The Ministry for the Future

75

In the United States, the National Students’ Union website showed that thirty percent of the union members had now responded YES to the union website’s standing poll asking them if they were in so much financial distress caused by their student debt that they would like to see the union initiate a fiscal non-compliance strike, by not paying their next debt payment. On joining the union, members had agreed to join any strike requested by thirty percent of the membership, so now the union coordinators called for a strike vote to be sure, and got an eighty percent yes vote, with ninety percent participation. None of this was surprising; student food insecurity, meaning student hunger, was widespread, also student homelessness. So the strike began.

Student debt was a trillion-dollar annual income stream for the banks, so this coordinated default meant that the banks were suddenly in cash-flow hell. And they were so over-leveraged, and thus dependent on all incoming payments being made to them on time to be able to keep paying their own debts, that this fiscal strike threw them immediately into a liquidity crisis reminiscent of the 2008 and 2020 and 2034 crashes, except this time people had defaulted on purpose, and precisely to bring the banks down. The banks all rushed to the Federal Reserve, which went to Congress to explain the situation and ask for another giant bail-out to keep liquidity and thus confidence in the financial system itself. There were calls from many in Congress to bail out the banks, as being essential to the economy, and too connected for any of the big ones to be allowed to fail. But this time the Fed asked Congress to authorize their bailing out the banks in exchange for ownership shares in every bank that took the offer. This was either nationalizing finance or financializing the nation, in that now it was clearer than ever that the country was in effect run by the Fed. And since Congress ran the Fed, and people voted in members of Congress, maybe it was all beginning to work, somehow, because of this strike. Definancialization of a sort. End of neoliberalism.

This possibility was shocking enough, but in that same month, the African Union informed the World Bank and the Chinese government that they were declaring all African debts to these organizations to be odious debts. All the national governments forming the African Union were together backing complete debt forgiveness, the haircut of haircuts, to be followed by a new set of agreements, negotiated by the African Union in collaboration with all the African nation-states. They called this the end of neoliberal neocolonialism, and the definitive start of Africa for Africans. Even Egypt and the rest of North Africa joined in on this, plumping for people over capital, continent over history, and in Egypt’s case, maybe all the Muslim north, splitting with Arabia.

And in the very next month, in China the workers known informally as the billion took over Tiananmen Square, by the simple expedient of walking into it by the millions, on the way causing all the rest of the traffic in the city to grind to a halt. By taking over Beijing’s highways by way of a crush of pedestrians, they were able to bypass the barriers and checkpoints around Tiananmen Square and fill it and the surrounding district so full that the police and army couldn’t react, confronted as they were by about five million people jammed into the city center. Similar demonstrations appeared in all the largest Chinese cities; there were literally hundreds of such demonstrations, far more than the Chinese army could deal with in any typical crowd control way. Coordinated demands for the end to the hukou system were supplemented by other demands that together insisted that the Chinese Communist Party be more responsive to all its citizens’ needs. As the protests had been timed to the five-year Party congress meeting, it proved possible to pressure the Party into appointing an entirely new standing committee, one including women and younger people, and devoted to reforms as demanded.

Seeing an opportunity in all this turmoil, the Kurds declared Kurdistan in the part of Iraq they already controlled, with significant chunks of Syria, Turkey, and Iran included within the new boundary, to underline the point that the Kurds were asserting themselves here, and there was no one strong enough to stop them. All the surrounding countries were outraged and antagonistic, but they were also already antagonistic among themselves, so they could not form an effective response that would not also constitute an attack on a neighboring sovereign state, either ally or enemy, but either way a nation dangerous to attack.

All these events occurred at once; and these were not all. There was so much going on, such a spasm of revolts occurring spontaneously (if it was spontaneous!) all over the world, that some historians said it was another 1848, some kind of reemergence of the spirit of 1848 around the zone of its bicentennial. And just as it had been during that period of enormous unrest and revolutionary upheaval, no one could explain why it was happening in so many different places at the same time. Coincidence? Conspiracy? World spirit, Zeitgeist in action? Who knew? All they knew for sure was that it was happening, things were falling apart.

In all this turmoil and uncertainty, the market sought something to be sure of. Volatility was good for traders, sure; but at the end of the day you had to have somewhere to hang your hat. Short the dollar—really? Short everything? Maybe, but where then did you hide your emergency fund in case everything went pear-shaped? The cash-in-the-mattress move wasn’t the same as going long, which actually at this point was looking almost impossible. This meant things were getting more and more existential, as it was a question of ultimate value, of trust in the act of exchange itself. And when definitions of value shifted from talking about interest rates to talking about social trust—when finance and theories of money fell through a trapdoor in daily normality, down into the free fall of philosophy’s bottomless pit—when people began to wonder why money worked at all—wonder why some people were as gods walking this Earth while other people couldn’t find a place to lay their head at night—it turned out there was no very good answer. Certainly no answer at all when it came to investment strategies you could count on.

Money was made of social trust. Which meant, in this spasmophilic moment, with everything changing and the ground falling under one’s feet in immense tectonic jolts, that money itself was therefore in limbo. And that was scary.

Vast amounts of paper turned to vapor. The banks of the developed Western world were too connected to fail; if one or two of the big ones went down, the rest would shrink in on themselves and wait for the state to reestablish trust before either lending money or even paying what they owed. Why pay a creditor that might be non-existent next week? Best wait and see if they survived to press that debt in court.

In other words, liquidity freeze. The various forms of paper that are in effect IOUs between banks all became worthless; the only money was cash. But that couldn’t work, because every day there were trillions of dollars’ worth of exchanges on the various markets, including the dark pools where people working in unregulated data space were trusting each other to pay despite the lack of regulatory oversight; and honor among thieves is kind of a feudal notion, more appropriate to Robin Hood and his merry men than to the world of contemporary finance. No. Since money is an idea, a system based on social trust, when things go south, and trust disappears in a poof, then there simply isn’t as much money as there used to be.

This was not shocking news to some; which was why much of the wealth on the planet was invested in property. Real estate values may drop, but ownership of that capital asset still remains, and will be there later no matter what happens. But property is not liquid. So the money problem remains even if the latent wealth problem has been solved in advance by buying up land, houses, apartments in Manhattan towers, and so on.

So with groans and clanks and huge ripping sounds, the world’s economy ground to a halt. A great depression was back at last and in full, after almost a decade of recession. The depression they had been living in up until now, now got called the Little Depression, or the Super-stagnation, and so on. This new one was the Super Depression, here at last. Very little money out there; and without money, people can’t be paid. No loans, no purchases. Unemployment quickly surpassed the 1930s high-water mark of twenty-five percent. Indeed, this time it looked like unemployment could rise to—to what? Fifty percent? Seventy percent? No one had any idea.

People spoke of barter coming back, especially in rural areas, where one could almost believe in it. But not really; barter was always mostly an idea in the minds of economists, a fantasy history. And in the cities it didn’t work at all. The pawnshop is the bartering site in cities. But that’s just money for stuff, stuff for money. It only works if money works. Same with the internet, only more so. The internet as a market didn’t work when no one trusted money.

Local currencies were proposed and introduced, backed by the town one lived in; but the town needed local banks; and the local banks needed central banks. A lively set of exchanges nevertheless began in many local regions, often watersheds big enough to support their populations; and people began to use their YourLock accounts as sites for digital microbanking that was of some real use, and showed potential for some kind of post-capitalist crowd banking.

But all this was too new, too provisional; there were too many people, and all of them strangers. Despite all the interesting efforts, as the economy circled the drain, it became clearer: for this moment, it was the central banks or nothing. They were the Dutch boy’s finger plugging the leak, the last stitch that might stop the hemorrhaging. The central banks spoke for the state. The states in question were there with their armies and police to back these central banks, all of them in theory owned by the public they reported to. If public banks held the line somehow—perhaps by creating more money, by keeping all the private banks afloat by way of even more quantitative easing—then all might be well.

Since some people had been pinning their hopes on the central banks anyway, this sudden onset of chaos and disorder was seen as an opportunity. Possibly the public could now insist on the right to be properly repaid for public money backing private banks, as they had been all along. Extract reparations from the profit takers; abolish profit if it was necessary to create the reparations. If the private banks objected, let them crash, then move to a fully nationalized financial system, owned by the public and used for the benefit of the people.

So strangely, in this new utmost financial crisis, people, ordinary people en masse, as the material manifestation of “the public,” now seemed to hold the ultimate power. When push comes to shove, it’s always humans looking at humans; and when a thousand people stand looking at one person, it’s clear who has more power. So it was a matter of realizing that, then acting on that realization. Maybe that shouldn’t have felt strange, but it did; it felt like free fall. Inventing the parachute after leaping off the cliff.

Which meant it had to be arranged fast.

Thus the shadow government devised by the Ministry for the Future in Zurich, Switzerland, became one template for a new plan. Not completely new, of course. In fact it was a rearrangement of various elements of old plans, in many ways. Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along. Which made the new methods easier to implement. Not complete revolution, no ten-day weeks with new names and so on, no dive into that revolutionary euphoria that tries to change everything at once. Just ownership adjustments. Numbers. Representations. Reversals in some valences of value. Improvisations. The sun still rose, plants kept growing. But people lived in ideas, so despite the sun in the sky and so on, things felt crazy. It was a panic spring.

But as it became clear that the central banks were stepping in to keep things stable and liquid, certain markets calmed. Bakeries kept baking. The US Congress got very busy adopting new laws. Chinese people ended their demonstrations and went back to work, with a different standing committee in charge. Kurdistan secured its borders and signed treaties with every nation and organization that would co-sign. People began to look for ways to earn a carbon coin or two. Only a few of these would be a lot in the local currencies. Surely sequestering a hundred tons of carbon couldn’t be so hard. DIY DAC became a vibrant side activity, like growing a truck garden for food; and sometimes the two were even the same thing.

It was quite a month, then quite a year; a year that became one of those years that people talk about later, a date used as shorthand for a whole period. A tectonic shift in history, an earthquake in the head.