Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020), 563 pages, $17.99 paperback
Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2021), 231 pages, $17.99 paperback
According to Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece who resigned in 2015 in the face of IMF and European demands for privatization and cuts to social services in exchange for a bailout, the capitalist era as we knew it has already ended. The world economy has entered in a new and even more oppressive stage of fiefdoms, a techno-feudalist society where banking and investment overlords control the land and the wealth while the rest of us toil on their behalf. Economic policy benefits the rich and the multi-national banks, whose thousands of lobbyists play to special interests and subvert any attempt to argue for the more equitable distribution of wealth and economic opportunity. The international scale of the bank bailouts of 2008, a watershed moment for the salvaging of capitalism, provides Varoufakis with the futurist fantasy of an alternative reality—what if the system had been allowed to collapse and a new one had been put in its place? In his novel Another Now, Varoufakis imagines that reality split into two different yet parallel paths in 2008. His protagonist Costa, a sophisticated computer engineer, accidentally meets his counterpart “Kosti” in the other reality in 2025, and thus has the opportunity to learn about the functioning of a society that has done away with retail commercial banks, the stock market, and inherited wealth so as to create a new economic and social order.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future also puts forth an alternative vision for the organization of human society. Here the emphasis is on averting the catastrophic consequences of climate change. As a result of the failure of industrialized nations to cut their carbon emissions, a small new UN agency has been founded in 2025 in Zurich, Switzerland. Its name: the Ministry for the Future. That same year, India is hit by a heat wave that kills millions. The combination of humidity and heat in a town in Uttar Pradesh, along with power failures that cause air conditioning to fail, creates an unsurvivable “wet-bulb temperature” in which humans and animals suffocate. Frank May, an American who declines to flee and remains at the local clinic (part of a sister-city project), barely survives—but at the cost of severe PTSD. The Indian government, frustrated at the failure of world leaders to address climate change, decides to artificially create the effect of the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo by injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to cool the planet for a few years and buy time for more radical changes.
The two novels grapple with the crises confronting humanity today, both positing radical changes in the political and economic system. We are in the realm of science fiction, of utopian thinking. Each novel, in turn, tries to answer a different question. Varoufakis asks how the inequality of opportunity at birth can be addressed, while keeping in place financial incentives to superior achievement and human creativity. Robinson asks how human financial, agricultural, and transportation systems can be changed so as to prioritize ecological goals and decarbonize the environment.
Robinson’s scope encompasses the global economic and political order, while Varoufakis is more concerned with social networks and working out an equitable market economy. In Varoufakis’ carefully worked-out system, all children are given a bank deposit at birth which is added to each year by the distribution of the society’s rising GDP. Once persons reach adulthood, they have the capital to pay for their education and later are free to join any company they choose and even to invest part of their capital there. However, no-one can own more than one share in a company, and it has to be the company they actually work for. All companies are public, and because of the share restriction, each employee has only one vote. Bonuses for outstanding achievement are voted on at the end of the year by all the employees. There is no private ownership of land. Service jobs are automated, and people are assured a basic income that leaves them free to be artists or even lay-abouts should they opt out of the techno-corporate world. Kosti explains that the changes after 2008 were possible because privatized public utilities and monopolies like Amazon and Google had been uniquely vulnerable to mass consumer boycotts. A series of techno-rebel groups (variously called Crowdshorters, Solsourcers, Bladerunners and Environs) had used targeted activism to bring those behemoths to their knees. (74-79)
Once Costa understands how the system works in the Other Now, he has to convince his friends Iris and Eva of its viability. Eva is a former Lehman Brothers banker who is still reeling from the 2008 capitalist crisis but who also remembers the collapse of first-epoch socialism in the 1990s; Iris is an anti-capitalist dissident and activist whose incisive and critical mind is honed to find the flaws in any system. The back and forth between these three protagonists allows Varoufakis to develop some of the fine points of the Other Now. Finally, Eva is convinced that the Other Now has invented a market system that transcends capitalism: “An absence of income and sales taxes […] universal freedom from poverty, but also from a welfare state […] a payment system that was free, efficient and which did not empower the few to print money at the expense of the many.” (153)
Iris, on the other hand, remains skeptical about a society that still relies on markets, given that these will always be subject to manipulation of one form or another. As Costa expands the communication with the Other Now, Iris is able to meet her counterpart Siris and learn about an attempt in 2022 by profiteers to cheat people out of their deposits; Iris also has environmental concerns about the ecological stress on the planet due to the Other Now’s continued emphasis on growth. In the end, her doubts persuade Siris to make a surprising decision.
The arguments between the three protagonists in Our Now and their interactions with their counterparts in the Other Now provide good dramatic content, including a branching out into philosophical discussion of the nature of wealth creation, the human drive for domination, patriarchy, the limitless appetite for self-gratification, as well as the self-alienation implicit in technology. Socratic methods of argumentation work well here and avoid dry exposition. In this way Varoufakis also avoids closure and any claim to have “solved” the contemporary crises of capitalism and planetary exhaustion, and opens up, instead, a space for dialogue.
The Ministry for the Future lays out a mosaic of 106 multi-voiced chapters that are wide-ranging in subject matter but which, on aggregate, circle around to offering some concrete solutions to the human-powered planetary crisis. The encounters of Mary Murphy, the leader of the Ministry, with her staff, with leaders from the world’s central banks, and with the ailing but emboldened Indian heat wave survivor Frank May, provide one narrative through-line; other chapters are presented as riddles that give voice to the sun, the carbon atom, or blockchain technology; still others describe different forms of carbon sequestration and wildlife preservation, as well as a project in Antarctica to repurpose oil drills by using them to bring up melted water under the glaciers and thus reattach them to the land. Change is not always powered by peaceful means: a group calling themselves the “Children of Kali” brings down jet airplanes with drone attacks, sinks container ships and large commercial fishing vessels, and takes over mines in order to create cooperatives; another group (possibly a “black arm” of the Ministry itself) invades the Davos economic summit, turning the wealthy participants into hostages who get bombarded with images of wealth inequality and worldwide human suffering; and, it is suggested, might have blown up its own Ministry offices in order to garner sympathy and get international support for its project. (546)
By the novel’s end, several progressive trends are happening: the creation of workers’ cooperatives (Spain’s Mondragon is hailed as a pioneer), the transformation of ocean vessels into ships that run on solar energy and sails, the replacement of jets by dirigibles that run on electricity, the ascendency of the carbon coin as a replacement of the dollar as international currency, the transformation of agriculture away from agribusiness, the transition to open source social media called “YourLock” where participants can decide whether or not to sell their data to advertisers, and many other initiatives that point in the direction of carbon sequestration and emission reduction. The kaleidoscopic approach of the novel makes clear that everything is still in process rather than having reached a final stasis, yet the drawdown of carbon is real: “The majority was being drawn down by reforestation, biochar, agroforestry, kelp bed and other seaweed growth, reduced and improved ranching, direct CO2 capture from the air, and so on. All these efforts were paid for, or rather rewarded beyond the expense of doing them, in carbon coins, and these coins were trading strongly with all the other currencies in currency exchange.” (454). However, a worrying aspect in the novel is the dependence on reforms in the banking system and markets to assure a better and more ecologically-balanced future. Robinson does make a nod to socialism as something that the Greek Syriza movement might have resorted to in 2015 instead of betraying the people’s will (409) and suggests, toward the novel’s end, that a new world religion based on earth-citizenship and the celebration of Gaia is the way to draw all living things together. As his character Mary Murphy puts it, the Gordian Knot has been loosened but not yet untangled.
Along with its many technical descriptions, The Ministry for the Future retains dramatic interest and remains a good read that stimulates thinking about possible alternatives to the present system. Robinson even suggests that the proposed economic and social policies will solve political issues, such as the fraught relationship between the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; and will lead to the abolition of the caste system in India. This may be an overreach, but without alternative visions, we will be left in the 2025 dystopia described in Jia Zhangke’s 2015 film Mountains May Depart, where the young protagonist “Dollar” wanders aimless and unmoored in a collapsed economic system with no place where he can feel at home. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch has argued, we have yet to make this planet our home. We have not even learned to walk upright—instead, we prowl across the earth in the vain and destructive search to satisfy our raging appetites.
Inez Hedges
Professor Emerita
Northeastern University
Boston, MA
