart of this change we find neither bold entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, nor established firms.

Investments pushing the frontiers of scientific knowledge are just too risky. The advances sought may not be forthcoming. Those that do occur may not ever be commercially viable. Any potentially profitable results that do arise may take decades to make any money. And when they finally do, there are no guarantees initial investors will appropriate most of the resulting windfall.

Mainstream Western economics gives capitalism high marks for innovation. The pursuit of profit is supposed to assure a strong incentive to engage in the invention, development, and production stages of innovation, while also inducing investors to provide potential innovators with the necessary financial means. Free entry into markets compels rapid diffusion of innovations. An optimal contribution to human welfare is assured, given the assumption that profitability reflects the ultimate value to society of any economic activity. While capitalism does promote a certain kind of rapid technological change, the above account has serious flaws. The pursuit of profit does not play such a big role at the important invention stage of innovation. Studies show that a large majority of economically important inventions come from university scientists, government researchers, and independent inventors, for whom pecuniary considerations are not typically dominant.6 At the development stage, the still-high risks, plus the sometimes substantial external (and hence uncapturable) benefits from innovation, lead to (successful) demands for government subsidization.7 The profit incentive for innovation is profoundly contradictory. For the profit incentive to operate, innovators must be able to gain monopoly control over the innovation and bar competitors, or else the first innovator’s profit will be small and fleeting. However, the legal and extra-legal means that capitalist innovators use to gain such monopoly power (patents and predatory tactics) prevent the rapid diffusion of new products and processes. The greatest flaw in the capitalist innovation process has to do with the third question, that of the contribution of innovative activity to human welfare. As capitalist innovators follow the guide of profits, the following problems arise: 1) innovations are disproportionally directed at upper income consumers;8 2) public goods are largely ignored in the innovation process; 3) external benefits and costs of innovation, which may loom very large, are not taken into account in innovation decisions; 4) the monopoly power required to stimulate innovation leads to high monopoly prices for the resulting product, limiting the use of the new innovation and hence reducing the benefit from it;9 5) much innovation activity is pure waste, as firms devote innovation resources toward the end of defeating rivals rather than benefitting consumers.10 While capitalism does promote the development of the forces of production, it does so in a manner that is severely flawed. Capitalism can promote innovation only if the state and other non-capitalist institutions play an active role in organizing and financing the innovation process, particularly the invention stage. It can do so only with significant monopoly power and barriers to entry that simultaneously promote and hinder technical progress. And it produces a severely distorted innovation process that, after a certain stage of development, may subtract as much from human welfare as it contributes, or even more. 4. Innovation under Soviet State Socialism The Soviet system was, at best, a highly flawed and distorted version of socialism. However, it was the first large-scale effort to build a modern economy based on public ownership of productive property and coordination of the economy by economic planning. For this reason, the experience of the Soviet economy in the area of innovation is relevant to our concerns here. Spokespeople for the Soviet system claimed that, as a socialist system, it would, and did, outperform capitalism in promoting technical progress. The key advantages cited were the absence of commercial secrecy, the avoidance of the wasteful duplication of R&D effort of capitalism, and the ability to directly incorporate technological advances into the central plan rather than having to rely on the indirect incentive of profitability. However, the Soviet leadership soon discovered that innovation was not as straightforward a process as had been assumed. In the postwar decades the system was frequently adjusted and reformed to improve innovation performance. The mature Soviet system had various institutional components to its innovation system, including the incorporation of major planned new technologies into the central plan by Gosplan each year. However, two institutions were most important in Soviet innovation performance: 1) a system of R&D Institutes, which had innovation as their sole mission; and 2) the individual enterprises, which typically had a design department for new product development and, at larger enterprises, a research laboratory. The Soviet system did have significant strengths in innovation performance.11 Soviet R&D Institutes were staffed with well-trained and dedicated researchers and were reasonably well funded, and they and the enterprises did produce many important innovations. The success was best known in military and space technology, but it extended to some civilian industrial technologies.12 Output per labor hour in the Soviet economy grew rapidly until 1975, much faster than in the U.S. during that period (Kotz and Weir, 1997, p. 46). However, Soviet innovation performance never lived up to expectations. Understanding the problems encountered in the Soviet innovation process -- and the institutional sources of those problems -- is relevant to evaluating the potential innovation performance of a DPPS system, including potential problems that it might encounter. There was a serious incentive problem in the Soviet innovation process. The incentive problem was not located at the R&D Institutes but rather at the enterprises. Soviet enterprises were relatively good at minor innovations. The incentive problem involved larger changes in the production process and the development of new products that differed substantially from what had been produced before. The Soviet enterprise director faced a context of relatively low rewards (in the director’s bonus) for successful innovations while the risks attendant upon major innovations were quite high. This tended to make Soviet enterprise directors conservative about innovation, with reluctance to develop new products or processes or to introduce those that emerged from the R&D Institutes. The risk of innovation was not just the result of the inevitable delays and unforseen costs that arise when trying something new. The key factor was the difficult supply relations in the Soviet planning system. Enterprises always worried about whether sufficient supplies would be delivered on time to enable the enterprise to meet its goals. This was a result of the policy of “taut planning,” aimed at achieving the maximum possible output from available inputs. Innovation necessitates unforeseen changes in required inputs, and the taut planning system made it difficult to change the input mix in mid-plan. The hierarchical relations of Soviet planning meant that enterprises did not have close relations with their suppliers, which compounded the problem. These conditions made innovation very risky, with a likelihood of interruption of the enterprise’s regular production, resulting in financial punishment for the director. Another incentive problem was an absence of penalties for failure to introduce available new technologies. A laggard enterprise with outmoded technology might find its costs rising above the industry average, but the ministry tended to protect its enterprises and made subsidies available. There were also problems of the means available for innovation. Innovations that involve radically new products typically entail either the entry by an existing enterprise into a new line of production or the creation of new enterprises. The Soviet planning system had relatively rigid boundaries between industries, and entry into a different line by an existing enterprise was discouraged, as poaching on the territory of others.13 While new enterprises were created from time to time, this was limited and usually faced opposition from existing enterprises. Individual inventors were greatly underutilized in the Soviet system. Most enterprises had an official policy of making small-scale facilities available to aspiring inventors. However, this program was not very effective at drawing out creative individual inventors, perhaps because the passivity bred into individuals by the repressive, centralized, hierarchical Soviet system discouraged individual inventive activity. In the matter of the effectiveness of innovative activity at advancing human welfare, the Soviet system did avoid some of the problems of capitalist innovation. There was no bias against innovation in public goods. There was no problem of monopoly pricing of new products and processes, with the attendant limitation of their use. However, the Soviet system had significant weaknesses in the effectiveness of innovative activity. We will cite three problems in this area. First, while irrational profit criteria largely guide the allocation of innovative effort in a capitalist system, in the Soviet system the “planners’ preference” guided this allocation. The top leadership favored certain sectors, particularly the military, space exploration, and certain industrial sectors, while consumer goods occupied a lowly place in their priorities. Second, there was a problem stemming from the poor relations between the two key institutions involved in innovation, the R&D Institutes and the enterprises. The R&D Institutes had the best researchers and facilities, and they produced a large volume of plans for new products and processes. However, the enterprises, which had to produce the new product or introduce the new process, complained that plans arrived that were incomplete, unrealistic, or unworkable. R&D Institutes complained that enterprises were uninterested in their proposals. The result was that much innovative effort failed to bear fruit. This seemed to be a result of the hierarchical character of the system, in which relations between institutions at the same level of the hierarchy were very poorly structured.14 Third, and perhaps most serious, innovation in the Soviet system generated major external costs, particularly for workplace and environmental health. The reason for this in the Soviet case was not the pursuit of profit but the single-minded emphasis on growth in output and the undemocratic and repressive character of the system which prevented the affected parties from defending their health interests. 5. Innovation in a Democratic Planned Participatory Socialist System What kind of innovation performance would be expected under a DPPS system, by comparison to that of capitalism and state socialism? Three features of DPPS, as laid out in Devine (1988), are relevant to innovation performance. First, the main features of the overall economic plan would be determined by a democratic process (Devine, 1988, p. 190). Second, the planning and coordination of the economy would take place, not through market forces or top-down central planning, but through a process of “negotiated coordination” (Devine, 1988, ch. 8-10). This means that resource allocation decisions would be made by boards -- industry boards and local and regional negotiated coordination bodies -- that have representation of all affected constituencies, including workers, consumers, suppliers, the local community, and even “cause” groups such as environmentalists, job safety activists, feminists, etc. These bodies would arrive at decisions through compromise among the interests represented on them. In addition, the basic units of social production, or enterprises, are considered social property and have governing boards that include representatives of all groups affected by the activity of the enterprise, including workers, consumers, suppliers, and the local community. Third, each individual would be expected to spend part of her/his work life in each of the main types of labor, which Devine defines as planning and managing labor, creative labor, nurturing labor, skilled labor, and unskilled/repetitive labor (Devine, 1988, 171). This would eliminate the social division of labor, while preserving the technical division of labor with its efficiency advantages. In the absence of competitive pursuit of profits, or a Politburo demanding innovation, what would be the source of innovation under DPPS? First, the democratic, participatory institutions of that system would empower the population to demand innovations aimed at its own benefit. Under such a system, people would stand to benefit from innovation, in the three roles that people occupy – that of consumer, worker, and community member. Consumers can benefit from new, better, and cheaper products. Workers can benefit from less arduous toil and a more satisfying experience at work. Members of the community can benefit from products and work processes that improve, rather than harm, community life. DPPS, like every economic system, can also tap a second potential source of innovation. That is the species trait of human beings of having a propensity to look for ways to change and improve their methods of doing things, entirely apart from any desire for more goods or less labor. This drive, present in most people, although not in equal measure in all, represents an important source of innovative behavior at the stage of invention, if the economic system allows it to operate freely. How would a DPPS economy translate the potential benefits of innovation into actual effective innovative activity? How would it encourage, within the economy, the expression of human beings’ natural tendency to create new things? If the populace wants innovation, they would have to build into the system significant incentives for those who are in a position to carry it out. Enterprise managers, along with everyone else who participates in any of the stages of innovation, should be eligible for rewards for successful innovation. It is not sufficient to assume that decision-makers will automatically innovate -- it must be communicated to them, via a reward system, that society values innovation. Such rewards would be needed regardless of the mix of material versus moral incentives. Pay incentives need not be huge to elicit innovative behavior, as long they are large enough to bring a noticeable consumption benefit to the innovator. As the Soviet experience indicates, a planned economy can increase the risk associated with innovation, deterring innovative activity. However, DPPS should not suffer from the problems of uncertain supplies and inflexibility that characterized Soviet planning. With representatives on one another’s decision-making boards and with opportunities to communicate on negotiated coordination bodies, there should be reliable and flexible relations between suppliers and customers. It would be necessary to eschew the Soviet policy of taut planning and operate the economy with sufficient excess productive capacity to accommodate the unforeseen changes in inputs that innovation requires. Without the spur of competition to compel laggard enterprises to adopt the best technology in the industry, could an enterprise management, perhaps backed up by a workforce unenthusiastic about change, simply refuse to make improvements? As was noted above, an enterprise under DPPS is not the sole property of its workers but is social property, upon which constituencies outside the enterprise have a legitimate claim. Industry boards would have to keep track of laggard enterprises, and consumer representatives on both industry and enterprise boards would have to be powerful enough to exert pressure to make appropriate changes, imposing financial penalties where necessary. In order for this system to work effectively, it would be desirable to have more than one enterprise in each industry, except in cases of natural monopoly.15 The purpose is not to impose a market form of competition in which the cheapest producer drives out the rest, a process which often yields socially irrational outcomes. Rather, the purpose is to permit the gathering of comparative information about enterprise performance, from market exchange as well as other sources, so as to make informed decisions about what changes enterprises should be asked to make. It would not always turn out that the higher-cost producer is the one asked to change; the lower-cost producer might be found to have achieved low costs by anti-social practices rather than superior technology. Long ago Adam Smith complained that the detailed division of labor tends to make workers stupid. The DPPS practice of assuring everyone participation in the highest types of labor should have the opposite effect. This practice, along with the widespread participation in decision-making fostered by a DPPS society, should encourage the creative, innovative behavior that is natural to our species. DPPS should create conditions for a substantial outpouring of creativity from the population, some of which would take the form of innovation in the economic sphere.

The search for habitable planets is driven by capitalism's failures. Some left-wing thinkers think that the galaxy will eventually be in danger of being destroyed by capitalism. At last week's Left Forum Conference in Manhattan, a NASA researcher suggested that the drive to explore exoplanets and mine asteroids has been bred primarily out of a need to feed the beast of capitalism. "[Exoplanet exploration] has been masked as a scientific interest, a human interest, and human curiosity to explore different worlds," Anastasia Romanou, a climate research scientist for Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. "Late era capitalism is feeling the pressure from resource scarcity, and therefore, it has to find its own way out. It cannot think outside its own box of solutions, and it will have to find another place, and another place, and another place to exploit." Romanou fears that exoplanets will suffer the same fate as the global south, which was first explored, then mined for minerals and drilled for oil. "Late capitalism" describes the theoretical dying days of a capitalist economy. These final days include resource shortages and weakened manufacturing practices—essentially, the bourgeoisie have been stretched too thin. But the term has also been repurposed as a meme that mocks the absurdity of modern capitalism. Kai Kaschinski, a representative of the Fair Oceans organization, said that exoplanets and asteroids will one day face the same fate as the deep seas, which are in the process of being privatized and mined by resource extraction companies. He said that the the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which allows US companies to mine celestial bodies such as asteroids for valuable minerals, may be in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Space lawyers say that treaty did not conclusively determine who is allowed to mine asteroids and who isn't. "The argument of the government was that there is an international secret authority of the law to sea, and the law of sea makes it possible to dig in the area," Kaschinski said. "So the Obama government was of the opinion that if you can dig in this area of common heritage of mankind, you can also dig in the common heritage of mankind in space." Right now, asteroid mining is still just an idea with engineering and ethical issues yet to be resolved. Despite this, several companies including Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have announced plans to mine asteroids and are currently developing the technology necessary to do so. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has also already discovered over 2,000 exoplanets, 21 of which lie in a "habitable zone." So although we continue to discover more and more exoplanets, the economic implications of our drive to explore the galaxy loom on the horizon.

This mainstream vision of how to achieve a sustainable world is coherent in theory, at best, but demonstrably it does not reflect empirical reality (see Alexander, 2014). Although many economies around the world are indeed getting better at producing commodities more cleanly and efficiently (a process known as ‘relative decoupling’), overall ecological impact is nevertheless still increasing, because every year increasing numbers of commodities are being produced, exchanged, and consumed as a result of growing economies (Jackson, 2009, Ch. 5). We might have more fuel-efficient cars, for example, but the rebound effect is that we are also driving more and buying more cars. This is but one example of the ‘Jevons paradox’ that permeates market societies and beyond (Polimeni et al., 2009) – a paradox, so-called, because a per unit reduction in the throughput of commodities does not always lead to reduced ecological impact, since those efficiency improvements are often outweighed by the increasing amounts of commodities that are consumed (Holm and Englund, 2009). The implication of this is that technology and efficiency improvements are not going to solve the ecological crisis, as their most optimistic advocates and popular consciousness seem to assume they can (Lovins, 1998) – at least, not unless the highly developed nations also transition away from growth economics. Efficiency without sufficiency is lost.

As we have seen, when corporations do not invest their economic surplus in new capital formation—primarily due to vanishing investment opportunities in an economy characterised by excess capacity—they are left with abundant free cash that is partly returned to the shareholders through share buybacks and, to a lesser degree, dividends. It is also used for speculation, including mergers, acquisitions, and the panoply of corporate “cash management” techniques that amount to the leveraging of free cash to enhance returns. This gives rise to a whole alphabet soup of 19 financial instruments, in which corporations use the cash at their disposal partly as collateral for debt leverage, with non-financial corporate debt rising rapidly as a share of national income. Predictably recurring internal corporate funds in the form of free cash constitute a “flow collateral” allowing for further leverage, feeding speculation. A speculative economy relies on borrowed funds for leverage, backed up in part by cash. Expanding cash reserves are also needed as hedges in case of financial defaults. The whole system is a house of cards.

The progressive financialisation of the capitalist economy, whereby the financial superstructure continues to expand as a share of the underlying productive economy, has led to ever-greater asset price bubbles and growing threats of world economic meltdown. So far, a complete meltdown has been headed off by central banks, as in the 2000 and 2008 financial crashes. At every major recurring disturbance, and with serious economic repercussions, the monetary authorities pump massive amounts of cash into the financial superstructure of the economy only to give rise to greater bubbles in the future.

The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank serving the energy industry, reports that the steep decline in the price of generating solar and wind energy “will inevitably lead to trillions of dollars of stranded assets across the corporate sector and hit petro-states that fail to reinvent themselves,” while “putting trillions at risk for unsavvy investors oblivious to the speed of the unfolding energy transition.”19 “Stranded assets” are all the fossil fuels that will remain in the ground because of falling demand as well as the abandonment of pipelines, ocean platforms, storage facilities, energy generation plants, backup power plants, petrochemical processing facilities, and industries tightly coupled to the fossil fuel culture. Behind the scenes, a seismic struggle is taking place as four of the principal sectors responsible for global warming—the Information and Communications Technology (ICT)/telecommunications sector, the power and electric utility sector, the mobility and logistics sector, and the buildings sector—are beginning to decouple from the fossil fuel industry in favor of adopting the cheaper new green energies. The result is that within the fossil fuel industry, “around $100 trillion of assets could be ‘carbon stranded.’”20 The carbon bubble is the largest economic bubble in history. And studies and reports over the past twenty-four months—from within the global financial community, the insurance sector, global trade organizations, national governments, and many of the leading consulting agencies in the energy industry, the transportation sector, and the real estate sector—suggest that the imminent collapse of the fossil fuel industrial civilization could occur sometime between 2023 and 2030, as key sectors decouple from fossil fuels and rely on ever-cheaper solar, wind, and other renewable energies and accompanying zero-carbon technologies.21 The United States, currently the leading oil-producing nation, will be caught in the crosshairs between the plummeting price of solar and wind and the fallout from peak oil demand and accumulating stranded assets in the oil industry.22

Endless growth will generate minerals scarcity within decades 

The EV transition is, in short, a massive industrial project. Electrification of roads and rail will require upgraded smart grids, complex routes connected to high power lines, and regular battery-swap stations. The paper explores several scenarios to explore how such a transition would take place. 

According to Bruce McIndoe, president of McIndoe Risk Advisory, there are five megatrends that will shape the future of business and the world: globalization, demographics, climate change, resource scarcity, and technology innovation. Each are interlinked and influence global supply chains as the world supports a growing global population.

McIndoe briefly described these trends: 

The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution.36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “species exterminations” resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.38

If present climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously close to a Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible.39 The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40

This essay suggests that the avoidance of such tragic hubris lies in a self-interrogative stance towards theory, taking as a guide Gayatri Spivak’s view of herself as a theorist who is engaged in ‘the careful project of un-learning our privilege as our loss’ (9fia process in which, she says, Derrida is also engaged (14). Spivak’s stance implies that the careful unlearning (as opposed to the mere abandonment) of any stance has to be a conscious and always provisional process, which would allow theoretical strategy to enjoy neither a privileged position nor unambiguous closure. Theory used in a conscious way should offer a liminal space which encourages the conscious deconstruction of our own discourses, in order to ensure that we do not rest in the privileged position which theory often assumes for itself. This essay will suggest that those who construct utopian worlds are among those who need to un-learn their privilege, in the awareness that this entails a kind of necessary loss. However there is also the prospect of gain, since a more conscious utopian discourse would offer an increase in aware and consensual ways of defining community, thus obviating the usual need to police the boundaries of utopian societies.

Temporal Geographies of the Speculative Undercommons The texts I examine herein posit critiques and alternatives to the speculations of globalization and interject radical revisions of progress narratives by attending to the markedly uneven accumulation of wealth of late capitalism. These counterspeculations tend to refuse strictly utopian or dystopian trajectories for technoculture, and they attempt to intervene in developmental teleologies by denaturalizing linear arrangements of time. These speculative fictions enact what Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd have called “the excavation and connection of alternative histories and their different temporalities that cannot be contained by the progressive narrative of Western developmentalism.”60 In the recent years of rampant speculation, late capitalism has insistently faced forward, driving Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History along, if not attempting to push it aside. When speculative futures run wild, excavation, historicization, and haunting become increasingly important modes of contingency to slow the storm of progress.61

The speculative fictions that I discuss come from a wide range of geographical contexts, each the site of some form of U.S. imperialism. Under the rubric of speculative fiction, various historical networks of affiliations (among Asian immigrants to the Caribbean and Mexico, Malaysian workers in Singapore, and Asian Brazilians who migrate for a second time to Southern California) are evoked that decenter the United States in the narrative of immigration to the Americas. The authors I examine posit the geographical loci of the Brazilian Amazon, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the Southeast Asian archipelago as speculative spaces, wherein histories of colonization and labor exploitation have produced markedly different relationships to Western science and technology. My project, therefore, suggests that these speculative fictions forge transnational affiliations by positing diasporic movement as a technology that works covalently with other intensified global flows. Migrant Futures considers speculative fictions that create transnational affiliations among communities of color that extend networks of care beyond national narratives of “risky subjects” and the calculations of global financialization.

I have elaborated this theoretical scenario to explain the complex psychosocial processes that constituted the preconditions for the symbolic efficacy of the fantasy of American exceptionalism. I have solicited the insights of Slavoj Žižek and Renata Salecl to articulate this explanation because they arrived at an understanding of the workings of state fantasy from within the precincts of the Soviet imperial formation onto whom the cold war state had projected the agency responsible for the construction of the U.S. State of Exception. As the subjects within a nation-state that had actually been subjected to the imperial formation that the U.S. state had described as its dialectical contrary, Žižek and Salecl are perhaps the theorists best suited by historical circumstances to explain the perverse logics of the U.S. State of Exception. But the paradoxical logic at work in the primal scene of American exceptionalism discerned by two of its ego-ideals need not impede a more forthright description of the reality effects of this pervasive state of fantasy. After World War II, the U.S. government propagated the belief that America was the fulfillment of the world’s aspiration for the “Nation of Nations” by constructing the threat to the attainment of that ideal in the image of the Soviet Empire. The construction of this national enemy in the image of an Evil Empire enabled the U.S. state to represent its imperial practices as preemptive measures that it was obliged to take to prevent the Soviet Empire from incorporating U.S. citizens within its imperial domain. American exceptionalism produced the desire within U.S. citizens to construe U.S. imperialism as a nation-preserving measure that would prevent Soviet imperialism from destroying America’s national ideals. American exceptionalism also enabled U.S. citizens to turn this nation preserving measure into an exception to U.S. national identity that proved its rule. Rather than construing the occupation of South Korea and West Berlin as violations of the belief in American nationalism, the fantasy of American exceptionalism allowed U.S. citizens to derive enjoyment from these exceptions as necessary means to achieve the state’s destruction of imperialism as a Russian way of life. Exceptionalism became a state fantasy when it caused U.S. citizens to want to participate in the state’s imperial will by changing the objective cause of their desire. The imperialism that the state in fact practiced intensified the need within U.S. citizens to disavow those practices. This need in its turn produced a counterloop of desire for the recovery of the ideal natin. But the latter desire could only be acted upon by renewing the practice of disavowal through which the U.S. national identity was produced. What was important in the practice of this desire was not whether or not the fantasy of American exceptionalism was “true.” What mattered was the way that the fantasy of exceptionalism overwhelmed this question of the truth. Americans could not be deceived about American exceptionalism because, to paraphrase Renata Salecl, they articulated the truth of their nationalizing desire in and through this deception. Throughout the cold war, U.S. citizens structured their position within the United States through the structuring disavowal of imperialism as an American way of life. But the vexed relationship between the ideal nation and the state’s imperial practices did not lead U.S. citizens to abandon their national identity. On the contrary, this intimate transgressive relationship between the state’s imperial practices and Americans’ national ideals seemed to heighten and augment their desire for and identification with these imagined national ideals. American exceptionalism induced Americans to propagate the American national ideal domestically and globally so as to nullify the imperial enemy’s desire for domestic and global dominance. Overall, the fantasy worked by enabling U.S. citizens to experience what was exceptional about their U.S. national identity as the disavowal of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. The United States differed from other nations in that its national fantasy was in fact a state fantasy. It became a state fantasy at the site where the national fantasy would otherwise take hold. Slavoj Žižek has described the site upon which the disparity between the national ideal that national citizens hoped for and the imperfect nations they could expect to produce as the place in which they took up the endless desire to achieve the ideal nation. But in the United States this national site was annulled through the state fantasy of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism defined America as having already achieved the condition of the ideal nation that normally incited national desire. After it defined America as the fulfillment of the world’s dream of an ideal nation, the fantasy of American exceptionalism eradicated the difference between the national ideal U.S. citizens wanted and the faulty nation they had, by representing America as having already achieved all that a nation could be. American exceptionalism thereafter motivated U.S. citizens to displace their normal national desire— to achieve an ideal nation— with the abnormal desire to propagate the U.S. model of nationalism. It was the cold war state that promoted the image of “America” as the fulfillment of the world’s desire for an ideal nation into its rationale for imposing and defending the U.S. model of nationalism across the globe. After the state positioned the “Nation of Nations” as the keystone of its imperial foreign policy, America exceeded the conditions of normal nationness and became the imperial state’s practicable model for nation-building. But the state practices that exceeded nationalism were not predicated on the state’s desire to achieve the ideal nation but on its desire to become the sole imperial power. In doing so, the imperial state formation had not merely surpassed the individual citizen’s desire to achieve an ideal U.S. nation; it actively contradicted the U.S. citizens’ belief that America was indeed an ideal nation. The identificatory mechanisms of American exceptionalism supplied U.S. citizens with the psychosocial structures through which they disallowed acknowledgment of these contradictions. At the level of what I earlier described as their ideal identifications, U.S. citizens wanted to believe that the United States was the perfection of a national ideal rather than a rapacious imperializing power. Moreover they could not articulate criticism of U.S. imperialism without feeling as if they had spoken on behalf of the imperial enemy with which they were also fantasmatically identified. As we have seen, Freud named the figure who aroused such guilty identifications the superego. Jacques Lacan has called the dimension of the state fantasy that oversaw the processes of self - recognition that distinguished the ideal identification from the fantasmatic identification the Gaze. In the reconfigured cultural field that emerged after World War II, the fantasy of American exceptionalism assumed the vantage point of the superegoic Gaze. The fantasy performed its spectacular operation when it brought the visual field into line with the desires that individual U.S. citizens subjectivized when they identified with their appropriate positions in the symbolic order. When U.S. citizens identified with their mandated subject positions, the Gaze named the superegoic figure that made them feel good about their symbolic identifications.21 America’s exceptional Gaze produced U.S. citizens’ acquiescence to their cold war identities by facilitating their self - recognition within them. When it served as the superego, American exceptionalism also demanded that U.S. citizens perform the disavowal of American imperialism as the way to continue to feel good about their national identity. American exceptionalism may have explicitly represented the United States as an exception to the rule of nations, but it tacitly required that U.S. citizens continue to construe it as a nation so that they could practice the state’s desire to proliferate the national model globally. U.S. citizens sustained their fantasies concerning how the nation should be by practicing the American exceptionalism that enabled them successfully to disavow the fact that it wasn’t what it should be. The state fantasy of exceptionalism thereby introduced the disavowal of imperial - ism as the unacknowledged mediator in between the state’s policies and the practicable life worlds of U.S. citizens. Exceptionalism activated a two - tiered process dividing the manifest organization of the U.S. role in the world with the latent fantasy whereby U.S. citizens imagined themselves as practicing nationalism through the disavowal of imperial - ism. It was at this site—where the U.S. imperial practices overran the condition of normal nationality—that U.S. citizens were taken up by a state fantasy of a different order.

More important than these economic issues, more pernicious, is the narrowing of our horizon of utopian possibilities to this type of thinking about the future: the future is only more of the present, more of the same capitalist values and sites of invisibility, the future—as the present in which some of us already live—while the actual present pales in comparison to the techno-product-saturated future to which we aspire. Mark Fisher calls this kind of thinking “capitalist realism.” Capitalist realism, he argues in his book of that title, is the dominant ethos of the present, a present in which we can imagine no alternatives to capitalism, in which the world as seen by capital is simply the world, not one social alternative among many. Under conditions of capitalist realism, Fisher contends, dystopias no longer function to prompt us to imagine something other than the present but simply exist as the spectre of its intensification. Under the condition of capitalist realism, we seek simply to survive, to endure, and are no longer capable of imagining that there is an outside or alternative to it. Echoing work done by Michael Schudson, a Marxist theorist who studied advertising, Fisher points to the speculative images of the future that are produced by corporations as the chief mechanism by which we are encouraged affectively to invest in the future of capital. Fisher calls such images “science fiction capital” and suggests that our emotional investment in them encourages us to place our material investment in only a narrow range of futures. He calls on us to invest our sf capital instead in estranged new worlds rather than the continuation of this one. This is a crucial challenge for those of us who work on speculative culture. How can we resist the limited kinds of utopianism promised by the future that is imaged by corporate capital? How can we say “no” to such visions and their surface promises of inclusivity, how can we show our concern for the deleterious effects of globalization, solutions to real problems such as food distribution or climate change, and what Povinelli calls “the unequal distribution of life and death, of hope and harm, and of endurance and exhaustion in late liberalism” (3)? How is it that the right has so effectively captured the social imaginary of the future that those of us on the left find ourselves arguing against the future? Capitalism has colonized not only our present and imagined futures, but also, literally, has consumed the future in the form of futures markets. We now sell future value or assess the worth of corporations based on the products they will make in the future. As Robert Tally notes, derivatives such as commodity futures are “are at once products of the new capitalist world order and the engines driving it” (78). So, how might we invest our imaginative, affective and material energies in other kinds of futures? Part of the answer, I think, lies in thinking about the utopian as ways of living, as embodied in the social arrangements of the future rather than in its commodities. Ruth Levitas’s recent work on the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society in her book Utopia as Method offers a path forward in her insistence that utopia is an urgently needed, material practice, not merely some kind of imaginative fantasy; she refutes those who reject utopia as an impossible fantasy by noting that “what really is impossible is to carry on as we are, with social and economic systems that enrich a few but destroy the environment and impoverish most of the world’s population. Our very survival depends on finding another way of living” (122-124). She argues that the utopian method has three aspects: the architectural practice of producing concrete visions of a better society; the archaeological method of finding elements of utopian possibility “buried in the constant barrage of political rhetoric and policies” (242); and the ontological method of “considering the kind of people we want to become” (244) and thus the kind of society capable of fostering such people. Levitas sees her method as a kind of speculative sociology, emphasizing that utopia is a practice, not a goal or a static visio. More importantly, she contends, we need to be aware that utopia as process is … necessarily provisional, reflexive and dialogic. It is always suspended between the present and the future, always under revision, at the meeting point of the darkness of the lived moment and the flickering light of a better world, for the moment accessible only through an act of imagination. (3366-3369) She ends her book by proclaiming, “we must live in this world as citizens of another” (4787-4788). In a variety of ways, both the creative works discussed in this issue and the essayists themselves take up this project, this “act of imagination” through which we can foster the light of a better world. We can live in this world as citizens of another by inhabiting a perspective from which the default logic of capitalist realism no longer holds, through which we can see, as some of the essays suggest, the cracks in its operations; as other essays and reviews demonstrate, we can live in this world as citizens of another by already understanding ourselves through this ontology, as those better people. We reclaim the capacity to imagine the future and, via that cultural work, remake— imaginatively and affectively, hence politically—our mode of living in the present.

What lurks behind this analysis is the frustrating sense of an impasse. Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. For it turns everything into an eternal present. The highest values of our society—as preached in the business schools—are novelty, innovation, and creativity. And yet these always only result in more of the same. How often have we been told that a minor software update “changes everything”? Our society seems to function, as Ernst Bloch once put it, in a state of “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it was.” This is because, in our current state of affairs, the future exists only in order to be colonized and made into an investment opportunity. John Maynard Keynes sought to distinguish between risk and genuine uncertainty. Risk is calculable in terms of probability, but genuine uncertainty is not. Uncertain events are irreducible to probabilistic analysis, because “there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever.” Keynes’s discussion of uncertainty has strong affinities with Quentin Meillassoux’s account of hyperchaos. For Meillassoux, there is no “totality of cases,” no closed set of all possible states of the universe. Therefore, there is no way to assign fixed probabilities to these states. This is not just an empirical matter of insufficient information; uncertainty exists in principle. For Meillassoux and Keynes alike, there comes a point where “we simply do not know.” But today, Keynes’s distinction is entirely ignored. The Black-Scholes Formula and the Efficient Market Hypothesis both conceive the future entirely in probabilistic terms. In these theories, as in the actual financial trading that is guided by them (or at least rationalized by them), the genuine unknowability of the future is transformed into a matter of calculable, manageable risk. True novelty is excluded, because all possible outcomes have already been calculated and paid for in terms of the present. While this belief in the calculability of the future is delusional, it nonetheless determines the way that financial markets actually work. We might therefore say that speculative finance is the inverse—and the complement—of the “affirmative speculation” that takes place in science fiction. Financial speculation seeks to capture, and shut down, the very same extreme potentialities that science fiction explores. Science fiction is the narration of open, unaccountable futures; derivatives trading claims to have accounted for, and discounted, all these futures already. The “market”—nearly deified in neoliberal doctrine—thus works preemptively, as a global practice of what Richard Grusin calls premediation. It seeks to deplete the future in advance. Its relentless functioning makes it nearly impossible for us to conceive of any alternative to the global capitalist world order. Such is the condition that Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. As Fisher puts it, channeling both Jameson and Žižek, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”