While the Year of Ten Thousand Memos is most famous for the commotion caused by the “chaotic trio” of the Legal Committee, Military Committee, and Esoteric and Religious Group Committee, the committee that would have the greatest long term impact on the Revolution was undoubtedly the Monetary Committee. This is true in part because the actions of the Monetary Committee would accidentally start the collapse of the Imperial economy, although this would only become a clear effect after the committee had been disbanded. Looking at the committee with a wide view of the Revolution however, the truly most important result was the creation of the Oxalite and Khalasite factions which the final stages of the Revolution would revolve around. They would not yet become all encompassing as they would within a few years, but the dispute that began over monetary policy would shift and expand and contort in ways no contemporary observers could have expected until it ate the Revolution itself.
The issue that every single delegate on the Committee agreed needed to be solved was the centralization of the currency. There was not a dissenting voice against the policy, at least in theory, there should be on galactic Imperial currency. At this point in history, currency in the Empire was hyper localized. Each planet issued its own currency, in its own denominations, on its own rules. This led, as was common in the Empire, to massive differences between planets. While most planets used an exclusively electronic currency, there were still a few (especially on those planets least connected to the rest of the Empire) that used mostly physical currency. The rules they had for creating new money were also disparate. In general, the richer planets used a fiat system monitored and controlled by an independent and central authority while the poorer planets used a system based on standardizing a scarce resource that existed on the planet.
In order to make trade across the Empire possible, there was a pan-Imperial currency: the Imperial credit. However, it was limited. The Imperial credit was exclusively allowed to be used for interplanetary commerce and currency conversions, but nothing else. Even large space construction projects had to be funded by a nearby planet, not with the Imperial credit or by the Imperial government. This system was so obviously inefficient that it was by unanimous agreement that the Monetary Committee voted in favor of “a more centralized currency.”
The first few months of the committee functioned essentially as I described the Administrative Committee. Diligent delegates poured over monetary codes from across the galaxy, interviewed central bankers and industrialists and Imperial bureaucrats, and wrote policy that they hoped would make the Imperial currency system more just. The relationships in these first months were more complex and faction ridden than the Administrative Committee, but it was nothing like the Chaotic Trio. I will not give a full account of these factions and their debates in this book, because they ultimately are not relevant to the narrative. If readers are interested, Thurston Hyg’s monograph “Monetary Policy in the Early Imperial Revolution, 11247-11250” contains a very detailed account of it.
The truly contentious discussion concerned the issue of implementation of the new Imperial currency and it is this that I will tell in more detail. In brief, the debate turned on whether or not existing currencies should be converted according to existing value to the new denomination of Imperial currency or whether this should be done with a degree of “value flattening” in which the poorest currencies would be exchanged for more Imperial credits than they were worth while the richest currencies would be exchanged for less than worth.
To explain this debate, it will best be done through the eyes of its two more prominent participants, who conveniently enough will both play very significant roles in the future of the Revolution. On the side of direct, uninterfered currency exchange was the delegate from Oxalis, Li Ouroa. Ouroa was a lawyer in her mid-50s working on interplanetary luminium trade negotiations for the famously productive luminium mines on Oxalis. She was chosen in a similar situation to Ghale Thusif himself, although the deadlock came not from corporate-union negotiations but from inter-corporate negotiations. Already a part of one of the few inter-corporate organizations in her trade work, Ouroa had a highly sophisticated sense of aristocratic charm she could turn on when she wanted to that helped push her over the edge and into the candidacy. This charm was to become famous (or infamous), as either a sign of Oxalite refinement and a symbol of the civilization it dreamed to start or as a sign of Oxalite haughtiness and a symbol of the hegemony it hoped to impose.
The second figure was, of course, the delegate from Khalas, Strawberry Singh. Singh was the exact same age as her Oxalite counterpart and shared some of the same charm, although hers was far more often directed as the lower levels and “downtrodden” (or, to respond to some of the more recent historiographical trends in interpreting Singh, those she interpreted as downtrodden). Khalas was an Imperial dependency, but one in a unique situation. Largely used as a haven for cocoa and tobacco plantations, in its early years the planet had seen a much higher level of labor activism than most other dependencies. This had culminated in the declaration of the Constitution of Khalas in 7880, which officially declared the planet a democracy with totally free election. Over the years the actual democratic aspects had decayed and the planet was governed just as undemocratically as most Imperial dependencies were, but the trappings of democracy were still there. Elections were still regularly held, even if those elected had little real power. When the Necrotic Reforms were announced, while many dependencies sent delegates that would fight to maintain the rights of their upper strata, Khalas was in a different situation. Considerable popular excitement was brought on by the decrees, which Singh was able to take advantage of. A totally unknown laborer on a cocoa plantation prior to the Imperial Decree, she quickly announced her candidacy and with her populist style and considerable luck she was soon swept up in a mass movement revolving around her. Forced to act through democratic channels that were the only legal ways of nominating a delegate on Khalas, the planetary elite that had managed to sidestep democracy suddenly found it biting them from behind while unprepared to handle it. So they cut a deal. To this day we do not know exactly what was in, Singh denied ever making such a deal although there is such a volume of evidence for it that it is absurd to deny, some of those same elites would later claim (while in a particularly vengeful mood) most she assured them there would be no significant shakeup in the political order of the planet due to the Symposium. Obviously, this was not the case.
At the onset of the Revolution, neither Ouroa nor Singh was involved in events in the slightest. This is easiest to explain for Singh, as she had no political experience and was just learning the ropes. In fact, it is the events of this chapter that will really spur her into motion as an independent political actor. Ouroa is a bit more difficult because she clearly did have political experience, but was choosing not to use it. It may be as most historians believe that she thought none of the initial plotting would go nowhere. It may have seemed to her, and not unreasonably, that the fight over the selection of delegates would not have an important role in events and that the fight with the Emperor was unwinnable. An alternative and more recently posited view, one that I do not entirely agree with but think based on Ouroa’s later actions has a degree of truth to, is that she was biding her time. Far sighted enough to see that something was going to come to a head, she could also see that those first to step into the limelight would also be the ones with the most history and promises to come back to haunt them in the end.
Of the 25 members of the Monetary Committee, one week into the debate when it was becoming clear to the participants that the issue at stake was a much larger one than the previous arguments they had faced the sides stood with 7 delegates in favor of value flattening, 11 delegates opposed to it, and 7 undecided members. Ouroa and Singh had taken up their positions as the leaders in the debate and while the balance was toward Ouroa and the opposition, there were enough undecided delegates that it could still go either way.
The principle argument in favor of the flattening was that by directly exchanging existing currencies for the new credits, they would be dramatically increasing the level of inequality within the Empire. There were many planets, especially dependencies or tributaries, that had currency nearly worthless at the galactic level that was still perfectly usable on the planetary level. This was a real concern for residents of those planets and one not limited to the lower classes. A fortune made on a dependency wouldn’t end up meaning much to someone once they realized that sum total amounted to more than the savings of a middling day laborer in the Imperial core.
The opposition was composed of two sorts. For the first group, the opposition came from fears of the economic impacts. Fears over inflation were significant phenomena on many planets, especially those with bureaucrats less concerned about the financial implications of their actions, and they worried that this flattening of value could cause prices to skyrocket across the entire Empire. The opposition to this opposition was that their proposal was redistributary in nature, no money was being created, it was only being moved from the wealthiest planets to the poorest. Had this been the only opposition to the proposal that might have been enough to convince enough uneasy delegates to support the measure, but that was not the case. Rather, the second group of opponents to the flattening were directly incensed by that very redistributary measure. The group’s opinion can best be summed up by Li Ouroa’s quip that “One cannot speak of justice in one room and of theft in another.”
That this presaged the later debates about the nature of justice and the efficacy (and morality) of redistribution, whether of wealth or power or resources, is obvious. The seeds of this debate would sprout into sectarianism and separatism, although it is not obvious that this had to be the case. The question then is why this conflict was allowed to fester in such a way that it could later rear its head so violently. In that question, I come down with the majority of historians who assign a principal role in this instance to the Luminium Compromise.
The compromise was proposed by the undecided delegate Johanna Saint-Germain from the Feixing Asteroid Mining Outpost. Her recommendation was that rather than direct redistribution, the luminium mining planets, who with the exception of Pearl made up the entire layer of wealthiest planets, would sell luminium to the poorest planets at a significant discount. Then, the poorer planets could sell the luminium on their own and gain the profit. In this way, the rights of property would be respected while still providing a mechanism of redistribution. The inflation hawks were still concerned, but so long as the political opposition to the flattening broke with them, they would not be able to form a majority to stop the policy.
It took a few weeks of internal discussions, but the political opponents eventually broke in favor of the compromise. Even to the most ardent of them, it was hard to deny that a simple conversion into credits would destroy intraplanetary trade across much of the Empire as some planets were reduced to zero imports. If only for the preservation of their own export trades, some mechanism was needed to supply money to planets that would be reduced to nothing. With her shield of private property sidestepped, Li Ouroa gave in and accepted the compromise.
That the pro-flattening side accepted this has been a matter of much more debate and recriminations, primarily directed at Strawberry Singh. The Luminium Compromise would turn out to be an economic disaster for the countries purchasing the luminium. While the luminium miners sold to them at a significant discount, they would only sell at bulk quantities such that in order to purchase their first shipment, the planets would have to take out a loan. And the loans they were allowed to take out were not small or easy to repay. While every banker in the galaxy accepted taht while the Luminium Compromise was a necessity to avoid crashing the galactic economy, none of them liked it. It was an affront to the principles of a free market, principles which were very strong on the planets with the banks capable of making loans of the size that the luminium purchasers needed. So when a planet got behind on making their repayments, as over 90% of them did according to one recent study, the bank had considerable leverage over them. Across every poor planet in the galaxy went a fleet of bankers’ ships filled to the brim with restructuring specialists and budget cuts and offers to refinance the debt in exchange for stock in or direct control over crucial industries on a planet. This would all take a couple years to fully develop and begin affecting the revolution, but the process began the moment the Monetary Committee issued their final report.
None of this is a surprise or difficult to predict. It certainly would not have been so to someone who had just spent several months pouring over the details of monetary and fiscal policy, talking with experts in the subject, and reading histories about this exact phenomena. So why did Singh accept the compromise? At the time and for the rest of her life, she denied that she knew what would happen. When the Revolution had progressed, she would famously give a speech declaiming that she had only accepted the compromise out of the false perception that the Oxalites (note the anachronistic phrasing, it was not until the aftermath of the Noble’s Rebellion that this word would be coined) were fully human. This explanation was very convenient for Singh because it allowed her to play up just how naive she was, a persona she loved to use no matter how obvious it became that it wasn’t true, and because it let her off the hook for making the decision to accept what would later be called fiscal imperialism (once Imperium became a dirty word). It may be more likely that Singh simply did not believe she could stop the policy from passing and so saw no advantage at that point in placing herself in the opposition. Undoubtedly she did not know exactly how far the banks would go, but she certainly was not as naive as she pretended. Singh and her faction moved to support the measure which passed 22-3, only 3 inflation hawks voting against it.
A compromise had been reached and when the final report was presented to the Chamber, it was done so unanimously and without further comment. The Chamber accepted it as written and made no alterations. Within a week, its dictates began to be enacted. Yet, despite the unanimous approval, behind the scenes things were not as they seemed. The factionalism that had been opened by the debate of flattening and seemingly killed with the Luminium Compromise was not truly dead. Like all strong compromises, it left nobody happy. They all felt they had moved out of necessity rather than true belief, a necessity that while important was not truly just. All involved felt exploited (even while the actual exploitation was only being performed on one group of planets). While the Oxalite-Khalasite conflict is often correctly remembered as a economic-political conflict over the nature of property and wealth and justice, it was also a highly personal one. And by the end of it, Li Ouroa and Strawberry Singh despised each other more than any other two delegates in the Vaird.
By the end of the Monetary Committee, neither Ouroa nor Singh were attending sessions. In part this was their mutual hatred preventing them from being able to exist in the same room as each other, but in part this was also because both of them had gotten intricately caught up in one of the Chaotic Trio. For Ouroa this was the Legal Committee, an involvement that would make her famous across the galaxy. For Singh, this was the subject of our next chapter: the Military Committee.