The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  We sat around drinking. Damn, we said. Why? we said. Some of us talked about the bathtub graph. People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they’re first learning it, and then when they’ve known it forever. These were the two periods with higher rates of accidents, while the in-between was a stretch of low accidents. So the graph looked like a bathtub. People who fly planes fit that graph really well. Working on glaciers is somewhat the same.

  That’s how scientists talk at times like that. Maybe everybody. Faced with a death, with a friend suddenly disappeared from the world, the mind shies away from the shock of it, the incredulity. Why? Can’t we have a do-over? Pop back just a few hours, do it differently?

  No.

  So we sat there and drank.

  Well, Sophie said, at least he died saving the world.

  No! Jeff said. No! It was a mistake!

  Even then he didn’t cry, though his face went red and he looked furiously distraught. We huddled in a mass around him and sobbed or didn’t. These feelings come on you or they don’t, the timing is weird. Lots of people dissociate in moments like that, and it only hits them later. Sometimes so much later you can’t believe it, I know this myself— for me, once it was literally twenty-one years between the death involved and me feeling it. Twenty-one years, I swear. But on this night most of us cried, all but Jeff. We were distraught.

  After that we pulled ourselves together and cleaned up the place and discussed plans more quietly. Nothing to be done. Finally we gave up and went to bed, reluctantly, as it seemed too normal, it seemed like giving up on any chance of things changing or the world going back in time. Just had to give up and go to bed; we were going to have to deal with a lot of shit the next day. And there was no point in drinking any more. It wasn’t going to do any good. Our leader had made a simple but deadly mistake. The world would go on, but for us it would never be the same.

  58

  The usual view of liberation theology locates it in South America in the latter part of the twentieth century. The phrase was invented to describe this Latin American phenomenon, so it’s fair enough to think that’s what it refers to.

  But in Spain we think there was an earlier example of a young idealistic Catholic priest, helping his people in defiance of the church hierarchy. No doubt it has happened many times without anyone noticing it outside the community affected. Of course the situation with young priests has gone wrong so many times. But maybe more times, the young idealistic man, trying to do good in the world, intense, devout, isolated, put out there in a community of poor people, people suffering in so many ways, just trying to make ends meet, to hold it all together, and their church supposed to be part of that effort— when some of these young men get confronted with that situation, in all their belief and their desire to help, their trust in the church, quite a many of them must have fallen in love with their people and worked furiously their whole lives to do everything they could to serve them.

  In this particular case in Spain, the young priest was named José María Arizmendiarrieta. Born and raised in the Basque part of Spain, he took arms in the Spanish civil war on the Republican side, then got captured by Franco’s soldiers. It’s said that he then had a sort of Dostoyevsky moment, in that he was condemned to execution and scheduled to be shot, but in his case was spared by a bureaucratic oversight, as they failed to show up and get him on the day in question, no one knows why. Let’s say God had a plan for him.

  After that he took holy orders, perhaps feeling his life was meant for something, and he was sent to Mondragón in 1941, when he was twenty-six years old, as part of an attempt by the Franco regime to pacify the Basque people, who were still rebellious in the aftermath of the Republic’s defeat.

  At first his congregation was not impressed by him. He had only one eye as a result of the war, he read verses in a monotone, he seemed distant and tentative. One can wonder if he was shell-shocked, or a bit on the spectrum as we would say now. It took him a few years of quiet listening to his people to come to a determination of how he might help them best. Before the war the area had supported some light industry which had not returned. Father José María wondered if they could start something up again, and as part of that, he helped them to organize a polytechnic school, now known as Mondragón University. Soon after opening, it provided enough engineering support to bootstrap the expertise to begin a few manufacturing businesses again, starting with paraffin burners. And on his suggestion, and with his help, these were organized from the start as employee-owned cooperatives. This mode of organization was in the Basque tradition of regional solidarity, a manifestation of that precapitalist, even pre-feudal gift economy of the ancient Basque, which goes back as far as can be determined, into the time before written history.

  Whatever the explanation, these cooperatives thrived in Mondragón, and a complex of them has been growing there ever since. Eventually they included the town’s banks and credit unions, also its university and insurance company. These worker-owned enterprises became a kind of co-op of co-ops, which now forms the tenth largest corporation in Spain, with assets in the billions of euros and yearly profits in the millions. The profits don’t get shifted out as shares to shareholders, but are rather divided three ways, with a third distributed among the employee-owners, a third devoted to capital improvements, and a third given to charities chosen by the employees. The wage ratio between management’s top salary and the minimum level of pay is set at three to one, or sometimes five to one, or at most nine to one. All the businesses and enterprises adhere to the cooperative principles formalized later by the larger worldwide cooperative movement, of which Mondragón is somewhat the jewel in the crown: open admission, democratic organization, the sovereignty of labor, the instrumental and subordinate nature of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, inter-cooperation, social transformation, universality, and education.

  This list is worth studying in some detail, but not here. Taken together, if these principles were to be applied seriously everywhere, they would form a political economy entirely different from capitalism as generally practiced. They make a coherent set of axioms that would lead to a new set of laws, practices, goals, and results.

  How this has worked out in Mondragón is open to interpretation. The system has been enmeshed in the world economy all along, and it had to make adjustments when the European Union formed, as well as continuous adaptations to the markets and countries it existed in. There are those who say it could not succeed outside of its Basque context, that Basque culture makes it possible; this seems unlikely, but there are many who don’t want to consider that an alternative to capitalism, more humane, what you might even call a Catholic political economy, not only is possible, but has existed and thrived for a century, and is still going strong.

  There have also been moments of crisis, as when recessions struck just at the moment that certain critical cooperatives had expanded, or when a manager absconded with an immense amount of money, causing severe cash flow problems. Still, the place makes a good living for its people, and creates a culture that is mostly loved by those who perform it. There is solidarity and esprit de corps, and even in a world of intense competition, it makes a profit most years, enough for over a hundred thousand people to make a living from it and to give back to the general culture.

  There are other such enclaves around the world, and systems that while not as distinctive and whole, are yet somewhat like it. They survive, sometimes they thrive. The question is, to put it in the dominant vocabulary of our time, could they scale? Are they a way out, a way forward, a step along that way?

  We think so. For us, the project is to spread the system throughout Spain. For everyone else, maybe the world. But this is our contribution. We give you Mondragón.

  59

  I was in my apartment in Sierra Madre, which is a little town lined by tall palm trees, wedged between Pasadena and Azusa, set right at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, which tower over that part of LA like a b
rown corrugated wall, pretty ugly if you ask me. It was kind of a blessing when the smog got so thick you couldn’t see it, which could happen even from only three miles away. None of the ring of mountains backing LA are good-looking. But they do form quite the wall, as we found out that day.

  Luckily I was an active kayaker before I broke my arm, and I still had my kayak. My apartment was a granny flat over a garage, its separate entrance something I valued a lot, as I didn’t have to bother my landlord going in and out, and he usually never saw me and thus never got a chance to scam on me. It was kind of a mercy rental on his part, or so I thought before his intentions became clear, as I couldn’t afford Hollywood anymore, no doubt obvious when I gave him my clichéd young-aspiring-actress-currently-waitressing shtick. And he let me store my big stuff in his garage below my studio, which was really just a storage shed with a bathroom in it, tacked onto the flat roof of his garage. So when the atmospheric river hit, I was one of the few people in the city with watercraft on hand.

  It rained hard all that first night, the timing was part of the problem— by the time everyone woke up things were already bad, and it just went downhill from there. Literally so for the water, and therefore everything else. But it wasn’t your ordinary flood, or maybe it was, I don’t really know, but in our case, the water came roaring down off the side of the San Gabriels onto us. It was terrifying to see what the dawn revealed that day. The mountains are ten thousand feet high over Sierra Madre, and they were catching all that rain, which was falling as hard as in a hurricane or something, and then it was all rushing down those vertical ravines onto the streets that poked up into the ravines, now all of them whitewater rapids brown with mud, and filled with boulders and shrubs and pieces of all the houses that were coming apart farther up the street.

  I looked out my front door and saw cars floating down the street on a brown wave about three feet high that covered everything. I could see the water was already coming into my landlord’s house, and rushing hard toward the 210. Everywhere I looked was a big sheet of brown water! I shouted to my landlord but he had already left without informing me, very typical. In fact I couldn’t see anyone anywhere except for a family on top of their SUV, getting taken for a sideways ride and looking desperate.

  I got down my outside stairs and sloshed through brown water to the garage side door. Inside I found the power had gone out, of course, so it was a struggle to get the big garage door open. I managed to pull it up from the inside, and a sloosh of water flowed into the garage, a little wave about a foot high. But there was my kayak and I grabbed it and the paddle off the wall, wriggled into the skirt and got into the kayak and took off into the street.

  That was a crazy moment, realizing the streets were all flooded and my kayak was the only way for me to get around. So much water! And brown as hot chocolate. And it was still raining cats and dogs too, so it was hard to see very far, and hard to believe what you could see. Later I heard the whole LA basin was flooded, all the way from the Hollywood Hills down to San Clemente, past Irvine where I grew up. Orange County was just as bad as LA, which makes sense given they are the same coastal plain with the same backing mountains. Of course there are some high points here and there on the plain, as everyone found out that day. Palos Verdes sticking up near Long Beach of course, and a few inland neighborhoods on lines of low hills like Puente Hills and Rose Hill, and back where the freeways meet around San Dimas. But for the most part LA is just one big coastal plain, and on that day, a big brown lake. In lots of places the elevated freeways were the only flat surfaces that stuck up out of this new lake, so, with no other place to go, the freeways were where people went. There were still some cars up there, but none of them were moving, and as the need for space to accommodate people got greater, a lot of cars were shoved over the side into the drink.

  I kayaked under the 210 through a very scary underpass, and paddled around getting people off roofs and over to the freeway, where onramps served as boat docks. A lot of people were zipping around on motorboats they had kept in their driveways, also some kayaks like mine. We were doing all we could to help, some people were really desperate, especially if they had kids, and it was hard to keep them from tipping my kayak over in their panic. My arm started to hurt where it had broken, and I kept feeling a sense of unreality that this could all be happening at all, it was too much like a cheesy disaster film, but whatever, I must have gotten cast at last, and besides the fear on people’s faces and in their voices kept reminding me that no, this was real no matter how weird it was. And my arm hurt, kayaking is just very bilateral, you can’t do it one-armed, but I just kept saying Fuck it and kept paddling.

  One thing about the LA basin being so huge was that even though the whole thing was flooded, it was never flooded very deep. Lots of taller rooftops stayed above the flood level, although many other buildings had collapsed into the water. Most palm trees were knocked down, it was a shock to see and a danger to navigation. One of many! Sometimes I had people hanging on to the back of my kayak and the current would take us toward a floating tree or a car and I would have to paddle insanely to get away from them, my arm hurting and the people hanging on and not always kicking in the most helpful ways. And all the old washes crossing the plain were now revealed again as fast places in the flow, it was spooky to see those currents, dangerous too, and it was never obvious which way water would be moving on any given street, because it depended on where the nearest wash was, since the water got sucked toward those, and the streets were almost flat. A whole river network was being revealed or half-revealed by currents in the streets, north south east west, they could be running in any direction. Orange Grove Avenue was on enough of a tilt to be like a water slide running south, then the old sunken part of the Pasadena Freeway just west of it ran in the other direction, it was crazy. Sepulveda was scary fast, I was told, the other kayakers all said Stay off Sepulveda, it’s like class 8! And the rain kept pounding down on us. Hard rain, in LA, for hour after hour? It was like Noah’s flood! And it looked like it could go on for forty days and forty nights too, why not?

  So, ten million people stranded on all the high points left sticking out, and no food to speak of. Rain pounding down for hour after hour. Lots of little boats but nothing big, and nothing organized. All the freeways packed with very wet people. It was never colder than about seventy degrees, although that feels cold when you’re wet and it’s windy, but cold wasn’t the issue. Nor was the flood like some do-it-right-now-or-die emergency, where you get an hour of total danger followed by relief. That became clear as it went on. So, not like a movie, not at all. Which was impressing me more and more. Here I was helping people, all of us wet and scared, and my right bicep just screaming, and I kept thinking This is real, this feels good, why again are you trying to be a fucking actress? Oh sure, some people had gotten caught somehow and drowned, it was inevitable given the number of people and the power of water, water is a force of nature, you can’t resist it if it gets you, but for the most part people were on rooftops or on the freeways, and it was more a matter of evacuating everyone before they starved than anything else. If you didn’t get drowned right away then it was just a matter of holding on and waiting for relief.

  So as the day wore on I joined a crowd on the roof of a restaurant and they fed us spaghetti. They had broken through the roof and were using the restaurant’s food supplies and big pots from its kitchen, and cooking over an open fire a group of men were tending, set on a big sheet of corrugated metal they had pried off of something, with another sheet as a roof over them to keep the rain off. Chances seemed good they would burn that restaurant down, but on the other hand they could always take their roof sheet away and the rain would drench any fire that wasn’t nuclear, it was still pouring down so.

  After a while there my arm felt better and I went back on the water, fueled up and ready to help more people. There were fewer of them in the later afternoon, people were either dead or had gotten to a high point of some kind. So I joine
d the other boaters and we made some street sweeps. It was really fun to ride down Orange Grove Avenue, I have to say, running the brown flow almost as fast as a car, but you had to stay sharp, because sometimes an easy flow would head under a freeway bridge or the like and it could quickly become desperate getting out of that current before you got sucked down and killed. People shared knowledge of these danger zones, that’s how I heard about Sepulveda, no one’s phone was working but some people had GPS devices with maps saved on them, and they were happy to share their orienteering news, and a lot of people out had local knowledge as well, so we paddled around and the motorboats zipped around, often wasting gas without thinking that they weren’t going to be able to refill anytime soon, but after a while they remembered, if they didn’t run out, and so most of the action as the sun went down was kayakers and a few rowboats and the like, even some sailboats with their sails down and people in them paddling along awkwardly. Little flotillas like human water bugs on the great lake of LA.

  And what was occurring to me over and over again as all this was happening was, Hey: I hate LA. I was born here and I know it well, and have even read or been told some of its history in school, and I really do hate it. The truth is, after World War Two this place went from a sleepy little spread of villages to the ten million people here now, and during that time the developers were getting rich making ticky-tack suburban neighborhoods, that and putting in the freeways, which cut the plain into a hundred giant squares, and all of it crap. No plan, nothing good, no parks, no organization, no plan of any kind. Just buy some orange grove and subdivide it and tear out the trees and build a bunch of plywood houses, and then do it again, over and over. It happened in a snap of the fingers, and it was never anything but stupid. And that’s what we’ve been living in ever since! And more than a few of us trying to live out a remake of the movie La La Land. It was double stupid.