Pathfinders: Moon madness (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to media hoopla last month, the NASA Artemis 2 flight round the Moon generated enormous public interest around the world. Did it really? Anecdotal evidence seemed pretty thin on the ground.

Okay, so maybe those old enough to remember the first-time round weren’t impressed. A fly-by is not a landing, after all. Back then the Apollo programme really did look like something out of science fiction and seemed to herald a new era of space conquest. Never mind that it was all blatant anti-Soviet swagger, after the US had been humiliated by first Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin. Some things are bigger than politics.

The fascination was huge. The few state TV and radio channels were awash with space updates for weeks. Poor kids watched it all through snowy static on monochrome TV sets, while kids with rich parents played with plastic Saturn V model rockets with real detachable launch stages, plus model Moon landers on cratered terrains, crewed by Action Man astronaut dolls. Every magazine had special issue pull-out posters to plaster across bedroom walls. And then the landing. Neil Armstrong’s crackly, matter-of-fact voice held the world in breathless thrall as, between technical beeps, he announced the legendary step. Nobody used the word ‘singularity’ back then, but it felt like one. And that wasn’t even the greatest drama. Candlelight rallies and school assemblies across the world offered up fervent prayers during the hour-by-hour knuckle-gnawing crisis of Apollo 13. For a time it seemed like there was no another topic of conversation to be had. The world was of a single mind.

The illusion couldn’t last, of course, and neither could the budget. The Soviets had been bested, the world lost interest, and Apollo was cancelled. The space age failed to materialise and the notion of colonising other planets evaporated from the world’s travel plans. If today’s oldies are unimpressed, it won’t just be that humans have ‘been there, done that’, but rather that FA resulted from it. This time round the political swagger is aimed at China, which has announced that it intends to have a crewed moon-base by 2030. To any US president and especially King Donald, now modestly lecturing the Pope and presenting as Jesus, such an upset is beyond unthinkable.

Compared to the steely-eyed Cold War of the Apollo era, today’s world looks positively unhinged, with infantile megalomaniacs in charge of infantilised populations, and god-knows-what disaster right around the corner. If the Moon was habitable, perhaps we’d all be queuing up. As it is, opinions on Artemis among younger generations seem divided. Some argue on Reddit that they have enough to worry about ‘down here’ as it is, though one commentator makes a despairing case for distraction: ‘I (like most people) need something to be excited about right now. I refuse to not be excited for this just because life fuckin sucks at the moment lol’.

Recent YouGov polling finds that ‘57% of Britons feel returning to the Moon is of little to no importance for humanity’ and only ‘37% of Britons believe it’s likely that humans will land on Mars in their lifetime’. This appears to reflect a reasonable sense of priorities rather than any profound loss of interest in science, with ‘just 21% of Britons believing it’s of little to no importance for humanity to explore space for scientific purposes’.

Maybe the UK perspective is not representative, given that Britain never really had a dog in the space race, but opinions across the pond also seem divided. According to one source, ‘most polls show that as many as 90 percent of Americans don’t care about returning to the Moon or establishing a presence there’.

This however is in sharp contrast to a recent Ipsos poll which found that 62 percent of US adults thought sending people into space was worth the money (though interestingly the percentage dropped by 20 points when the phrase ‘billions of dollars’ was mentioned), with NASA earning 80 percent approval, a rating which Trump himself, currently on 38 percent, probably thinks he shares.

You might expect scientists devoted to popularising science to be in favour, at least. But astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson is scathing in his dismissal of the Artemis programme as a waste of time and money, and future Mars expeditions as ‘vanity projects’. Then there’s Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal, who argues that in the age of AI and robotics there is simply no point in humans running the considerable risks of interplanetary spaceflight except possibly as ‘an ultra-expensive sport’ for billionaires.

NASA knew, of course, that they faced a potential public engagement problem, especially during a cost-of-living crisis, so they embarked on an extensive PR campaign in order to justify the $100bn+ budget which, though only a fraction of the US defence budget, could still fund ten years of the UN World Food Programme that feeds 150 million people across 120 countries. Thus, NASA devoted much time to workshopping ‘ethical and social considerations’ in a bid to persuade voters that the whole venture was a worthwhile expense. As NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville put it, ‘This program will be over if people don’t buy it and they don’t come with us’.

Capitalists and state politicians do have ulterior motives though for Earth’s ‘eighth continent’. The great powers will happily ignore the Outer Space Treaty if they can feasibly extract the mineral deposits thought to be there. And with water now believed to exist at the poles, nuclear-powered crewed bases are viable, which could serve as low-gravity launch stations to Mars using electrolysis to generate oxygen rocket fuel. But in true Cold-War MAD style, these bases could also bristle with hard-to-hit nuclear missiles, as well as being out of range of prospective satellite wars. That, in short, is how capitalism on Earth could turn the Man in the Moon into our collective nemesis.

Paddy Shannon

Election Special: World of Waste (1964)

From the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live today in a world of waste—a ludicrous waste of buying and selling; a criminal waste of war and preparations for war; a useless waste of ticket clipping, accounting, form-filling.

Only now and then does the utter stupidity of the whole futile business pull us up short and make us see things as if for the first time. We stand amazed at the way human beings can go on putting up with such a crazy world, so out of keeping with its real needs and interests.

When more than half the population of the world are going hungry and destitute, the British government will spend something like £2,000 million this year on what it likes to call “defence.” The United States will spend more than ten times as much to the same end and no doubt the Russians will be doing the same.

Every country in the world reserves up to one-tenth of its total national wealth in preparing for war. Some of the weapons they make are obsolete before they actually begin to leave the factories, others even before they are off the drawing board. Many more are scrapped after they have seen only a few months service.

Probably no one will ever know the full amount that has been spent by this country on its atomic programme, and the expenditure by other countries is equally shrouded in secrecy. That the sums are vast is certain.

When the Americans launched Colonel Glenn into space, it cost the staggering sum of £150 million. Britain has spent the better half of £1,000 million so far on rocket missiles. Even greater sums have probably been spent by the Russians, yet Kruschev told the Russian workers only a little while ago that he hoped that by 1980 every Russian would be able to eat an egg a day !

We are so bemused by governments talking in these astronomical figures that they lose all significance. It takes a conscious effort to turn these vast numbers of pounds into such basic things as houses, oil refineries, washing machines, boots and shoes, bread and butter.

In these days when families roam the streets looking for somewhere to live, the productive resources represented by the £150 million spent on the Glenn circus could have built 30,000 houses (and we mean houses, not the glorified chicken coops which currently pass for them). For the same sum five times as many homes could have been provided with good furniture to make them a pleasure to live in. Or perhaps a quarter of a million cars could have been built, or three million refrigerators, or ten million vacuum cleaners, or just a decent pair of shoes for every adult in the country.

Capitalism measures everything in terms of money.

These are the millions, the hundreds of millions, the thousands of millions of pounds, dollars, roubles, francs, marks, yen, and all the other currencies one can think of, that capitalism wastes each year. And this only in misdirected production —we leave out all the other ways in which human labour and resources are uselessly frittered away.

Translate all this vast accumulation of wasted wealth and labour into the worthwhile things of life and into the things that produce them—into houses and brick factories, into electricity and power stations, into food and agricultural machines, into clothes and spinning mills, into coal, oil, roads, railways, and ships.

Stop and think of all this when next you hear some glib politician talking at election time of the millions that are going to be spent on a new rocket, a bigger tank, a faster aeroplane, another atomic test.

Pathfinders: The ‘doged’ pursuit of knowledge (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A funny thing about touted scientific breakthroughs is that, just like politicians’ promises, they make a lot of noise at first, but then are apt to quietly fizzle out later when nobody’s looking. So it may have been for the strangely headline-grabbing announcement back in March that a new ‘Dark Energy experiment’ was challenging Einstein’s theory of the universe. Wait, what, they’ve disproved Einstein, you gasp? But no, it’s not quite that big an earthquake. Stargazers at the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory had found a ‘blip’ in the cosmological measurements that suggested that the mysterious dark energy force supposedly driving the expansion of the universe might have slightly weakened over time. Though the key phrase is ‘might have’, this immediately got everyone terribly excited at the prospect of ‘new physics’ and the possible need to rewrite the cosmological standard model. Years of funded research and potential Nobel prizes glistered like the starry firmament, but cosmologists were quick to point out that this was in no way a certain result and would require vital independent confirmation from other sources, notably Europe’s Euclid space telescope and NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (tinyurl.com/4sv65khx).

So it may be something and it may be nothing, which is fair enough. But then why did it make such huge headlines, as if it was a genuine discovery? Well, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and pretend that we are jaded and cynical observers of capitalism, and ask ourselves what other factors might be at play here. Let’s in particular imagine the following entirely fictitious bit of dialogue: “Trump’s threatening to cut the NASA budget in half!” “Oh shit, we need to big up a breakthrough, pronto!”

Yup, when suddenly you can’t pay your mortgage or bills moments after having a safe and respectable long-term government-funded science career at the National Institutes of Health (proposed to be cut by 37 percent), the National Science Foundation (50+ percent), the Department of Energy (14 percent), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (24 percent), the US Geological Survey (33+ percent), the Department of Agriculture (18 percent), the Environmental Protection Agency (46 percent), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (39 percent), the Forest Service (62 percent), or the innocuous National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services – funding anthropology and archaeology – and the Marine Mammal Commission – saving the whales – (all 100 percent), you know you’ve been ‘Doged’. And few agencies are being hit harder than NASA, with an eye-watering 53 percent cut (tinyurl.com/3crbp648). Obviously all its Earth science climate projects will be the first to go, as the Drill Baby is not interested in those. But one of the other projects which might also bite the dust is the aforementioned Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, now coincidentally being cited as vital for confirming the Einstein-busting dark energy result (tinyurl.com/hejv2ztr).

It’s not that Trump is anti-science per se. He’s all for science as long as it makes him look good. So he was redneck-hot for the Artemis programme to plant NASA astronauts in MAGA hats back on the moon, especially if they could do it before the Chinese got there. President Bush originally also had a moon programme, called Constellation, that Obama subsequently cancelled, and Trump brought back as Artemis. But here, observers say, NASA was its own worst enemy, by being too institutionalised and cavalier about cost overruns, and using legacy suppliers like Boeing, whose own Starliner vehicle turned out to be an embarrassment (Pathfinders, October 2024). Asked to build a new rocket that could get humans to the moon, NASA simply came up with an adaptation of the previous Constellation-era Ares V rocket, rebranded as the Space Launch System (SLS). Despite this now being the era of cheap and reusable rockets, the SLS is a disappointing and hugely expensive replica of the old single-use Saturn V model. The US is now planning to ‘retire’ the SLS, possibly before it’s even launched, instead looking to private capital in the form of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is offering to do the same job for around one fortieth of the SLS cost ($100m versus $4bn).

NASA is more than an agency, it’s an icon, with an almost reverential status in US history for putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Savaging its funding must seem to many like burning your own sacred temple to spite the priests. But it’s also a monument from another age, when private capitalists were not nearly as rich as they are today, and only governments had the resources to fund space programmes. Now, tech bros like Bezos and Musk are doing their own space programmes, and doing them in some ways better than NASA. This is incidentally rather awkward to explain for those people who think ‘socialism’ is the state ownership of industries and that this is somehow an improvement on private capitalism. It’s not. State and private capitalism are as bad as each other, and both exploit workers and give them no real say.

As far as capitalist science is concerned, the goal is generally profit not the pursuit of knowledge. The rich get to decide what it pursues, either directly through their own purse, or indirectly through their complicit governments. Obama’s 2015 Space Act, cravenly endorsed by 43 countries, is widely seen as the new ‘enclosures’ for legalising space mining for profit (tinyurl.com/3va6mkdf). But once workers recognise their true common interest and abolish capitalism, what would happen to these capitalist-era plans to go to the Moon, or Mars? They’ll probably slide right down the global To Do list, below more pressing priorities like sustainable universal nutrition, health and housing, but possibly not off it entirely. The final frontier is always going to fascinate humans. The key difference is, when a socialist world looks up at the night sky, it will look with eyes of wonder, and not with an eye to plunder.

Paddy Shannon

News in Review: Keeping cool in the space age (1966)

The News in Review column from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keeping cool in the space age

The fabulous achievement of Luna 9 was bound to cause a lot of excitement. But when everyone about you is losing their heads it is, as we know, a sound idea to keep calm.

What does a long, cool look at space flight reveal?

In the first place, it speaks volumes that with a mass of unsolved problems like hunger, crime, bad housing and war plaguing us on earth, capitalism spends such enormous efforts on investigating other worlds.

This is not an objection to space flights on moral grounds; there is no logical reason to expect capitalism suddenly to start putting human welfare before its own interests.

Space investigation is given a high priority by the world’s two great powers and it is not difficult to see why this is so.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union make no secret of the fact that their space programmes are an essential part of their military effort, yielding valuable information on guiding systems and aiming techniques for long range missiles.

Already the information is being used for military purposes; both powers have observation vehicles in orbit above us and the Americans have actually publicised their plans for a military space laboratory to be sent up in the near future.

But even if we make the effort to ignore this consideration and assume that the exploration of space is purely a matter of scientific investigation, there is still the question of what the world working class can hope to gain from it all.

Have the conditions of any worker, anywhere, improved—indeed, can they hope to improve—as a result of the space flights, the probes into the moon, the dare-devil acts of space walking and the rest? The answer is clearly no.

Who, then, stands to gain? Even at the present, new industries have arisen as a result of space flights, and established ones have done their best to get in on it. (The Daily Express, whose equipment helped to receive the moon pictures from Luna 9 made some quick advertisements out of it)

Presumably, other new industries will rise in the future, employing and. exploiting their workers in their efforts to make profit from the romantic business of space travel.

Eager investors will want to get in on this. Perhaps there will be a Unit Trust which deals in space shares.

In short, all capitalism’s normal standards of commerce and profitability will be applied to the Space Age. The knowledge which the flights yield will be used, as all such knowledge has been in the past, for the benefit of the ruling class —to improve the returns on their capital, to protect their interests, to establish them in new markets.

Perhaps, in the end, to help them blast their rivals out of the field—or the sky or whatever.

Man’s probing into space is only the latest of his victories over his environment, and the same lesson applies to it as to the others. Capitalism is the cause of the problems of modern society and until it is ended man’s achievements— his skill, his knowledge, his courage- will be misused and perverted.

Rail strike and the incomes policy

It would be difficult to say whether the last minute calling off of the rail strike was more of a relief to the Government or to the National Union of Railwaymen.

From the word go, the threatened strike was given a dramatic build-up; expressions like ’’last ditch” and ’’breaking point” cannot have been given so thorough an airing in the press for a long time.

The railwaymen were assailed from all sides. Even papers like The Guardian and the Daily Mirror, which in the past have been sympathetic to them, were urging the strikers to have what they called common-sense.

It was, apparently, a time fraught with danger for us all. If the railwaymen got their way the Government’s Prices and Incomes Policy would collapse and ruin, which anyway has never stopped hanging over us, would descend.

But it was no secret that the Incomes Policy was already a flop. Sooner or later then the Government had either to abandon it openly or provoke a head-on clash with a big union.

The NUR was predictably resentful at being awarded the part of keystone in George Brown’s policy, although they really had little to complain about, they, after all, support the Labour Government and they also support its Incomes Policy.

The trouble was the usual one, of getting a union which accepts wage restraint in principle to apply it to its own members in practice. The NUR was all for the Incomes Policy, but did not want to be the one to start it.

Indeed, who is going to volunteer for this role? Who will choose to ignore the effects of rising prices, who will forego a chance to improve their conditions, who can escape the class struggle?

So far, the answer is—nobody. The railwaymen are only the latest in a long queue of those who have campaigned for higher wages since the Labour Government came to power. Some have got it without resorting to anything as vulgar as a strike threat; the judges, high rank Civil Servants and members of the Armed Forces have all been given more than the Incomes Policy allowed them.

And, of course, there was the case of the Members of Parliament and the Ministers who, being in the happy situation of being able to give themselves a rise, agreed soon after Mr. Wilson took over that they should all have one.

Yet Ministers and M.P.s are the very people who are urging the rest of us to hold back on our claims. It is by no means unreasonable to expect that, if the Incomes Policy had to be started somewhere, it should have been in the House of Commons.

But the Members, when they were deciding that they should have a rise, used exactly the same sort of arguments as any trade union. They said they were overworked, that they could not make ends meet, that the House was not attracting the best sort of Member because they could get better money outside.

So the Incomes Policy, at least on the surface, is saved and staggers on to fight another day. Mr. Wilson has once more stood, like a knight in shining armour, between us and disaster—and once more has gained a lot of political advantages out of it, especially over George Brown, who was shown up publicly as unable to pull off something which Wilson could do.

Mr. Wilson has scored another palpable hit. But there is no denying the class struggle of capitalism. There will be other battles, and other strikes, and more undercover deals to settle them.

All right for some

It was most inconsiderate of the North Vietnamese Government; they might have guessed the effect it would have. True, they did their best to rectify the matter but in future they really must be more careful.

It happened on the 8th February last and it was started by a statement from the North Vietnamese Consulate in Delhi that President Ho Chi Minh had asked India's help in putting out peace feelers over Vietnam.

The Consulate quickly pointed out that the same request had been sent, presumably as a matter of routine, to several other governments, most of whom had dismissed it as the customary meaningless public relations stuff.

But before anyone had realised this a minor wave of panic hit Wall Street, where some investors were appalled by the prospect that peace would actually break out in Vietnam.

What would happen in such a situation to all that money invested in the aerospace and defence industries? When a war is hot and the killing fast, the sun shines on these investments. But the terrible prospect of peace brings dark and heavy clouds.

Thus it was that when some idiot in Delhi got the wrong end of the stick, and when the information was passed on, Wall Street's war stocks took a tumble. It took the later explanation from the North Vietnamese to put the matter right

Then Wall Street recovered. All the war investors there, who stay so courageously out of the firing line, made good their losses and that little corner of capitalism went merrily on. Of course in Vietnam the killing and the suffering continued, but what was that against the averting of a crisis on Wall Street?

This is all reminiscent of the 1951 slump in business in the United States and England, which was caused by the cancellation of government contracts no longer needed after the end of the Korean War.

It goes to show that not only does capitalism cause modern war but it also makes a business out of it—a business with its salesmen, its stocks and shares and its investors.

And let us not forget that the man who does well out of war investments, the man who gets a nice profit from putting his money in bombs and bullets, in fear and destruction, is that thing so beloved of capitalism — a Successful, Patriotic Business Man.

Mr Heath makes a discovery

Mr. Edward Heath, who fought his way up from the world-famous slums of Broadstairs through Oxford University to become (he hopes) the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, has recently made a staggering discovery.

Of course, since he became Tory leader Mr. Heath's publicity boys have been making sure that we discovered one or two things about him.

He's a bachelor. Lives in a flat in Albany, which is not one of those places you get into because you have enough points in the council housing list.

He plays the piano. And the organ. And he likes to conduct choirs dressed up (Mr. Heath, not the choir) in a big yellow sweater.

All of this should prove to us that Mr. Heath is a Man Of The People. And in case there are any doubters on this score, the leader himself has recently been probing around the People; that is how he made his staggering discovery.

There are far too many under privileged people in Britain. (Mr. Heath’s words, not ours—he said them at Birmingham last month.) Not only that; a fearless searcher after Truth like Ted Heath has more to reveal. There are also, he said, places which are “. . . breeding grounds of exceptional misery, poverty and crime; bad housing, oversized classes and rootlessness."

Now none of Mr. Heath’s public relations boys has ever issued a hand-out telling us that he suffers from a bad memory. But he seems to have forgotten that it was only two short years ago that he was an important member of a Conservative Government which was asking us to put them back into power because under them we “never had it so good."

And if Mr. Heath has forgotten this, what hope is there that he will remember the promises he is making now, to “. . . put an end to poverty and hardship in this country once and for all . . ."? Or that especially moving bit about old age pensioners “. . . a bit of extra tea to entertain a friend . . .”?

Perhaps the safest thing to assume is that the Tories do not expect this sort of drivel to be taken seriously; perhaps they think that in this time of pre-election fever anything goes. (A couple of days after his Birmingham speech, Mr. Heath was challenging the Government to let the electorate decide . . which party most has the welfare of the needy at heart”)

But if the Conservatives do mean it to be taken seriously—and if that is how the electorate take it — then there is clearly no bottom to the depths of political cynicism, and a depressingly dense stratum of working class gullibility to be penetrated.

Voice From The Back: Blinded By Capitalism (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blinded By Capitalism

The following news item appeared in the Guardian (17 June): “Drug firm blocks cheap blindness cure. Company will only seek licence for medicine that costs 100 times more. A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.” People with wet mascular degeneration, a common condition among the elderly, have previously been treated with Avastin, which prevents impaired eyesight and blindness. The manufacturer Genetech have not presented it to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence because they are putting Lucentis forward instead. This treatment costs 100 times more. This is good business practice but bad news for the elderly workers suffering from the condition.

Conned By Capitalism

An example of how capitalism threatens lives is given in the Guardian (26 June):

“Drug companies are accused today of endangering public health through widescale marketing malpractices, ranging from covertly attempting to persuade consumers that they are ill to bribing doctors and misrepresenting the results of safety and efficacy tests on their products. In a report that charts the scale of illicit practices by drug companies in the UK and across Europe, Consumers International – the world federation of consumer organisations – says people are not being given facts about the medicines they take because the companies hide the marketing tactics on which they spend billions.”

Kicked By Capitalism

Sport according to most dictionaries is a “pleasant pastime; amusement or diversion”, but inside modern capitalism it is no such thing. It has become, as most other human endeavours have become – a ruthless competitive business. In the business pages of the Observer (16 July) we learn that Leeds United borrowed over 25 years’ future earnings, were relegated and had to sell all their good players; we also learn that Leicester City borrowed on future earnings to the extent of £26 million, and by the way, they were relegated too. So while supporters on the terraces sing their songs of devotion and undying support the banks, investors and other money lenders count their gains.

Disgusted By Capitalism

In a world where 8 million kids die every year through lack of clean water and sanitation the following news item disgusts us, how about you? “Forget the salt and lime, you’ll need a mint to enjoy this tequila. Producer Tequila Ley.925 announced Saturday that it had sold a bottle of Mexico’s best-known beverage in  a gold and platinum casing for a whopping $225,000. This is a really unique bottle of tequila and our client, a US based collector of fine wines and spirits, will treasure this prize to add to an already impressive collection”(Associated Press, 23 July).

  

Abandoned By Capitalism

President Nixon’s praise for the US moonlanders was a cynical vote-catching ploy as can be seen by the following press report. “America was so eager to beat the Soviet Union to the moon it launched its 1969 mission before it was ready, a documentary claims. The documentary reveals that the crew had to use a pen to fix a broken switch on their lunar module to return to earth, the Daily Mirror reports. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had accidentally snapped off a circuit breaker switch. According to Apollo 11: The Untold Story, US president Richard Nixon prepared an address announcing the deaths of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins. The US ordered NASA to cut links with the astronauts if disaster was imminent, not wanting the world to see images of astronauts spinning off into space” (Herald Sun, 25 July).

  

Shunned By Capitalism

“Las Vegas councillors have made it illegal to give food to homeless people. In an effort to curb charity that is said to be having unintended consequences, the city council has decided to ban food handouts to the homeless. The law targets so called mobile soup kitchens. It carries a maximum penalty of a $500 fine and six months in jail.” (New York Times, July 31). It is all so logical, isn’t it? You are trying to con workers into the fantasy that capitalism is a wonderful society and that they can become capitalists too, when some poor worker in Las Vegas tries to ask for something to eat. Solution? Ban the soup kitchen.

The Nautilus and the Sputnik (1958)

From the September 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Use and Misuse of Science

On 9th August two items of news reached the Press, the voyage of an American atom-powered submarine under the North Pole and the hint by the British Minister Of Supply that the Government is considering, the construction and launching of a British Sputnik. Here surely are two evidences of the marvels of scientific knowledge and human courage and ingenuity that no one need hesitate to glory in!! And so it might be if the human race had learned how to conduct its social relationship in a manner conducive to its own wellbeing and happiness. But that is precisely what it has not yet done.

The submarine “Nautilus” with 116 men aboard, had journeyed under the North Pole and the Arctic icecap from Alaska to Iceland, proving the practicability of cutting the voyage from London to Tokio from 11,200 to 6,300 miles; truly, as described in a message from the British Admiralty, “a remarkable and historic achievement.” The submarine is reported to have cost nearly £13 million, and allowing for all the other costs involved, this might be considered a trifle if it did in fact bring the kind of benefits to mankind that are claimed for the feat. But what in fact will it achieve? Its captain, Commander Anderson, said:—

"We were anxious to show the possibility of utilising this route some day as a fast commerce route."—(Daily Telegraph, 9th April, 1958.)

What else has it achieved? A correspondent of the Daily Telegraph tells us:—

"A new ocean, the frozen wastes of the Arctic, has been opened up to navigation and hence to naval use. This is the meaning of the unprecedented trans-Polar under-sea voyage from Hawaii to Iceland, of the nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus."

Then the correspondent, Mr. Hanson Baldwin, develops this theme—far removed from Commander Andersen’s words about commerce. Quoting an American naval expert he shows how a submarine firing guided missiles could range across the Arctic, with the Russian towns of Murmansk, Leningrad and Moscow well within range. “The whole vast Arctic coastline of Russia is potentially open to assault.”

From the Depths Below to the Moon Above

So much for the penetration of the icy waters. Now for the projected British Sputnik in space. The Manchester Guardian, in the seemingly thoughtful and sober way of which it is proud, discusses the project and doubts its advisability. But the Guardian’s argument is atrocious when viewed from the real interests of the human race.

It concedes that there are “virtues in carrying the Union Jack outside file earth’s atmosphere,” the virtues consisting chiefly of “a certain amount of prestige,” like that gained by the Russian and American governments already. But the Guardian’s editor considers the cost would be too great, unless at the same time some military advantage can also be gained in the shape of using the launching of a Sputnik to acquire experience with guided missiles.

Not that the editor underestimates the value of “prestige,” but he thinks that “the kind of prestige which Britain needs is that which makes it easier to sell locomotives in South America, motor cars in the United States, and electrical machinery in the Far East.”

“A Sputnik may help in this direction,” he writes, “though not as much as a successful Zeta or victory at Le Mans.”

Here we see the real motive behind it all, the one that poisons and distorts every official and commercial activity of the world in which we live. The scientists may talk of pure research to discover Nature's secrets, and the Cabinet Ministers of benefits of peaceful commerce, but all the time their actions line up with the inescapable character of capitalist enterprise, the trade competition that gives rise to rivalry and war, with Nationalism and Patriotism serving as the justification for every hostile act including the bestialities of war itself.

How can the vicious circle be broken? There is only one way. It is stupid self-deception for the Manchester Guardian and Labour Parties of the world to dream of taming the cut-throat struggle through United Nations pacts and interventions. Continuing on those lines means continuing the history of the past 100 years into a war-torn future, with consequences beyond imagination. If capitalism continues, with the giant capitalist Powers, U.SA and Russia fighting it out, and with their respective capitalist allies and satellites all necessarily involved, the conquest of the Arctic seas and the conquest of space will prove as empty as and even more disastrous than did the opening of the Suez Canal nearly a century ago, about which just the same soothing claims of beneficial progress were made. (We can see in our day what the Suez Canal really did for the world.)

The only way out, and one the Manchester Guardian never even considers, is to end the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and the consequent ceaseless armed conflict for control of sources of nature-given materials, and competition for markets in which to dispose profitably of the products of the workers' labours, and to launch out on the really great and fruitful adventure of organising world resources on the simple basis of production solely to meet the needs of mankind.

But that is Socialism and so far its daring simplicity frightens all except the small minority who hold to the principles of the S.P.G.B. and its companion parties.

Edgar Hardcastle

The 'Observer' Atlas of World Affairs (1971)

Book Review from the August 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 'Observer' Atlas of World Affairs: A Guide to Major Tensions and Conflicts by Andrew Wilson. £2.50.

This is an entirely new work, and besides being an atlas it is also a geography book of a special kind with table of economic resources, raw materials, and the war strengths of the various powers.

To quote from the dust cover “it brings together in readily appreciable form the chief factors affecting the world of the 1970’s. All the material has been chosen for its relevance to present day political, military, economic and social issues. An unusual aspect of this profusedly illustrated book is the emphasis given to military matters, underlying the grim reality that supports the present structures of international affairs. Military technology is rarely encountered by the average citizen, but it both threatens and defends him, and cannot be ignored.” We might have doubts about defending citizens, but the threats from war are clearly evident.

In the section on “rich and poor countries” the author does not tell us (as indeed is not his purpose) why some people are rich and others, poor, but he does point out that in many poor countries, there are a few who are fabulously rich while the masses are very poor. He further shows how investments in these “poor countries” does not tend to make them rich, but only perpetuates the already big difference between rich and poor. Incomes per capita are given for comparisons, and are very revealing.

He also shows how the poor exporting countries in their efforts to export in order to be able to import manufactured products, have to pay more and more of their raw material for less and less manufactured products, and that it is the larger manufacturing or capitalist giants that have the whip hand in the bargaining.

For example 

“Two-thirds of Ghana's exports are cocoa. Between 1953 and 1961, cocoa exports increased by 71 per cent, but the revenue rose by only 23 per cent. In the same period European goods shipped to West Africa went up 25 per cent in cost. So a piece of machinery that cost Ghana the equivalent of ten tons of cocoa in 1953 cost 25 tons of cocoa in 1961.”

“Half Brazil’s exports consist of coffee. Between 1953 and 1961 coffee exports increased by 90 per cent in volume, but the revenue dropped by 35 per cent."

“Half the exports of the Malay peninsula are rubber. Between 1950 and 1961 rubber exports increased by 4 per cent in volume, but the revenue fell by 35 per cent.”

These are examples of the unequal development of capitalism which politicians and their parties often use for their own propaganda. Another example of this from a different field is illustrated in the atlas by quoting from the last decade of figures from Japan. During the 1960’s Japan increased her gross national production by an average of 10 per cent per year; in 1969 the rate was over 14 per cent; yet in terms of per capita income Japan lies 20th in the world league. Such facts point to inevitable wage struggles ahead in Japan, and which have actually begun.

The sections dealing with the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. examine the economic and military aspects of these countries with tables of their resources and their nuclear striking power—which is frightening. He acknowledges that both powers have long reached the point when they could withstand a nuclear “first strike” and be able to hit back. At the same time, either power has sufficient striking potential to blot out the other many times over. The author states his own opinion (for what it is worth), that it is very unlikely that either power will attempt such knock out measures, but rely on conventional apparatus for its war adventures. But theory and practice in such drastic circumstances sometimes depart from scheduled plans.

In the chapter on space exploration, he enumerates the various advances made, and adds “Although neither the Moon nor orbiting space stations appear at present to lend themselves to aggressive military purposes, a space confrontation’ could theoretically develop if one country were to intervene with another’s satellites. In addition to scientific and communications purposes, Russian and American ‘spy’ satellites provide a continuous picture of military developments in each territory, using optical, radar, and infrared cameras. This at least makes sense on why both Russia and America has been prepared to spend millions of pounds on these satellites. Spying has always been an expensive although necessary part of capitalism’s activity.

The list of world conflicts given during the 20th century is very formidable. From the Spanish-American war of 1898 to the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 there is a list of 59 wars, insurrections, revolts or military skirmishes; and from the Korean war of 1950 until last year a Jordan-Palestine conflict, another 72 are listed.

The Common Market is also dealt with and the author states categorically that the E.E.C. is both political and economic as we know only too well.

Population is a question not ignored, and although there is nothing new in this section, except that it is up to date, some useful figures are given.

Horace Jarvis

Pathfinders: Space Race 2.0 (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

You know who the first man on the moon was, right? And the second? Bet you can’t name the third, or the next nine. After the initial feat, and an edge-of-your-seat crisis with Apollo 13, the space race quickly got old, and global interest waned. 50 years ago this month, the crew of Apollo 15 made the fourth landing on the moon and drove the first moon rover, and barely anyone noticed. Not long after this, the huge money sink of the Apollo programme was scrapped. For all the sciency hype, the moon’s only real purpose was as the finishing line in a space race aimed at putting one over on soviet ‘communism’.

Now we’re watching Space Race Reloaded, this time as a multi-player game involving the US, Europe, China, Russia, India and others, and including for the first time large amounts of private capital. What on earth – or off earth – is going on?

Space exploration has attracted its share of eccentrics, like ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes who, in February 2020, launched himself skyward in a steam-powered rocket to prove that the Earth was flat, but died proving instead that it was very hard. If you’re going to be eccentric, it helps to be rich, and the bullish billionaire trio of Bezos, Branson and Musk have not hesitated to vie in what, from a worker’s earthbound perspective, are pointless and ecologically egregious vanity projects involving low-orbital flights for rich tourists. The bulbous head of Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket inspired an inevitably phallic comparison by the Daily Star which talked about the billionaires ‘willy-waving’ with their ‘giant thrusters’.

But it’s more than just boys showing off their toys. In May China parked a rover on Mars, and last month launched a crew up to its new Tiandong space station, as well as announcing plans for a joint Sino-Russian moon base. Meanwhile Nasa’s new director Bill ‘Big Willy’ Nelson has ‘sought to leverage China’s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund Nasa’s plans to return to the moon’.

In the 1970s, space programmes relied solely on the resources of national governments. Now things are different. Since 1970 the wealth of the top one percent has grown at 100 times the pace of the bottom 50 percent, creating mind-boggling resources of private capital that can now be invested in the biggest projects. Nasa has contracted part of its operations to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, including servicing the International Space Station, and that’s only the beginning.

SpaceX also won the contract to supply the moon lander for Nasa’s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, as part of its Artemis moonshot programme. Disappointingly for space nerds, the SLS is an unimaginative repeat of the old Saturn V burn-and-discard 3-stage system. After some notable successes with reusable rockets, SpaceX did hope to win the contract for a Nasa reusable rocket design but its Falcon Heavy rocket isn’t anywhere near big enough to get to the moon, and its gigantic Starship rocket – billed as a potential Mars crew shuttle – is still in development.

If the moon wasn’t really the point last time, this time it might be. First, there is the matter of helium-3 (see Pathfinders, March 2014), a rare isotope on Earth but abundant on the moon and potentially useful in nuclear fusion that might provide up to 10,000 years of cleanish energy. But it’s still uncertain whether helium-3 extraction would be economic. Second, there is the fact that the moon, as a satellite, will be out of range of the satellite wars which are widely predicted (Pathfinders, November 2020), and which prompted a Nato space war summit just last month (Times, 15 June). Third, Nasa confirmed in 2020 that there was water on the moon, which was a game-changer. In space shuttle days, the cost of lofting a kilo of water to space was $54,000. With SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 shuttle to the ISS, this dropped to $2,720 (Link). Yet a permanent moon base is only really feasible if there’s a local supply. The water concentration Nasa detected in sunlit areas was 100 times less than in the Sahara desert, however the presence of any at all suggests that there may be vast deposits of ice in the dark polar craters. These would not only enable moon colonies but also potentially supply liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuels in order to make the moon a launch point for further space exploration, and as a staging post for Mars.

But it’s not all about ends, it’s also about means. China has been making giant technological strides lately, and this is alarming the Americans, because space technology is also weapons technology – ‘there are no technologies used in space that aren’t dual-use’. The fear is, whoever gets a lead in space has a lead in perpetuity. Moon bases today, missile bases tomorrow, perhaps.

It need hardly be said that socialists deplore the militarisation of space. But billionaires like Musk are motivated by an altogether higher purpose, and that doesn’t include the silly story about him planning to mine a gold asteroid worth $700 quintillion. He is well known for tweeting about potential extinction-level asteroid strikes, and how humans need to colonise other planets so all our eggs are not in one basket. Nasa has pooh-poohed the notion of deadly asteroids, however a darker truth could lie behind the prediction. What if the super-rich suspect that climate change is out of control, and that the Earth is ultimately doomed through its own (i.e. their) folly?

What better use for your billions, and what better legacy, than to initiate searches for a viable replacement planet? In this context, the search for extraterrestrial life takes on a new significance. Nasa has just announced probes to explore the supposedly bio-generated phosphine layer in the upper atmosphere of Venus. And just last month the Juno probe did a flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and thought to have a liquid iron core, hence magnetic shielding, and more subterranean water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. Next year it will do a flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa, with a thin oxygen atmosphere and, it’s believed, a water ocean 60 miles deep under a 20-mile-thick ice crust. Europa is one of the most promising sources of life, if any, in the solar system. The European Space Agency is planning a trip there in 2022, and Nasa again in 2025.

The idea of the capitalists funding an ‘exit strategy’ to escape the dead Earth they have created is of course the plot of Ben Elton’s 1989 novel Stark. We say, they’re welcome to live on some frozen airless dump, and we hope they rot. But let’s hope we get socialism before that happens, and before any idea of exporting capitalism to other planets really gets off the ground.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Chimps, Chumps and Cheetahs (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

As evolved and unintelligently-designed bald chimps everywhere must surely know, this year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. However they may be less aware that it is also claimed to be the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the 300th anniversary of the start of the industrial revolution and, perhaps less debatably, the 50th birthday for the Mini automobile (Link).

Crowning all these trivial achievements this month is of course the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What can one say of this historic event? At the time it was hard to overhype. One small step for a man, one giant poke in the eye for the Russians, it supposedly gave us velcro, teflon and digital watches, but more to the point, it promised to launch the bone-throwing chimp species, Kubrick-like, into the galaxy.

And, er, that was it. Apollo the space overture was not followed by the opera. Since then the veterans who knew how to get to the moon have all died or retired, and now the tyro NASA chimps are back where they started, arguing about rockets and facing Obama funding cuts instead of Kennedy largesse.

What did it all mean? Not much, except to show that in science, as in share prices, optimism can overrun the cliff-edge of experience, a fact which often escapes young chimps who imagine that scientific progress is secure, inevitable and limitless. Perhaps this is because, in the non-scientific world, we don’t tend to hear about the null results, the blind alleys or the dead-ends, we only hear the success-stories. This may mean, argues NASA climatologist Peter Dizikes, that we foster unrealistic expectations of science in practice: “The way we teach science is that Newton said “X” and it’s correct, so learn this formula. This promotes the idea that science knows all the answers. Whereas when you look at any actual working scientist, whether it’s in climate change or medicine or building a nuclear power plant, the stock in trade of science is uncertainty; it’s not certainty” (www.salon.com, 19 June).

It doesn’t help that capitalism is all about hard sells not hard truths, a blizzard of con rackets, snake oil cures, kwik-fixes and pseudo-solutions that all too easily make us into chumps who forget to ask the right questions. Too often the media will breathlessly report anything scientists offer them, without any provisos or qualifications, just to grab a slice of reader attention. Grey areas require grey matter, but who’s got the time? To take a random sample of the latest news items, we learn, ‘according to new studies’, that boys who have a ‘warrior gene’ are more likely to end up in violent gangs (Yahoo News, 5 June), that squeamish people are more likely to be conservative (Yahoo News, 5 June) and that engineers are more likely to become terrorists (New Scientist, 13 June). There is not space here to detail all the ways in which these studies may be misleading, misguided or plain wrong, but sample size, experimenter expectation and the possible existence of conflicting studies would be three avenues to explore for starters.

A possible fourth is fraud. When politicians or bankers turn out to be corrupt nobody raises an eyebrow. When catholic priests turn out to be kiddy-fiddlers the world reacts with weary resignation. But when scientists fiddle data everyone throws up their hands in shocked amazement, because scientists are for some reason expected to be above that sort of thing.

Yet there are some legendary cases of scientific fraud, and it turns out that the latest and as yet unnamed addition to the periodic table, element 112, was held back from recognition by years because one member of the team was sabotaging the results by falsifying data (New Scientist, 20 June). Worse, scientific fraud may not be rare but commonplace. A recent survey involving over 11,000 academics found a third of scientists admitting to ‘massaging’ research data and one in fifty indulging in outright fakery: “When scientists were asked about colleagues’ behaviour, 14 percent said they had witnessed research fraud and almost three-quarters said they had seen questionable behaviour”. Socialists won’t be surprised to learn that “misconduct was most common in clinical, medical and pharmacological research, where large grants are often at stake” (TimesOnline, 7 June). Naughty chimps! Me Tarzan, you Cheetah.

Or should that be naughty orang-utans? A new paper that flies boldly in the face of the genetic evidence suggests that humans are biologically closer to the red apes than to chimps or bonobos, an idea which is causing widespread splutterings of derision in the scientific community. Nevertheless New Scientist (20 June) sees fit to lead with a lofty editorial on why we should welcome scientific heresy, even if it’s wrong: “Alternative hypotheses should be given an airing … science that pulls up the drawbridge on new ideas risks becoming sterile.” How true, even if it does sound a little defensive from a journal which is drawing fire for being too sensational and populist.

But heresy is risky, and scientists can be as conservative and risk-averse as anyone else. Privately many scientists could put together the same ‘heresy’ socialists propose, which is that capitalism, once the friend and sponsor of good science, now is more its enemy than its ally. It controls the funds and the fundamentals, it calls the tunes, it forms the corrupting context in which science does its work. In a capitalist world where politicians are vile, bankers are venal and priests are paedophiles, it can hardly be a revelation to find that science is as bent as everything else. But will they speak out against the system which holds them in check? Not while they have a vested interest in not doing so. That’s why we have to do it for them.

Paddy Shannon

50 Years Ago: Man in Space (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia’s daring young man did all the right things, at the right time.

Sent looping around the Earth, he sang a patriotic song: (“The motherland hears, the motherland sees, the motherland knows…”). On the rostrum beside Mr. Khruschev, he was the star turn at this year’s Moscow May Day parade.

Gagarin’s exploit, Commander Shepard’s flight, and the arrival of the Russian Venus rocket shot, have put spaceships right back in the news. Such things are interesting, not to say exciting – but have they been worth anything?

We all know that Russia and the United States are feverishly applying the knowledge which their space probes give them to the production of more accurate missiles. Some of these were paraded before Gagarin in the Red Square on May Day.

Without a doubt, the quest for more accurate and more powerful weapons is the main incentive in the space programmes of the great powers.

Incidentally, they may also gain knowledge which has little or no military value. But there is no guarantee that even this will not one day be misused.

There is one thing the space shots have to teach everybody. Capitalist society is bound to distort human knowledge for inhuman ends. Scientific investigation can only come into its own when this world is sanely organised.

(“News in Review”, Socialist Standard, June 1961)

News in Review: A case of courage (1966)

The  News in Review from the July 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A case of courage

If the reports about James Meredith are true, he deserves to go down in history as a very brave man, who did something of which he was deadly afraid because he believed it to be right.

He went into Mississippi University, the first Negro to do so, because he believed that the colour of his skin should not stop him doing so.

He started to march from Memphis to Jackson because he believed that Negroes should overcome the fears which prevented them registering to vote.

The fact that he was shot down on the road shows the extent to which racism still festers in Mississippi, and the violence which it inspires.

Meredith’s courage should not, however, blind us to facts.

If he was demonstrating that the colour of a person’s skin does not affect his abilities, does not make him inferior or superior as a person, all well and good.

But having demonstrated this, there is something else which should be made clear.

Workers of all colours are united by a common economic interest under capitalism, to stand together against the ruling class who are also, of course, of all colours.

Beyond that all workers should cooperate to get rid of capitalism, with its privileges and its denials and with the prejudices which help to divide the working class into so called races, nations and so on.
The nature of the Civil Rights movement prevents it asking for more than that the Negro in America should be the same sort of worker as a white man.

James Meredith, and the other members of the Civil Rights movement who have suffered and been murdered, have made a courageous sacrifice. It is a sacrifice worth a lot more than the result it will almost certainly have.


Seamen's strike

The big question to be asked about the seamen’s strike is—what will the strikers learn from it?

One thing which a strike should teach the strikers is that capitalist society is divided into two classes, who are continually in dispute over the division of wealth.

Another is that there is no permanent way of dealing with the effects of a class divided society other than getting rid of it.

It was obvious from the beginning that the seamen would be up against the government. Mr. Hogarth, the General Secretary of the National Union of Seamen, said at the union’s conference at Worthing on 2nd May.

  We know . . . that the government will do its damnedest to work the prices and incomes policy of 3½ per cent. We have got a fight on our hands, not just against the owners but against the government as well.

This seems to be a flash of enlightenment that a government stands for the interests of the capitalist class, whether ship owners or anything else, and that they will stand up for those interests in a fight.

But Mr. Hogarth destroys this impression by demanding in the same speech, that “. . . certain sections of the shipping industry should come into public ownership” (Daily Telegraph, 3/5/66).

This is not the first time a union’s leader’s sympathy with the Labour Party has clashed with his obligation to his members. The matter is not to be resolved by making a contradictory speech.

Neither is it the first time that striking workers, after the true nature of capitalism has been exposed to them, have kept faith in discredited remedies for their problems.


Man’s best friend

“LEFT BARES ITS TEETH ON VIETNAM” states a recent Daily Telegraph headline. One was tempted to add the word “again”. The “Left”, thus referred to, was of course the left wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the occasion was a censure amendment on Government policy towards Vietnam.

It was headed by such dear old favourites as Michael Foot, J. Mendelson, and Ian Mikardo, and signed by many of the new Labour M.P.’s—who have obviously not yet learned that this kind of thing is not the way to the Prime Minister’s heart. We doubt if anybody was really worried by all this, least of all the Government. If however they were, their fears were soon put to rest as this turned out to be yet another in a long succession of damp squibs.

The Labour left has proved to be one of the most overrated movements of this century. Its docility during the last Parliament, with its slender Labour majority, was a source of amused comment in the political columns; while during the recent election they wholeheartedly supported a policy quite contrary to their expressed beliefs. Nobody during the election campaign had any doubts as to where Wilson and company stood on such subjects as Vietnam.

Now that Labour is safely returned, with a good majority, the left-wingers can caper about at will. But one thing they have never done is to push the Government to defeat, and one does not have to be a prophet to suggest that they never will. Left-wing M P.’s hold their seats in spite of their views, and not because of them. The Labour Party is pledged to run Capitalism, and has no other purpose; nobody can remain a member and not accept this fact. Our left wing M.P.’s have no desire to exist in the political wilderness in some small organisation.

The canine inference of the headline is rather apt; like all well-trained dogs the Labour Left will always jump to heel when called.


Peace in space?

Every time a space ship goes up to perform some hitherto impossible task it leaves behind on Earth a cloud of hypocrisy.

The latest American achievements in Moon flights and space meetings were no exception.

Among the politicians’ nonsense about human progress which these achievements inspired were the usual assurances that the knowledge gained by the programme would never be used in a war.

But at the same time there were uneasy suggestions that perhaps it would be a good idea if space were made international territory and the Moon declared a neutral zone, just in case . . .

The big, inconvenient fact which all the assurances ignore is that this is capitalism, a system which has never been able to act peaceably about something which is vital to its economic interests.

Capitalism may be able to keep a place like the Antarctic a peaceful, internationalised area, but only because it has no discovered mineral wealth and is of no strategic or commercial value.

Space is already a different matter. It is the highway along which will pass the weapons held in constant state of alert by many nations.

Space is an important laboratory, where missile guidance systems and rockets can be tested as they can be tested nowhere else.

It is a pipeline of communication and an observation point from which one state can spy on the industrial and military activities of another.

Space is important to capitalism. That is why the big powers are constantly probing it, and why they have numerous observation and experimental satellites aloft, after significantly unpublicised launchings.

And what will happen if other powers grow interested in space? There is already a European space syndicate, although its future is uncertain. What if there grew up an Afro-Asian project, a Chinese Moon probe ?

Then the space race will be on in earnest, in addition to the arms race. Not an enticing prospect.

Can you think? (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inside capitalism lie the seeds of its own destruction — the working class, developing the consciousness which one day it will use to win political control, and large-scale highly productive industry and intensive agriculture, capable of providing for the needs of all mankind without distinction of race or sex. Because world capitalism is not ruled by a homogeneous, unified class but by many sectional interests forced into competition, these individual capitalists and individual states are compelled inescapably and sometimes reluctantly to develop the old, and introduce new, productive techniques (but also to inhibit their use by trying to ensure that only that which can be sold at a profit is produced) and to educate the working class to a correspondingly high technological level (but also to try to prevent it coming into contact with truly scientific ideas about the society which it now organises and maintains without the help of these parasitical owners).

Ideas such as: man has no instincts, either noble or savage. All his social behaviour is learned and socially conditioned.

The working class own almost nothing except their physical and mental energies. Certainly they have no country and so patriots (except the dead ones) suffer from delusions.

No god has ever been proved to have intervened in the affairs of man — but make-believe gods have been invoked to keep the serf at his plough, the king on his throne, the Ulster Unionist Party in office and the pope in his luxury palace.

Members of all ethnic groups — be they black, red, yellow, white or brown — have potentially the same intelligence. That these potentials are not realised is due to historical circumstances and environmental factors and not to biological differences.

Neither Russia nor any of its satellites, allies or former ‘fraternal states’ is controlled by the working class. Capitalists rule there and exploit wage slaves. Wherever wages are paid in exchange for labour-power a profit is being made, or the deal would not take place.

So-called overpopulation is only a problem because the prevailing social system cannot afford to feed the hungry.

For example, the Indian sub-continent, highly fertile in most parts as it is, with contemporary methods of agriculture could provide food enough to feed the whole world, not just Indians.

The race for the moon, like all other military-political-strategic ventures would be a long way from the top of the list of priorities in a sane and rational socialist world without money, prices and profits, where all goods would be free and all work would be entirely voluntary, where human beings would not be capital investments being kept as oiled and efficient soft machines by their weekly wage packets, but would be priceless co-participants in the conquest of human needs through the democratically controlled harnessing of science, industry and agriculture, the motive being freedom from want, freedom and time to pursue pleasing and satisfying activities instead of the monotonous and physically destroying enslavement to the hard machine in the service of their master—profit.

A hallucination? A dream world divorced from the objective realities? Do you still succumb to the human nature/original sin myth that is central to the apologetic ideology of capitalism, which justifies coercion, oppression, repression, moral codes (‘Thou Shalt Not’), exploitation, war, periodic crises, poverty and the existence of a class which produces nothing but consumes the best? Or do you still subscribe to the even hoarier view that resources are scarce and always will be scarce because they always have been scarce? How long is it since you took your head out of the sand and had a breather? The atmosphere will very soon be thick with socialist ideas. Not solely because of the efforts of our Party’s small membership but because others besides us are rational people faced with the general problems of the working class. If we have come to these conclusions from examining the world in which we live and the agents of change contained within it, then so can they. So can you.

Ideas spring out of the economic structure of society. They spell out Socialism a mile high. Freedom and plenty will not be the result of heaven-sent providence but of human effort, as everything in history has been. 

Michael Bradley

50 Years Ago: The Moon and Progress (2019)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perhaps it would be better if, after all, we left the moon alone. It is lovely to look at and does nobody any harm, and in any case there are plenty of problems to be tackled here on earth, before we start spreading out into space. Yet even the most fervent Luddite, the most obstinate flat-earther, must feel a chill of excitement at the thought of men out in black space, circling the moon, observing it, stepping out onto its surface.

There is near-unanimity of opinion that space flights, moon landings, and the rest are a ‘good thing’ and anyone who has doubts on the matter is immediately classified as a neurotic, reactionary crank. It is true that space vehicles can make a valuable contribution to weather forecasting, communications, and geology, if only because of their unique position for observation. Another result of that unique position is, of course, that space vehicles have distinct, and frightening, military uses — for both observation and combat. It is no coincidence that the world’s two space powers are also the world’s two greatest nuclear powers and that the other positions in the league table of space achievements roughly correspond to the positions in the nuclear power league table.

It might seem churlish to point this out, in face of the glamour of the moon shots. But is it so bad, to try to keep calm amid the hysteria and to wonder whether all technological advance is useful, why some of it happens, whether society has its priorities in order, and whether we should all fall flat on our faces in worship of the great god Progress which is supposed to feed and succour us, which we are supposed to rely on and to be unable to deny?

(Socialist Standard, August 1969)

Voice From The Back: Billionaires And Poverty (2014)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaires And Poverty

Millions of workers throughout the world struggle to survive but it is not all doom and gloom in capitalism–some people are doing exceptionally well. ‘The population of dollar billionaires across the globe has increased by a net 155 to 2,325 in the past 12 months, according to the latest census….’ (Times, 18 September). The Singapore-based Wealth-X, a consultancy that tracks the number of the extremely rich has come up with the following figures for billionaires: US 571, China 190, UK 130, Germany 123 and Russia 114.

Spiritual Values?

One of the myths that religious leaders often like to support is that religious people are not concerned about material things and only spiritual values are of any worth. Despite this some of them do not too badly when it comes to money. ‘Topping the Forbes list is Bishop David Oyedepo with an estimated net worth of US$150m (about R1.6bn). He founded the Living Faith World Outreach Ministry in Nigeria which is Africa’s largest worship centre with a seating capacity of 50,000. Oyedepo owns four private jets, a publishing company, a university, and a high school’ (Sowetan, 18 September). To prove that Oyedepo is not unique – according to the United States entertainment conduit ‘MonteOz’, TB Joshua is only the tenth richest pastor in the world.

An Awful System

Everyone is aware of the poverty of many children in countries in Africa and Asia but what is not as well known is the plight of many children in the USA. ‘The persistent rise of child poverty in Massachusetts–confirmed by last week’s census figures for 2013–is the result of costly day care and housing, the proliferation of low-wage jobs, and a labor market that can be difficult for young parents to break into, according to specialists in the field. Nearly one in six children in Massachusetts was growing up in poverty as of last year, data from the US Census Bureau show; in households with single mothers, it was one in four’ (Boston Globe, 22 September). It speaks volumes for the awfulness of capitalism that such poverty exists in one of the most advanced countries in the world.

Foodbank Reality

A PC site specialising on food issues has come up with some alarming statistics. ‘Maidenhead town centre is a postcard-perfect vision of dreary British consumerism with its rows of coffee shops, Greggs bakeries, chain clothing stores and mobile phone shops. You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking a queue swelling at 9.20 AM on the high street was for some sort of flash sale. In fact, it was the queue for the local food bank. There’s been a staggering 163 percent rise in foodbank use compared to the previous financial year, and over 900,000 adults and children have received three days emergency food and support. Despite signs of economic recovery, the poor have seen their income becoming more and more squeezed. More people are relying on foodbanks than ever before (MUNCHIES, 22 September). So while politicians boast of an economic recovery this is the reality for many workers.

Fantasy And Reality

From time to time the world’s media turns its attention to such issues as climate change and the environment. We have such attention at present. ‘World leaders including US President Barack Obama are holding a summit on climate change at the United Nations. The aim at the New York meeting is to galvanise member states to sign up to a comprehensive new global climate agreement at talks in Paris next year. ‘Climate change is the defining issue of our time. Now is the time for action,’ UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said ahead of the summit’ (BBC News, 23 September). After millions of words are spoken and pious resolutions are passed we can confidently predict the outcome will be the same as in the past – nothing! As long as the profit motive is the driving force of capitalism the environment is of secondary concern.

Meanwhile, Back On Earth

With India successfully placing a satellite in orbit around Mars local politicians were not long in basking in the glory. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, visited the Space Research Organisation and declared that India had a great scientific future. ‘While Mr Modi is eager to use the success of the mission to trumpet India’s economic and scientific prowess as a rising global power, critics said that the mission was a waste of money in a nation where 43 percent of children under the age of 5 are chronically malnourished and 33 per cent of its 1.2 billion people lack access to electricity’ (Times, 25 September). Becoming a global power in a capitalist world where might is right is a higher priority.