There’s a long running argument among socialists about the role of the state.
Socialism’s roots in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel focussed it on state power. The perfected state was the tool that would develop society up to its highest potential.
The 20th century version of this was the idealisation of state agencies like NASA. The state may have democratic limits to power. But if we can just get the smartest people together and give them the resources they need, they’ll take us to the stars.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future, the state agency for which his 2020 hard SF novel is named, is like NASA for climate change.
But even more so. MftF is a supra-state agency, formed by international agreement, and given powers that make it a de facto world govermment…and the seed of a world state.
H G Wells dreamed of a world state. Donald Wolheim made the establishment of a world state the only goal of science fiction in his founding documents for the Futurians, an SF society that included Asimov among its members.
So KSRs vision of government agency as proto world state is in a long tradition of socialist thought and science fiction storytelling.
I also think it’s a pathologically terrible idea.
Terrible because it would not work.
Pathological because the belief it could work is rooted in an entirely misguided belief in the state as the answer to all problems.
The reason socialists so often revert to state power as the answer to all problems is because the opposing argument within socialism has historically come from the anarchists. And anarchism may be the only self terminating political philosophy, as in every revolution the state socialists kill off the anarchists who refuse to centrally organise their efforts.
I’m posting this because my call for Actually Viable Stories has been answered by many people with “KSRs Ministry of the Future”. To which I say – no. KSRs reliance on state power as the answer make MftF very much part of dying modernity, not an answer to what comes next.
What *could* answer our problems of governance, if not not the state? Or is authoritarian state power, as in Cixin Liu’s 3 Body Problem, the only future that can stand?
That’s a rich question for writers of AVS.
Modernity is done
Damien Walter 