I’ve noticed a disturbing trend on social media, which isn’t all that surprising given the disturbing things that seem to keep happening in the online social world: people on the political left in the West are increasingly using the Hammer and Sickle as a viable symbol of revolution and disgust with the direction in which much of the world seems to be heading. While voicing a negative opinion of the Trump administration in the United States or bemoaning the antics of Bolsonaro in Brazil is definitely not a bad thing, employing a symbol that flew over the USSR while Stalin oversaw the deaths of between three and nine million citizens is a bad thing. Before I jump down the throats of twenty-somethings who were born after the fall of the Soviet Union and who might not know their twentieth century history as well as I think they should, I have to recognize the ugly fact that as we watch fascism rise again and late stage capitalism bleed young people dry, there aren’t a lot of alternatives to capitalism outside of communism. The war of ideologies thinkers naively thought finished after WWII and again after the Berlin Wall came down is still raging, and we’re still wielding the same old –isms, because over the past four decades we have stopped discussing how we ought to structure our world. Is there another blueprint for how to set up civilization that goes against capitalist orthodoxy without swinging fully over into Soviet-style communism?

Enter Peter Fleming and his newest book, The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide. In this concise, astute, unapologetic volume, Fleming tackles the world as it is today without offering platitudes or consolation and instead tries to get readers to wake up to the reality that capitalism has in fact failed, that the world as we in the West have known it since roughly the end of the Second World War has died, that what is coming next is going to be far worse.

Peter Fleming is a professor of Business and Society at City, University of London, the author of several books on the crisis of capitalism—including the acclaimed Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself—and a regular contributor to The Guardian. He has studied and written and taught and lived through the mess that is late stage capitalism and provides the kind of insight that a lot of cultural critics seem ill-prepared to make. Whereas so many critics of our time are screaming and spitting, blinded by their own anger, Fleming is quiet, muted, dangerous. Instead of shouting into the abyss hoping an errant echo will provide the answer he seeks, he barely sighs. Fleming knows what he is talking about and doesn’t waste precious time stroking an ego. The Worst Is Yet to Come is short, sharp, and to the point.

And what a point he makes! Setting his book up as a post-apocalyptic survival guide, complete with tips for how to survive the hellscape that is on the horizon, Fleming provides an answer to the failures of capitalism in the form of revolutionary pessimism, a refutation of capitalism on political instead of economic foundations and a recognition that other responses (optimism, nihilism, etc.) are no longer effective. As the first of the tips at the end of Chapter 3: “Is Capitalism a Cult?” states, “Neoliberal capitalism is a political project first and foremost. It would rather choose to be economically inefficient, disorganized and even unprofitable than democratize its domain. That’s why challenging capitalism on economic grounds is often useless. Refute it as an ethico-political impossibility instead.” While most of the books that fall into the survival guide genre are more concerned with zombies and nuclear holocaust and might have been written by UFC fighters instead of thinkers (seriously: Forrest Griffin “wrote” Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down), Fleming illustrates how the world is quite literally circling the drain because of how we have allowed it to be set up and provides practical instead of ideological solutions that can be implemented by many of us. This is not a jokey, kitschy sort of self-help book, but an intelligent breakdown of what we are facing today and hands-on advice on what to do about it.

Answers are few and far between in regards to many of the questions plaguing modern society. What can we do about climate change? How do we adequately confront a new fascism? What happens when capitalism collapses completely? As many people around the world turn to authoritarian leaders and revive the flag that flew over Nazi Germany, let us not respond by flying the symbol of Stalinist Russia, let us not be seduced by ideologues that promise only to combat what we are facing today. Let us look to thinkers and philosophers, writers and intellectuals—people who are offering actual solutions to problems, people searching for answers outside of traditional ideologies. Peter Fleming is one such thinker and his newest book, The Worst Is Yet to Come, is the kind of volume we need in these trying times.

Buy The Worst is Yet to Come (Repeater Books, 2019) here.









Author Details Jay C. Mims Contributor Jay C. Mims is a writer living and working in North Texas. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia College Chicago and a BS in Politics from Texas Woman’s University. His first novel, ‘Skin Eater,’ is available on Amazon and other online retailers, and his short fiction can be found at emptyshelves.wordpress.com. When not working on fiction, you can find him on the back of his motorcycle or lifting heavy things.

