The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So now defending her ministry was part of defending Switzerland. And as this museum fortress served to show, the Swiss were very intent to defend themselves. Small country in a big world, as was explained to her by a Swiss military man as he escorted her along a big tunnel to a conference room deeper inside the mountain. Unusual things became necessary. He introduced himself; turned out he was the country’s defense minister.

  She sat down at a long table, suppressing a groan of relief, and was joined by a circle of officials. Such a relief to sit down, her legs were throbbing. She glanced around the room; it was broad and low-ceilinged, its long back wall made of the green-black gneiss of the mountain itself, cut and polished like an immense facet of semi-precious stone. Overhead a ceiling that seemed to be white ceramic glowed everywhere with a powerful diffuse luminosity.

  Mary felt her face burning, knew by that feeling that she was sunburnt and trail-dusted. Wiped out: Alpenverbraucht, Priska had called it. Alp-wasted. She looked around, saw that everyone at the table recognized how she felt, and knew the feeling well. They had been there, they understood her state.

  One of them shuffled his papers, glanced at his phone, waiting for something. Then seven people walked into the room together. The executive council, Mary understood suddenly. All seven of their presidents!

  The seven-headed president of Switzerland sat down across the table from her. Five women, two men. She didn’t know their names.

  They spoke in English. Of course this was for her sake, but a question distracted her as she tried to attend to them; she wondered what language they would speak if they were just among themselves. She dismissed the thought and tried to concentrate on what they were saying, too exhausted to reply, almost to understand. Some were French speakers and some German, she thought, although with the Swiss it wasn’t as easy to tell which was which as it would have been with actual French and Germans. And especially not now. It felt like she was reeling in her seat.

  One of the presidential women told her that they had come here to meet her because they were now confronted with a crisis that seemed to have something to do with her. The recent attack on her ministry was part of a larger attack; also under assault were the UN offices in the country, Interpol, the World Bank offices in Geneva, and Switzerland itself. The international order, in effect, was now under attack.

  Attack by whom? Mary asked.

  A long pause as the seven presidents looked at each other.

  We don’t know, admitted one of the women. Suisse Romande— Marie Langoise, it came to Mary. A Credit Suisse veteran. She went on, There’s been an attack on our banking regulators that appears to have come from the same source as the attack on the Ministry for the Future.

  I see, Mary said, though she didn’t.

  Did your ministry plan the hostage taking of Davos? Langoise asked.

  Don’t know, Mary said sharply. Then she added, But maybe those people had it coming, right? Did anyone really regret that?

  We did, one of the others said.

  Unfriendly silence. Mary let it stretch out. Their move, she felt. Although none of them seemed to agree.

  What did they do to your banks? she asked at last.

  They looked around at each other.

  We are not bankers, Langoise said (though she was), so we can’t go into the details. But the attack apparently compromised many secret Swiss bank accounts.

  Revealed them? Mary asked.

  No. Private accounts are encrypted in multiple ways, they could not be revealed. But now the banks themselves are having trouble accessing files that decode owners’ ID, in order to contact them and so on. So the danger is not so much exposure of clients, as loss of fundamental information.

  Mary said, Your banks can’t figure out who owns what?

  Somewhat the case, one of the others admitted. Another banker, Mary thought. Out of seven Swiss presidents, how many came from a banking background? Four? Five?

  Of course it would eventually get sorted out, one of the presidents said. Information all on paper and in cloud, as of course it should be. Time machine storage; it took Mary a second to understand this meant a computer back-up. But still, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was depositor fear. Even panic. Not good for stability.

  Mary nodded. Silence as they watched her. She saw they were here to listen to her.

  She began to talk to them, almost as if thinking aloud to herself. Why not? She was too tired to find and apply her usual filters.

  It’s the mystery of money, she said. Numbers that people trust; unlikely from the get-go. But then, if that trust was lost, boom, it was gone. Meanwhile they were all part of a global financial system that had become so complex that even the people running it didn’t understand it. She looked around at them as she said this: yes, she meant them. An accidental megastructure, she went on, enjoying the sound of J-A’s phrase, right at the heart of society. Right in this secret Swiss mountain fortress, which ultimately protects not just your countryside and your society, but your banks. Which means also people’s trust in civilization. Their faith in a system that no one really understands.

  The seven parts of the presidency regarded her.

  Mary felt a fog pass through her; then she came to, it seemed, and became aware of them again. What do you want from this situation? she asked curiously.

  They wanted the Ministry for the Future defended, they told her. Even strengthened. Just as part of Switzerland’s own defense. They wanted better ways to make a better future, as part of making a safer Switzerland. It wasn’t as if the country’s eight million people could live off what could be manufactured and grown in Switzerland alone. Country half the size of Ireland to start with, and 65 percent of that mountains, useless to humans. The remaining 35 percent an agglomeration, satisfying human needs as best they could. They did what they could, but were part of a larger world. Not self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency was a dream, a fantasy, sometimes of xenophobic nationalists, other times just a decent wish to be safer. Swiss people mostly realistic, which meant being honest about what is possible. Thus engagement with the world.

  So they wanted her ministry to succeed, because they wanted Switzerland to succeed, which meant the world had to succeed. The future had to succeed. That would take planning, it would have to be engineered.

  All this is well enough, Mary told them. It’s our project too. But you can do more than you are. Right now you’re not doing enough.

  She almost laughed as she heard herself doing a version of what Frank had done to her that night. But not a good idea to laugh at them for no obvious reason, and she suppressed it, recalling suddenly that vivid night, the way she had been transfixed by Frank’s scorn. What had made his accusations so compelling? Because here they were not so convinced, she could see that. They thought they were doing all they could. As had she, before Frank caught her.

  She asked if their banks really knew who their depositors were, even when their records were not damaged.

  They looked puzzled at this.

  I ask, Mary said, getting irritated (Frank had been more than irritated), because your banks are often regarded as tax havens, because of their secret accounts. Other countries lose tax money which gets put in secret accounts here. So you’re rich in part because you’re the bagman for criminals worldwide. A kind of organized theft. People are supposed to trust money, but then a lot of it gets stolen, by the very structure of money itself.

  Very unfriendly silence at this.

  Mary saw that and pressed harder. She might even have stood up if she could have mustered the energy. She might have shouted. It was time for redemption for Switzerland, she told them flatly, keeping right inside the line of civility. Or maybe on the edge of it. All that stuff you want to forget as if it never happened, the Nazi gold, the Jewish gold, the tax havens for oligarchs and kleptocrats, the secret bank accounts for criminals of all kinds. It’s time to end all that. End the secrecy in your banks. Blockchain all your money, and put all you
r ill-gotten gains to good use. Leverage it for good. Forge an alliance with all the other small prosperous countries that can’t save the world by themselves. All of you rich little countries join together, and then join up with India, follow India’s lead. Create more carbon coins by way of investments in carbon drawdown. That’s the safest currency there is now. Far safer than the Swiss franc, for instance. Stabler. More stable. Your best choice at this point.

  Some of them were shaking their heads at this.

  You need to join the world! Mary insisted. You’ve always been Switzerland alone, the neutral one.

  We joined the Paris Agreement, one of them objected.

  And Interpol, said another.

  And the United Nations, said a third.

  We’ve always been engaged, another clarified.

  Okay, Mary conceded. But now, join the carbon coin. Gather the rich small nations into a working group. Help get us to the next world system. New metrics, new kinds of value creation. Make the next political economy. Invent post-capitalism! The world needs it, it really has to happen. And you’ve got to change your banks now anyway, to recover from this attack. So change them for good. Make them better.

  Silence.

  Mary looked at them. Alp-wasted, yes indeed. A feeling everyone in the room had felt: descend back into the world, after an ascent to that higher realm one encountered in the Alps, an encounter with the sublime— otherworldly, visionary— then afterward exhausted, sun-blasted, clarified. Transparent to the world, lofted into a higher realm. Mary knew she had an intense look she could fix on people, her laser, Martin had called it. She had known it all her life, even in childhood when she had been able to freeze people in place, even her mother. Now she leveled it on these people facing her, and they too went still. Something had set her off— her exploded office, her cramping legs. The Alps. She lasered them.

  The Swiss presidents shivered collectively, shaking her off. They looked around the table at each other. Not happy. Not angry. Not panicked. Not dismissive.

  They were thinking.

  64

  Once John Maynard Keynes wrote of “the euthanasia of the rentier class.” This is a very provocative, not to say ominous, phrase. Euthanasia was a 1930s euphemism, one of many phrases used in that period to refer to state-sponsored execution of any perceived political rivals. A century later it still sounds deadly.

  But it appears that Keynes used the word only to mean something like putting some poor creature out of its misery by a relatively painless procedure. This is true to the original Greek: in literal translation, euthanasia means something like “a good death.” Dictionary: “The painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. The practice is illegal in most countries.” Mercy killing is one synonym.

  First use in written language is in Suetonius, describing the emperor Augustus’s “happy death.” First use in describing a medical practice is by Francis Bacon. Relief from suffering was crucial to the early connotation of the word.

  Now, it could be argued that the rentier class is not suffering, and in fact is happily engaged in eating up everything. A parasite killing its host by overindulgence is not suffering. In which case, really the rentier class needs to be executed.

  But perhaps it is overstating the case to compare the alteration of certain tax and inheritance laws to execution. Although possibly more than changes in tax and inheritance laws would be required to bring an end to the rentier class, often called “the ruling class.” Still, the concepts get blurred on a regular basis: a shift in social structures is often regarded as a kind of killing. On the other hand, the name for a certain kind of fiscal decapitation is called taking a haircut, which clarifies just how minor and even trivial are most of the financial limitations on wealth that get considered in the neoliberal hegemony.

  Euthanasia: “For the good of the person killed.”

  Now this is interesting, because capitalism is not a person, and the rentier class as such, though made up of people, is not a person. And as a class it is suffering, one could argue, from guilt, anxiety, depression, shame, a surfeit of everything, a sense of irredeemable criminal culpability, and so on. So to put this class out of its misery would be to relieve the individuals in that class from that horrible psychic burden, and possibly release them to a fuller happier life as guilt-free humans on a planet of equally guilt-free humans.

  Capitalism: after a long and vigorous life, now incurable, living in pain. In a coma; become a zombie; without a plan; without any hope of returning to health. So you put it out of its misery.

  But what about banishment, what about exile? What about a really short haircut?

  Criminals in earlier times could simply be banished, and not allowed to return to their home territory. A punishment which did not match a mortal crime with another mortal crime. A judgment, and a harsh punishment sometimes, but also it could be simply a chance to start over somewhere else, being the same person you were before. It all depended on circumstances.

  “The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

  So “the euthanasia of the rentier class” was Keynes’s way of trying to describe a revolution without revolution, a reform of capitalism in his time, toward whatever subsequent post-capitalist system might follow. It was his evaluation of the parts of the already-existing system, for their possible use value in a future civilization. He did not suggest ending capitalism; just end rent, and rentiers. Although that very well might come to the same thing in the end. He might have been using a euphemism to conceal the shock of his suggestion.

  A just civilization of eight billion, in balance with the biosphere’s production of the things we need; how would that look? What laws would create it? And how can we get there fast enough to avoid a mass extinction event?

  The rentier class will not help in that project. They are not interested in that project. Indeed that project will be forwarded in the face of their vigorous resistance. Over their dead bodies, some of them will say. In which case, euthanasia may be just the thing.

  65

  We were slaves in that mine. Of course they told us we could leave if we wanted, but we were in the desert backside of Namibia and no way to get away, nowhere to go. We would have had to walk hundreds of kilometers without food or even hats to cover our heads. On the other hand if we stayed we got fed. Two meals a day, ten-hour work day, Sundays off. Hurt bad enough and you could go to the clinic and nurse would look at you, maybe a doctor if it bad enough. Broken bones were set. Dysentery pilled and IVed.

  There were about five hundred of us. All men except for some of the nurses and cooks in the mess hall. Most from Namibia, some from Angola and Mozambique and SA and Zimbabwe. Most of us operated machinery or worked on it, but there was some digging too. Digging out machinery after collapses. Bodies too sometimes.

  It was a pit mine. Open hole in the earth. Made in the shape of an oval that widened a valley that might have been there before. Roads spiraling down toward hell. Red rock of iron ore, and there were some yellow and greenish patches we were supposed to look for and dig out into separate trucks. We didn’t even know what was in those colored rocks. Gold? Uranium? Rare earth, some called it. Not so rare there, but mostly it was red rock. Iron ore, common as dirt, and yet we were slaves to its taking.

  Then a bad time came in the kitchens. Less food every week, and the water tasted of iron and made people sick. Finally one of the dorms got up one morning and sat down outside the kitchens. Feed us right or we won’t work, they chanted together in a chant. Looking at them sitting there you could see they were desperate. They were scared men. We all saw it and one by one we went and sat down beside them, until every single miner in that mine was sitting there in the morning sun, expecting to get
killed. Drones buzzing overhead like flies. It could have just as easy been these flies killed us as anything. The guards with their machine guns just watched us, like we were all waiting for something. Which we were, be it death or whatever. No matter what it was it couldn’t be worse than what we were living. So it felt good to sit there that morning in the sun, scared and sweating. We were brothers in that moment in a way we had never been while working.

  Finally a man came out with a bullhorn. We knew he was just the voice for a higher power. The mine was owned by Boers from SA, or China or somewhere far away, we heard all kinds of thing. This voice was speaking for them, whoever they were. It said, Get back to work and we’ll feed you.

  We sat there. Someone yelled, Feed us and we’ll get back to work!

  So there it stood. We weren’t going to budge unless they fed us. They weren’t going to feed us unless we budged. We talked it over with the men near us. Everyone agreed; might as well die now and get it over with. We encouraged each other to stick to that. It was that bad. We were scared.

  Meanwhile the cloud of drones had been growing overhead, like vultures flocking over some dead body on the veldt. There were more drones up there than there were people on the ground. They hung there more like mosquitoes than vultures, with the same sort of whine as mosquitoes, but bigger. Most about as big as dinner plates, some bigger. Their whine cut at your head and itched in your belly.

  Then all the drones or almost all came swooping down fast like hawks and we rose to our feet shouting our dismay and throwing our arms overhead and ducking down and the like. But the drones all went at the guards. They surrounded them dozens to each man, packed around them like coffins made of stacked black buzzing plates. One guard shot his gun and his cloud of drones collapsed on him and felled him to the ground somehow, we couldn’t see what they did to him, but he didn’t move, and the other guards saw that and no more shooting.