Future Historians

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Premises

1. The Pascalian bet: one chance in 100 (or 1000) for humanity to survive the 21 st
century?

2. If that chance exists, we ought to be able to imagine it as sci-fi, no?

3. The power of utopias to awaken people to struggle is proven

4. Today more than every people need a credible positive vision

5. Looking backward from the future has many advantages.

6. Marx’s believe in a future socialist society enabled him to analyze the present
capitalist society as temporary, part of a series of societies that rise and fall.

7. Looking backward simplifies complex situations as we “know” in what
direction they are going.

8. Looking backward as future historians keeps us from quarrelling like rival
sectarians as we have all been dead for at least 70 years.

9. Basic rules for Future Historians: No Gods, no Extraterrestrials, no infallible
vanguard parties. Plurality of future societies and roads thereto.

Methods (evolving) of our International Study Group and Collective Writing
Project

During its first year, the Study Group outlined some twenty Study Topics, including
Economics, Energy, Women, Utopias etc. From week to week, we gathered materials
on a specific topic, shared them through a Drop Box, and discussed them during our
2-hour videotaped seminars, all available on YouTube. We are continuously adding to
this body of research, which we use as the basis of our Collective Writing efforts.
We are now concentrating on Collective Writing, which is a more challenging
process that we are struggling to master. Our results, such as they are, can be read on
our WIKI at http://futurehistorians.org/doku.php?id=start The originality of our
project is threefold:

1. Most previous utopian fictions don’t really tell us HOW people were about to
get from capitalist barbarism to a better world

2. The future societies proposed by Thomas Moore and his successors are all to
an extent monolithic, from Bellamy’s rigid socialism of Looking Backward to
Morris’s enchanting nostalgia for an idealized Middle Ages in News From
Nowhere. Ours will be plural, pluralistic and planetary, with plenty of room
for variety and individual taste.

3. Often previous Utopias are not realistic, credible, in conformity with historical
and scientific/technological knowns.

The solution to these problems we came up with is entitled: Then, Now, and How. It
takes the form of a history book aimed at young people a century from today, which
teaches them how their great-grandparents got from there to here. It takes the form of
an encyclopedic anthology, where the reader can follow her personal interests,
whether in a Topic like Agriculture or in a period of the past like capitalism Then or
the revolutionary emergence of the new world How. Thus, the table of contents takes
the form of a Grid. This ever growing patchwork allows for great diversity and
avoids sectarian rigidity. (Show demonstration on line).

For THEN we patch together excerpts contemporary critical studies of capitalism into
a coherent narrative and then change the very tenses into the past. We call this the
power of the preterit. Read in the past tense, today’s hysterical, strident exposés of
capitalist horrors which we radicals broadcast to mostly deaf ears, are transformed
into irrefutable historical accounts in the reader’s mind. Their long-dead authors get
referenced as “prescient.”

For NOW we borrow from every kind of predictive writing, fiction, authors
advocating ideas like municipal socialism and solar communism. Only we change the
verbs from the future or the hypothetical to the present tense, extolling the relative
virtues of different 22 nd century solutions to 21 st century problems and making them
seem reasonable and real. More creative plagiarism.

For HOW we study and record all evidence of the potential of ongoing social
movements, like the Yellow Vests, to grow, deepen and converge with ongoing
movements in other sphere and lands so as to become part of a planetary anti-
capitalist emergence. Then we outline all the obstacles to be overcome by such
movements to succeed. But again, we change the tenses, unleashing the power of the
preterit. Instead of asking “how can the YV overcome French racism,” we ask and
answer the question of 2119: “How did the Yellow Vests overcome French racism?”
Our basic techniques for creating Then, Now and How are imagination and creative
plagiarism. So, as a demonstration, let’s look at the proposed text book entry: “The
Yellow Vests and the origins of today’s egalitarian society.” Let’s try it and see. Just
change the verb tenses of the questions with which we began today’s seminar.
Future Historians

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