In turn, the permanent state of shortage warped and deformed human relationships. The smooth impersonality of money-exchange in our society is so embedded that we take it absolutely for granted. If you’ve got the cash, you can have the thing. In the Soviet Union, having the cash was the mere beginning of the campaign to acquire the thing. Every transaction became personal, and not in a warm and fuzzy way. Since the scarce goods weren’t rationed out by ability to pay, they were doled out in proportion to clout, influence, connections, ruthless calculations of mutual advantage. Soviet society was a tangled web of bullying, sycophancy, arm-twisting, back-scratching and emotional blackmail. Everyone made life as difficult as possible for those they dealt with, in order to be able to trade the easing of the difficulty for something else. You want a restaurant table, a dress, your phone repaired? Then find me some roofing felt, a Black Sea holiday, a private tutor for my son. Instead of post-capitalist freedom and sophistication, the Soviet Union offered pre-capitalist barter, with a large helping of robber baron-hood on the side.
The loudest and most important lesson of the Soviet experience should always be: don’t ever do this again. Children, don’t try this at home. Leave alone forever, please, this particular authoritarian recipe for bootstrapping a peasant society to wealth, because it only gets you halfway there, and leaves you surrounded by crumbling concrete and rusting machinery.
Yet we’d better remember to sympathise with the underlying vision that drove this disastrous history, because it is basically our own. As the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century recede, it becomes clearer that the Soviet project for red plenty was just one in the twentieth-century family of projects to hoik humanity out of its ancestral scarcity. The Soviet version is the cousin of ours; the loony cousin with blood ‘up to the elbows’ (as Khrushchev put it, when asked in his forced retirement what he regretted most), but still one of the family. Through luck rather than virtue, for the most part, we happen to live in a variant that has succeeded better, so far. Our version isn’t costless either. The steel and concrete required to sustain it are created for us elsewhere, out of sight, leaving us free to stroll around our pastel pavilion, on the side of which glimmers the word ‘Tesco’. Inside are piled, just as Khrushchev hoped, riches to humble the kings of antiquity. But terms and conditions apply.
More surprisingly, there is something specific to sympathise with in the intellectual ambition of the Soviet moment. I’m sorry, you may say, thinking of the well-censored dullness of official Soviet thought – the what? Yes, for much of the eighty years during which the USSR was the planet’s unique experiment in running a non-market economy, the experiment was a stupid experiment, a brute-force experiment. But during the Soviet moment there was a serious attempt to apply the intellectual resources of the educated country the Bolsheviks had kicked and bludgeoned into being. All of the perversities in the Soviet economy that I’ve described above are the classic consequences of running a system without the flow of information provided by market exchange; and it was clear at the beginning of the 1960s that for the system to move on up to the plenty promised so insanely for 1980, there would have to be informational fixes for each deficiency. Hence the emphasis on cybernetics, which had gone in a handful of years from being condemned as a ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’ to being an official panacea. The USSR’s pioneering computer scientists were heavily involved, and so was the authentic genius Leonid Kantorovich, nearest Soviet counterpart to John von Neumann and later to be the only ever Soviet winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Their thinking drew on the uncorrupted traditions of Soviet mathematics. While parts of it merely smuggled elements of rational pricing into the Soviet context, other parts were truly directed at outdoing market processes. The effort failed, of course, for reasons which are an irony-laminated comedy in themselves. The sumps of the command economy were dark and deep and not accessible to academics; Stalinist industrialisation had welded a set of incentives into place which clever software could not touch; the system was administered by rent-seeking gangsters; the mathematicians were relying (at two removes) on conventional neoclassical economics to characterise the market processes they were trying to simulate, and the neoclassicists may just be wrong about how capitalism works.
But if the horrible society of the Soviet Union left any legacy worth considering, if a pearl were ever secreted by the Soviet Union’s very diseased oyster, this is it. And so follows the oddest implication of the Soviet moment. It may not be over. It may yet turn out to be unfinished business. For, from the point of view of ‘economic cybernetics’, the market is only an algorithm. It is only one possible means of sharing out and co-ordinating economic activity: a means with very considerable advantages, in terms of all the autonomous activity and exploration of economic possibilities it allows, but not the only one, and not necessarily the best either, even at allowing autonomy and decentralisation. In the twentieth century, devising the actual apparatus for a red plenty was an afterthought to the ideology. In the twenty-first century, it may be the algorithm that appears ahead of a politics to advocate it. In which case, the contest of plenties will be on again. And every year our processing power increases.
(2010)
PLENTY
For 6,000 years, from the dawn of agriculture to a gnat’s blink back, historically speaking, all human beings lived in one, universal situation. If you want to see it, you have only to go to the airport and catch a plane to anywhere that isn’t Europe, North America or East Asia: because most human beings live in the same situation still. It’s this. People work very hard, and goods are scarce. In the span of the year between planting and harvest, people go hungry, because they’re waiting for the crops. If the harvest fails, people stay hungry, and they start to consume the means of their own survival – the cow, the seed corn – in order to last out till next year. Locusts, diseases and marauders make random raids. Droughts and floods make their visitations. If you find a large diamond in your field, someone more powerful comes and nicks it from you. If you find two large diamonds, the powerful person nicks your field and turns it into a diamond mine. Most people, most of the time, manage to rear at least some of their children successfully, and the struggle continues into the next generation. But people don’t expect that the passing of time will see a reliable gain in prosperity. Like the White Queen in Alice, it takes all the running they can do to stay in the same place. Good times, as they know them, are a matter of cycles. The good times come and then they go again: whether on the short cycle of the agricultural year, when a good crop makes the land yield a brief fatness, or on the longer cycles of climate and history, which can make some decades or centuries better than others. At the very best, there can be a lucky time when everything seems to go right for a while at once. The weather smiles, the ruler is benevolent and competent, the trade routes swell, your particular nation does well at war, there are marble facings on the buildings in the capital city. Such times are remembered as golden ages, recalled again and again in fireside talk as the time of the great Augustus, or of Haroun al-Raschid, or of King Arthur. But they pass. They always pass. ‘Cities and thrones and powers / Stand in time’s eye / Almost as long as flowers / That daily die’ – wrote Kipling, who knew that the British imperial time he thought golden was also destined to go, to turn grey and to blow out like the dandelion. The universal experience of mankind has been that feasts are brief, and are always, always followed by fasts.
So after a day getting no further forward, another perpetual resource for the skinny people sitting at the fireside has been the shared dream of a feast that never ends. Of an abundance that is permanent not cyclical. Of a state of being that seizes the instant when the fat of the land runs down your chin, and lets you live there forever, freed from the plough, freed from toil, freed from scarcity. The sign of these fantasies, the symbol under which skinny dreamers have stowed them down the generations, is the cornucopia, the ‘horn of plenty’. Sometimes the cornucopia turns up in mythology i
n disguise – ‘the little porridge pot’ that never runs out in English folklore is a squat pewter version dispensing an oozy grey bounty, and the Magic Pudding of Norman Lindsay’s Australian fairy tale capers about on little legs offering steak ’n’ kidney with jam roly-poly for afters, in the tropical heat – but the classical form, the form you see it in in temple carvings, is the curved cone strung with flowers and ribbons. Somewhere back here in the shape is a fusion of the biological bits and bobs that achieve human fertility, and somewhere here too in the function is a salute to the everyday marvel of ordinary agriculture, which blows a raspberry in the face of entropy by giving you back ten turnips when you only put one in the ground. But the cornucopia goes further; wishes further. It asks for reproduction set free from biology’s limits. It asks for quantity run wild. From its curved trunk which isn’t quite like a penis, from its open mouth which isn’t quite like a vagina, roll forth fruits without regard to season, vegetables that never needed to be manured or weeded. Out of nowhere pours abundance. Into the world of incompleteness, of straining to make do, streams stuff to make good all deficiencies, in amounts beyond counting.
Not surprisingly, the dream of plenty often merges with the prospect of heaven, especially where heaven is seen as God’s recompense for whatever was in short supply in life. In the Quranic heaven, for example, water flows as it hardly ever does in Arabia. But since the dream is (after all) the dream of a full mouth, of working your way along the butter-dripping kernels of an infinite corncob, it also has manifestations that are cheerfully low and entirely this-worldly, in which physical abundance doesn’t merge into the plenitude of the divine, but exists down here somewhere, if you could only find it. Not dreams of paradise, in other words, but of the earthly paradise. Medieval Europe had the Land of Cockaigne, where the rivers run with cream and ready-roasted piglets run around squeaking ‘Eat me! Eat me!’ Depression America had the Big Rock Candy Mountains, where the cigarettes grow on trees and ‘little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks’. There was a lake of stew, and of whiskey too, and (it was reported) you could paddle all around them in a big canoe. This dream leaps over the boundaries of times and places. It is transcultural, just as scarcity is transcultural. It does not expect to be fulfilled. Or to be believed. It’s the just-material, just-for-pleasure, foolish version of the serious religious dream of redemption. All the while, beneath the fantasy, the reality it’s giving the dreamer a break from remains visible. Cockaigne’s true context is famine. The song of ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’ could have waved a wand and made all the pains of a hobo’s life vanish, but instead it only modified them to the extent of giving wooden legs to the railroad cops who chased him, and rubber teeth to the dogs who bit him. Dogs and cops remained, too solid for a mere dream of plenty to abolish them.
Then something unexpected happened. We learned how to build a mechanical cornucopia. Early models were clumsy. They covered acres of ground, leaked choking black smoke, and ripped off the limbs of unwary children. Later designs, though, ran with a clean reassuring hum, and did any damage safely over the horizon – or in such small increments that it was easy to forget about it. And the world changed, for some of us. Instead of the feasts and the fasts, the good luck and the bad luck, we moved into a world where time promised improvement, where we could expect there to be mostly a little more every year: 3 per cent more, 5 per cent more, 2 per cent more. Compounded. The dream began to come true. The unlikely dream, the dream not intended to have load-bearing qualities. Over the last half-century about a billion people have moved into the dream, and hundreds of millions more are presently making the escape from our ancestral scarcity. In our time, for the first time ever in human history, plenty has become a fact. We may not recognise it, but the Big Rock Candy Mountain is where we live now; we have become citizens of Cockaigne. The success or failure of harvests no longer makes any difference to the food supply, which is gigantic and continuous. There’s more to eat in a single supermarket than in any medieval painting of the garden of earthly delights. We have to pay for it, of course, but mostly we can. We aren’t pressed up against the glass looking at a plenty we can’t touch. Compared to what came before, the cornucopia flows for even the poorest of us in the rich countries.
And food was only the first commodity in which scarcity was abolished. It looms large and urgent in the dreams of those who don’t have enough of it, but we’ve moved on to the other scarcities that were waiting in a row to be abolished once hunger was dealt with. From our cornucopias also pour houses that keep out the weather, clean water to bathe in daily, medicines to prolong life, clothes no-one wore before us – and then stuff, oh a torrent of stuff of unimaginable profusion and variety, stuff to tempt us, stuff to entertain us, stuff to decorate ourselves with, stuff to transport us from place to place, stuff to store other stuff in. So much stuff that the idea of any one individual being able to sample all of it seems laughable. It seems self-evident to us now that even the richest person couldn’t taste the whole cornucopia – wouldn’t even want to – though in the scarce times that’ve only just passed away, kings and magnates really did try to drag some of whatever was going to their mud palaces. Our plenty far outweighs the consuming power of each of us as we contemplate it. Welcome to the magic porridge pot, welcome to the lake of stew.
Now we have it, though, we aren’t sure we do have it. It doesn’t feel the way that we expected, before, it was going to feel. People who live in scarcity and dream of plenty have a very clear idea of what plenty would be. It’s what would make up the deficiencies they presently feel, what would lift the constraints that presently grip them. It is self-evident to them what ‘enough’ would mean. The fact that they haven’t got enough enforces the definition of it. Enough is what they lack. When they look at the rich world and see that everyone (or almost everyone) in it is washed, clothed, housed and fed, they know what they are seeing. They say to themselves, if I lived there, I would rejoice and be glad that the fasting was over and the feasting was permanent; that my children could be certain of what I was never certain of. That’s why they’re willing to pay their savings to human traffickers, and to suffocate in freight containers. Even in the rich world, during the earlier stages of the transition to plenty, what it would consist of seemed obvious. When Keynes wrote Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren in the 1930s, he looked forward to a time near at hand when, quote, ‘the economic problem would be solved’. Not an economic problem, or some economic problems – the economic problem, the one singular finite problem that has existed from the beginning of economics as an endeavour, and about which it was originally so gloomy. That is, the problem of allocating scarce resources so that everyone has enough. The founding fathers shook their heads. Malthus believed that population always grew faster than the food supply. Result: famine. Ricardo believed that workers’ wages could never rise higher than the bare minimum cost of breeding up the next generation of baby workers. Result: penury. So it seemed quite clear to Keynes in the Depression, working on the tools he thought could prevent all future depressions, that if a society could just provide everyone in it with a secure job, a place to live and enough to eat, then the one big issue of economics would be dealt with. We’d have done it. We’d have solved the whole of the material part of the problem of being human. We’d have enough, so we’d be free to move on and solve other problems. And how we’d flourish.
Well, we are Keynes’s grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But that isn’t how it feels to us now, living in the plenty that the whole world dreamed of, and the majority of the world dreams of still. Indeed, it’s far easier to recognise from the outside that plenty is what we do possess, because our everyday experience amid the cornucopia’s spilling fruits is certainly not that the striving is over, that the ‘economic problem’ is solved, that the material issues of human life are dealt with. On the contrary: we are still running as hard as we can, with apparently undiminished urgency, and our d
esires still feel to us as if they are thwarted and fulfilled in the proportions you’d expect from a resistant universe. We are sceptical of our plenty; we focus on what we haven’t got yet, we ask ourselves if this is really abundance or not. (I propose a rule: if you aren’t sure whether you really live in plenty, you do.) We tell ourselves stories about how plenty will really arrive some time in the future, when the price of bandwidth falls to zero, when nanotechnology makes atoms assemble themselves just like that into the objects of our choice – not realising that those new dreams are just retreads, speeded-up repetitions of what already happened when the Industrial Revolution kicked our cornucopia into gear and first showed us that plenty doesn’t come from diamonds, but from the power to multiply a widget by a million. By historical standards, the times are already magically good. But then, we don’t judge by historical standards. Now that we’re in plenty we don’t constantly measure it against the scarcity it replaced. You can’t be grateful for avoiding something you’ve never experienced. You can only count your blessings for so long, and then the new world has to be engaged with on its own terms; the new world in which the material struggle does not lie behind us, and new wants present themselves unendingly to be fulfilled.
Somehow we’d believed that achieving plenty would mean getting wants and needs disentangled. The whole idea of having enough depends on being able to tell the difference. Those in the past who took a utopian look forward to plenty tended to imagine, just like Keynes, that there was a common-sense contrast of feeling involved in the difference between wanting and needing; and so moving from one to the other, from the era of needing a bowl of soup to the era of wanting a Rolex, would be signalled by a change of mood, a kind of relaxation of urgency, or, to put it at its most positive, by the birth of a new kind of human freedom. Marx, for instance, who was as besotted by the runaway productivity of industrial technology as any enthusiast for the New Economy during the internet bubble, thought that, when the engines of plenty were running for everybody’s benefit, we’d be free to start discovering what human beings were actually like, what our nature might be with the leg irons of need no longer hobbling us. No longer needing to scrabble for our daily bread, we’d gaze at the world of things with a playful, impartial curiosity; we’d gaze at other people and know for the first time with absolute clarity that they weren’t things, since we didn’t have to treat them as things any more to assure our own survival.
True Stories Page 11