Many reading this book will have heard some approximation of the quip, ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Fisher, 2009, p 2). The origin of this line can be traced back to Fredric Jameson's (1996) Seeds of Time, but it is probably most closely associated with Slavoj Žižek, who has been fond of making the claim in various ways. In a 2005 documentary, for instance, Žižek proclaims, “Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay” (in Taylor, 2005, np). Mark Fisher has even coined a term to capture this sentiment of inevitability, ‘capitalist realism’, describing it as the ‘widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009, p 2).

Awareness of a mass resignation of society to the inevitability of capitalism is not new. It was already captured in Friedrich Engels’ (2000) comments on ‘false consciousness’, later honed by the likes of Antonio Gramsci (2011) and Theodor Adorno (2015) to explain the working class's complacency towards their own exploitation. Yet what seems to have changed is that the political left has now also fallen prey to capitalist realism as evidenced, for instance, by the almost complete incapacity to envision and pursue societal wellbeing in a way that does not depend on ever-expanding business revenue and a rising stock market (Jackson, 2017). Hence, while some socialist and green-minded movements can point to isolated political victories, in the end, they have been unable to tap into or develop any inspirational ideas to effectively challenge the deep sense that our current organization of the world, despite its many intractable problems, is more or less as good as we can ever hope for. Clearly, for those who truly believe ‘another world is possible’, something new is needed to wake us from our dogmatic resignation.

In this book we delve into one proposition seeking to do just that.