Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

"That a system evolved in a given environment only proves its best at replicating itself in that environment," he said. "That doesn't make it a system that we should want to live in. Nor, more importantly, is it any indication of its ability to survive over the longer term. Environments change, sometimes rapidly, sometimes because of the system's own ill effects. Outcompeting other systems, rather than living harmoniously with them, can eventually be self-destructive. Viruses are a good case in point. The Ebola virus, although extremely infectious and good at replicating itself, kills its hosts much more frequently than, say, Covid-19. The fact that coronavirus was relatively harmless is what allowed it to bring capitalism to its knees in 2020. The question is not whether share trading and capitalism have outcompeted other systems up until now but whether their effects are consistent with their host's survival!"

Once capitalism had died, and markets were freed from private ownership, a different kind of value took over. Instead of judging something's worth by its exchange value - what it would fetch in return for something else - the Other Now judged worth according to experiential value - the benefit the thing brought to the person that used it. Prices, quantities, and monetary profits were no longer the sole masters of society.

Turning people into numbers was awful, he felt. The surest way to destroy a quality is to turn it into a quantity. Was this not what capitalism had done to us? Reduce every value to a price, every exchange into a transaction, every thing of incalculable beauty into a measurable object of desire? And yet, despite his idealism, Costa also recognised that a democratic, technologically advanced, large-scale economy cannot be run like a commune. It needs numbers. Quantification is unavoidable.
"If we are to be turned into numbers, we might as well design a system in which the numbers are determined democratically," he opined.
"Randomness is the great ally against tyranny," Kosti replied. "If the juries determining our numbers were chosen by any other process than purely random selection, they would be open to influence and ultimately exploitation and tyranny."

Painstakingly, they wrote software that could identify precisely which chunk of debt within each CDO was owed by which household, when each each chunk of a bill or debt repayment was due, to whom it was owed, and who owned the specific CDO at every point in time. Using this vast database of information, they were then able to contact households - most of which were outraged by the bankers' behaviour and the bailouts they were set to receive - and invite them to participate in low-cost, targeted, short-term payment strikes - or crowdshorting as Esmerelda called these campaigns.

"But what do you always say the prime directive of a commercial bank is, Iris?"
"Never lend to anyone who actually needs the money," Iris replied, reeling somewhat from being agreed with.
"Precisely. The moment you put a commercial bank between the central bank's money and the people out there, two things happen: much of it never gets to the people, and what does goes largely to those who don't need it. If we'd had the same central banking facility in 2020 as the Other Now had in 2022, we could have replaced all lost incomes and prevented most, if not all, of bankruptcies immediately."

"Libralism's fatal hypocrisy," said Iris, "was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers, and brewers, so as to the defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments, and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders, we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all the values that liberals like you, Eva, claim to preach."
[...]
"Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I've seen it happen," he said. "But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity's destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans."

Moreover, if it is true, as often said, that most socialist regimes turn out to be dictatorships, that is largely because a dictatorship is much harder to overthrow or subvert than a democracy. It follows that the repeated assaults by the Western ruling classes against every form of socialism have provoked a sort of artificial selection that allows only dictatorial forms to survive. After successfully ousting the democratically elected Mossadegh from power in Iran, the CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt tried to mount a similar putsch in Syria, but failed because Syria was already a dictatorship. Castro has survived in Cuba long after the fall of Allende in Chile.

the problem was not just who owned what before entering into market exchanges. The problem was the market itself. It was the very principle of conditional rather than unconditional exchange:

Because in her estimation, free markets, which may indeed require the end of capitalism to be fully realized, are not the solution. Markets, capitalist or otherwise, create the habitat in which patriarchy and oppressive power survive. Her opposition to the Other Now, Iris concluded, was not dissimilar to her contempt for Lear. Just as a slight reduction of inequality in the name of social democracy only paved the way for a revival of inequality later on, so the Other Now had merely prolonged the reign of markets over societies –which is, of course, why Eva had warmed to it in the end.