This quote, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," has been attributed to the cultural analyst, Fredric Jameson.
It bears deep reflection.
Capitalism is the first mode of production which separated the mass of people from the means of securing their own livelihood. Previous modes of production saw ordinary people as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists or farmers.
Given the economic precariousness of the proletariat, some social organising principle is needed to coordinate actions to secure the reproduction of collective life. This is called an economy.
Historically there have been only two forms of economic organisation consistent with the existence of a proletariat (a class of resourceless labourers): the privately-owned, decentralised means of production constitutive of capitalism; and bureaucratically-owned means of production in a centrally-planned 'socialism'.
We know the track record of both models. In particular we know that a statist centrally-planned economy does not work - it lacks incentives to grow and optimise, and is captured by bureaucratic elites.
There are two further models: the naive Leninist-Trotskyist model of a worker-controlled (soviet) state and economy .. and a fully-automated economy.
The Leninist-Trotskyist model was only ever theorised in the sketchiest form and founders under modern political, industrial and financial complexity .. and human nature.
The fully-automated economy is a limit point of the natural tendency of capitalism to automate (the law of increasing organic composition of capital). However in that limit the last workers are displaced and therefore surplus value can no longer be created. Profits tend to zero as competition equalises prices to costs.
So no more capitalist economy, but that does not mean no economy. A collection of fully-automated companies (perhaps with non-waged human involvement in setting objectives - and certainly in consumption) is rather like a collection of villages each of which has a monopoly of some kind of natural resources (water, fruits, meat, ...) which are essentially not scarce. Such an economy engages in exchange, because human needs straddle the portfolios of the various producers, and it's similar to petty-commodity production, albeit without the involvement of human labour.
The working class may have vanished as a social category (no wage labour) but humans certainly haven't. Provided the machines have not been so badly designed as to eliminate humanity, people experience this world as super-aristocrats: their every feasible, practical need met.
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed," said William Gibson. And if we look at the super-rich today we see a preview of behaviours which could be open to all in a society of totally-automated abundance.
As expected, the behaviour-set is just what would be expected given the innate nature of the human animal - all drives are exhibited from the most prosocial to the most antisocial.
On a sufficient timescale (a century or two) human nature can itself be engineered and hopefully there will be major speciation events. We will find it easier and more robust to adapt to Mars than to make Mars adapt to current-us, for example.
Capitalism will abolish itself not through socialism but through self-elimination. And the human race will diversify into every possible ecological niche in this awaiting universe.
Unless we're stupid about it.
