Cornucopia

by John Kinsella

  The conflict with the revolutionary guerilla movement was a consequence of enduring inequalities that left great swaths of Colombia’s population in misery, a fact that political and more privileged classes, mostly city dwellers and landowners, chose to ignore, sadly the case in much of Latin American.

  Such conflicts had ravaged the countries of Central America, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as Cuba in the Caribbean. Only when they finally ran their course could a new age of prosperity take root, where freely elected governments could settle their internal inequalities democratically. There were of course Argentina and Venezuela, where interested, or unrealistic politicians dragged their nations into repeated economic crises.

  As Asia, led by China, practised a form of mercantilism which thrived on the willingness of its working classes to improve their condition, the Arab world burned. The Gulf states had failed to reform their oil and gas export based economies, dancing while they ignored the plight of the masses in their more populous neighbours, stoking the fires of revolt, sectarian conflict and terror.

  The flames spread through North Africa and the Middle East, as Iran’s Ayatollahs coveted the idea of becoming a regional nuclear power, and Russia fanned the flames as it heeded the call of a twenty-first century version of its traditional autocratic nationalism.

  1. Commonwealth of Dominica, a small independent Caribbean nation, not to be confused with the Dominican Republic

  2. Fuerza armadas revolucionarias Colombia

  CARTAGENA – COLOMBIA

  It was not Cannes, but the Cartagena International Film Festival, which in addition to being much more exotic, was the gateway to the Latin American market with its six hundred million cinema goers. The city’s fifty-fifth film festival was a major cultural event in the Hispanic world with almost three hundred films competing for a golden India de Catalina.

  One of the favourite’s was Rodrigo García’s film Last Days in the Desert, a fictional portray of Jesus Christ’s forty days in the Desert, starring Ewan McGregor in a double role, of both Jesus and Lucifer. Garcia, the son of Colombia’s literary giant and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez, was the film’s writer, director and producer.

  Strangely, the film was produced in the USA, in English, starring a British actor in the lead role, and Ciaran Hinds, another Brit as the father, Tye Sheridan as the son, and Ayelet Zurer, an Israeli an actress, as the mother. It wasn’t a Colombian film, and perhaps it wasn’t supposed to be.

  Pat Kennedy was excited by the presence of the Irish and Scots actors; O’Connelly by Rodrigo García, son of the famous writer, and writer in his own right; and Liam Clancy by the glamour of it all.

  O’Connelly had been a special guest at the Cartagena Hay Literature and Arts Festival that January, which in previous years had invited authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Ian McEwen, Salman Rushdie and of course Colombia’s own Gabriel García Márquez. This together with knowing Ewen McGregor, and a little string pulling by Don Pedro, brought the INI gang together at the awards ceremony and gala diner.

  Pat had been surprised when Barton recounted how the Hay festival had been founded in the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known for its forty odd libraries, which had been organizing book festivals all over the world for near on thirty years: literary get-togethers that Bill Clinton once remarked were Woodstocks of the mind.

  Pat was delighted to be present at the film festival, which with the presence of Scottish and Irish actors seemed, at least to him, to have a Celtic air about it. Faced with the glorious past of the nations where he found himself more and more frequently, in particular China and Russia, he felt a pressing need to discover his own origins, and in the quest for his own cultural identity had almost become obsessed with modern Celtic culture, and in particular with the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.

  To his growing annoyance foreigners always confused Ireland with England, plus the fact that Celtic history and culture were almost unheard of beyond the fringes of Western Europe.

  In his search for a modern icon, whose poetry he could cite, Pat had rejected the best known Irish candidate: Brendan Behan. The Irish bard did not fit in with the image of modern Ireland, at least as far as Pat was concerned; his mother had frowned on the man as a drunk, a disgrace to Ireland: Behan was remembered for his drinking, wit and literary talent, and for many Irish people in that order.

  Pat’s booze driven compatriot, Behan, had been a fierce Irish Republican, at times a poet, mainly in Gaelic, mostly a play-write and novelist, but always a drinker, who preferred to talk about what he was going to write, famous for his quips: I only drink on two occasions … when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.

  At times perspicacious, Behan had once said, in the days before Ireland escaped the impoverished destiny forced upon it by London, and at a time when the Irish Church prayed for the conversion of China: The Chinese are more Christian than the Irish … at least they provide free health to their people.

  Whatever the public criticism or acclaim, Pat saw Behan as a man of the past, the wars were over and good riddance to them and their horrors, things that brought forth the kind of men and brutality that Pat had always taken pains to avoid. Ireland had changed, it was modern, a vision Pat had valued since his youth; he had pushed the impoverished, dark, grim, Ireland of the past from his mind, always reaching out to future, which he had often discovered lay beyond its shores.

  Seen from China or Russia, Ireland was an insignificantly small place, and its drunken Gaelic poet as part of the Eireann Isle’s folklore best forgotten, along with many of the violent Republicans in Ireland’s post-independent history, which did not however mean Pat condoned England’s role in Ireland: there was good and bad, but as a proud though rational Irishman, the time to move on was long past.

  Of course Dylan Thomas was pretty good at riotous drinking, but his poetry and fine declamation inspired Pat. The Chinese were always asking him to join in their Karaoke sessions, which he did willing, he was anything but shy, but in his search for something Irish or more specifically Celtic, which made Ireland seem greater vis-à-vis the Chinese, he had discovered, for more serious occasions, the Welsh poet.

  ABUNDANCE

  As an economist and historian, Francis was his own witness. He had grown up in the Ireland of the nineteen-fifties, a stagnant, narrow, poor country, held back by the clergy and gentry, governed by Éamon de Valera, whose theocratic dream of a rural, non-materialist, Catholic Ireland, led to backwardness and inaction. Then, in the half century that followed, Ireland was miraculously transformed into a land of plenty. Sure there was the crisis, but what was remarkable was the little effect it had on abundance; the damage was in reality a crisis of confidence, which, with a little time would be overcome, healed.

  Were Ireland’s achievements all that miraculous? In a way yes, but the miracle was not specifically Irish. It had occurred to almost every nation on earth to a greater or lesser degree. A phenomena that first it had been slow, then coming in waves, and the waves were even lapping the shores of Black Africa.

  As a boy on his visits to England, Francis had not noticed a great deal of difference between the life of his comfortable upper middle class Irish family and that of his cousins in London, where the working class were still to reap the benefits of Britain’s post war society, about to embark on the road to material prosperity.

  He remembered the small town of his grandparents in County Wexford, sixty miles south of Dublin. He had spent many happy summer holidays in Enniscorthy, where Saturday night entertainment for both young and old consisted of an evening at the tumbledown cinema on Slaney Street, where outdated films were changed once a week, and where after the show a packet of chips, generously sprinkled with salt and vinegar, from the chippy opposite the cinema, was considered a treat. Apart from the cinema there was little else except the town’s pubs and the occasional dance, the latter strictly observed by the parish priest.

  In 2015, a motorway linked Dublin to Enniscorthy and every Irish
man and woman owned a car, an unimagined luxury in the fifties when the common folk did not own motor vehicles.

  *

  In the modern world of individualism, each and everyone was encouraged to become an entrepreneur, retraining and relooking themselves in a fast moving economic environment, constantly alert to technological progress. The relentlessly movement of capital ignored borders in its constant search for profit, contemptuously sweeping those skills and goods made obsolete by new technology into the trash-bin of history.

  Perhaps the American dream had become harder to attain in the US, but little by little it was being realised by other nations, where in the last century the idea of such material comfort would have seemed far fetched, more generally in China, and also to a lesser extent in India. Russia was another question: where plenitude was always within reach, but forever obstructed by its seemingly self-defeating autocratic destiny.

  Strangely the Marxist dream, abandoned by Communist states, was embraced by parties such as Syriza in Greece, in their leftist anti-capitalist anti-everything revolt. Was it the left’s last hurrah? The answer was confused as Greeks rejected the EU, but not the euro. In a new twist to an old idea it was proletariat that determined what it wanted and no longer intellectual revolutionary leaders.

  The proletariat was not starving, on the contrary it had never been so well off. Not only that, never had it been so well informed.

  Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité had always been a vain slogan. Dostoevsky saw through its charade when revolutionary rhetoric turned sour and ordinary citizens were confronted by cruel reality. Nearly half a century after the great writer’s death, Lenin confirmed it by bloodshed and tyranny as the Bolsheviks imposed their law, not only on the aristocracy and nobles, but on proletariat.

  In London and Paris, Dostoevsky saw through the imperial splendour of the time, which derived its wealth not only from empires scattered across a large part of the globe, but also from the exertions of the downtrodden living in those two imperial capitals, condemned to eking out their miserable existence in the service of the princes whose ambitions rode roughshod over the masses wherever they were. The myth of Liberté and all the rest was an invention by the privileged classes.

  Two world wars had seen the rise of the ordinary man, then the new millennium opened the door to post industrial economy. It was a contradiction in terms: on the one hand citizens refused sweatshop labour, capitalist diktats, wage cuts and austerity, on the other hand well-paid jobs became scarcer, which did not prevent the miracle of abundance from making its appearance, even in the remotest corners of the planet: mobile telephones in remote Africa, solar panels in Papua Niugini and Internet deep in Amazonia.

  Abundance was assured by Cornucopia, the only prerequisite of which was endless demand: an insatiable mass of consumers, whether they had the means, whether they worked, and whether they were young or old, sick or infirm, was irrelevant. The vast productive machines of Asia, Europe and the US were designed for one purpose only; Cornucopia, which of course could not survive without consumers, and consumers could not survive without credit, and banks, which in turn could not survive without the constant creation of new credit.

  John Maynard Keynes wrote in his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren: ‘For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.’

  Francis was not however blind to history’s lessons and the unpredictability of the future; how a small decision could change everything; what if Yanis Varoufakis had had his way, Greece would have quit the euro for a very uncertain future, left to its own means to face the flood of Syrian refugees and immigrants that lay just around the corner, ready to ambush unsuspecting Greeks. The future, had always, and always will, be formed by a multitude of variables of every conceivable and inconceivable kind.

  As wages grew in China, countries such as Mexico and Colombia boomed. At first glance this could seem incongruous, but the proximity of these Latin American countries to the US and bi-lateral trade agreements with Washington made it economically profitable to manufacture everything from automobiles to washing machines in countries to the south of the Rio Grande. Mexico was exporting one million vehicles to the US each year, many of them with the GM blazon. This in turn opened the Cornucopia of plenty to the consumers of these countries.

  As manufacturers ran out of cheap labour sources, it was already clear that machines would replace men and abundance would become ubiquitous: whatever you want, when and wherever you wanted it. The very rich alone could not sustain the needs of the vast productive machine; another model was needed, the key to which was the question of debt management and the distribution of credit.

  The idea that life and existence alone justified a share from the unstoppable flow of goods and services from Cornucopia was making headway. A century and a half had passed since Karl Marx had imagined an economy in which the role of machines was to produce, and the role of men was to supervise them. Therein lay his error. He had never imagined machines would not need men to supervise them, though machines needed men to consume.

  Some thought the future of humanity was in knowledge; perhaps, but what if that knowledge belonged to machines. It was evident that no one human being could store the vast amounts of knowledge and information that had become available to mankind, but a machine could.

  Marx’s theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time was flawed, in so much as productive labour would no longer exist in the future, when machines mastered all aspects of production: a force independent of man.

  Wages and profits would no longer count. Machines, though they consumed energy were untiring and undemanding. Moreover, the notion that labour was required to conceive and build machines was rapidly losing ground. Machines were conceiving machines that were replacing men. Long lines of assemblers, at Foxconn or Toyota, were already things of the past for certain of their products, just as combine harvesters and modern machines had transformed agriculture.

  Francis remembered his conversation with Jack Reagan who had commenced his career in an engineering design office, his friend had recalled how he had calculated with a slide rule, how it had taken him a week to design a simple metal framework using a pencil and transparent drawing paper, tasks that had until then remained unchanged for a century or more. Well before the start of the millennium, all such tasks were carried out with the aid of screens, computers and data libraries, and in a hundredth of the time.

  Marx was right when he assumed that machines would do most of the work, where the ideal machine would last forever and cost nothing. Whilst the cost of the production process and labour would fall, his error was to think human labour would even be needed.

  For Francis, it was not utopian to imagine the dawning of a Cornucopian world, even if a period of transition was needed for the system to expand into Africa, or, whether Africa or some of its dysfunctional societies would ever be included.

  Historically, feudalism had been replaced by capitalism, and post-capitalism would be replaced by abundance, where the social model was yet to be invented, though strangely enough there was growing evidence of a model in already existing socially assisted milieus.

  A simple look at the past was a reminder that money had not existed for the masses in feudal societies and until the twentieth century living on credit was seen as iniquitous.

  The social and political model for the dawn of abundance had not yet been invented, in the meantime socialism with its labour movements lived in denial, their only arm was that of their Luddite ancestors: out of hand rejection of anything that did not conform to their obsolete ideology or faith, which some called a religion.

  At the same time governments and politicians worked within a framework of equally obsolete models: electoral democracies, autocracies, theocracies and oligarchies, a
ll incapable of reform, an impasse that would inevitable led to a more dramatic transition.

  Francis always pointed to the defunct Soviet model, that had disappeared, imploded, definitively on Christmas Day 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the USSR passed into history. Though the end of the Soviet era was effective immediately, it had taken years of decline, decay and denial. In the same way it had taken time and pain for China to shake off the dysfunctional world of Maoism and create a motor of pre-Cornucopian abundance.

  Would an enlightened elite emerge: a small class that believed in the necessity to save consumers and politicians from themselves? Would they become the overseers of Cornucopia? Or would the masses take the matter into their own hands? It was a question that tormented Francis in a metaphysical sense: would human society come of age and opt for a universally consensual form of government, or would it pursue its age old habit of endless conflict in the interest of a small elite?

  MOSCOW

  It was a balmy spring day when John Francis stepped out of the taxis. He paused for a moment to admire the small leafy square off ulitsa Tverskaja before going into the elegant yellow hued appartment building where Ekaterina lived. Like the surrounding properties it had been recently renovated. Typically of much of central Moscow’s architecture it dated back to pre-Revolutionary days.

  During the last years of the USSR, many of the capitals buildings had fallen into decay, then after the dissolution properties in desirable central districts had undergone a transformation. Occupants who had held positions in state organisations lost their privileges and their incomes declined with successive devaluations of the rouble. Property values shot up, developers moved in and appartment buildings were transformed and modernised for a new class of private business managers and professionals.