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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, all 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.
Francis dropped his bags, took a quick shower and then headed off to meet Ekaterina from her office a few blocks away on Tverskoj Bul’var. Friday afternoon’s traffic in Moscow’s was more hopeless and there had been no point in her meeting him at the airport.
As he left the appartment building he marvelled at the metamorphosis of the garden square, the last time he had seen it, just four weeks earlier, it had lain under a hardened layer of grimy grey snow. It was magic, the trees were decked out with bright green leaves and the flower beds bursting with colour. Francis felt good as he turned in the direction of Tverskaya, it was no doubt in anticipation of the long break he had planned with Ekaterina and not a little to do with the glorious weather he discovered on arrival, a marked contrast to the wet and wind swept streets of Dublin.
Around him everything looked normal in Moscow for that time of the year: the girls were pretty, the trees were green, the fashionable stores still fashionable, the luxury boutiques still out of reach of all but the rich, the flower sellers still babushkas and the traffic still snarled-up.
The gay spring appearance was deceptive, it belied the difficulties of many ordinary Russians struggling to cope with the changes. The class cleavages were more pronounced than ever as the wealthy continued unabashedly to flaunt their affluence, hiding their fears that bad times were ahead.
The middle classes who had bought new homes with foreign currency loans were desperate: with the fall of the rouble they owed twice as much as they had borrowed in euros. For the working classes the transformation from socialism to capitalism had been brutal, leaving many stranded in a world they had not had time to understand.
It seemed to many post-Soviet society had favoured a privileged few, those who had cheated the people of their collective assets: natural resources, industries, banks, properties and institutions. Corruption was rampant as those close to power rode roughshod over the people’s rights.
To Ekaterina, who like many young ambitious outward looking Russians had embraced the changes offered by the early Putin years, her hope had been transformed into enormous disappointment. She was a patriot, but not blind to the calamity of Putin’s leadership, who by his ambitions was leading Russia into a useless confrontation with the West. Her country’s future was not with Iran, Syria and North Korea. A sad turn of affairs because Russia had so much to offer to Europe and the West.
In the light of the changes brought about by the Kremlin, the success of China was a bitter pill to swallow. From an agrarian based society China had succeeded in its transformation, overtaking Russia in every sense, even if it was still ruled by the Communist Party, whilst Russia after abandoning Communism had slipped back into its bad old ways of despotism at a alarming pace.
Like all Russian mothers who wanted a better future their children, Ekaterina feared the misery of the dark days her parents and grandparents had known under the Soviet Union and its tyrants. There was of course a nostalgia for a state that had offered work, health and education to its sons and daughters, pride in its accomplishments in space, science and the arts. Her disappointment was intense, would she like so many progressive young Russians be forced to seek a new life abroad?
Ekaterina was one of those who had taken out a mortgage in dollars. Her salary at Christie’s, where she was an expert in contemporary art, had been sufficient to buy a modern two bedroom flat, but with the collapse of the rouble her mortgage payments had doubled.
She like millions of Russians found herself trapped by a crisis not of her making. Her optimism had been cut short by Putin’s Ukrainian adventure and buried by the collapse of oil and the imposition of sanctions. Of course most Russians were unaffected by their government’s counter measures against the West, but many Muscovites and Petersburgers worked for foreign companies or those that imported food and goods from France, Germany or the USA. For them life had become difficult as they cut back on discretionary purchases and foreign holidays out of fear of losing their jobs.
Springtime in Moscow
Some Russians had lost faith in the rouble, others had even invented a parallel currency, the kolion. The lucky ones, those who owned a family home in the countryside, gave up the unequal race and left Moscow or Petersburg. Ekaterina had even contemplated moving to her grandmother’s old family home, now a weekend dacha, in a small village sixty kilometres from the capital, where people lived without the state thanks to home grown food: chickens, geese and firewood from the forest. There they turned to the Orthodox Church for guidance, as in the more distant past, and counted on help from their neighbours.
Ekaterina with her flaming red hair and independence reminded Francis of a girl he had once known in Dublin. She did not give in easily. But she had little choice, Moscow offered work. Like a magnet it emptied towns and villages in the surrounding regions, where industries and jobs had disappeared as had schools, hospitals and services. Hapless distant villages fell into ruin for lack of resources. Old folk who saw their pensions shrink to a pittance, bitterly regretted the good old days of the Soviet Union, when unlimited access to medical services and hospitals was there for all.
For many like Ekaterina the idea of her country spending money on foreign adventures, nostalgic of the Soviet era, was incomprehensible when there was so much lacking at home.
Cornucopia Page 89
