How a tax haven is leading the race to privatise space

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian


On a drizzly afternoon in April, Prince Guillaume, the hereditary grand duke of Luxembourg, and his wife, Princess Stéphanie, sailed through the front doors of an office building in the outskirts of Seattle and into the headquarters of an asteroid-mining startup called Planetary Resources, which plans to “expand the economy into space”.

The company’s engineers greeted the royals with hors d’oeuvres, craft beer and bottles upon bottles of Columbia Valley rieslings and syrahs. In the corner of the lounge stood a vintage Asteroids arcade game; on the wall hung an American flag alongside the grand duchy’s own red, white and blue stripes. Between the two flags was a prototype of a spacecraft designed to roam the galaxy, prospecting asteroids for precious natural resources that would someday – at least in theory – make the shareholders of Planetary Resources very wealthy earthlings indeed.

The nation of Luxembourg is one of Planetary Resources’ main boosters. The country’s pledge of €25m (£22.5m) – which includes both direct funding and state support for research and development – is just one element of its wildly ambitious campaign to become a terrestrial hub for the business of mining minerals, metals and other resources on celestial bodies. The tiny country enriched itself significantly over the past century by greasing the wheels of global finance; now, as companies such as Planetary Resources prepare for a cosmic land grab, Luxembourg wants to use its tiny terrestrial perch to help send capitalism into space.

Space exploration has historically been an arena for grand, nationalistic operations that were too costly, dangerous and complex for civilians to take up without state backing. But now, private companies now want in, raising questions that, until recently, have seemed like mere thought experiments or hypotheticals: who can lay claim to an asteroid and all of its extractive wealth? Should space benefit “all of humankind”, as the international treaties signed in the 60s intended, or is that idealism outdated? How do you measure those benefits, anyway? Does trickle-down theory apply in zero-gravity conditions?

Space is becoming a testing ground for these thorny ethical and legal questions, and Luxembourg – a tiny country that has sustained itself off of regulatory intricacies and tax loopholes for decades – is positioning itself to help find the answers. While major nations such as China and India plough increasing sums of money into developing space programmes to rival Nasa, Luxembourg is making a different bet: that it can become home to a multinational cast of entrepreneurs who want to go into space not for just the sake of scientific progress or to strengthen their nation’s geopolitical hand, but also to make money.

It already has a keen clientele. Space entrepreneurs speak of a new “gold rush” and compare their mission to that of the frontiersmen, or the early industrialists. While planet Earth’s limited stock of natural resources is rapidly being depleted, asteroid miners see a solution in the vast quantities of untapped water, minerals and metals in outer space. And the fledgling “NewSpace” industry – an umbrella term for commercial spaceflight, asteroid mining and other private ventures – has found eager supporters in the investor class. In April, Goldman Sachs sent a note to clients claiming that asteroid mining “could be more realistic than perceived”, thanks to the falling cost of launching rockets and the vast quantities of platinum sitting on space rocks, just waiting to be exploited.

“[Mining asteroids] is not a new idea, but what’s new is state support of the idea,” says Chris Voorhees, the chief engineer of Planetary Resources. “Everyone thought it was inevitable but they weren’t sure when it would occur.” Now, he says, Luxembourg is “making it happen”.

The grand duchy – which has all the square footage of an asteroid and, with a population of half a million, not all that many more inhabitants – has earmarked €200m to fund NewSpace companies that join its new space sector; to date, six have taken it up on the offer. It has sent officials to Japan, China and the UAE to talk about space exploration partnerships, and appointed space industry veterans, including the ex-head of the European Space Agency, to advise them. In May, it took out a glossy supplement in Scientific American magazine to signal it is committed not just to helping businesses, but to advancing research as well.

And in July, the parliament passed its law – the first of its kind in Europe, and the most far-reaching in the world – asserting that if a Luxembourgish company launches a spacecraft that obtains water, silver, gold or any other valuable substance on a celestial body, the extracted materials will be considered the company’s legitimate private property by a legitimate sovereign nation.

The presence of royalty at Planetary Resources HQ ahead of the passing of the law was a canny part of the country’s space incursion. The young couple was there to dazzle, charm and lend gravitas to the operation – European aristocracy doesn’t show up in suburban office parks any old day – but the mission’s greater aim was to impress upon Silicon Valley executives, the bemused Luxembourgish press and space scientists around the world that mining asteroids was no longer science fiction. To that end, the royals were accompanied by about 40 of their subjects, all of whom had a role to play in this emerging industry.

Etienne Schneider, Luxembourg’s congenial deputy prime minister, led the delegation. With his easy manner, excellent English and penchant for fancy cars, he cuts a Macronian figure: a product of European socialist political parties, sure, and a social liberal to his core – Schneider is married to a man – but one who will willingly play handmaiden to global capitalist interests should the right opportunity arise. He announced recently that he would be running for the role of prime minister in 2018.

With Schneider came a delegation of scientists, trade attaches, bankers, lawyers and local journalists who switched between German, English, French and the local language, a consonant-heavy mix of Flemish and German with the occasional foreign word thrown in to supplement: “meeting”, “framework”, “brunch”. (“We don’t have all the words,” a member of the delegation told me sheepishly.) In French, the language is known as Luxembourgeois, which pretty much says it all; the duchy’s 500,000 citizens, who have a GDP per capita of $104,000 (£78,800), are the wealthiest in the world after Qatar’s, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The Planetary Resources team took their benefactors on a tour of the labs where its hardware is built. The company isn’t mining asteroids yet, but to benefit from Luxembourg’s concessions, it opened an office in the grand duchy this year. Up close, its Arkyd 6 spacecraft – which is ready for launch – looks just like satellites look in the movies, only smaller. It had multiple flaps and appendages, including an infrared sensor, a star tracker to orient the craft in space and a GPS unit, which works only in the earth’s orbit.

Once the tour was complete, cocktail hour began. Schneider, who owns a vineyard, bounced from one conversation to another, brimming with enthusiasm. To end the visit, Chris Lewicki, the CEO of the company, gave a toast praising Luxembourg’s contributions “to an abundant future for all of humanity”. As a parting gift, he presented her royal highness with a necklace. Instead of jewels, it was studded with tiny fragments of asteroids.

It is reasonable to wonder what, exactly, a marginal European monarchy, egged on by a vivacious gay socialist, was doing telling American entrepreneurs on the cutting edge of innovation that their hamlet-sized state could propel humanity – and capitalism – into deep space. The grand duchy has no national space agency, no launching sites, and only modest research capabilities. It opened its first and only university in 2003 and its military consists of 1,008 troops. Luxembourg does not fit the image of a spacefaring nation; in fact, some have questioned whether it should even be a nation at all.

Yet Luxembourg’s very essence – as a speck in the heart of Europe – allows, even requires, it to partake in such ambitious ventures. Its national motto is “We want to remain what we are” and, over the centuries, this independent spirit has endured occupations by the dukes of Burgundy, the kings of Spain and France, the emperors of Austria and the king of the Netherlands. Today, the state, which only gained full independence in 1867, occupies a curious position in the global imagination: a country with an outsized economic influence that everyone has heard of, but that no one can quite locate on a map.

According to Gabriel Zucman, assistant professor of economics at UC Berkeley, the country is hard to miss in the financial world. “Luxembourg has private banks like Switzerland, it has a big mutual fund industry like Ireland’s, it’s used for corporate tax avoidance like Bermuda or the Netherlands, and it also hosts one of the two international central depositories for securities, so it’s active in euro bonds,” he says. “It’s the tax haven of tax havens, present at all stages of the financial industry.” Tony Norfield, a former banker in the City of London who now writes on global finance, has described Luxembourg as “a paragon of parasitism”.

The story of how a marginal and relatively powerless country has survived world wars, economic crises and cataclysmic technological advances to become a banking and finance powerhouse tells us a lot about how far a small country can go if it devotes itself to anticipating and accommodating the needs of global capital. It’s a contentious business: for every happy shareholder praising Luxembourg’s business-friendly rules and money-saving loopholes, there’s a critic condemning Luxembourg’s willingness to expedite the regulatory “race to the bottom”.

 

Luxembourg City. Photograph: Design Pics Inc/Rex/Shutterstock

Then again, there aren’t many options for a country like Luxembourg besides exploiting its most valuable resource: its national sovereignty. And Luxembourg has done this more and better than any other country in the world. By crafting innovative rules, laws and regulations that only it could (or would) put on offer, Luxembourg has attracted banks, telecommunications companies and consulting firms before any of these industries came to dominate the global economy. Now, by courting asteroid miners before anyone else takes them seriously, it may very well end up doing the same thing for the commercialisation of space.

Luxembourg’s first significant attempts at liberalisation began in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As radio grew popular, the grand duchy decided not to create a publicly funded radio service like its neighbours. Instead, it handed its airwaves to a private, commercial broadcasting company. That company – now known as RTL – became the first ad-supported commercial station to broadcast music, culture and entertainment programmes across Europe in multiple languages. “By handing the rights to a public good to a private company, the state commercialised, for the first time, its sovereign rights in a media context,” notes a 2000 book on Luxembourg’s economic history. The title of the book, published by a Luxembourgish bank, is, tellingly, The Fruits of National Sovereignty.

Then, just three months before the stock market collapsed in 1929, Luxembourg’s parliament passed legislation exempting holding companies – that is, parent firms that exist solely to own parts of or control other companies – from paying corporation taxes. In the first five years after the law’s passing, 700 holding companies were established; in 1960, there were 1,200, and by the turn of the century, some 15,000 “letterbox” firms – one for every 18 citizens – were incorporated in Luxembourg. (In 2006, the European commission found that this exemption violated EU rules, so Luxembourg promptly created a new designation, the “family estate management company”, that complied with the country’s EU treaty obligations while offering many of the same money-saving advantages.)

Throughout the first half of 20th century, Luxembourg’s main industry was steel, but by 1980, that business all but collapsed. Even before its iron ore mines shut down, though, the grand duchy came to represent a discreet but powerful regulatory freedom. A homegrown economic model began to take shape: over the next decades, it would make a name for itself by passing legislation “designed to tempt the world’s hot money,” notes the Tax Justice Network, an anti-tax-evasion advocacy group.

The country’s policymakers also realized that less could really be more. According to Georges Schmit, a lifelong civil servant who has played a big role in shaping the country’s economy since he joined the ministry of the economy in 1981, a key component of Luxembourg’s early success was the fact that it did not have its own central bank. The country had been in a monetary union with Belgium since 1921, and didn’t impose reserve requirements on financial firms. This meant banks could lend or spend the money that they would have had to keep on deposit in other jurisdictions. In Schmit’s words, Luxembourg’s biggest draw “wasn’t our doing; it was the lack of our doing anything”.

Over the years, the government managed to coax over foreign financial institutions, from complex securitisation vehicles to Islamic banks. And on the consumer level, the state’s low taxes drew Europe’s tax-averse petty bourgeoisie. Starting in the 1960s, “Belgian dentists” and “German butchers” – the prevailing stereotypes cited in the international financial press – began taking daytrips to the grand duchy to deposit money to avoid tax at home. The Luxembourgish state even lowered fuel costs to attract the daytrippers, and in 1981, introduced legally binding bank secrecy comparable to Switzerland’s.

In the next century, the dentists would give way to Qatari princes, Chinese princelings and other global members of the global super-rich – or at the very least, their investments. “When a country is small, the rest of the world is big,” says Schmit. “Since independence we needed to find larger economic spaces, be they regional or continental.” By serving as a hub for investors, companies and markets during decades of rapid deregulation and globalisation, Luxembourg turned itself into an indispensable cog in the machinery of international finance.

In 2009, Schmit embarked for California to continue his life’s work: finding new ways for his country to attract money, this time as the general consul and trade envoy in Silicon Valley.

Since he had joined the ministry of the economy to devise new innovation strategies almost three decades earlier, his country seemed to have defied all odds and made virtues of its apparent weaknesses. Its small size had not prevented it from becoming the largest centre for investment funds in the world after the US. Its tiny population had not deterred multinationals and EU institutions such as the court of justice from basing their headquarters there. It had parlayed its status as a neutral country and founding member of many European organisations into sending three of its politicians – more than any other country – to preside over the European commission. And by marketing its easy access to Europe, an educated workforce, bank secrecy (which it voted to ended in 2014 under pressure from other countries and the OECD) and myriad regulatory advantages, the country built an outsized financial sector.

Crucially, Luxembourg never seemed to let an opportunity pass it by. Following its support for commercial radio 50 years prior, the country was the first in Europe to privatise satellite television. In 1985, the grand duchy granted a company called Société Européenne des Satellites (SES) the right to broadcast TV directly to viewers’ homes from a satellite positioned in space. “The big innovation is that this was a privatisation of space,” says Schmit, who served for 17 years on the SES board. “All the other operators were owned by governments through international agreements. This was the first commercial company that set out to use space for broadcasting.” When SES grew profitable, Luxembourg’s bet paid off: the tiny country became home to a telecoms giant, and, as an early investor, received a piece of the pie.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Prince Guillaume and Princess Stéphanie of Luxembourg. Photograph: Didier Baverel/WireImage

In the early 2000s, Luxembourg pounced at the chance to court retailers such as Amazon and Apple with tax incentives. There were the perks the state was happy to publicise – the lowest VAT in Europe, for instance – and there were case-by-case deals with large companies that it kept rather quieter. The companies flocked in, but in the aftermath of the financial crisis, with awareness of wealth inequality growing and austerity measures bruising ordinary Europeans across the continent, Luxembourg could only keep these arrangements under wraps for so long.

In late 2014, the grand duchy went from relative obscurity to complete infamy when the details of these “tax rulings” – versions of which were also carried out by Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands – were disclosed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Known as the “Lux leaks”, the massive trove of leaked data revealed that, from 2002 to 2010, the country’s tax agency approved a series of confidential deals that allowed AIG, Ikea, Deutsche Bank and more than 300 other large firms to save billions of dollars they might have otherwise owed to other countries.

The rulings weren’t necessarily illegal, and they weren’t unique to Luxembourg, but they did cause a scandal, provoking damning reports in the media, protests around Europe and promises for tighter regulation from within the EU. Investigations on both sides of the Atlantic on related matters followed, and lawsuits revealed information on more companies still. (One memorable detail: Amazon’s 28-step tax-restructuring arrangement in Luxembourg was named Project Goldcrest after the country’s national bird.)

Around this time, Zucman, a recent Paris School of Economics PhD who studied with Thomas Piketty, began looking into Luxembourg’s role in international tax avoidance and evasion. His focus was not on the multinationals, but on Luxembourg’s thriving fund industry, which through niche regulations and loopholes allowed investors to avoid certain taxes, too. Luxembourg was a well-known financial centre, but the statistics Zucman dug up while researching his book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, took him aback: in 2015, national data showed $3.5tn worth of shares in Luxembourgish mutual funds were domiciled in the grand duchy, while data from other countries accounted for only two of those trillions. The missing $1.5tn suggested to him that the money – which, he notes, was probably accumulating interest by the day – had no identifiable owner. That meant the countries to whom tax was owed on these ungodly sums were unaware of their existence.

Globally, Zucman calculated almost $8tn in financial wealth – which does not include real estate, luxury goods, gold or other commodities – has been stolen from countries and taxpayers in this fashion thanks to “secrecy jurisdictions” such as Luxembourg, the Virgin Islands or Panama working “in symbiosis”. In his book, Zucman described Luxembourg as an “economic colony of the international financial industry” and challenged its right to its greatest asset: its sovereignty.

“Imagine an ocean platform where the inhabitants would meet during the day to produce and trade, free of any law or any tax, before being teleported in the evening back home to their families on the mainland,” he wrote, referring to the country’s unusual demographics: 47% of Luxembourg’s 500,000 residents are foreign, and 44% of the workforce commutes in across nation-state lines each day for work. “No one would dream of considering such a place, where 100% of its production is sent abroad, as a nation.

“The trade of sovereignty knows no limits,” Zucman continues. “Everything is bought; everything is negotiable. Luxembourg is not the only country that has sold its sovereignty, far from it … but it is the one that has gone the furthest.”

Scrutiny of Luxembourg’s tax practices – from the press, the public and the EU – spread at an awkward time. At the end of 2013, the country elected a new prime minister, Xavier Bettel, whose coalition government of democrats, socialists and greens wanted to distance themselves from the economic policies of former prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker and play by the EU’s rules. “Honestly, I am fed up with being accused of being a defender of a tax haven and a hotbed of sin,” Bettel said in a speech to the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association shortly after taking office. “We need to work on our image … we have much changed in the last years, now it is time to make sure that everybody knows.”

Etienne Schneider, then economy minister, was part of this effort, too. But instead of being applauded for breaking with the past, from the moment they took power the politicians were constantly reminded of their country’s indiscretions. The new government needed to square the Luxembourgish model of economic development with new political realities. It had to keep looking ahead. Most of all, it wanted to change the conversation.

A curious possibility had emerged the previous summer, when Georges Schmit visited Nasa’s Ames research centre in Palo Alto and found himself in conversation with Pete Worden, a former director of the centre. Over coffee, Worden told Schmit about the emerging NewSpace sector and about his dream of finding life on other stars and planets.

Schmit sensed Worden would hit it off with Schneider, so he introduced them. At first, asteroid mining struck Schneider as crazy. “I listened to him and wondered what this guy might have smoked this morning; it sounded like complete science fiction,” he recalled. But the more he listened, the more it made sense. Worden persuaded Schneider that “it’s not if it will happen, it’s when it’ll happen. And the countries who’ll be the pioneers will be the ones that’ll get the most out of it later on.”

From 2014 to 2016, a series of meetings between the Americans and the Luxembourgeois took place. If they resembled April’s trade mission, they will have involved tedious tours of technology companies, self-aggrandising speeches about how space would bring about Earth’s “third industrial revolution”, and many hours stuck in traffic – but also genuine wonder at what might happen if humankind made space their own.

Schneider hung his hopes – and his political future – on the stars. Here was a chance to change the conversation away from taxes and towards space; to establish an industry for Luxembourg’s future; to contribute to science and human knowledge, even. Besides, in such trying times, who didn’t like talking about the wonders of exploring the great unknown? NewSpace companies were certainly eager to work with Luxembourg. They were thirsty for funds and attention, and felt invisible in the US. Luxembourg was a place where they could get meetings with high-level politicians in minutes; where everyone spoke great English; where the bureaucracy was minimal, and the promise of low taxes remained. As one NewSpace executive told me this year: “We just want to work with a government who won’t get in the way.”

The only catch was the ambiguity of space law: companies wanted assurances that the fruits of their extraterrestrial labour would be recognised here on Earth. This is not a given. Unlike on Earth, where a country can grant a company a mining concession, or a person can sell the right to exploit their land, no one has an obvious legal claim to what’s outside our atmosphere. In fact, the Outer Space Treaty, signed by 107 countries at the UN in 1967, explicitly prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies. The question now is: if nobody owns or governs the great unknown, who is to say who gets to own a little piece of it?

Since the emergence of the NewSpace sector, individual countries have attempted to lend some clarity to eager entrepreneurs, reasoning that the prospect of private property in space will encourage hard work and innovation. The American Space Act, passed in 2015, is the first “finders, keepers” law that recognises ownership of space resources, but it only does so for companies owned by US citizens.

In October 2015, Luxembourg commissioned a study on whether it could fill that legal void. The report, completed in 2016, noted that “while legal uncertainty remains, under the current legal and regulatory framework, space mining activities are (at least) not prohibited” and concluded that Luxembourg should pass legislation that gives miners the right to keep the extraterrestrial bounty they extract.

Such a law was drafted shortly after the study’s completion, and on 1 August 2017, it went into effect. Luxembourg’s bill does not discriminate by nationality, or even by the location of a company’s headquarters. In fact, the law indicates the country’s willingness to serve as a sort of flag of convenience for spacecrafts, allowing them to play by one country’s futuristic rules in the absence of universal, binding agreements. Rick Tumlinson, of Deep Space Industries, another space exploration company in which Luxembourg has invested, told me that there was value in Luxembourg’s law because it saw no citizens and no borders: just one blue planet from high above.

Six weeks after the trade mission in California, I disembarked from a tiny plane on the runway of Luxembourg City’s airport in a melee of grey suits and black carry-on roller bags. I walked past large wealth-management and equity-fund advertisements into the car park, where I caught the bus into the city centre, passing dozens of huge new building projects, a tramline under construction and two enormous yellow towers that, in the afternoon light, resembled twin gold bars reaching for the sky.

Luxembourg City. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Within an hour, I was sitting at a table outside a dive bar opposite the old city’s bathhouse with Lars Schmitz, 29, and Gabrielle Taillefert, 21, two members of a local theatre and art collective called Richtung22 (Direction22). Over the past few years, the group has staged a series of performances lampooning their country’s mercenary modus operandi. Instead of writing their own scripts from scratch, the collective makes dramatic collages almost entirely out of primary documents: laws, press releases, speeches, transcripts from parliament, promotional videos and so on.

One of Richtung22’s early works satirised Luxembourg’s nation branding committee, which was set up in March 2013 to promote the country abroad. The play, which was financed in part by the culture ministry, was entitled Lëtzebuerg, du hannerhältegt Stéck Schäiss (Luxembourg, Vicious Pile of Shit). Since then, Schmitz says, state funds for Richtung22’s work have dried up.

In his spare time, Schmitz, who is slight of build with cropped blonde hair, works on antifascist and anti-capitalist organising. He has the droll resignation of a leftwing activist operating in a country whose politics are so abstract and so global that grassroots resistance must necessarily come in the form of farce. Richtung22’s latest play savages the country’s efforts to attract the NewSpace industry. Its title is Luxembourg’s Private Space Explorevolutionary Superfancy Asteroid Tailoring. Schmitz sees space mining as a high-tech spin on an age-old scam: selling sovereignty. “The country’s business model is hidden,” he said. “It’s making laws that companies want, and taking a risk on those companies. But the government uses it to say ‘This is how modern we are! This is something new!”

Zucman shares Schmitz’s view. “Adapting this strategy to the business of space conquest is what being an offshore financial centre means,” he says. “It’s not diversification. It’s just extending the logic of being a tax haven to new area.”

On stage, the entire space enterprise is portrayed as a cynical, money-grubbing, reputation-redeeming debacle dictated by private-sector interests. “We feel bad that our country does this to the world, and no one else here talks about this stuff,” Schmitz told me. He ran off a dozen or so Luxembourgish transgressions, including but not limited to aiding and abetting tax evasion and weaseling its way out of EU banking regulations. In such a small country, it’s hard to be so outspoken against the national interest. “People think we’re traitors,” he said.

Was there anything good about his country, I asked. “It’s beautiful,” Schmitz conceded. He was right: Luxembourg is beautiful, and was particularly charming on that balmy May evening. The city rests on two levels; the smaller “low” city’s quaint little streets and sidewalk cafes skim the river, while the “high” city centre is home to a lively main drag with pricey boutiques, fancy chocolate shops and chains such as H&M. Cafes advertise crémant – a local bubbly wine – and local dishes that borrow their richness from the French and their stodginess from the Germans.

The next day, I went to meet Marc Baum, an MP from the democratic socialist party déi Lénk (the Left). He handed me a policy paper his party published criticising Schneider’s space-mining proposal: they believe his law is inconsistent with Luxembourg’s outer-space treaty obligations, that it creates opportunities for billionaires to further enrich themselves and could be harmful to the environment. Even worse, it enshrines the notion of “competition instead of cooperation” between states. “It’s infinite capitalism!” Baum exclaimed over a cold beer on a terrace.

Baum, as it happened, is an actor, too. When we met, he was preparing to perform Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, an absurdist play about a town whose protagonists speak exclusively in cliches and end up turning into rhinos on account of their unquestioning conformity. Over the course of the drama, the townspeople justify their decision to “go rhino” by declaring that “humanism is dead, those who follow it are just old sentimentalists”. The play’s sole hero, Berenger, resists succumbing to “rhinoceritis”, but fails to save anyone else: he ends up being the only person in the whole town who does not grow a horn. The analogy between that and Baum’s own predicament seems a little on the nose. He was one of just two politicians who voted against the space law in July.

In June, about a month before his signature legislation was passed by the parliament, Schneider and some of his associates flew to New York for yet another sales pitch – this time, for the benefit of venture capitalists on the east coast.

His speech focused on the financial aspects of Luxembourg’s space race, and the country’s intention to get in on the ground floor of commercial space exploration. “Under the US Space Act, your capital has to be majority US capital,” he said, referring to US willingness to recognise property rights in space for its citizens. “We don’t really care where the money comes from in our country, as long as the money is clean.”

On Schneider’s telling, Luxembourg could do for the space-resource trade what it had done for the eurodollar market, international holding companies and multinationals: provide a safe, reliable base where they could operate in tandem with a keen and cooperative – or, by his detractors’ assessment, pliable and sycophantic – state. Schneider announced that after passing its law, Luxembourg would create its own space agency. This would not be a copy of Nasa, but would instead “focus only on commercial space resources”. He told the audience that Luxembourg would solicit private funding to capitalise NewSpace companies, and seek the advice of venture capitalists to decide what companies to invest in. If asteroid mining does, in fact, take off, Luxembourg will be what Schneider’s friends in Silicon Valley might call an “early adopter”.

It’s a gamble, for sure. But it’s difficult to imagine where Luxembourg would be had it not deployed this ingenious development strategy continuously over the past century. The global economy offers few alternatives than to serve it, and rewards its enablers richly. Perhaps a mercenary spirit is what it takes to succeed as a small country in the world – and that “we want to remain what we are” is just Luxembourgeois for the old French saying: plus ça change.

Public luxury for all or private luxury for some: this is the choice we face

George Monbiot in The Guardian


Imagine designing one of our great cities from scratch. You would quickly discover that there is enough physical space for magnificent parks, playing fields, public swimming pools, urban nature reserves and allotments sufficient to meet the needs of everyone. Alternatively, you could designate the same space to a small proportion of its people – the richest citizens – who can afford large gardens, perhaps with their own swimming pools. The only way of securing space for both is to allow the suburbs to sprawl until the city becomes dysfunctional: impossible to supply with efficient services, lacking a sense of civic cohesion, and permanently snarled in traffic: Los Angeles for all.

Imagine designing a long-distance transport system for a nation that did not possess one. You’d find that there is plenty of room for everyone to travel swiftly and efficiently, in trains and luxury buses (an intercity bus can carry as many people as a mile of car traffic). But to supply the same mobility with private cars requires a prodigious use of land, concrete, metal and fuel. It can be done, but only at the cost of climate change, air pollution, the destruction of wonderful places and an assault on tranquillity, neighbourhood and community life.

This conflict is repeated in financial terms. In order that the very rich can pay less tax, public playgrounds are allowed to fall apart. The beneficiaries might use the extra money to build private play barns for their children. Public toilets are closed so that some people can install gold-plated taps in their bathrooms. Public swimming pools are put on restricted hours so that the very rich can turn up the thermostats in their private pools. Public galleries need to charge for entry so that billionaires can expand their own art collections. Wealth that could be shared and enjoyed by all is sequestered by a few.


Public luxury for all, or private luxury for some: this is the choice we face at all times – especially at this election

It is impossible to deliver a magnificent life for everyone by securing private space through private spending. Attempts to do so are highly inefficient, producing ridiculous levels of redundancy and replication. Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination. The expansion of public wealth creates more space for everyone; the expansion of private wealth reduces it, eventually damaging most people’s quality of life.

  ‘Look at roads, in which individual people, each encased in a tonne of metal, each taking up (at 70mph) 90 metres of lane, travel in parallel to the same destination.’ Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images


This is a global issue, as well as a national one. According to the Global Footprint Network, every person in the UK uses the equivalent of 5 hectares of land and sea through the food we eat, the products we use and the carbon we release, which has to be absorbed somewhere if it is not to accelerate global warming. Yet the UK’s “biocapacity” (our ability to absorb these impacts) is a little over 1 hectare per person. Our extravagance is a cost that others must bear.

Public luxury available to all, or private luxury available to some: this is the choice we face at all times, but especially at this election. It is the conflict between these two visions that defines – or should define – our political options. There is a significant difference between Labour and the Conservatives in this respect, but I wish it were stronger.

Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund, will reinvest in public galleries and museums. It will defend and expand our libraries, youth centres, football grounds, railways and local bus services. Unlike the Conservative manifesto, which is almost silent on the issue, Labour’s platform offers a reasonable list of protections to the living world.

But it also promises to “continue to upgrade our highways” (shortly after vowing to “encourage and enable people to get out of their cars”) and to provide new airport capacity. The conflicts are not acknowledged. Progress in the 21st century should be measured less by the new infrastructure you build than by the damaging infrastructure you retire.

Labour also misses a wonderful opportunity in its plans to expand affordable housing, to promote accommodation that both revives community and makes better use of space. In co-housing developments, people own or rent their own homes but share the rest of the land. Rather than chopping the available space into coffin-sized gardens in which a child cannot perform a cartwheel without hitting the fence, the children have room to run around together while the adults have space to garden and talk. Communal laundries release living space in people’s homes. Carpools reduce the need for parking. Isolation gives way to conviviality.

More importantly, and less surprisingly, the Labour manifesto fails to acknowledge the left’s great conundrum: the environmental damage caused by efforts to create jobs through economic growth. Like the Conservatives, like almost every party everywhere (the Greens are a notable exception), Labour’s economic vision is based on the presumption that there are no limits. Both conservative and social democratic parties see the world as a magic pudding that can never be exhausted. They build their economic programmes on a fairytale.

Kelvingrove Art gallery in Glasgow. ‘Labour, through its proposed cultural capital fund, will reinvest in public galleries and museums.’ Photograph: VisitBritain/Britain on View/Getty Images

And they have another unexamined premise in common: that money legitimately buys you the power to take what you want from the world. There is an almost universal assumption in politics that you have the right to help yourself to as much of the global commons (atmosphere, soil, water, fish) as you can afford, though this reduces what is left for other people to share. You have the right to occupy as much physical space as your money can buy, regardless of the restrictions this imposes on others.

Where does this licence arise? Even if private wealth were obtained through the exercise of virtue (an unlikely proposition at the best of times) or through enterprise and hard work (ever less probable, in this new age of inheritance and rent), it is hard to discern the just principle that translates this money into permission to acquire the space and resources on which other people depend for a decent quality of life. When and by whom was this permission granted? How does it correspond to our notion of equal rights, or our concept of democracy, which is based on an equal power to decide?

You will not find these questions asked in this election or in any other. They are fudged by recourse to the magical belief that there is enough space and resources for everyone to do as they wish, that infinite growth ensures that no one – when the parties’ economic promises are fulfilled – will need to intrude on the interests of others. Yet, on this finite planet, they are the questions that will determine not only the quality of our lives but our security and, eventually, our survival. The primary task of all far-sighted politicians should be to decide first how much we can use, then how it can best be shared.

When the questions that count above all others are beyond the scope of politics, when almost everyone in public life is either too blinkered or too frightened to answer them, when – even in this great, defining election, which at last offers people meaningful political choice – neither large party can even name them, you begin to recognise how much trouble we are in.

The space between two balls is where cricket is really played

Minding the gap

by MARTIN CROWE in Cricinfo

Shane Warne could clear his mind of an unsuccessful previous ball to attack afresh with the next © Getty Images



The gap. This is the space between thoughts, between breaths, between fielders, between balls. They say to experience the gap wholly brings ultimate joy in what we do. In the gap there is nothing, and it's that nothing space in which lies the secret to our purpose.

As I contemplate the meaning of much my life, a life I now truly treasure, with dangers lurking, it is in this moment of nothing that I feel at peace. Awareness has taught me that previously I was always too quick to fill the gap with judgemental, premeditated masking and conditioning.

Batting is essentially about scoring runs, by hitting the ball instinctively and late, finding a gap in the field, whether it be over or through the field. Barry Richards, the great South African player, came to Auckland when I was 12 and remarked to a small group that it was vital to look at the gaps in the field, not the fielders in the field. That never left me and remains one of the greatest pieces of advice I ever received.

However, I often dismissed myself with predetermination to hit the ball into those vacant areas. I was constantly filling the gap in my mind with a busy traffic of thoughts; of this, that and anything else that randomly joined the gridlock building in my mind.

The mind needs constant clearing out of past and future concerns in order to function effectively, so by positively affirming that gaps must be found instinctively, the mind invariably seeks that wisdom automatically, subconsciously. This is when cricket is played best.

The gap between balls, that 30-second time span between when the last ball became dead and the next ball becomes live, is arguably the most important period in a batsman's innings.

I learnt in my third year playing for New Zealand that if I properly appreciated the gap between balls it would aid my desire to compile a long innings, especially under pressure in Tests or under duress in a limited-overs chase. Up until then I was a classic example of playing sublime innings of 30 or 40 before succumbing to an easily worn-down mind-body battery.

On my first tour of Australia in 1985, I began listening to some senior players and coaches talk about mind power. They spoke to me about my concentration routine, in particular. They emphasised that my innings were running out of energy too quickly, and suggested I switch off after the ball was dead and remain non-judgemental in the time before the next ball. That by doing so I would conserve a certain amount of energy, which could be used later.

The first time I tried it, in a tour match, I returned fresh to the dressing room after more than six hours in the hot sun, unbeaten on 242 at Adelaide Oval. The next innings brought 188, at the Gabba in the first Test of the series.

Now the wisdom was automatically written into my intellectual software. Awareness of the gap between balls didn't guarantee anything, but it gave me a better chance, once in, to make a big score, to convert starts and fifties into three-figure scores.

Cricket is such a complicated game that when the mind quickens, the mistakes invariably flood in. Great captains have the poise, the ability, to create a gap between thoughts so that the information they seek can come to them at the right moment.

There is no panic or indecision. There is none of this chasing-the-ball mentality. Instead there is a space they fall into that gives them the accurate assessment they need, and the decision comes accordingly. Michael Clarke has this in abundance, Mike Brearley and Ian Chappell had it, as did Mark Taylor in his prime.

Great batsmen have it too. Garry Sobers, Don Bradman and Brian Lara, to name a few, had the ability to clear the mind easily, enjoying the gaps between balls, and ever more so were focused on the gaps they found in the field.

The spin bowler who can access this gap mentality despite a swiftly completed over when he is being slogged all over is the treasured one.

Shane Warne had this ability to be in the present. At the top of his mark he could slow down the game if he chose. Even if the odds were stacked against him, he would clear the negative, letting go of the previous ball, and visualising the outcome of the next one, providing another piece to the puzzle, building his attack up, mounting more pressure again. By not letting anything before or after affect the creativity he needed to access for each ball, he was able to instinctively find the insights he needed.

So when we consider how important it is to have a clear-minded approach in cricket, to utilise the space between balls bowled or faced, between fielders' positions, we can appreciate that it is the gap we truly seek, mentally and strategically, to find the answers to the many questions we are confronted with.

If we are to widen that out to life itself, we can again begin to find that our peace and our creativity lie in the moments between thoughts and actions. When we can sit or stand still, even for 20 seconds, when we can hold off the urges to judge, or the old habit to overthink, then we really begin to open ourselves up to the truth, for the truth is in the present, not the past or future.

Look at any player between balls and study how he spends that time from when the ball is dead and before the next - whether it be batting, bowling or fielding - and try to sense the poise he has. Is the pressure building, is it neutral, or is it low-key?

Unless the play is boringly slow with the potential to kill the spectacle, it is a fascinating exercise to watch players on centre stage while the ball is dead. What is everybody contemplating? Cricket, to me, offers a glimpse of the way we live our lives, and this gap in play, before the next ball is bowled, holds the most intrigue of all.

That's why I adore Test cricket. There are so many more interesting gaps in play to appreciate. Tests are won and lost in these 30-second pockets.

If we want to solve the housing crisis, we must answer these three questions

Paul Mason in The Guardian

As housing charity Shelter turns 50, the country is still plagued by overcrowding, rogue landlords, insecure tenancies and homelessness. How do we even begin to make things better?



Boys from the City Of London school on a charity walk in aid of Shelter from Blackfriars, London, to Windsor, Berkshire, on 26 March 1969. Photograph: Len Trievnor/Getty Images


Its official name was Navigation Street, and a glance at a 19th century map suggests its origin: an isolated row of terraced houses leading down to the canal that runs through the middle of my hometown.

Canals were originally called “navigations” and the people who dug them “navvies”. This term – still in use in the 1960s – was code for poor, itinerant, Irish manual workers. So we called it “Navvy Street”: it was where the poorest people in the town lived and probably served that function from when it was built to when it was knocked down and turned into a “close”.

Navigation Street was the place I thought of when the housing charity Shelter reissued documentary photographs from the 1960s to mark its 50th anniversary. If you flick through Nick Hedges’ photos now, you could be forgiven for thinking they depict some kind of uniform, northern industrial bleakness at of the time. But you’d be wrong.



Shelter and the slums: capturing bleak Britain 50 years ago



The overcrowding, dirt and abject poverty in those images shocked people because they were exceptional. Two decades of post-war social housebuilding, plus a pro-active welfare state, had done a lot to suppress poverty. Places like Navigation Street were rare by the late sixties.

Shelter was born because people realised dwindling number of classic slum streets were not the only problem: there was widespread hidden homelessness expressed through overcrowding. The private rented sector was utterly insecure and housing costs were devouring the incomes of the poor.

Skip forward 50 years and we too have rising homelessness – 54,000 families in England last year, up 36% since the financial crisis began. Housing charities record rising overcrowding, precarious tenancies, predatory landlords and unaffordable rents. The difference is it’s not only the poor who suffer.

The shared student house has been reincarnated as the shared young professional’s house, with some even forced to share rooms. According to Crisis, there are 3.5m households containing a “concealed” adult or couple in England.

Meanwhile apartments too small to live in are being built across southern England: their occupants will have jobs once considered middle class. Precarious tenancies, outlawed during the housing reform movement of the 1960s, have created a “complain and you’re out” culture.

If you wanted to photograph the modern housing problem you’d go to the coffee shops where young people perch over laptops, late into the night, rather than endure their overcrowded flat. You would photograph the sofa-surfers; the migrants forced to live in converted garages; the families packing their bags as rent hikes and benefit cuts in the private rented sector force them to move to the periphery of towns and cities, or throw themselves at the local council for help.

The root of this problem is not one of policy – though the row over social housing and housing supply will probably shape this parliament – the deeper problem is the financialisation of home ownership.

At one point, rising home ownership solved many of the problems identified the 1960s. The predictably steady rise in house prices over time, like predictable inflation, created an escalator for the working class. If you combined that with vigorous social housebuilding, as practised by both Labour and Conservative councils in the 1970s, you created affordability at both ends of the scale.

If you then dramatically slash the supply of social housing, through right-to-buy and reduced council building, you create a permanent imbalance that turns home ownership into a form of asset investment.



‘Pay to stay’ trap will force working families out of council homes



What you get then is boom and bust. And the only way to cure the bust is for the government to greet every collapse in market prices with effective state subsidies for home ownership. This, in turn, induces a speculative frenzy of one way bets – on development, on buy to let, on off-plan investment buying from abroad.

To economists who study financial frenzy, the British housing market has followed the classic curve: the certainty of rising prices and short supply draws more and more people into the market, knowing a crash cannot wipe them out – because when confronted with falling house prices, governments have used taxpayers’ money and micromanagement of the banks to halt a spiral of repossessions and falling prices.

We don’t know what Britain would look like if the same levels of explicit subsidy and implicit preference had been pumped into the social rented sector. All we know is that the current situation is not tenable.

But we can ask ourselves the following questions:

First: how much space are people entitled to live in? The market sets no limits; even such formal rules as they still exist (they are being weakened) are flouted by the young salariat.

Second: what is the optimal balance between the private, social and state-owned rented housing and the owner-occupied sector? This cannot be hard to fathom since many cities in the 1980s and early 1990s achieved housing markets that “cleared” in economic terms: in Leicester in the 1980s I had no problem finding a secure private tenancy; no problem getting the council to hound my landlord to maintain it properly; very little problem moving from there to a housing association flat; very little problem transferring, as a key worker, from there to a council flat in London. Yes, London.

Third, what do we mean by “affordable”– when it comes to either rents or prices on state-specified newbuild homes? Under both Labour, Coalition and the Conservatives the concept of affordability has become delinked from incomes and attached to a percentage of the market rate. The same state that decided nobody should be repossessed during the 2008-11 housing slump could decide that nobody has to pay more than a fixed percentage of their incomes on housing costs.

Maybe we need to start with principles: that everyone has a right to a home; that every person has a right to a minimum amount of space in that home; and that those who claim the right to own houses nobody lives in should pay a hefty, disincentivising penalty.

Yes, that’s an infringement of the market – but housing in Britain has never been a free market: it is being created and re-created through regulation and deregulation – on benefits, on affordability, on building standards, on right to buy. The point is to shape the market towards smart outcomes.

India’s Mars mission could be a giant leap

Critics say India has too much poverty for such an endeavour. But space exploration should not be the preserve of the rich west

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 24 September 2014 20.44 BST

Staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft successfully entered the Mars orbit on Wednesday. Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

After a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles, an Indian satellite has arrived in orbit around Mars. To have done so on an economy ticket – at $74m “the cheapest interplanetary mission ever to be undertaken by the world”, according to the mission’s leader – only adds to the significance of the event.

India’s space agency – the Indian Space Research Organisation – is a late entrant to the space race, and the success of Mangalyaan (“Mars craft” in Hindi) makes the country an Asian leader in space exploration, if not yet a global one. The mission has been received with delight on India’s social media and across its political spectrum, where “national pride” is the watchword.

To reach a distant world, where others have failed, might have had special significance for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, as he finally heads off to the United States for an official visit, having been denied a visa in the past because of doubts over his role in the 2002 Gujarat bloodshed. Modi and his ministers have been quick to assert collective pride in Mangalyaan as part of their vision of a globally ascendant India, ignoring the fact that the mission was actually fostered by their predecessors.

But questions are being asked. The Economist, not a known advocate of the poor or of government spending on social welfare, demanded to know – not only of India but of Sri Lanka, Belarus, Bolivia and Nigeria, all “minnows” with fledgling space aspirations: “How can poor countries afford space programmes?” Cut aid to such over-reaching parvenus, some in Britain have suggested. The criticism seems partly directed at the fact that the mission was not privately funded, as research in the west increasingly is; state money was channelled towards it without any marketable product emerging.

But inquiry and exploration are not the prerogative of advanced capitalist western nations – with the rest of the world eternally condemned to be a footnote in the history of science, even as its historical contributions to knowledge are forgotten. A country, however “largely third world” its “reality”, as one peevish British economist put it, does not have to circumscribe its sphere of achievement to feeding its people, important as that is. Indeed, it can be argued that in a better world the search for knowledge and the quest for social justice would be necessarily intertwined. As the Economist concedes, India’s weather satellites helped reduce the number of deaths during cyclone Phailin last year.

The real problem, of course, is that in economies that are in addition seeking to win the global capitalist growth race, such symbiosis between people and science is increasingly rare. It’s what the progressive economist Jean Drèze may have had in mind when he described the Mars mission controversially as a flag-waving “delusional dream” – when public health and energy needs ought to be met first. Recent floods in Kashmir speak of failures, technological and political, to anticipate and respond to natural disasters. Indeed, placing industrial development over ecological interests often causes such disasters in the first place.

Serious questions remain about whether science and technology – and not just in poorer countries – can have a greater good in mind when the bottom line is profit. The space race between the US and the Soviet Union was not an affordable luxury undertaken for the sake of knowledge, but intrinsically tied to the military-industrial complex. Whatever the intellectual commitments of India’s space scientists, there’s no doubt that the language of national “heroism” and technological “might”, which underpins a dangerous religiously inflected military and nuclear standoff in the region, afflicts much of the praise poured on the Mars mission’s success.

Perhaps national science and technology policy can be fully prised away from corporate and defence industry interests, and placed firmly in the province of economic justice and social progress. But the current administration’s record is not encouraging: Indian ministers have flouted scientific advice by fast-tracking environmental clearances to corporations including mining firms.

Yet India is fortunate in having a long and diverse history of campaigning science movements that have sought to draw both on indigenous knowledge traditions and direct modern scientific research towards progress in health, literacy, environment, nutrition and sanitation. The best way for India to commemorate the success of Mangalyaan would be to reopen a national debate about how science and technology can best be harnessed in the widest interests of its people.

Why outer space really is the final frontier for capitalism

The private sector is far more timid than it appears, so if we want to mine the untold riches of the moon, international socialism must step in

• 
• • Richard Seymour
  • theguardian.com, Friday 20 December 2013 11.45 GMT

'The idea that someone would finally think to scan below the moon’s surface for precious minerals is rather moving.' Photograph: Alamy

Such is the state of advanced capitalism: we can't pay our bills, but China's on the moon. In fairness, the Chinese government is doing humanity a favour.

The race to populate space has been staggeringly slow, and the idea that someone would finally think to scan below the moon's surface for precious minerals is rather moving. For so long, the moon had appeared to us as merely a dull, lifeless wodge of dust and space-shit. To think of it as being radiantly packed with precious minerals is actually quite romantic. One can imagine poems being written about it.

It gets better. Apparently, the substance sought is helium-3, an isotope of the element that could potentially replace oil and gas as our energy generators. Not only is the moon redeemed, but the earth is saved.

It takes a lot to make this cynic weep, but I'm seriously waxing lachrymose now.

The question is, why haven't the moon's resources been thoroughly plundered by now? Why hasn't it provided us with the energy necessary to colonise the rest of space? I'll tell you why: it's because capitalism is weak and timid.

In principle, it shouldn't be this way. Capitalism, said Rosa Luxemburg, always needs a periphery. There needs to be a non-capitalist outside to appropriate – new land, new resources, to provide profitable investment opportunities. Whether it takes the form of colonisation, privatising public goods, turfing peasants off their lands or creating "intellectual property", there is a need to accumulate beyond the existing realm of capitalist property relations.

The geographer David Harvey points out that the world capitalist system needs to find $1.5tn profitable investment opportunities today in order to keep growing at its historical average of 3% a year. In 20 years' time, it will need to find $3tn.

The effects of this are complex. On the one hand, such production places a tremendous burden on the planet and risks making large parts of it uninhabitable and extinguishing a great deal of life. Further, this production both exploits workers and becomes imbricated with all manner of brutality – consider the relationship between coltan production and war in the Congo. On the other hand, well: tablets, smartphones, DVD players, advanced sex toys that do something other than just buzz, cars that don't smell like foot disease, an abundance of stuff that makes life easier and more interesting.

The problem with capitalism, though, is that it's actually staggeringly timid in some respects. For all that the Communist Manifesto breathlessly extolled the revolutionary spirit of capital – "constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions … all that is solid melts into air" – businesses are really quite conservative. They aren't going to invest unless they're reasonably sure of a profit, even if the result is sluggish growth and flatlining innovation.

This is why, as Mariana Mazzucato points out, it falls to states to undertake the risky investments that pay off in the technology that makes, for example, iPhones possible. Of course, capitalist states do a great deal else to overcome the inertia of the system, from war to violent enclosures. It doesn't do to idealise the state. The point here is that, if it were left to private sector enterprise, we would never have seen a human foot touch down on the moon's surface.

Of course, under capitalism the state's ability to explore the unknown is limited by its priority of making things work for business, or developing a greater war machine. States don't need an immediate return on investment, but if they're to justify taxing profits, they need to demonstrate some sort of plausible return. Hence, there's always more money for military arsenals than spaceships. We could be holidaying on Mars, but some people would rather bomb Afghanistan. Put that on a placard.

However, as Leigh Phillips explains, even the limited exploration of space thus far has produced unexpected bounties for the Earth-bound: cooling suits used by nuclear reactor technicians, dialysis technology, running shoes, water purification, housing insulation, food preservation, fire retardants and so on. And even if it didn't provide all these spin-offs, human curiosity is an end in itself. So what if we don't find the aliens who have been kidnapping drunk rednecks and plumbing their lower intestines? We'll find precious mineral ore on an asteroid, and that's more than enough.

So, this is what we need. First, international socialism. And to paraphrase Lenin, socialism = soviet power + interstellar travel. Don't ask me how we get that, we just need it as a precondition for everything else. Second, an international space exploration programme, funded with the express purpose of adding to the sum of stuff and human knowledge. Third, a popular space tourism programme. We have to be careful with this. The last thing anyone wants to see is a conga line of pot-bellied fortysomethings drinking Red Stripe on Jupiter. But hopefully socialism will elevate the culture. Finally, a publicly funded cryogenics programme now for everyone who wants to live to see this day.

Is that really too much to ask?

An Alternative view on Modi's Gujarat

Illustration by Sorit            Opportunity Costs Of A Leader             The Gujarat model dispossessed and polarised millions, and scotched debate. Would India take it to heart? Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan

I moved to Delhi some three weeks ago after spending over three decades of my life in
Ahmedabad, prepared to be quizzed about the impending elections in Gujarat and whether the present government is likely to return to power for the third consecutive term; hear praise for peace returning to Gujarat after the violence of 2002, since no incidents of violence have taken place since then; and hear about Gujarat’s astonishing economic development and the prospect of the state’s leadership moving from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. I get all that.

But I also wonder if the people who ask me these questions realise that the Gujarat development model is inextricably linked with a certain set of ideologies, ambitions and aspirations which facilitate and sustain it?

In some ways, Gujarat is a microcosm of India. It has a great diversity of religions, castes and communities. The percentage of Muslim minorities in the state is just slightly lower than the national average. Dalits and adivasis together form about a fifth of Gujarati society, just as in the rest of India. (However, the Dalit-adivasi ratio is quite different). And all these communities, along with fisherfolk, pastoralists and the landless poor, have paid the price for helping realise the economic dreams of the state’s expanding, ambitious middle classes. Common property resources—coastal land, rivers and pastoral lands in rural areas—have been systematically taken over to make way for special economic zones and large industrial and infrastructure projects. Lakes and riverfronts have been gated and redeveloped as entertainment zones and real estate for the urban elite, dispossessing the poor, marginalised and the voiceless.

What is the worldview that underpins the shaping of such a socio-economic order? I am neither a political analyst nor a sociologist, just a teacher of design and I speak from direct experience. This is a development model, it’s plain to see, whose motive force is the ambition of the Gujarati middle class, made possible through large-scale dispossession and sustained only by denying dissent.

Anyone raising issues of equity, justice or sustainability associated with such a model of development is likely to be branded antediluvian at best and ‘outsider’, anti-Gujarat and pseudo-secularist at worst. Either way, dissenting views would find no space in the local media or in public discourse.
Since the 1980s, episodes of caste and communal violence have sharpened spatial segregation of communities, resulting in Muslim and Dalit ghettoes and upper-caste enclaves and declining social interaction. Muslims increasingly send their children to schools run by their community in their own localities. Within the municipal school system, they prefer the Urdu medium of instruction, while Gujarati medium schools are attended overwhelmingly by Dalit children. Schools are spaces for shared childhoods leading to adult bonds of friendship and understanding within accepted traditional social boundaries, but such spaces are no longer available. So it’s not Muslims and Dalits who are victims of social polarisation, but Gujarati society as a whole.

Anyone raising issues of equity or justice vis-a-vis the Gujarat model of development would be branded antediluvian at best, and anti-Gujarat ‘outsiders’ at worst.

After three decades of caste and communal violence, and almost fifteen years of the present political regime, we now have a generation of young Gujarati adults who know no other social order, no other way of being. The lack of access to diverse views through the media or public debate breeds intolerant parochialism and uncritical acceptance of the mirage of miraculous growth-rate figures. Perhaps, the middle class elsewhere is no different in its aspirations for a Gujarat style of development. But they might like to take a moment to consider the kind of social order that will inevitably accompany it and the political sanction it will receive. Would that be their idea of India? Significantly, cases related to the murder of an activist protesting against illegal mining in south-western Gujarat (he was murdered right outside the Gujarat High Court) and the blocking of community access to a river by a prominent industrial house are now before the Supreme Court. It is worth remembering that in the thousands of cases related to the 2002 riots that were closed in local courts, the process of bringing the perpetrators of communal carnage to justice had restarted only on the intervention of the SC. What will happen to democratic institutions of checks and balances if a Gujarati worldview were to be established nationally is anyone’s guess.

As a university teacher I can attest, as will other colleagues in design, architecture and management institutes in Ahmedabad, how difficult it is to even discuss ideas like secularism or social justice in the classroom, or to debate whether or not the state’s development model is socially and economically sustainable, or the human costs involved. Yet, I remain optimistic, happy with small signs that there is some intuitive goodness, even courage, in young people that shines through my experiences with students. This year, Id was celebrated at roughly the same time as the festival of Rakshabandhan. In a classroom assignment, students were asked to observe the social geography of the old parts of Ahmedabad. One student, a young woman, reported her observations of a side-lane flanked on one side by a Muslim mohalla and on the other by a Jain pol. Id decorations lined the mohalla-side of the road and rakhis were displayed for sale on the opposite side. She said she was really happy to see this, that the two communities could celebrate their festivals side by side. In another classroom project, architecture students were asked to visualise designs for the disputed Ramjanmabhoomi site, in accordance with the Allahabad High Court ruling. Each student in the class offered designs which, while complying with the ruling, brought the irreconcilable communities together, using the space creatively to resolve the differences.

While young people often echo the prejudice and parochialism that surrounds them, when given a chance to experience reality freely and to relate in a human way, they respond positively. Left to themselves, they can intuitively feel the rich web of their environment and respond humanely. But these impulses need nurturing, they need space to breathe and expand and be expressed. In Gujarat, and also in the rest of India.

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(Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan teaches at the School of Design, Ambedkar University, Delhi, and co-authored Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity, Penguin 2011)