Ecotopia (16 page)

Thus, in areas such as Puget Sound, the Columbia and Williamette rivers near Portland, and San Francisco Bay and Delta, waterways became useful for transportation—small water-taxis abound, and ferries cover longer distances. Ecotopians are almost as devoted to water as they are to trees, and rowing or sailing about in boats are favorite pastimes. There is hardly an Ecotopian who doesn’t spend some of his time fishing, sailing, rowing, swimming, wading, or just looking at water. The national bird, I am told, is the egret—who spends his days knee-deep in marshes.

While the policies of the Survivalists and the Ecotopian government may seem extreme or foolish to us, they have not been carried out in a ruthless manner, as many suspect. For instance, while the national train system was under construction, existing freeways were used as highspeed bus routes. Articulated trailer-buses running at 100 miles per hour were given exclusive right to the lefthand lanes. Experience gained with this intermediate system was reportedly useful in the management of the train system when it was completed. The Ecotopians thus seem adept at using moderate and gradual changeovers to reach extreme goals. We may disagree with those goals, but I believe we must respect then-manner of achieving them.

(May 28) Letter from Francine yesterday morning—smuggled through our prearranged emergency drop in Canada. Was somehow a
shock to get it—hadn’t really expected to hear from her unless something went terribly wrong. Same madness in her life as usual: new schemes to astound the art world, a great sexual coup at a consular cocktail party—her first full-rank ambassador! Maybe she misses me—that would be a switch. But she would never admit it on paper, if at all. Maximum latitude: the rules of the game….

Went over to an Ecotopian fair afterward. These are held monthly in many cities and towns. This one surprisingly large and well organized. Lasts three days, in the City Hall plaza, which is partly paved but tree-shaded with a number of fountains and a creek; it also has the steps of the grand old City Hall—which serve as bandstand, stage for performing actors, pantomimists, even jugglers. Plaza was covered with booths and stands of all kinds: craftsmen, farmers with produce to sell, food and drink vendors, fortune-tellers, portrait-sketchers, musicians. Takes on the appearance of a village: the booth people set up tents just behind their wares, in which they live for a couple of days.

How many of the thousands strolling about are potential customers, and how many just friends and families and children of the sellers, I couldn’t tell. In any case the economic functions didn’t seem overwhelmingly pressing. Mainly an enormous party, at which some selling, bartering, and trading went on. Gives people a chance to see friends from other areas (many of the merchants come from groups that live out in the country, but attend fairs regularly to sell their wares). Around the fringes there are musical groups performing, and there’s dancing in the evenings, when most of the people seem to get together.

This is not one of the four weekends of the year when sexual license is said to prevail (the spring equinox was two months ago) but things certainly looser than usual. Maybe reacting to Francine’s nutty letter, I got drunk and reckless, and followed two flirtatious young women into a tent. Nice sometimes to blot out thoughts of Serious Relating, and they were willing to play the game of anonymity. I guess it’s a result of my puritan heritage that I’ve never been with two women at once (though I have often wished I had the nerve to try it). These girls were absolutely cool and matter of fact about it, which made it easier. Sometimes they
would both concentrate on me, sometimes I would share one with the other. They seemed to regard sex the same way we’d regard eating, or maybe walking—a pleasant biological function, but without any heavy emotional expectations. Very relaxing….

Curious note of natural delicacy: they never excluded me from any of the possible permutations and combinations, or ever expected me to be a mere voyeur. And nothing I did, even though a total stranger from another country, seemed to take them aback: they’re maybe 22 or so, but they don’t seem surprisable by anything men do.

It was an exhausting night; left me feeling lightheaded. Toward dawn I got dressed and walked all the way across the city to the Cove, listening to the fog horns and thinking about Marissa. Though I have twinges of jealousy about her, her behavior after the war games and mine this evening seem parallel and equal in some odd way. I don’t feel guilty, anyway.

Once home, I scribbled a note to Francine, offering her diplomatic immunity and telling her about
my
escapade, and fell asleep. In the morning I tore up the note, and got back to work.

WORKERS’ CONTROL, TAXES,
AND JOBS IN ECOTOPIA

San Francisco, May 28. Is the Ecotopian economy socialist? I asked a high government spokesman this question. I told him that it is widely considered to be so, by Americans, but that obviously the information gap of recent decades made a clear understanding difficult. This gentleman gave me a polite lecture, making it clear that he was speaking to what he considered the major American confusions.

The Ecotopian economy, he began, must be considered a mixed one, like that of the United States; but some elements of the mix are novel, and because of ecological and political considerations the balance of the mix is quite different. Not long after Independence,
he reminded me, there was a massive flight of capital, similar to what happened after the Cuban revolution. Most families of great wealth fled, going either to Los Angeles, to the East, or in some cases to their Swiss or French estates. This undoubtedly damaged the managerial capabilities of Ecotopian enterprises, he admitted, though the total number of such refugees was only a few thousands, including women and children.

The Ecotopian government, faced with the necessity of feeding, housing, and clothing its population, at first teetered between a cautious attempt to carry on enterprises on the old lines, and breaking through into new and uncharted methods.

But as it happened, my informant argued, in a few months it became clear they had no real choice; for the people, seeing the former owners depart, realized that a new era was indeed upon them and began spontaneously taking over farms, factories, and stores. This process was chaotic, but it was not anarchic; it was controlled by the local governments and local courts. The assumption was usually made that those who had been working in the organization “owned” it; and since they had no other means of support, their immediate problem after Independence was to go on running it pretty much as it had been run. There were, he pointed out, some examples to go on, of enterprises taken over by employees in France in the late sixties, and of course a number of U.S. corporations had become employee-owned by purely legal and gradual means.

Such take-overs set the tone for the ongoing tasks of production and distribution of essentials; and they worked. But more massive and deliberate economic changes soon took place, above all in the diversion of money and manpower toward the construction of stable-state systems in agricultural and sewage practices, and in the scientific and technical deployment of a new plastics industry based upon natural-source, biodegradable plastics. (The transportation system, which remains an infringement on the stable-state principle, also consumed many resources in that period.)

I inquired about the sources of government revenue for such large-scale projects. The tax system of former years, it seems, was
entirely abandoned at the time of Independence. Laws formalizing the forfeiture of property by owners, plus confiscatory inheritance taxes, were legislated. (Aside from personal articles, no Ecotopian can now inherit any property at all!)

Ecotopian revolutionaries took the position, which still appears to prevail, that a little-recognized yet fundamental defect of capitalism is that you cannot tax its owners justly—for wealth under capitalist governments always manages to provide sufficient tax loopholes for itself. The new tax system, upon which Ecotopian government now depends, relies entirely on what we would call a corporation tax—that is, a tax upon production enterprises (including individual craftsmen, incidentally). It is based partly upon net income, but also partly upon “turnover,” or gross income. Like most functions of governing, tax-levying is carried out by the communities (mainly cities), which delegate very limited powers to the regional or national levels.

The reasoning behind this system, according to my informant, is complex, but it turns upon the view that all taxes are fundamentally a means of the government seizing a share of economic output and putting it to publicly determined purposes—and that this seizure should therefore be at the immediate source, simple, understandable, just, and open to public view. (Ecotopian tax returns are not confidential, as with us.)

In recent years, this tax policy has been complemented by laws that have redefined the position of the employee—very drastically from an American viewpoint. The workers in an Ecotopian enterprise must now all be “partners”; a man cannot just set up a business, offer wages to employees, fire them when he no longer needs them, and pocket whatever profits he can make. Grotesque as it may seem, all Ecotopians who join an enterprise now do so on the same sort of basis as our high executives. Just as these gentlemen inquire about profit-sharing, stock options, tax shelters, retirement plans, and so on, so do ordinary Ecotopians inquire about the partnership terms in an enterprise they are considering joining!

There are no personal income, sales, or property taxes in Ecotopia, though there is a land tax that encourages concentration and probably accounts for the remarkable compactness of Ecotopian cities.
There is a widespread aversion to other types of tax on the grounds that they are either regressive or promote divisiveness among people—whereas the enterprise tax, bearing as it does on collective groups, is thought to promote solidarity. (A paradoxical notion, perhaps, since these groups compete with each other strenuously enough.)

It is alleged, though of course this would be extremely difficult to prove, that there is no super-rich class in Ecotopia. It is admitted that certain occupational groups, such as artists and scientists and some doctors, have slightly higher incomes, though national training policies deliberately seek to keep such differentials moderate. But there are now said to be no individuals in Ecotopia who grow personally rich because they control means of production and hire other men’s labor power. Occasionally, however, strange anomalies occur—when an enterprise comes up with some remarkable product or service for which there is an immediate and strong demand. The inventors and fabricators of the “bird-suits,” for instance, are a small research collective, originally about 30 people. Because of the appeal of their ingeniously insulating garments, they are said to have made a great deal of money recently, even though they have now chosen to take in some new members and to work even less than the usual 20 hours per week.

Don’t such successful groups use their profits to control other enterprises, or become absentee owners, and thus end up as capitalists just like ours? The answer on this point was complex, but seems to boil down to the fact that direct absentee investment by one enterprise or person in another enterprise is not permitted. Surpluses can thus only be “invested” by lending them to the national banking system, which in turn lends funds to enterprises. This arrangement, which resembles the one pioneered by the Yugoslavs in the seventies, obviously gives the bank an immense leverage on the economy, and makes possible the sometimes surprisingly large public investments that have characterized Ecotopian development. (The most it allows lucky producers, like the bird-suit people, is the chance to retire and live off the interest their profits can earn from the bank.) This process clearly needs close
study by our economists; it appears to contradict many Ecotopian protestations of decentralization, even if the national bank does maintain regional branches which are said to have great autonomy.

Ecotopian enterprises generally behave much like capitalist enterprises: they compete with each other, and seek to increase sales and maximize profits, although they are hampered by a variety of ecological regulations. I suspect they are not immune to a certain amount of chicanery and false claims about their products.

However, the fact that the members of an enterprise actually own it jointly (each with one vote) puts certain inherent limits on what these enterprises do. For instance, they do not tend to expand endlessly, since the practical maximum size of a joint-ownership firm seems to be fewer than 300 people—beyond that they tend to break down into bureaucratic, inflexible forms and lose both their profitability and their members, who seek more congenial environments. “Small is beautiful,” I was reminded. Also, the enterprises tend to be just as concerned with conditions of work as they are with profits, and in many instances members seem willing to accept lower profit and wage levels in exchange for a comfortable pace of work or a way of organizing work which offers better relations among the people doing it.