The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  That meant a team that came through the village dropped by our place for about an hour, and took samples to get a benchmark figure. One of them was looking around at our place with an expression that made it clear we were obviously going to be setting a good low benchmark. Our daughter was pestering him as he worked, and he took some of our soil and put it in a glass of water, swirled the water, then stopped and showed her how at the moment he stopped moving the glass, the water in it cleared almost immediately. All the grit and mud floating around sank to the bottom. You need to add compost, he told her. Organic material will float in water, but you can see you don’t have much of that. A good starting point. We might as well have been living on a linoleum floor, or a rock.

  After that I pushed every day. Doing no-till agriculture is all very well, but first you need soil to not till. That takes first doing some serious turning over and plowing under, I’ll tell you; years of backbreaking work, in our case, and always pinched for cash, as we used everything I could afford to set aside to pay for various neighbors’ manure and crop waste.

  But shit to gold, as they say; we did all that. I drove him and he drove his workers, and we got some trees and perennials planted and left them alone, and during the harvests we harvested their usufruct with gratitude. We suffered a drought and a flood, but saw our land do a little better through those catastrophes than some of our neighbors’ properties did, because of what we were doing. And it was all without any tractors or fertilizers or pesticides, just the good old poisons that had always been there. All the right kinds of old ways, and all documented by me, as these were going to be factors in the eventual carbon reckoning. We grew most of what we ate, we grew some things to sell, and we put all we earned back into the land. My ox grumbled; who ever heard of growing a crop of dirt?

  Finally came a time when the team from the district office was coming through again to check carbon levels. The moment I heard I went down to the district office to sign up for it. Soon after that, the day came when the team, a different one of course, visited to make its evaluation of our little farm’s soil. They wandered the property taking samples, sometimes digging with a tool like a posthole digger, other times with a pole like a long corkscrew. Samples, then evaluations over at their truck, which held in its back some big metal machines.

  When they were done with their evaluation they came over to us. You’ve done well, they told us. We’re authorized to pay you right now, but first you have to know, we subtract an eleven percent fee out of your pay-out, to pay for our expenses, and also your taxes. So if you’ll sign here to agree to that, we’ll get it done.

  My big ox bristled. I’ve never heard of any such cut, he said. What’s ours is ours, just pay us what we’re owed, we’ll deal with the rest of it ourselves.

  The one talking sighed and looked at his colleagues. I can’t do that, the procedure is set. You have to sign to get your part.

  I won’t do it, my husband declared. Let’s go have it out at the district.

  No! I said. I dragged him off to confer in private; I didn’t want to embarrass him too much in front of these strangers. Around the corner of the house I wagged my finger under his nose. You take the deal or I’ll divorce you, I told him. We’ve worked too hard. People like this always take a cut. We’re lucky it’s only eleven percent, they could have said fifty percent and we’d still have to take it! Don’t be an idiot or I’ll divorce you and then I’ll kill you, and then I’ll tell everyone why.

  The ox thought it over and went back to the visitors. All right, he said, my wife insists. And she can be very insistent.

  The men nodded. We signed their form, then looked at what they had given us.

  Twenty-three? my man asked. That’s nothing!

  Twenty-three carbon coins, they said. Actually, twenty-three point two eight. One coin per ton of carbon captured. Which means, in your currency, if that’s how you want to take it, about … He tapped on his wristpad. At the current exchange rate, it comes to about seventy thousand. Seventy-one thousand, six hundred and eighty.

  My ox and I looked at each other. That was more than we spent per year on everything, by a long shot. Almost two years of expenses, in fact.

  Is that before or after the eleven percent is taken out? my ox inquired.

  I had to laugh. My husband is funny.

  81

  Transcript Mary S/Tatiana V, phone conversation, secure line. M in office, T in safe house, location undisclosed.

  M: How are you doing?

  T: Bored. How about you? Shouldn’t you be in hiding too?

  M: I don’t think anyone wants to kill me. It wouldn’t change anything.

  T: Maybe.

  M: So what are you doing?

  T: Working. Telecommuting, like this. Advising our legal efforts.

  M: Anything interesting?

  T: Well, I think some parts are working.

  M: What do you mean?

  T: I think the bet that the super-rich will take a buy-out is turning out to be correct. For most of them, anyway.

  M: How can you tell?

  T: We’ve been trying it. Offer them fifty million they can count on, or endless prosecution and harassment, even a situation like mine, to stay safe. Many of them are taking the deal.

  M: This is legal? It sounds like extortion.

  T: There are legal forms for it. I’m just speaking plainly for your sake.

  M: Thanks. So they don’t just shift their money into tax havens?

  T: We’ve killed those. That’s maybe the best thing about blockchain for fiat money— we know where it is. There aren’t any hiding places left. If you do manage to hide it, it isn’t really money anymore. Only money on the books has any real value now. The older stuff is like, I don’t know, doubloons. Real money, we know where it is and where it came from.

  M: Wasn’t that always true?

  T: No. Remember cash?

  M: I still use it! But it was numbered, right?

  T: Sure. But once it got moved around a couple of times, it was just cash. There were lots of ways to launder it, and it couldn’t be traced. Now it can be traced, in fact it has to be to stay real. So there’s no place to hide, there are no tax havens. We blockaded the last ones, got the WTO to declare them a disqualifier, all that. No. For individuals, if you want to stay rich in the current moneyscape, it’s best to take the haircut and accept your fifty million and walk.

  M: I guess it makes sense.

  T: Yes. Fifty million in the hand is worth a billion in the bush. Maybe it’s the rich who are most like homo economicus was supposed to be. They have all the information, they pursue rational self-interest, they try to maximize their wealth. But if a maximum level of wealth gets mandated by society, fighting that isn’t rational. Especially if you’ve got something like twenty times as much as you need to be secure.

  M: I don’t know about that. The kind of ambition that gets you a billion won’t be brooked. It’s a sociopathic thing. There’s nothing rational about it. It’s a man thing, most of the time. Although I’ve met women who feel just as entitled.

  T: Of course.

  M: So they’ll lash out.

  T: Some of them, sure. You’re always going to have crazy people. It’s the system I’m talking about. If crazy people lash out in a sane system, they do some damage but then they end up in jail, or someone kills them. So it’s the system that matters. And that’s where I’m seeing results.

  M: Is the Russian government on board with all this?

  T: Hard to say. Maybe so. Soviet nostalgia is getting stronger. And Siberia is melting, which turns out to be no joke. Some people thought it would be a good thing, that we would grow more wheat and so on, but turns out we just get a bunch of swamps, and you can’t drive on the frozen rivers like they used to. It’s a mess. Also it’s releasing so much methane and CO2 that we might make jungle planet. Nobody in Russia wants jungle planet. It’s too messy, it’s not Russian. So ideas there are changing.

  M: So they’re co
ming around.

  T: Maybe so. It’s still a battle inside the Kremlin, but the evidence is clear. And that Soviet regard for science still holds for a lot of Russians. It’s a Russian value too. And they think it’s funny that the Soviet way might save the world. It’s a kind of vindication.

  M: Every culture wants respect from all the rest.

  T: Of course. Now the Chinese have it, and India too. The ones still hungry for it are Russia and Islam.

  M: So how do you get that respect?

  T: Not by money. The Saudis showed that. They were fools. Obvious fools get no respect. In Russia we worry about that. We think we are always seen as fools. The great bear, dangerous and uncouth. Provincial.

  M: Best novels in the world, best music in the world?

  T: That was all czarist stuff. Then the Soviet Union, it had some respect for standing up to the Americans, and getting out there in the sciences, and standing for solidarity. Or so it gets remembered. Now we are just the great losers to the Americans. And with the whole world speaking English, that impression can never go away. Not unless we use Soviet methods to save everyone from American stupidity.

  M: Or go back to the czar.

  T: Yes, that’s the bad response. We saw that with Putin. But the Soviet dream is better. We assume our past, use it to save the world. Mother Russia saves the day.

  M: I hope so. Someone’s got to do it. I don’t think America will.

  T: America! They are the rich person who has to accept owning just fifty million rather than infinity. They’ll be the last ones to come around.

  M: I guess I should go to San Francisco again.

  82

  Stores are bottlenecks, being distribution centers and not that numerous. You kick them in the balls when you attack their distribution centers. Their stock price drops at news of such attacks, and they have no way to counter that. And their valuations are already at historic lows. Of course police might arrest and prosecute, but that doesn’t bring the share price back up. A hundred thousand dollars of physical damage can leverage a hundred million dollars in lost asset value. Big pension funds notice there’s a problem and move their monster assets elsewhere, then endowments and trusts and universities and non-profits and hedge funds all notice the big dogs moving, and they try to get out of the house before it falls on their head. And suddenly a big famous corporation, which is also of course a legal person, has suffered something like a stroke, and is now lying there paralyzed in a hospital bed, on life support, his heirs arguing over who gets the last of his stuff.

  So stores were torched, sure. In the past that would have been the end of it. People like direct action because it’s quick, and afterwards you don’t have to face any real change. But around this time the Householders’ Union backed the Student Debt Resistance in support of its payment strike. That was non-compliance in action, meaning stay-at-home for almost every job. It’s a form of general strike.

  Then on July 16th big parts of the internet, the online store of stores, stopped working. That felt freaky. And we had done it. Was it smart? Wasn’t the internet like our nervous system now? It was like that guy who cut his arm off to get out of a canyon in Utah. A very desperate measure. We had cast ourselves out into an interregnum, the chaos between dynasties. The Crisis, Year Zero: oh my fucking god.

  In a situation like this, there has to be a plan. You can’t make it up on the fly in the middle of the breakdown. Not in the modern era of hyper-complexity. Say the internet stops working, your savings suddenly vanish and money doesn’t work anymore: Jesus H. Christ in a bucket! Can you make up a new society from scratch at that point? No, you can’t. Things just fall apart and next thing you know you’re eating your cat. So take this in: there has to be a pre-existing Plan B. And it can’t be a secret plan, popped on the world in the time of chaos. No conspiracy theories, please, so fucking tedious those people— as if things secretly made sense! No. Obvious bullshit. We’re winging it here. Not that there aren’t conspiracies, it’s just that they’re all well known. So it’s in that spirit that Plan B has to be a known plan, an open conspiracy known to all in advance, like the shadow government of an opposition party, putting out all its plans for citizens to consider and hopefully vote for. All of the proposals on the table and argued for. Step-by-step assembly instructions. Yes, this sounds like politics— because it is. Very depressing.

  A canonical example of how much the lack of a Plan B can hamstring a revolution is— well, pick any revolution you’ve ever heard of! They’re almost always spasms and so you get the usual spastic result, history as fuck-up, as pinball machine, as nightmare. But consider this one example, which is actually an example of how the lack of a Plan B can stop a revolution from even starting in the first place, despite the crying need for one, so it’s especially relevant for us now: meaning Greece and the failure to Grexit, back in the early years of the century. Greece had fallen into arrears in paying its debts to the European Union central bank, also the World Bank, and a raft of private bank creditors. These global financial powers then put the screws on. They told Greece to quit giving its citizens pensions and health care and so on, so the Greek government would be able to afford to pay back the international lenders who had so foolishly extended credit to such a bad risk. Syriza, the party in power in Greece at the time, refused to do this. The so-called Troika, representing international finance, insisted they do it. They couldn’t give in on this one, or all the little PIIGS would run off, meaning Portugal Italy Ireland Greece and Spain.

  So who was going to lose here, the Greek population or international finance? Syriza put the question to its people in the form of a poll. The Greek people voted by a large majority to defy the Troika and refuse austerity. Syriza then promptly accepted austerity and the EU’s leash, going belly-up and begging for a bail-out.

  Why did Syriza do that, why did they betray the wishes of the people who elected them? Because they had no Plan B. What they needed at that moment was a plan that would get them out of the EU and back to the drachma. They would have needed IOUs of some sort to stand in and do the job of money while they printed new drachmas and made all the other necessary changes as they transitioned back to a country in control of its own currency and sovereignty. And in fact there were people in Syriza working furiously to design that Plan B, which they called Plan X, but this turned out to be a case of too little too late, as they couldn’t convince their colleagues in government to risk trying it.

  So, in the absence of such a plan ready to be enacted, Syriza had to cave to the EU and global finance. It was that or chaos, which could have meant starvation. People in Greece were already hungry as it was; unemployment was 25 percent, 50 percent for the young, and the austerity regime already imposed earlier by the Troika meant there was no money for basic social services, for relief. The government of an advanced nation, a European nation, the cradle of civilization blah blah blah, was reduced to choosing hunger and unemployment rather than starvation and chaos— those were their only choices, because they hadn’t made a Plan B.

  This time, our time, when the whole thing broke all over the world, there had to be a Plan B.

  What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.

  Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover story for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let’s call it real political representation. Do you feel you have real political representation? Probably not, but even if you feel you have some
, it’s probably feeling pretty compromised at best. So: public ownership of the necessities, and real political representation.

  Details can be arranged on a case-by-case basis, and even though the devil is in the details, they are still details, a matter of making the pieces of the puzzle fit. These details can be worked out, and often they already have been. The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.

  One scary thing, there has to still be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means the already-existing central banks have to be part of it, which means the current nation-state system has to be part of it. Sorry but it’s true, and maybe obvious. Even if you are a degrowth devolutionist, an anarchist or a communist or a fan of world government, we only do the global in the current world order by way of the nation-state system. Or call it by way of the family of languages, if it makes you feel better. Hundreds of different languages have to be mutually comprehensible. It is what we’ve got now, and in the crux, when things fall apart, something from the old system has to be used to hang the new system on, hopefully something big and solid. Without that it’s castles in air time, and all will collapse into chaos. So yes: money, meaning central banks, meaning the nation-state system. It’s a social agreement, nothing more. This is what makes it so creepy. It’s like being hypnotized; you have to agree to it for it to work. So we are all hypnotized in a giant dream we hallucinate together, and that’s social reality. Not a happy thought.

  Especially since the current order is so unequal, so unfair. Old story, of course. Biblical; detailed in Genesis; it’s the oldest story, inequality, and never much changed from the start of civilization. So how can we change that? What do we do now?