Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy by David Fleming

Fleming worked for thirty years to produce a massive book Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, which was finished just before his death in 2010 and published by Chelsea Green in 2016. Many core themes of that book were skillfully distilled (by his colleague Shaun Chamberlin) into a shorter, more readable paperback, Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.

Fleming, one of the earliest to warn about Peak Oil, argues about the decline of the market economy with the rigor of an economist, ecologist and physicist. But what really sets him apart is his understanding that those things are intimately related to social organization and human culture. He realizes that the needs and wanted engendered by capitalism will inevitably change as a society kept afloat by cheap fossil fuels falls apart.

Fleming is exploring a radical shift in our economy. He realizes that when the market economy inevitably fades and the state services and regulation are no longer affordable or minimally effective, we will need to draw upon social order and culture to fill the void.