Review: "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is my first fiction book review for this blog, and fittingly enough it’s the new book by Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Ministry for the Future”. It would be fair to say that Robinson’s works - especially the Mars Trilogy and the earlier Three Californias trilogy - had a formative effect on me and my politics growing up. In recognition of his influence, the epigraph of my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species”, is a quote by Robinson. That said, I absolutely loathed his last novel, “Red Moon” (2018) - which was not a very good book about China, nor a good book about the moon, nor a good book about a revolution. I am pleased to report, however, that “Ministry for the Future” is a return to form: well written, hopeful, and grounded - if not without its own flaws.

Whereas “Red Moon” was something of a narrative divergence for Robinson, focusing on two [intensely unlikeable] characters who were little more than bystanders to great events, “Ministry for the Future” takes the opposite approach: it’s a loose, almost epistolary, alternative future about how the world was saved from climate change. Its main character - Mary Murphy, an ex-Irish Foreign Minister tapped to head a new UN agency set up to save the world - is almost a stock liberal archetype, but over the course of the book’s 560 pages Robinson paints an affecting portrait of her as a human being. There are other characters who pop in and out of the narrative, but the bulk of the novel mixes lectures, short stories, records of meetings and tone poems to such a degree that it reads more as literature than genre fiction.

“Ministry for the Future” owes a lot to Robinson’s earlier works. Certain plot devices are events are so similar to those in “Red Moon” that a few times I thought they were taking place in the same universe. The influence of Robinson’s Antarctica novels is clear, as are the democratic and utopian politics of the Mars trilogy. Thematically, this book is closest to “2312” - whereas in that book, the climate apocalypse had already happened, in this one we’re to learn how it might be prevented. But for me, in style and composition “Ministry for the Future” is closest to perhaps my favourite of Robinson’s standalone novels, “The Years of Rice and Salt” - his alternative history of a world without Europe. Robinson loves writing about non-Anglo-Saxon cultures, and while “Ministry for the Future” is overloaded with reverence for the Swiss [a portrait that, as someone who’s lived in Switzerland, I find a tad obsequious], like “Year of Rice and Salt” it’s the Indians who by-and-large save the world.

An airport book for the Davos set

Robinson is often hard to pin down politically. His writing often reveals a strongly anti-capitalist bent, albeit shot through with a dose of California Ideology techno-libertarianism and environmentalism. “Ministry for the Future” is about a revolution - the revolution necessary to save the world from climate apocalypse - but a revolution that is gradual, incrementalist and implemented by international institutions, banks and scientists. The liberal elite, in other words. This is a book that Ezra Klein would love, and which that seems written specifically with that audience in mind. Realist but progressive. Intriguingly, though, a core component of the transformation this book imagines is brought about by terror - by terrorist groups, and [spoilers] by state terror conducted by the Ministry itself - but we learn almost nothing about this shadowy war taking place in the background of the story.

The politics of the book are also very contemporary - targeting the interests and prejudices makers of policy-makers here in 2020. Its timeline is often hazy - Robinson often describes issues and events that are supposed to be happening decades in the future in terms indistinguishable from what’s happening now. In terms of his socio-economic solutions, Robinson is also very of the moment: digital currencies and blockchain feature heavily - as they did, unfortunately, in “Red Moon” - as does MMT. In large part, it’s ‘carbon quantitative easing’ that prevents climate change, the creation by central banks of digital ‘carbon coins’ that replace the world’s major currencies. The book is almost a paeon to central bankers, mirroring the obsessive search by some on the left for a magic policy solution that can be designed, implemented and measured by technocrats.

Socialism: Utopian and Science Fiction

Big moments in “Ministry for the Future”, the inflection points that shift the course of history away from disaster, take place in board rooms in Switzerland and Silicon Valley. Change happens when well-meaning bureaucrats deliver knock-out powerpoint presentations for an audience of other bureaucrats. A large amount of the first half of the book takes place over ridiculously priced cocktails in Swiss bars [accurate]. In other words, this is book explicitly in the Utopian - rather than Marxist - socialist tradition. If Robinson’s aversion to discussing revolutionary violence doesn’t give it away, Charles Fourier is explicitly name checked in the latter parts of the book. Power doesn’t drive history - ideas do. And in this sort of world the best ideas from all cultures and places rise to the top to build the global hegemony of the future.

Chapter 99 is worth discussing in detail because it lays the thesis statement of this book out in detail. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Chapter 99 was the first chapter Robinson wrote, reading as it does like an author exercise. The book - without putting these words in the voice of any particular character - rejects the idea that there are “totalizing solutions” to the world’s problems. There are no single solutions adequate to the task - success is made from failures, “the cobbling together from less-than-satisfactory parts. a slurry, a broclage. An unholy mess.” People working together to solve the same problems fight with one another, not because their values are mutually unintelligible, but because of the “narcissism of small differences”. Revolutions are "invisible, technical, legal” - one can have the benefits of revolution without actually going through one. Power is an illusion - but laws are everything.

This is not a capitalist realist book - Robinson does envisage the end of capitalism, and he does it better than anyone else writing today. But it is a sober, realist take. Some reviews describe it as hard science fiction but this book - like the Mars trilogy before it - is more sociological than that. It’s for that reason that I’m hankering for Robinson to write a book about political violence. Hell, write a sequel to this book that tells the story of the Ministry’s black ops wing - show us what it means to blow up aircraft, assassinate the heads of corporations and steal the wealth of billionaires. Robinson’s eco-socialist utopia is incomplete because he hand waves all that away - even while acknowledging that it’s necessary [in the world of the book] to get the outcome ultimately arrived at.

Recommended Reading

In the end, I offer “Ministry for the Future” a strong recommendation. If you’re a young reader, the same age I was when first reading Robinson’s works, it’s a great introduction to post-capitalist ideas. If you’re a contemporary of mine, someone who works in government and finance and still dreams of saving the world, then this is also the book for you. But if you’ve already been radicalised - either by Robinson’s earlier works, by any serious reading of left-wing theory, or by the sheer reality of living in 2020 - then the politics of the “Ministry for the Future” will have little to teach you. It’s stunningly well written, and surprisingly affecting. Robinson has a lot of say about life, death, the planet and what it all means. He’s written the most optimistic vision of the contemporary world he could have. What does it say that I’m still unconvinced anything will change for the better?

Disaster Socialism

Australia is on fire. There’ve been bigger bushfires in the past, to be sure; bushfires that have killed more people or burned more hectares or done more damage. But the scale of the current crisis is hard to understate. Amidst an ongoing severe drought and the hottest December on record, most of the east coast is burning; significant towns have lost power and all connections to the outside world. Major cities from Melbourne to Brisbane are choking on ash, highways are closed and the summer tourist industry has been devastated. Canberra, which has so far been spared the fires themselves, had the worst air pollution in the world this week thanks to the ambient smoke and haze.

Regardless of whether any one extreme weather event can be proved to be caused by climate change, the 2019 bushfires foreshadow things to come. This year may (or may not) be a statistical outlier, but we know for certain that there will be more years like this - and with increasing frequency. This is not a once-in-a-generation natural disaster, it’s a generational disaster. Whatever costs the opponents of taking action on climate change imagine would come with switching to low-carbon energy generation, the cost in terms of lives, healthy, property and foregone economic activity from this year’s bushfire’s alone is almost certainly higher. The question is not, and has never been, how much will climate change will cost us - but who will pay for the sins of our past.

And here’s the bad news. I think it’s time we all finally acknowledged that green, left-liberal politics have conclusively failed to prevent or manage the crisis. We’ve spent more than a decade arguing over carbon pricing; and yet another UN climate conference (COP25) collapsed in acrimony just a few weeks ago. Sure, there are a few bright spots where having fair-minded people in positions of government or corporate power has made a difference, but it’s time to admit that more protests, more marches, and begging for more virtuous leaders is just wasting everybody’s time. For all I admire Greta Thunberg, and I really do, her style of activism offers no solution other than the failed liberal education fallacy - a giant exercise in consciousness-raising rather confronting the structural barriers to change head on.

It’s time to try something new. It’s time to try something different. It’s time to try ‘disaster socialism’.

Disaster Socialism for beginners

Most readers of a progressive persuasion are likely to be familiar with Naomi Klein’s theory of ‘disaster capitalism’, from her seminal (and prescient) 2007 work “The Shock Doctrine”. Klein noted that capitalist structures rarely let a good disaster go to waste; that in crisis mode people will tolerate radical political and economic steps that would have previously been unthinkable or impractical; allowing conservatives to ratchet society another few steps to the right every few years. Attached as they are to norms and institutions, left-liberals appear flummoxed and ineffective. Rather than being threatened by the natural disasters which its reckless exploitation makes more likely, Klein argued that capitalism ultimately benefits from them - a thesis with terrifying implications are we face more recurrent climate change-caused disaster events. As the dirtbag left might say, if you think a political right who ignores the climate emergency is bad, just wait until you have a right-wing that recognises and responds to the threat seriously.

I would therefore offer the following working definition of disaster socialism: the practice of taking advantage of a major disasters to promote socialist policies that a population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances. It hardly needs noting that in the phenomenon of (largely volunteer) firefighters risking their lives to protect others against nature, we already have a sphere of human social and economic life in which altruistic, pro-social behaviour is the norm. Disaster socialism is not just good politics - it’s an absolute necessity to prevent the damage wrought by these bushfires being used as an excuse for further loss of community in rural Australia, the disenfranchisement of indigenous communities and the transfer of public lands into the hands of private developers.

So rather than another wasted decade attempting to legislate a carbon price from the top down, progressive parties should adopt a platform that re-orients Australian civic and economic life around the prevention, management and response to natural disasters. The sad reality is that this is a transformation that will happen to us regardless - climate change makes it so. Liberal and neoliberal politics will be unable to achieve this end without relying on increasingly militarised and authoritarian solutions. We have an opportunity here, and now, to orient our climate change adaption policies instead around spontaneous self-organisation, community solidarity and social cohesion. If you want climate action, in other words, it has to be a ‘Green New Deal’ that blends climate mitigation and adaption with socialist organising - you cannot be a green and support the maintenance of the economic status quo.

High, high hopes

What might a programme of disaster socialism look like? To begin with, I’ll note that I’m not qualified to talk about how firefighters are recruited and paid in Australia - a topic that has long been fraught with political landmines. But I will suggest that it become foundational tenet of labour law that every employee in the country - and not just federal public sector workers - be entitled to a minimum of four weeks paid leave every year to participate in firefighting or other emergency services or disaster relief public work. In this way, every employer contributes to the defence of the broader economy. We need to build-up a core of well-trained and well-equipped professional firefighters, and support them with a massive cadre of willing and able civilians. We need to have permissive social structures in place such that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of men and women can mobilise themselves out of the cities to defend the countryside from disaster. Like an army reserve without the military overtones, we need to set up policies and programs that bring familiars people with the Australian demi-wilderness, teaches them how the land floods, how it burns, and how we’ll need to live as our continent continues to get hotter. Wherever possible, indigenous communities and indigenous knowledge should be involved in that effort.

We can also use disaster socialism to fund a program of massive re-investment in Australia’s rural and peri-urban communities. The reality is that the almost total urbanisation of our country is a legacy of more than half a century of underinvestment in our regions. A massive, whole-of-nation effort will be required to rebuild after each disaster, and to pre-adapt our rural towns to the threats they face, and to better connect them to national infrastructure so disasters can be responded to more effectively. Funding and workers for such efforts will in turn create a demand for more rural housing and infrastructure, leading to a virtuous cycle of development. Subsidies that make solar panels and better insulation accessible for middle-class homes in the suburbs are one thing, but public programs that make environmentally-friendly living the norm across the country should be our goal.

Disaster socialism also provides more opportunities to regulate. Acknowledging that each of these areas is politically sensitive, shifting our political narratives away from economic growth towards disaster prevention could help ease the passage of stronger regulation of land-use, the approval process for resource extraction projects and the management of water. The state needs to have an active, ongoing presence in disaster-affected communities across the country - progressives cannot become stereotyped as urban elites who descend on the regions only to protest economic developments that offend our aesthetic sensibilities - or worse, to promote mega-projects over the objections of residents. We need to work with local progressives to provide them the tools they need to manage and defend their communities on their own, from the bottom-up.

The movement in society

Finally, and I cannot emphasise this enough, we do not have to wait to capture the state to begin implementing our programme of disaster socialism. Progressive leaders have done a good job in responding to these bushfires, but I would humbly suggest that Anthony Albanese buying supplies for volunteer firefighters in his personal capacity, while good optics, is not a sufficient institutional response. The Labor Party - and other progressives parties and movements - should play leading role in connecting members in cities with disaster-affected communities, and in managing the flow of aid and volunteers. The union movement is also critical here, and I’ve actually seen the unions take a high profile role over the past several weeks in supporting their members who have been on the front line in fighting the fires.

The world is changing around us. As an Australian, you just have to open your eyes or smell the wind to see that current circumstances are not normal. To all my fellow progressives who put a higher value on the climate than on economic transformation, I would ask you this: what have you got left to lose? Social democratic government has been tried, it failed. Liberalism offers you no hope and a whole bunch of centrists are going to ultimately endorse authoritarian solutions to the climate crisis. Why not try socialism? We might fail - the scale of the problem may be too large and too complex for any conventional political movement to handle. But we have a theory of the case - that by building community solidarity we can not only respond more effectively to shared threats, but that we can also act more decisively to reform those social structures which have contributed to the current crisis in the first place.

Climate Change broke the neoliberal consensus, too

We began my interview last week on the "Connected & Disaffected" podcast talking about political polarisation: what is it, where it's come from, and whether or not we should fear it. My contention in the interview was that the Global Financial Crisis, and to a lesser extent the Iraq War, broke the post- Cold War hegemony of the neoliberal ideological consensus. In other words, the cultural quasi-equilibria characterised by the dominance of neoliberal narratives about society and the economy proved to be no longer fit for its structural environment. As a result, formerly marginalised social narratives are (re-)emerging, an experience that is deeply disconcerting to a generation of people socialised to believe there is no alternative. 

One point from my notes that I didn't get to make in the interview was that climate change was the third and final nail in neoliberalism's coffin. I don't talk about environmental issues often on this blog: I'm not an environmentalist by nature and am generally content to let the experts come up with pragmatic fixes. As I write in Chapter XVII of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", I'm interested in the natural environment primarily as a source of free public services that marginalised people (especially) rely on to survive. I'm interested in how the exploitation and privatisation of the environment fuels the unjust accumulation of wealth by the powerful, and how the distribution of environmental harms of that exploitation often falls hardest on those already disadvantaged (see: Naomi Klein). In other words, I'm not the sort of person who declares that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our times. 

A perfect little problem

Once upon a time, climate change was the perfect problem for the socially-conscious neoliberal. A potentially existential external threat, it has several elements that appealed to the technocratic elite: expert scientific evidence was required to establish the case for action; cooperation between states necessitated vast and complex international negotiations; domestic solutions envisaged creating a new freely-traded market commodity without changing the economic status quo; and there were opportunities to 'educate' the masses about their consumption patterns and nudge them to make 'better choices'. I think it's fair to say all these methods failed one way or another. We're already blowing past the climate targets we set just four years ago; barely half of US adults believe human activity causes climate change; and most of the rise in consumer energy prices has been caused by price-gauging privatised monopolies, not investment in renewable power. 

These failures are the result of the neoliberal worldview, and they should demoralise and delegitimise those techniques for anyone serious about social policy. 

• Experts are not a magic bullet. And scientific facts are not social facts. As I write in the early chapters of my book, governance is about making value judgements. Despite what utilitarians believe, there's no technocratic formula that will calculate the most ethical way in which to distribute wins and losses. Scientists have established the inevitability of potentially irreversible climate change to a virtual certainty, yet that fact alone tells us nothing about what we should do about it. People intuit this: the best studies show that expert evidence has no effect on public opinion about climate change policy. In fact, relying on appeals to scientific authority has only led the powerful opponents of climate action to develop sophisticated techniques to muddy the waters, conduct personal attacks on scientists and discredit the very idea of expert knowledge. So, good job on that one, neoliberals. 
• And then there's the wonkiest of wonk ideas: carbon trading. Why impose a new tax on pollution when we can create a complex new form of private property traded on indecipherably complex financial markets? Oh, and because this property right will be an artificial creature of state regulation, the price and quantity of carbon permits will be easily manipulated by lobbying interests on behalf the very industries that emit the most carbon. Australia's carbon trading scheme - while effective - was so convoluted and unpopular that the conservatives managed to repeal it FIVE YEARS AGO. As Democrats in the US have discovered with healthcare policy, when voters don't understand a public programme it's absurdly easy for opponents of regulation to portray it as a paranoid right-wing fever dream. Better simpler, direct policies that are easy to understand - and harder to attack. 
• Finally, when all collective solutions fail, neoliberalism tells us that fighting climate change is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility. And since individuals have every incentive to free ride in a collective action problem they have no power over, why we simply need to educate people to make choices contrary to their own rational self interest! I've written before why this kind of 'education' strategy is counterproductive: it creates new hierarchies of knowledge and hides existing hierarchies of power in such a way to generate increased resentment and anxiety from the have-nots. People don't want cheap energy because they're bad people who don't understand climate change: they want cheap energy because they're resource constrained and want one fewer stressor on their daily lives. Middle class neoliberals aren't better or smarter people because of their 'green energy choices', they're using their existing wealth to invest in a social signifier of status. South Park had this one down in 2006.

What's left unsaid

Y'know what's not on this list? The classical sort of central government action traditionally used to solve environmental problems. The same sorts of programs that actually have been implemented and are making the biggest difference in saving us from potential climate catastrophe. Where's China's central planning body setting national targets for solar energy expansion that have made it the world's largest manufacturer of solar cells? The public investment in basic science that led to Australian universities developing modern photovoltaics in the first place? The unilateral government decisions, like Angela Merkel's to close Germany's nuclear power plants, that leads to the market embracing renewables virtually overnight? The basic role of national industry policy in directing subsidies away from the fossil fuel industry and towards more environmentally friendly forms of power generation? The answer is that neoliberalism made these sorts of policy responses literally unthinkable. 

Solving collective action problems requires collective decision-making through national institutions (i.e. governments). As is true of social and economic dilemmas, so too of environmental ones. Nations that are on track to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement are going to do so on the back of their existing competence with industrial management and economic planning. Laissez-faire states without a tradition of government intervention in the economy, like Australia, are least likely to meet them. If you want to save the environment, you're first going to have to take a deeper look at how our societies and economies are structured. Ultimately, I'm with Naomi Klein on this one: our economic system and our relationship with the natural environment are so intrinsically linked that hoping for meaningful action on climate change under neoliberalism is self-defeating. 

Consider that my message for the voters in Batman.