Blue Mars (18 page)

“I’ve never heard of that one,” Nadia said.

“No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think
it’s really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an
advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years
in congress. It’s a drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too,
a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government.”

“I like that,” Nadia said.

“Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some
version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates
in ranked fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get
some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to
appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation,
and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed
before.”

“Interesting,” Nadia exclaimed. “Like trusses in a wall.”

“Yes.” Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran “fractured
societies” that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure:
Azania, Cambodia, Armenia ... as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit;
these had been bloody, bloody lands.

“It seems like political structures can only do so much,” he said.

“True,” Nadia said, “but we don’t have all those old hatreds to
deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been
marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods
could be used to pull even them into the process.”

Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described;
they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which
nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her
screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging
the corners of her mouth.

“You’re happy,” Art said.

She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the
travelers, she said to Sax, “It was so nice to find that political science had
abstracted something useful in all these years.”

Eight minutes later his reply came in. “I never understood why
they call it that.”

Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia
Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going
to pull it off.

So he went back to the big table
, ready to tackle the next-worst problem. That brought him back to
earth again. There were a hundred next-worst problems, all small until you
actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the
squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas,
in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia
document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more
radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and
Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not
something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because
it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional
capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last
group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along
with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double
weight, and people listened. “This new economy that’s being proposed,” he
declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, “is a radical and
unprecedented intrusion of government into business.”

Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking
and looked over.

Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed,
Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so
far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art
felt a quiver of anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred,
Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant—and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic.
Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron
labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in
seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first
ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a
limit-case illustration of the insular nature of other people’s relationships;
but this of course did not stop gossip, on the contrary, people talked about
them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that
Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on
the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that
they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that
emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives
as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no
one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it.

Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect
that the theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking
around in a fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned
his eye again on Antar.

“What you said about government and business is absurd,” he stated
coldly. It was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so
far, contemptuous and dismissive. “Governments always regulate the kinds of
business they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we
have been saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy
and self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these
rights are not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You”—he waved a hand
to indicate he did not know Antar’s name—”do you believe in democracy and
self-rule?”

“Yes!” Antar said defensively.

“Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental
values that government ought to encourage?”

“Yes!” Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.

“Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then
why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In
politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders,
for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue—
control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work,
and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of
the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is—a version of
feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.
But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under
duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.”

“Business leaders work,” Antar said sharply. “And they take the
financial risks—”

“The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the
privileges of capital.”

“Management—”

“Yes yes. Don’t interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a
technical matter. But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital.
Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and
it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny
nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to
them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the
rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really
democratic at all. That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the
metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever
stronger. In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and
five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth. History
has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the
injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the
technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics
of life to all.

“So. We must change. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental
value, if simple justice is a value, then they are values everywhere, including
in the workplace where we spend so much of our lives. That was what was said in
point four of the Dorsa Brevia agreement. It says everyone’s work is their own,
and the worth of it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of
production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the
future generations. It says that the world is something we all steward
together. That is what it says. And in our years on Mars, we have developed an
economic system that can keep all those promises. That has been our work these
last fifty years. In the system we have developed, all economic enterprises are
to be small cooperatives, owned by their workers and by no one else. They hire
their management, or manage themselves. Industry guilds and co-op associations
will form the larger structures necessary to regulate trade and the market,
share capital, and create credit.”

Antar said scornfully, “These are nothing but ideas. It is
utopianism and nothing more.”

“Not at all.” Again Vlad waved him away. “The system is based on
models from Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both
worlds, and have succeeded very well. You don’t know about this partly because
you are ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored
and denied all alternatives to it. But most of our microeconomy has been in
successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The
different parts of the macroeconomy have been used in the pseudo-metanat
Praxis, in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna
Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself.
These organizations were the precursors to our economy, which will be
democratic in a way capitalism never even tried to be.”

A synthesis of systems. And Vladimir Taneev was a very great
synthesist; it was said that all the components of the longevity treatment had
already been there, for instance, and that Vlad and Ursula had simply put them
together. Now in his economic work with Marina he was claiming to have done the
same kind of thing. And although he had not mentioned the longevity treatment
in this discussion, nevertheless it lay there like the table itself, a big
cobbled-together achievement, part of everyone’s lives. Art looked around and
thought he could see people thinking, well, he did it once in biology and it
worked; could economics be more difficult?

Against this unspoken thought, this unthought feeling, Antar’s
objections did not seem like much. Metanational capitalism’s track record at
this point did little to support it; in the last century it had precipitated a
massive war, chewed up the Earth, and torn its societies apart. Why should they
not try something new, given that record?

Someone from Hiranyagarba stood and made an objection from the
opposite direction, noting that they seemed to be abandoning the gift economy
by which the Mars underground had lived.

Vlad shook his head impatiently. “I believe in the underground
economy, I assure you, but it has always been a mixed economy. Pure gift
exchange coexisted with a monetary exchange, in which neoclassical market
rationality, that is to say the profit mechanism, was bracketed and contained
by society to direct it to serve higher values, such as justice and freedom.
Economic rationality is simply not the highest value. It is a tool to calculate
costs and benefits, only one part of a larger equation concerning human
welfare. The larger equation is called a mixed economy, and that is what we are
constructing here. We are proposing a complex system, with public and private
spheres of economic activity. It may be that we ask people to give, throughout
their lives, about a year of their work to the public good, as in Switzerland’s
national service. That labor pool, plus taxes on private co-ops for use of the land
and its resources, will enable us to guarantee the so-called social rights we
have been discussing—housing, health care, food, education— things that should
not be at the mercy of market rationality. Because la salute non si paga, as
the Italian workers used to say. Health is not for sale!”

This was especially important to Vlad, Art could see. Which made
sense—for in the metanational order, health most certainly had been for sale,
not only medical care and food and housing, but preeminently the longevity
treatment itself, which so far had been going only to those who could afford
it. Vlad’s greatest invention, in other words, had become the property of the
privileged, the ultimate class distinction—long life or early death—a
physicaliza-tion of class that almost resembled divergent species. No wonder he
was angry; no wonder he had turned all his efforts to devising an economic
system that would transform the longevity treatment from a catastrophic
possession to a blessing available to all.

“So nothing will be left to the market,” Antar said.

“No no no,” Vlad said, waving at Antar more irritably than ever.
“The market will always exist. It is the mechanism by which things and services
are exchanged. Competition to provide the best product at the best price, this
is inevitable and healthy. But on Mars it will be directed by society in a more
active way. There will be not-for-profit status to vital life-support matters,
and then the freest part of the market will be directed away from the basics of
existence toward nonessentials, where venture enterprises can be undertaken by
worker-owned co-ops, who will be free to try what they like. When the basics
are secured and when the workers own their own businesses, why not? It is the
process of creation we are talking about.”

Jackie, looking annoyed at Vlad’s dismissals of Antar, and perhaps
intending to divert the old man, or trip him up, said, “What about the
ecological aspects of this economy that you used to emphasize?”

“They are fundamental,” Vlad said. “Point three of Dorsa Brevia
states that the land, air, and water of Mars belong to no one, that we are the
stewards of it for all the future generations. This stewardship will be
everyone’s responsibility, but in case of conflicts we propose strong
environmental courts, perhaps as part of the constitutional court, which will
estimate the real and complete environmental costs of economic activities, and
help to coordinate plans that impact the environment.”

“But this is simply a planned economy!” Antar cried.

“Economies are plans. Capitalism planned just as much as this, and
metanationalism tried to plan everything. No, an economy is a plan.”

Antar, frustrated and angry, said, “It’s simply socialism
returned.”

Vlad shrugged. “Mars is a new totality. Names from earlier
totalities are deceptive. They become little more than theological terms. There
are elements one could call socialist in this system, of course. How else
remove injustice from economy? But private enterprises will be owned by their
workers rather than being nationalized, and this is not socialism, at least not
socialism as it was usually attempted on Earth. And all the co-ops are
businesses—small democracies devoted to some work of other, all needing
capital. There will be a market, there will be capital. But in our system
workers will hire capital rather than the other way around. It’s more
democratic that way, more just. Understand me— we have tried to evaluate each
feature of this economy by how well it aids us to reach the goals of more
justice and more freedom. And justice and freedom do not contradict each other
as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an injust system is no freedom
at all. They both emerge together. And so it is not so impossible, really. It
is only a matter of enacting a better system, by combining elements that have
been tested and shown to work. This is the moment for that. We have been
preparing for this opportunity for seventy years. And now that the chance has
come, I see no reason to back off just because someone is afraid of some old
words. If you have any specific suggestions for improvements, we’ll be happy to
hear them.”