EXCERPT Is the despair attending the much-vaunted impossibility of imagining a world outside of capitalism—the conviction that the time of competing alternatives is over and that all possibilities converge upon the actuality of this world—so great that we have finally given up on the task of constructing any alternative? In any case, where the idea of other possible worlds is mentioned, it is increasingly not in connection to a programme or project, but in the hushed and wistful tones of those for whom it suffices to guard the guttering flame of hope, perhaps looking back to unrealised ‘futures past’ or scrutinising the world for signs of a collapse that would let something else through. There is certainly an appetite for other possibilities—for a different world that would not simply be more of the interminable production of capitalist difference-within-the-same. Undoubtedly, ‘if you build it, they will come’—yet this precisely begs the question of construction, and many of today’s calls for the collective imagining of other possible worlds ring hollow because they provide no ground plan, suggest no tools beyond imagination and hope and, while critiquing the existing world, rarely specify what part its residual artefacts will play in the construction of the edifice of the new—for, as Nelson Goodman reminds us, every making of a world is a remaking.…