My Country Is Called Earth (9 page)

He replied, “No, because we wait until the animal has reached old age. We don’t kill our animals in their prime like you do, so our meat isn’t as tasty as your meat. On the other hand, our meat comes from animals that have been loved, not brutalized and terrorized, so our meat is healthy for us to eat.”

Mary talked about farming: “We emphasize sustainable agriculture. That is farming that does not injure the earth. First Gandhi practices sustainable agriculture by growing many different crops and by raising several kinds of animals.

“Sustainable agriculture is also organic. It was said in your time that if all farms were organic, people would starve. The cause of this misconception was the fact that organic farming often resulted in lower yields in the first years after switching from scientific methods. The farmer had to experiment to determine the best crop rotation, and he had to find substitutes for the pesticides and fertilizers he had been using. Organic agriculture requires a greater sensitivity to nature.

“There are several significant advantages to organic agriculture: Foods are being grown that are healthy for the individual. Chemicals are not being put into the soil and water that can harm living things. Man is working with nature, not against her.

“One hundred years ago only a few million people in the United States were farmers. Today, if you count all the people associated with rural villages, there are over two hundred and fifty million farmers in America. In the nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the ratio of rural citizens to urban citizens is even higher. In fact, eighty percent of the people in the world live on farms and in rural communities.”

Tuesday, July 7, 2076

On this day Mary took me to see First Gandhi’s urban center. Our trip to the city gave me my first chance to ride in the electric car Exellon had told me about. It was comfortable and quiet, and it’s acceleration was faster than the Volkswagen bug I owned in the twentieth century. When I asked her about the car, she said, “This automobile was built to last. We understand that the earth cannot support consumption for its own sake. We have an expression: ‘Only take what you need.’”

During the trip Mary told me, “There is one luxury from your time we consider a necessity: travel. We encourage every village member to see the world. Some members, falling in love in or with other lands, never return.”

We were on our way to the city of San Jose, about twenty-five kilometers to the north of the commune. San Jose was in the Santa Clara Valley, where I grew up. When I was a child it had nearly one million fruit trees, and called itself the apricot and prune capitals of the world. In the 1980s it became known as Silicon Valley—the capital of high-tech, and the home to more than one million people.

We rode on Highway 101. Instead of finding it filled with noisy, polluting autos and trucks, I saw only silent electric vehicles. In the middle of the freeway were two lines on which monorail trains flew by at great speed. I noticed as we neared the city that the sky was as clear as the sky above the commune, not hazy as I remembered the summer skies of San Jose to be.

Mary told me life in a city was more competitive than on a rural commune, but the stress was nothing like that of urban life in 1992. It was not possible to make a lot of money, so people did not overwork themselves, and they did not feel a need to do one hundred things in a day, so they were not in a hurry to go from one place to another.

Nearly everyone in a city was associated with a rural commune. You could live at your urban center for a period of time and visit the rural commune when you wanted a break. If your rural commune was close to the city, you could commute to your job every day.

City communes usually were involved with manufacturing or with running small businesses. Rural communes with urban centers were mainly devoted to farming. Communes far from cities often did not have an urban counterpart; besides farming they engaged in many of the kinds of activities performed by the city communes.

Mary said First Gandhi made no effort to store up wealth or to grow physically in terms of the amount of land it occupied. The commune attempted to make only enough goods and to cultivate only enough land to serve the needs of its members. She told me these words of Gandhi were written above the entrance to the commune: “The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not for every man’s greed.”

Mary mentioned to me that in 2076 most transactions were executed with money for the sake of simplicity, but there was also much bartering. Some communes traded exclusively by bartering. I asked her if there were any price controls in 2076. I wanted to know what prevented an individual or a commune from monopolizing the local supply of an item and charging a high price. Mary said people or communes could not do that because it would not be tolerated. Pressure would be placed upon the gouger by others.

When we arrived in San Jose we stopped at First Gandhi’s urban center. It was a block of homes in a residential neighborhood. Where the street had once been there was now a playground, a recreation area for adults, a large vegetable garden, and fruit trees. There was a small parking lot at the end of the block and next to it was a workshop, a two story building about thirty meters long and ten meters wide. We did not go inside, but Mary told me computer chips were made there.

I asked Mary how the commune governed itself. She said she had been elected to lead First Gandhi by a two-thirds vote of the members. The members could remove her from her position at any time by a majority vote. She did not make important decisions; they were made in the weekly meeting held in the dining commons. The urban center was linked to the rural commune by video during the meetings. Issues were decided by a two-thirds vote.

She told me how the commune allocated its income: All commune earnings were first applied to satisfying the needs of the members—food, shelter, clothing, education, medical care, etc. In years when there was a surplus, the commune paid a salary to its members based upon the amount of work the individual did and the value of that work to the commune.

What interested me was how taxes had changed. No basic necessities were ever taxed, nor were there any property taxes. She said all the federal, state, and local taxes of the twentieth century had been reduced to only four: the accumulation, gift, inheritance, and income taxes, all of which were assessed at the local level. The revenues from these taxes were used to redistribute wealth. If there was any money left over, it was used to pay the costs of the local government. Mary said that when the new taxes were first applied, some of the revenues from the wealthy regions of the world were transferred to the poorer regions, because it was understood that the rich had made their money from the labor and resources of others. By the middle of the century, when the wealth of the people around the world had evened out, this practice was discontinued.

In the afternoon we boarded a monorail that circled the San Francisco Bay in two hours, despite stops in the cities of Fremont, Hayward, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Rafael, San Francisco, Daly City, San Mateo, Redwood City, and Palo Alto.

During our monorail excursion Mary told me about the distinction they made between public and private acts. Public acts were actions of an individual that could affect other people or nature in significant ways without their consent. Private acts were all other actions of an individual alone or with other consenting adults. Private acts were not the concern of the commune or the government, but public acts were regulated.

She said this about guns: “It is difficult for us to believe today that intelligent people in your time argued that a man had the right to own a weapon that could kill dozens of people in a few seconds. Or that your society would even consider that a matter worthy of debate. How could the freedom of one individual be more important than the right of the public to live in safety?”

I told Mary, “I saw a guy from the National Rifle Association say on TV that people had the right to own assault weapons because they were used in competition, and also because they were collected by gun lovers.”

Mary laughed and said, “Following that line of reasoning, if I announce I’m going to have an armored vehicle race, then you have the right to own a tank.”

I said, “And if I decide I want to have a weapons-of-mass-destruction exhibit on my property, the government would be stepping on my rights if it said I couldn’t bury a Minuteman missile in my backyard.”

Mary next talked about corporations. She said the corporation, which was an invention of capitalism, had been outlawed early in the twenty-first century. She mentioned several reasons used to justify the elimination of corporations: Corporations permitted men to become rich from the labor of others. Corporations enabled men to concentrate power: The concentration of power allowed the owners to exploit workers and endanger their health and safety, especially in nations where there were few laws to protect labor. The concentration of power also made it easier for the owners to buy politicians and abuse the environment. And in a court of law a corporation had the same privileges as a person, without the responsibilities: A corporation could sue to have its “rights” upheld, but if a corporation committed criminal acts, the shareholders were not put in jail.

I asked, “Don’t you lose a lot of efficiency when you eliminate corporations?”

“When we weigh the value of greater production against the value of a human life, there is no contest. Today, we believe a job should not only allow the individual to support himself and his family, but it should also add to the quality of his life by giving him the opportunity to express his creativity. We want our jobs to use our hands and our brains; we are not interested in work that can be performed by robots. So today we favor community gardens and small farms over mechanized farming, shops over factories, and small businesses over large ones.

“In 2076 no one is permitted to hide under the corporate veil. Corporations have been replaced by what you in the twentieth century call general partnerships. But unlike your partnerships, which can have owners and employees, all businesses in 2076 are owned by their workers, who are held accountable for the actions of their company. There are no men anymore with the power to hire, abuse, and fire people—there are no bosses.”

I said, “If there are no bosses, then there is anarchy.”

She replied, “That’s the idea.”

Then I saw my mistake. I was thinking of the twentieth century definition of anarchy when I spoke. I rephrased my question: “If no one tells people what to do, how is it possible for them to work together? What if one of the partners is lazy—I guess you can’t get rid of him?”

This is what she said in response: “When people work together, they elect a leader to coordinate their activities. This leader can be removed by a majority vote at any time. The leader, therefore, exerts power only with the consent of the group. The leader cannot fire anyone, but the group can decide they don’t want to work with someone. That person is paid or given his share of the assets and is asked to leave. Also, an individual can choose to end his association with the group. Usually this is accomplished without bitterness. People today want harmony in their relationships.

“I know all this may sound like nonsense to people in 1992. They think men will not cooperate with each other unless they are coerced, but you must remember what I told you earlier: Our society could only succeed if men changed fundamentally from your time. We know the people of your time have the ability to change, because our society grew out of yours.”

I asked Mary if communes were required to own everything. She said no one was forced to join a commune, although almost everyone did. There were businesses and farms owned by individuals. It was against the law for those individuals to hire employees. Once a business or farm got so big that the owner could not do all the work himself, he either contracted out some of the work or he took on partners. Throughout the world men associated freely with each other.

I asked her if partnerships were limited in size by law.

She answered, “No. There is still a need for large associations. An example is manufacturing that involves a substantial capital investment, such as autos, airliners, and large ships. Those factories and shipyards are owned by the workers, so those partnerships have several thousand members.

I asked, “Is government still bloated with employees?”

“We have whittled down the number of government employees to a fraction of their number in your day by eliminating many of the regulating and licensing activities of government, by reducing the layers of bureaucracy, and by returning most government functions to the local level. Still, the size of government is larger than we would like. We tell our government employees that their ambition should be to make their occupations unnecessary.”

I asked her what was done to protect business owners from lawsuits. I told her one of the reasons businesses incorporated in the twentieth century was that the owners could only be sued to the extent of the capital of their corporation.

She replied, “You must be referring to the litigation explosion in your time. Ninety-five percent of your lawsuits would be thrown out of court today. We expect people to accept responsibility for their lives. If one person injures another through negligence or intent, the criminal courts will deal with the situation. Sometimes the courts will impose monetary penalties, which are limited—we don’t allow lawyers to go around looking for deep pockets.”

My last question for Mary was: “What happened to the Democrats and the Republicans?”

“We have no established political parties. We understand that time and power corrupt all institutions.”

Mary paused, then added: “We know that the longer an institution exists, the more likely the institution will forget its original mission, and the more likely its leaders and bureaucrats will decide their purpose is the protection, consolidation, and expansion of their power. Thomas Jefferson recognized the danger posed by institutions when he wrote that there should be a revolution in America every twenty-five years.”