I don’t normally comment in these essays on the political
affairs of other countries. As I’ve noted more than once here, the last thing
the rest of the world needs is one more clueless American telling everyone else
on the planet what to do. What’s more,
as the United States busies itself flailing blindly and ineffectually at the
consequences that its own idiotically shortsighted decisions have brought down
upon it, those of us who live here have our work cut out for us already.
That said, a sign I’ve been awaiting for quite some time has
appeared on the horizon—the first rumble of a tectonic shift that will leave
few things unchanged. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t happen in the United States,
but I was somewhat startled to see where it did happen. That would be in
Britain, where Jeremy Corbyn has just been elected head of Britain’s Labour
Party.
Those of my readers who don’t follow British politics may
not know just how spectacular a change Corbyn’s election marks. In the late1990s,
under the leadership of Tony Blair, the Labour Party did what erstwhile
left-wing parties were doing all over the industrial world: it ditched the
egalitarian commitments that had guided it in prior decades, and instead
embraced a set of policies that were indistinguishable from those of its
conservative opponents—the same thing, for example, that the Democratic party
did here in the US. As a result, voters going to the polls found that their
supposed right to shape the destiny of their nations at the voting booth had
been reduced to irrelevance, since every party with a shot at power embraced
the same set of political and economic policies.
That might have been bearable if the policies in question
worked, but they didn’t, they don’t, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that
they never will. Proponents of the neoliberal consensus—I probably have to
explain that label, don’t I? It’s a source of wry amusement to anybody who
knows the first thing about the history of political economy that the viewpoint
considered “conservative” in today’s America is what used to be known as
liberalism, and still has that label in economics. Unrestricted free trade, no
government interference in business affairs, no government protections for the
poor, and an expansionist and militaristic foreign policy: these were the
trademarks of liberal political and economic thought all through the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Those same policies came back into fashion as neoliberal
economics, and as “conservative” politics, in the late twentieth century. Since
then, proponents of neoliberalism have insisted that deregulation for industry
and finance, tax cuts and government handouts for the rich, a rising spiral of
punitive austerity measures for the poor, and a violent and amoral foreign
policy obsessed with dominating the Middle East by force, would bring economic
stability and prosperity at home and maintain peace overseas. That was the
sales pitch that was used to sell these policies. I think most people have begun to notice by
now, though, that the policies in question have had precisely the opposite
effect, not just once but wherever and whenever they’ve been tried.
I encourage my readers, especially those who favor the
neoliberal policies just outlined, to stop and think about that for a moment.
Around the globe, where businesses have been deregulated, taxes cut for the
rich and government money poured into their hands, harsh austerity measures
imposed on the poor, and foreign policy turned into a set of excuses for lobbing
bombs at Middle Eastern countries, stability, prosperity, and peace have not
been forthcoming—in fact, quite the contrary. At best, neoliberal policies
bring a brief burst of relative prosperity, followed by a long slide into
increasingly intractable crisis; at worst, you go straight into the crisis
phase, and then things just keep getting worse.
Logically speaking, if the policies you propose don’t yield
the results you expect, you change the policies. That’s not what’s happened so
far in this case, though. Quite the
contrary, the accelerating failures of neoliberalism have been met across the
board by an increasingly angry insistence from the corridors of power that
neoliberal policies are the only options there are.
What Jeremy Corbyn’s election shows is that that insistence
has just passed its pull date. Corbyn’s an old-fashioned Labourite of the
pre-Blair variety, and he’s made it clear for decades that he supports the
opposite of the neoliberal consensus: more regulation of finance and industry,
higher tax rates and fewer handouts to the rich, more benefits for the poor,
and a less aggressive foreign policy. When he entered the race to head the
Labour Party after Ed Milliband’s embarrassing electoral defeat earlier this
year, party apparatchiks rolled their eyes and insisted that he didn’t have a
chance. What they hadn’t noticed, and what the establishment across the
industrial world has by and large never noticed either, is that the consensus
is only a consensus among a privileged minority, and most people outside those
rarefied and self-referential circles will vote against it if they’re given
half a chance.
That’s what happened in the Labour Party election. When the
ballots were counted, Corbyn had staged a monumental upset, winning by a landslide
on the first ballot with a total three times as large as his nearest rival’s.
What’s more, since his election, people who’ve stayed out of party politics in
Britain have been joining the Labour Party in droves, convinced that at long
last they have the chance to have their voices heard. Until and unless he loses
a general election or some other Labour Party figure mounts an effective
challenge against him, Corbyn’s now the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal
Opposition and the heir apparent to No. 10 Downing Street should Labour come
out ahead in the next election.
Whether that’s a desirable outcome or not is not something I
propose to discuss here, as that choice is up to the people of Great Britain
and nobody else. Myself, I’m not a great fan of Corbyn’s variety of socialism,
or for that matter most of the others; it seems to me that there are many
better ways to run a society—though it’s only fair to say that the neoliberal
consensus is not one of these. What makes Jeremy Corbyn’s meteoric rise important
is that it shows just how fragile the neoliberal consensus actually is, and how
readily it can be overturned by any politician who’s willing to break with it
and start addressing the concerns of the eighty to ninety per cent of the
population who don’t agree with it.
That fragility need not lead to better things. Here in the
United States, Donald Trump remains sky-high in the polls for exactly the same
reason Jeremy Corbyn now heads the Labour Party: he’s willing to talk about
things the political establishment refuses to discuss. In his case the
unspeakable issue is the de facto policy, supported by both parties, of
encouraging illegal immigration to the United States in order to drive down
wages for the working classes and maintain a facade of prosperity for the
privileged.
A great many Americans are concerned about that, and not
unreasonably so. Whether allowing mass immigration to the United States is a
good idea or not, it’s fair to say that sharply limiting the number of legal
immigrants and then turning a blind eye to illegal immigration lands us in the
worst of both worlds. The only people
who benefit from it are the employers who get to pay substandard wages to
illegal immigrants, and the privileged classes whose lifestyles are propped up
thereby. Since the voices of the privileged are the only ones that have been
let into our collective conversation about politics for the last three and a
half decades, the concerns of the broader public haven’t been addressed; now
Trump is addressing them, and he just might end up in the White House as a
result.
He’s not the only one who’s riding that particular issue to
the brink of power. Marine Le Pen, to name just one example, is more or less
France’s Donald Trump—though, France being France, she has better fashion sense
and a less absurd hairstyle. Europe’s privileged classes encourage unlimited
immigration, just like their American equivalents, to force down wages and
break the political power of the working classes, and Le Pen’s Front National
has harnessed the resentment of all those French voters who have been on the
losing end of those policies for decades. Nor is France the only European
nation where that’s an explosive issue. The British politicians and pundits who
are busy decrying Corbyn’s election just now might want to temper their rage
and consider the alternatives: if Corbyn falls, Nigel Farage and the UKIP party
are waiting in the wings to harness the public’s frustration with the abject
failure of business as usual, and if Farage falls in his turn, what replaces
him could be much, much worse.
The mere fact that a failed consensus is cracking at the
seams, in other words, does not guarantee that what replaces it will be an
improvement. All it means is that there’s an opening through which a range of
alternative visions can enter the political conversation of our time, and
perhaps find an audience among the disenfranchised and disillusioned. That some
such window of opportunity was on its way comes as no surprise; as a student of
history, I’ve long taken comfort in the fact that even the most thoroughly
entrenched political and economic orthodoxies have finite life spans, and will
eventually be hauled out with the trash. Much of what I’ve done over the last
nine years on this blog has been a matter of getting ready for the opening of
that window, putting certain ideas into circulation among those few who were
ready to hear them.
That’s a more important step than I think many people
realize. In Germany in the early 1930s, when a failed consensus finally came
apart, the only alternative visions that had any significant presence were the
Leninist version of Marxian socialism, on the one hand, and a bubbling cauldron
of racist fantasies and radical antirationalism on the other; the latter triumphed,
and no doubt most of my readers are aware of what followed. In other places and
times, less psychotic options have been available, and the results have
generally been much better. The Zapatista rebels in southern Mexico a while
back favored the slogan “another world is possible,” and of course they’re
quite right—but a great deal depends on what kind of other world people are
prepared to imagine.
This is why, for example, the last three posts here on The
Archdruid Report have been devoted to a narrative describing a future very
different from the one that most Americans like to imagine: a future in which
the United States slams facefirst into a brick wall of unintended consequences,
plunges into a bloody civil war, and fragments thereafter, and in which one of
the fragments pursues a set of political and economic policies that go zooming
off at right angles to the conventional wisdom of our time. I expect to resume
that narrative next week, and to continue it with an assortment of
interruptions thereafter, precisely because a less impoverished sense of the
possible futures open to us is so crucial in facing the rising spiral of crises
that defines our time.
It’s a source of some amusement to me that I’ve fielded a
fair number of comments insisting that I have to reshape the narrative just
mentioned to fit one or another version of the conventional wisdom. This blog’s
focus being what it is, most of them have fixated on one or another aspect of
what might as well be called the Ecotopian model—the last really imaginative
vision of the future in this country, which was midwifed by Ernest Callenbach
in his brilliant 1974 utopian fiction Ecotopia. If you know your way
around today’s American Green scene, even if you haven’t read a word Callenbach
wrote, you know his ideas, because they still shape an enormous amount of what
passes for original thought today.
That’s not a model I’m interested in rehashing. Partly
that’s because not that many people outside the San Francisco Bay region find
Callenbach’s vision especially appealing; partly it’s because some aspects of
the model, notably the claim that solar and wind power can support something
akin to modern middle class American lifestyles, haven’t held up well in the
light of experience; but it’s also partly because other worlds are also
possible. The Ecotopian conventional wisdom is not the only option. It’s an
option toward which I have a nostalgic fondness—I was wildly enthusiastic about
Callenbach’s book back in the day—but it’s not the only game in town, and all
things considered, it’s not the option I would choose today. Thus Retrotopia,
as the name suggests, is not going to be full of avid spandex-clad cyclists who
dine on the produce of permacultured edible forests, or what have you. It’s
heading in directions that are far more threatening to the status
quo—including, by the way, the Ecotopian status quo.
The crying need for an abundance of alternative visions of
the future, apart from the conventional wisdom of our time, has also driven
another core project of this blog, and with that in mind, I’m delighted to
announce the winners of this
year’s Space Bats challenge. Those of my readers who are new to The
Archdruid Report may not know that since 2011, this blog has hosted a
series of contests in which readers have submitted short stories set in a
variety of deindustrial futures—that is, futures in which industrial society as
we know it is a thing of the past, our current complex technologies have faded
into legend, and human beings are busy coping with the legacies of the
industrial age and leading challenging, interesting, and maybe even appealing
lives in that context.
The first Space Bats challenge was a shot in the dark, and
to my delighted surprise, it fielded a torrent of fine short stories, the best
of which were duly published by Founders House Publishing as an anthology
titled After
Oil: SF Visions of a Post-Petroleum Future. A second contest duly
followed in 2014, and produced two anthologies, After
Oil 2: The Years of Crisis and After
Oil 3: The Years of Rebirth. The fourth contest was launched in March
of this year; as before, I was deluged with an abundance of excellent stories,
and had a hard time choosing among them; I owe thanks to everyone who submitted
a story and made the choice so difficult; but the following stories will be
included in the next anthology, After Oil 4: The Future’s Distant Shores:
“Sail Away Home” by Alma Arri
“Finding Flotsam” by Bill Blondeau
“Alay” by Dau Branchazel
“Crow Turns Over a Rock” by Eric Farnsworth
“Notes for a Picnic” by Phil Harris
“The Remembrancer” by Wylie Harris
“The Bald Eagle, the Lame Duck, and the Cooked Goose” by Jonah Harvey
“The Bald Eagle, the Lame Duck, and the Cooked Goose” by Jonah Harvey
“The Baby” by Nicky Jarman
“Northern Ghosts” by Gaianne Jenkins
“Caretaker Poinciana” by Troy Jones
“Scapegoat” by Cathy McGuire
“Flowering” by John W. Riley
I trust you’ll join me in congratulating the authors and,
more to the point, in reading their stories once those see print.
In its own small and idiosyncratic way, my experience with
the Space Bats challenge parallels the political earthquake currently shaking
the British landscape. All I did was ask readers to come up with stories that
broke with the conventional wisdom concerning the future—to set aside the
weary, dreary, endlessly rehashed Tomorrowland of spaceships, zap-guns, and
linear technological expansion along the same lines we think we’re following
today, and imagine something different—and as it turned out, that’s all I had
to do. Given the opportunity to write about some less hackneyed future, scores
of readers lunged for their keyboards and flooded each contest with quirky,
thoughtful, interesting futures...you know, the kind of thing that science
fiction used to feature all the time, back before it got sucked into the role
of cheerleading for a suffocatingly narrow range of acceptable tomorrows.
There will be another Space Bats challenge, beginning in the
spring of next year. I invite my readers to propose potential themes for that
challenge—this fourth anthology consists entirely of stories set at least a
thousand years in the future, and I’d like to have some equally offbeat focus
or limitation on the next contest, in the hope that it will inspire an equally
stellar collection of stories.
I’m also pleased to note that the After Oil
anthologies and my post-peak novel Star’s Reach are far from the only
contributions to a growing genre. Founders House, for example, has also
recently published Ralph Meima’s novel Fossil
Nation, the first volume of a trilogy, which offers its own lively
and readable glimpse at a future that cuts across the conventional wisdom of
our time and heads off in new directions. Other projects are in the works, at
Founders House and elsewhere.
At the same time, it’s worth remembering that the same
process is under way on a much vaster scale, and with much more serious
consequences. As the neoliberal consensus shatters and the failure of its
policies becomes impossible to ignore any longer, another world is not merely
possible, it’s inevitable. The question is purely what ideas, visions, dreams,
hopes, and shuddering terrors will shape the world that will emerge from
neoliberalism’s smoldering corpse—and that, dear reader, will be determined in
part by what you yourself are willing to imagine, to work for, and to struggle
for, during the difficult years ahead of us.
*****
One other note may be relevant in this context. Many of the
readers of this blog will be familiar with my alternative-future novel Star’s
Reach. Ever since it was published, I’ve fielded requests for more fiction
set in the same imaginary future, and while I’m flattered by the requests, my
fiction is heading in other directions at least for now. As a result, Founders
House Publishing and I have been talking about the possibility of transforming
the setting of Star’s Reach into a shared world to which many authors
can contribute, and doing at least one anthology—and possibly more—of short
stories set in 25th-century Meriga, or the wider future in which Trey sunna
Gwen and his companions have their place.
