Tom shrugged, trying to see her better in the dusk. “People said that when the colonial powers lost sovereignty over their colonies, but kept the power by way of economic arrangements. That was called neo-colonialism, and I see the point of it. But look, the mechanisms of control and exploitation in the neocolonialist set-up were precisely the corporations themselves. As home markets were saturated it became necessary to invest abroad to keep profits up, and so the underdeveloped world was subsumed.”
“Exactly.”
“All right, all right. But then to cut the corporations up, distribute their assets down through their systems to constituent businesses—this amounted to a massive downloading of capital, a redistribution of wealth. It was new, sure, but to call it neocolonialism is just to confuse things. It was actually the dismantling of neo-colonialism.”
“By fiat! By the command of the superpowers, telling the rest of the world what to do, in imperial style! Putting the arm on them, as you put it!”
“Well look, we haven’t always had the kind of international accords that now exist to take global action. The power of the United Nations is a fairly recent development in history. So some coercion by powerful countries working together was a political necessity. And at the time I’m speaking of capital was very mobile, it could move from country to country without restraint. If one country decided to become a haven, then the whole system would persist.”
“At that point third world countries would have been in power, and the superpowers would have become colonies. You couldn’t have had that.”
“But the haven countries wouldn’t have had the power. They might have skimmed away something in taxes, but in essence they would become functionaries of the corporations they hosted. That’s how powerful corporate capitalism was. You just have no idea nowadays.”
“We only know that once again you decided our fate for us.”
“It took everyone to do it,” Tom said. “A consensus of world opinion, governments, the press. A revolution of all the people, using the power of government—laws, police, armies—against the very small executive class that owned and ran the multinationals.”
“What do you mean, a revolution?” another student asked.
“We changed the law so much, you see. We cut the corporate world apart. The ones that resisted and skipped to haven countries had their assets seized, and distributed to local parts. We left loose networks of association, but the actual profits of any unit company were kept within it in a collective fashion, nothing sucked away.”
“A quiet revolution,” Nadezhda said, trying to help out.
“Yes, certainly. All this took years, you understand. It was done in steps so that it didn’t look so radical—it took two working generations. But it was radical, because now there’s nothing but small businesses scattered everywhere. At least in the legal world. And that’s a radical change.”
Accusing, triumphant, Pravi pointed a finger at him. “So the United States went socialist!”
“No, not exactly. All we did was set limits on the more extreme forms of greed.”
“By nationalizing energy, water and land! What is that but socialism?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re right. But we used it as a way to give everyone the opportunity to get ahead! Basic resources were made common property, but in the service of a more long-distance self-interest—”
“Altruism for the sake of self-interest!” Pravi said, disgusted. Her aggression, her hatred of America—it irritated Tom, made him sad. Enemies everywhere, still, after all these years, even among the young. What you sow you will reap, he thought. Unto the seventh generation.
“Sociobiologists say it’s always that way,” he said. “Some doubt the existence of altruism, except as a convoluted form of self-interest.”
“Imperialism makes one cynical about human nature,” Pravi said. “And you know as well as I that the human sciences are based on philosophical beliefs.”
“No doubt.” He shrugged. “What do you want me to say? The economic system was a pyramid, and money ran up to the top. We chopped the pyramid off and left only the constituent parts down at the base, and gave the functions that higher parts of the pyramid served over to government, without siphoning off money, except for public works. This was either altruism on the largest scale ever seen in modern times, or else very enlightened self-interest, in that with wealth redistributed in this way, the wars and catastrophes that would have destroyed the pyramid were averted. I suppose it is a statement of one’s philosophy to say whether it was one or the other.”
Pravi waved him away. “You saw the end coming and you ran. Like the British from India.”
“You needn’t be angry at us for saving you the necessity of violent revolution,” Tom said, almost amused. “It might have been dramatic, but it wouldn’t have been fun. I knew revolutionaries, and their lives were warped, they were driven people. It’s not something to get romantic about.”
Insulted, Pravi walked away, down the deck. The class muttered, and Nadezhda gave them a long list of reading assignments, then called it off for the night.
Later, standing up near the bowsprit, looking at stars reflected on the water, Tom sighed. The air was humid, the tropical night cloaked them like a blanket. “I wonder when we will lose the stigma,” he said to Nadezhda softly.
“I don’t know. We’ll never see it.”
“No.” He shook his head, upset. “We did the best we could, didn’t we?”
“Yes. When they shoulder the responsibility themselves, they’ll understand.”
“Maybe.”
Another night he was called down to the communications room to receive a call from Nylphonia. She looked pleased, and said “I think you have Heartech and the AAMT in violation of Fazio-Matsui. Look here.”
The AAMT had put Heartech’s black account into a Hong Kong bank, but the funds were “washed but not dried,” as Nylphonia put it. Still traceable. Some information had been stolen from the bank, and it corresponded perfectly with electronic money orders that had been recorded in passage through the phone system, going from Heartech to the AAMT. It would not be enough to convict them in court, but it would convince most people that the connection existed—that the accusation had not been concocted out of thin air. So it was sufficient for their purposes.
Tom nodded. “Good. Send a copy of this along to me, will you? And thanks, Nylphonia.”
Well, he thought. Very interesting. Next time Kevin and Doris went into the council meeting, they could use this like a bomb. Make the accusation, present the evidence, show that the proposed development on Rattlesnake Hill had illegal funds behind it. End of that.
He thought of the little grove on the top of the hill, and grinned.
The next dawn he slipped out of their berth, dressed and went on deck. They were tacking close-hauled to a strong east wind, and rode over the swells at an angle, corkscrewing with the pitch and yaw. The bow was getting soaked with spray, so Tom went to the midships rail, on the windward side. He wrapped an arm through the bottom of the mainmast halyards to steady himself. The cables were vibrating. Time after time Ganesh ran down the back of one swell and thumped its port bow into the steep side of the next, and white spray flew up from the bow, then was caught by the wind and blown over the bowsprit in a big, glittering fan. The sky was a pale limpid blue, and the sun caught the fans of bow spray in such a way that for a second or two each of them was transformed into a broad, intense rainbow. Giddy slide down a swell, dark blue sea, the jolt as they ran into the next swell, blast of spray out, up, caught in the wind and dashed to droplets, and then a still moment, the ship led by a pouring arch of vibrant color, red orange yellow green blue purple.