It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, July 31, 2023
Demonstration in Toronto demands freedom for Öcalan Kurdish people continue their protests worldwide to demand freedom for Abdullah Öcalan who has not been heard from for over two years. ANF News
TORONTO Monday, 31 Jul 2023
Concerns over the situation of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan increased after the Executive Council Member of the Kurdistan Democratic Communities Union (KCK), Sabri Ok said in an interview on the Kurdish TV Channel Sterk TV on July 8 that threatening letters had recently been sent to Abdullah Öcalan anonymously via the Imrali prison administration.
Lawyers are requesting to meet with Kurdish people's leader Abdullah Öcalan twice a week. However, applications for visits are systematically left unanswered. In some cases, months later, lawyers are informed that disciplinary action has been taken against the Kurdish people's leader and therefore no visit can be granted.
In its annual report about rights violations in Turkish prisons, the Human Rights Association (IHD) stated that Öcalan has not been heard from for 29 months.
Members of the Kurdish Revolutionary Youth Movement (TCŞ) staged a demonstration in Toronto, Canada to demand freedom for Öcalan. The action on Sunday evening was organized as part of the ’Cenga Azadiyê Serbixin’’ [Win the Freedom War] campaign launched by the youth movement Komalên Ciwan.
During the demonstration on Dundas Square, activists denounced the incommunicado detention of the Kurdish leader, chanting the slogans ‘’Bijî Serok Apo’’ [Long Live Leader Öcalan] and “Bê Serok Jiyan Nabe” [No Life Without the Leader].
A statement by the activists recalled that there has been no news from Öcalan since 25 March 2021 when a telephone conversation with his brother was interrupted and could not be continued.
“The applications filed by Öcalan’s lawyers and family members remain unanswered. The Turkish state seeks to take revenge by aggravating the torture system it executes against Leader Öcalan in Imrali in response to the heavy defeat it has suffered in the Medya Defense Zones (guerrilla areas in northern Iraq). We will turn everywhere into a scene of resistance for Leader Öcalan. We call on all revolutionary youths to unite around Leader Öcalan as part of the ‘Cenga Azadiyê Serbixin’ campaign.”
Following the press statement, the group marched to Philips Square.
Your Freedom and Mine Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan's Turkey ... A revolutionary imprisoned on an island fortress may hold the key to peace ...
Featuring texts from Murray Bookchin, Abdullah Öcalan, and activists involved in the struggle on the ground in North East Syria. This new edition features a ...
Amazon.com: The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Woman's Revolution and Democratic Confederalism: 9780745399768: Öcalan, Abdullah: Books.
Since his imprisonment, Öcalan has written a number of books on Kurdish history, Kurdish politics, and perspectives for a sustainable peace process and a ...
Books by Abdullah Öcalan · Die demokratische Zivilisation.
Artist Dora García Considers Alexandra Kollontai and Mexican Feminism
The newest of artist Dora Garcia’s films on feminist revolution, Amor Rojo’s simultaneous exploration of Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai and today’s Mexican feminism is the most compelling yet, but it misses the politics of the contemporary moment. Alexandra Kollontai at her home in Moscow, April 1946.
(Sovfoto / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Early in the film Amor Rojo, artist Dora García’s exploration of the legacy of Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai and the contemporary Mexican feminist movement, a narrator reads Kollontai’s thoughts on solidarity over dramatic footage of recent feminist protesters in Mexico lighting a bonfire. Solidarity comes not from the mere recognition of “a community of interests,” Kollontai wrote, but from the “capacity for love . . . in the broadest sense of the word.”
A revolutionary, Soviet diplomat, writer, and important thinker on communism and the condition of women, Kollontai has been the object of a small revival in recent years, inspiring writing by left feminist thinkers like Kristen Ghodsee and Jodi Dean and discussion in socialist-feminist reading groups. García has been leading this reconsideration.
Kollontai’s work and life was the subject of García’s exhibition Red Love at an art space in suburban Stockholm in 2018, which was followed by an anthology of the same title reflecting on the communist thinker’s legacy. The title was an allusion to Kollontai’s 1923 novel of the same name. (I wrote about García’s anthology and the Kollontai revival for Lux in 2020.)
Since then, intrigued by Kollontai’s time as Soviet ambassador to Mexico, García has been exploring the Bolshevik thinker’s legacy alongside a consideration of present-day Mexican feminism and queer movements in a series of compelling films and exhibitions. I interviewed her for Jacobin about this work last year, when García’s exhibition Revolution: Fulfill Your Promise! was at Amant, along with the first two films in the Kollontai trilogy — Love with Obstacles (2020) and If I Could Wish for Something (2021) — and a read-aloud of Kollontai’s letters by contemporary women, called Letters of Disappointment (the latter is still online).
Amor Rojo (Red Love) is the third film and related exhibition in the series. It is the best of the trilogy, going even deeper into the character both of Kollontai and of Garcia’s contemporary sources than the earlier films. It’s also more emotionally resonant and sensual. Both threads of this film, Kollontai’s life and Mexican feminism, are well rendered and inspiring, but I was disappointed that they never quite intertwine.
The contemporary Mexican subcultures and characters are beautifully vivid and deeply felt, with the return of La Bruja de Texcoco, a trans performer who also appeared in the earlier films, as well as some group interviews with members of a queer commune.
Kollontai’s own history, which is told through interviews with Mexican scholars, is also portrayed well. As in the other films, in Amor Rojo, García has a keen sense of the tactility of the archive. She evocatively focuses on rubber gloves, manila folders, old clippings, and century-old pamphlets that have ripped and must be put back together. Such objects can tease you with tangible glimpses into a person’s life. The experts offer insight and are given plenty of space to talk about Kollontai, her work, and her time in Mexico.
Through her sources, García offers a thoughtful exploration of how different the Soviet Union and Mexico are, because Mexico, despite a long history of anti-colonialist struggle, never had a communist revolution. It’s an important distinction, but one that leaves the viewer curious about leftist feminism in Mexico. A historian speaks of Mexican second-wave feminism, mentioning that after being forgotten for decades, Kollontai’s work was revived in the 1970s.
Yet despite the vivid presence of García’s genderqueer and trans youth, and the atmospherics of pro-choice protests and demonstrations against sexual violence, it’s not clear how Kollontai’s particular feminist ideas are resonating in Mexico today — if indeed they are. While García has great footage of feminist protests in Mexico, we don’t see this movement connected to women’s workplace fights — central to Kollontai’s politics — nor to Kollontai’s reimagining of family life.
On the latter point, García interviews members of a queer, anti-capitalist commune. But she doesn’t ask them much about any of the themes that would have most interested her Bolshevik subject: Do they have children? How are the children cared for, and who does that labor? Where do romantic couples fit into the life of the collective? How do they socialize housework?
Of García’s contemporary Mexican subjects, we don’t learn whether they hold jobs outside the commune or are active in their unions. About their politics, it’s clear they are anti-capitalist, but she doesn’t ask them about communism or socialism, or any questions about what kind of society they are hoping to achieve through their activism.
Possibly García doesn’t see the Mexican activists as part of those traditions because Mexico and Russia have had such different histories, but the film would be stronger with more attention to such convergences and departures. It may be that many queers and feminists in Mexico are mainly engaged in fighting against social conservatism and bigoted violence rather than for socialism, but we’d still love to know what they make of the questions to which Kollontai devoted her life. Members of a left feminist queer commune surely do have much to say on these subjects.
To be sure, some of Kollontai’s preoccupations would seem anachronistic to many young people today, perhaps including communism and revolution itself. More intimately, Kollontai was preoccupied with how to fix relations between men and women, while, globally, many present-day women and queers are more concerned with how to avoid being violently coerced into heterosexuality.
But maybe the shared spirit of 1920s Kollontai and queer Mexicans in the 2020s matters more than these specific divergences on ideology or issues. Refreshingly, in a time of aesthetically austere politics around the world, one clear through line binding Kollontai’s story to that of the young Mexican feminists is eros. Love and sex were always at the center of Kollontai’s work, and she was often mocked for that by other communists, who found personal matters trivial.
Her most famous essay is a letter giving advice to a young communist on love, called “Make Way for Winged Eros.” The film concludes with a long performance by La Bruja to an audience that looks ecstatic to be there together: the last shot of the film is a three-way kiss. CONTRIBUTORS Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.
Antonio Labriola Knew That Marxism Was a Philosophy of Action
Antonio Labriola played a major role in the development of Italian Marxism and inspired the thinking of Antonio Gramsci. Labriola knew that capitalism wouldn’t collapse of its own accord: only a socialist culture of activism could bring about a new society. Portrait of Antonio Labriola. (DEA PICTURE LIBRARY
The Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola was one of the key figures in the development of Marxism as a theory during the period after Karl Marx’s death. Breaking with the economic determinism of the Second International, Labriola argued against the reduction of Marxism to what he called “a new scholasticism.”
By reconsidering the relationship between base and superstructure in Marxist theory — rejecting the idea that the former determines the latter in mechanical fashion — he challenged a fatalistic understanding of Marxism that was becoming increasingly prevalent among its supporters and critics alike. For Labriola, an economic crisis like the one that devastated Italy’s banking system in the 1890s could not by itself lead to the collapse of capitalism.
On the other hand, Labriola insisted that we could not reduce Marxism to a form of voluntarism, whereby the ideal aspirations of a class could usher in a new world by sheer force of will. For Labriola, the task of achieving communism meant combining the painstaking work of analyzing the totality of “all present factual conditions” with that of “revolutionizing brains, organizing proletarians.”
Having won the admiration of important Marxist thinkers such as Karl Kautsky, Georgii Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin, Labriola fell into comparative obscurity after his death. His distinctive approach to Marxism deserves to be recovered in our own time, as we find once again that a crisis-ridden capitalist system will not collapse of its own accord. Only conscious effort and the development of what Labriola called a “socialist culture” will achieve that.
Philosopher of Praxis
Antonio Gramsci borrowed from Labriola the conception of Marxism as a “philosophy of praxis.” In his prison writings, he lamented that Labriola was now “very little known outside a restricted circle,” barely three decades after his death. Gramsci hoped to “put him back into circulation” as a figure who could challenge a “double revision” of Marxism:
On the one hand, some of its elements have been absorbed by idealistic currents (Croce, Sorel, Bergson, etc., the pragmatists, etc.); on the other, the “official Marxists,” seeking for a “philosophy” that contained Marxism, have found it in modern derivations of vulgar philosophical materialism. Labriola distinguishes himself from both with his claim that Marxism is in itself an independent and original philosophy. Work needs to be done in this direction, continuing and developing Labriola’s position.
Labriola’s understanding of Marxism as “independent” from both idealism and materialism was the result of his systematic knowledge of both philosophical traditions. He was born in 1843 in the provincial Southern town of Cassino, the son of a schoolteacher. His education began at the University of Naples in 1861. As he later wrote to Friedrich Engels, there was “a renaissance of Hegelianism” in Naples that year.Antonio Labriola was one of the key figures in the development of Marxism as a theory during the period after Karl Marx’s death.
Labriola’s mentor Bertrando Spaventa had been exiled from the city in 1849, when the police caught him “speaking ‘Hegelian,’ a language more difficult than Basque,” and seemingly quite threatening to the constituted order. Naples, in those days, was capital of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies under the control of the Spanish Bourbons. In his desire to free the whole of Italy from foreign domination, Spaventa had found in the work of Hegel a philosophy of history in which the ideal “manifests and realizes itself as freedom, and all the labors of history tend towards this result.” In the Hegelian system, he had discovered “the rationality of the revolution,” as he put it, for national independence.
With the successful conclusion of Italy’s Wars of Independence in 1861, Spaventa returned to Naples just in time for Labriola’s matriculation, where he could once more teach his classes on Hegel. This involved talking to his students about an unfolding revolution that was “about to destroy all social inequalities” in the wake of national unification so that “there will be no more noble and plebeian, no bourgeois and proletarian, but only Man.”
Toward Marxism
While Labriola was always proud of what he called “my rigorous Hegelian education,” his enthusiasm for Spaventa’s national revolution was short-lived. A clerical job at the Neapolitan police headquarters, which he needed to support his studies but disliked intensely, had confronted him with the situation of the country’s popular classes.
The experience of their lives trailed far behind the promises of the independent Italian nation and of Hegel’s “ethical State,” understood by Spaventa’s generation as the Aufhebung (transcendence) of social inequalities. The situation was especially dire in the South, which was already caught in the enduring anxiety of postunification Italy that took the name of “the Southern Question.”
Labriola began to move toward supporting increasingly radical positions: restrictions on private property; state intervention in the economy; extension of voting rights; state assistance to the poor and disabled; support for strikes and union demands; popular schooling. As professor of moral philosophy in Rome since 1874, he taught classes on the French Revolution that were open to the general public. This elicited protests from right-wing student organizations and the academic council alike.It was only in Marx that Labriola found a theory that would overcome the limitations of ‘philosophy for its own sake.’
In the meantime, while never giving up on Hegel’s concept of historical becoming as a process of antitheses, Labriola’s attention had shifted toward materialistic philosophical positions. He drew from Ludwig Feuerbach, Johann Fichte, and Baruch Spinoza a philosophy capable of interpreting the material conflicts and contradictions of social reality.
It was only in Marx, however, that Labriola found a theory that would overcome the limitations of “philosophy for its own sake” — philosophy that confines itself to “interpreting the world,” as Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach would have it, instead of changing that world through the unity of thought and praxis. Labriola’s “conversion” to socialism began, or so he wrote to Engels, “between 1879 and 1880.” By the mid-1880s, he was a regular contributor to national and international socialist periodicals, from the German Leipziger Volkszeitung to the British Labour Elector.
When the Czech philosopher Thomas Masaryk declared the existence of a “crisis within Marxism” in 1898, Labriola became a loud voice in the debates that followed, especially when responding to the arguments made by Eduard Bernstein. In a series of articles published in book form as Problems of Socialism, Bernstein felt the need to “revise” Marxist predictions about the imminent and inevitable demise of the capitalist system. As capitalism was not about to disappear, he argued, socialism had to propose reformist policies rather than revolutionary ones.
Firm in his conviction that “critical communism never moralized, predicted, [or] announced,” Labriola used his authority to reaffirm the revolutionary valence of Marxism against “that moron Bernstein,” as he called him. In 1892, he was among the promoters of the first Italian Socialist Party.
Socialist Culture
Labriola’s relationship to the new party was always critical: he once remarked that “a party of critics, which is what the socialist party ought to be, thrives on criticism and self-criticism.” Such criticism reached a climax in 1894 during the insurrections of the Fasci Siciliani, the peasant workers’ leagues of socialist inspiration.
Instead of supporting these movements, the party had concluded that conditions were not mature for a revolt, and that peasants were not industrial proletarians after all. But where could industrial workers be found in the largely agrarian economy of Italy at the time?
Like the Neapolitan Hegelians of the 1860s, Labriola argued, socialist leaders projected their idealist expectations onto real movements “as if they were not in Naples, but in Berlin.” During the harsh police repression decreed by the government of Francesco Crispi, Labriola found it hard to contain his ire: “The party doesn’t want to know about it; it waits for that future transcendental moment when the reactionary mass will face the proletarian mass, and then bang!”
For Labriola, this episode had many theoretical implications. First, it showed that socialism in Italy had to take the reality of the Southern Question into account and learn from the Fasci the importance of achieving strategic coordination between the city and the countryside. Second, one could not reduce socialism to a fatalistic conception of history that meant waiting for a sudden cataclysm.For Labriola, one could not reduce socialism to a fatalistic conception of history that meant waiting for a sudden cataclysm.
Last but not least, it was necessary to thoroughly reconsider the relationship between workers and the party — and by extension, between the masses and the intellectuals, or between theory and praxis. According to Labriola, the party did not possess a “catechism of communism” that workers had to follow. Rather, it was the working masses themselves who were to inform the party’s programs “by changing the modes and schedules of action.”
Although he never embraced a “spontaneist” view of proletarian consciousness, Labriola insisted that party intellectuals could not introduce socialist ideology to the working class from the outside. Instead, they should play the role of mediating between spontaneity and the realization of communism: “Between spontaneous phenomena and the developed consciousness of the proletarian revolution there is a missing link, which is precisely socialist culture.” Labriola devoted his three most important essays to developing such a culture.
The Letter and the Spirit
Written as a preface for the 1895 Italian translation of the Communist Manifesto, his essay “In Memory of the Communist Manifesto” argued for the centrality of socialist culture. If the Manifesto was, as Labriola remarked, “the personal work of Marx and Engels,” the communist movement itself was the real “author of a social form” that the Manifesto represented. The book “has the proletariat as its subject.”
The Manifesto, “small in size, and in style so alien to the rhetorical insinuation of a faith or belief,” had given theoretical substance to “the political action that German communists unraveled in the revolutionary period of 1848–50.” For that very reason, Labriola stressed, its key arguments “no longer constitute for us a set of practical views” — “it merely records as a matter of history something no longer necessary to think of, since we have to deal with the political action of the proletariat which today is before us.”
This was not Labriola’s way of discarding the Manifesto as somewhat passé. On the contrary, he saw it as the best way to remain faithful to its “marrow.” After all, neither Marx nor Engels “pretended to give the code of socialism, the catechism of critical communism, or the handbook of proletarian revolution.” Their intention was, after the fantasies of utopian socialism, to give birth to “critical communism — this is its true name.” The Manifesto was “critical” in the sense that we should recognize its formulations as being provisional and open to the real action of the workers’ movement, interpreting it in the light of changing circumstances.The underlying economic fact of human, material labor is always inseparable from certain forms of consciousness.
Lenin contemplated a Russian translation of this “seriously interesting work” on the Manifesto, and his sister Anne would oblige in 1908. Meanwhile, Labriola was working on his second essay, “Of Historical Materialism: A Preliminary Explication” (1896). Once again, we find here the idea that critical communism is not “the intellectual vision of a grand plan or design” but rather “the objective theory of social revolutions.” According to Labriola, its theory is “a plagiarism of the things it explains.”
However, such “plagiarism” did not entail mere descriptive empiricism or a contemplative view of reality. To clarify this point, Labriola tackled the problem of base and superstructure:
For our doctrine the problem is not to retranslate into economic categories all the complicated manifestations of history. It is a matter of explaining in the last instance (Engels) every historical fact by way of the underlying economic structure (Marx): to do that, analysis, reduction, and then mediation and composition are needed.
This meant that, within the totality of social relations, the interdependence of base and superstructure unfolds through historical processes of mediations:
There is no historical fact which does not repeat its origin from the conditions of the underlying economic structure; but there is no historical fact which is not preceded, accompanied and followed by certain forms of consciousness.
We might recall here a famous remark that Marx made about the distinctive nature of human labor: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” The underlying economic fact of human, material labor is always inseparable from certain forms of consciousness.
For Labriola, this meant in practical terms that theory without political action is no more than idle speculation, while political action without theory is but the myth of “spontaneous anarchy,” which always runs the risk of transforming rebel groups into “automatic instruments of reaction.”
Labriola’s third essay came in the form of letters to Georges Sorel that were collected under the title “Discussing Socialism and Philosophy” (1898). He conceptualized the interrelation of theory and action in a formula as “the philosophy of praxis,” which he describes as “the marrow of historical materialism . . . the philosophy immanent to the things about which it philosophizes.”
The formula had certain antecedents on the Hegelian left (August von Cieszkowski, Moses Hess), but Labriola meant it in an original way. Neither idealism nor materialism, neither positivism nor economism, the philosophy of praxis is a total “Lebens-und-Weltanschauung,” or “general conception of life and the world.” It is the “self-critical” analysis of historical mediations that at the same time explains and strives to transform the totality of social relations. As such, it is articulated in three domains:
(a) the sphere of philosophy, as the general theory of the history and praxis of man in society; (b) the sphere of the critique of economics, as the science of that particular historical stage constituted by the society organized on capital; (c) the sphere of politics, as the theory of the organization of the workers’ movement aimed at the construction of socialism.
Labriola’s Legacy
Having been such an important, looming presence in the life of Italian and international Marxism at the turn of the nineteenth century, Labriola’s name is barely recognized today. He is often confused with the socialist politician Arturo Labriola, of whom he had a contemptuous view: “nothing to do with me and cannot even understand the books on which he writes nonsense.”Having been such an important, looming presence in the life of Marxism at the turn of the nineteenth century, Labriola’s name is barely recognized today.
One cause of Labriola’s oblivion was none other than his most famous student, the philosopher Benedetto Croce — or “la mia croce,” my punishment, as Labriola called him. When Labriola died on February 12, 1904, the Socialist Party, holding steady on its revisionist course, did its best to forget his name. “We will return to his writings in the moments of idleness that militant life allows,” concluded the eulogy of party leader Filippo Turati.
The liberal Croce, on the other hand, was eager to return to Labriola’s writings now that the author could no longer reply. In his work Historical Materialism and Marxist Economy, Croce presented Labriola as offering “the most thorough and deep treatment” of Marxism, before going on to argue that he ultimately failed to provide communism with a coherent philosophy. With Labriola, Marxism was “dead,” according to Croce — a judgement he pronounced in the role of Italian philosophy’s “secular Pope,” as Gramsci dubbed him.
When the Italian Communist Party began reconstructing a Marxist culture from the ruins of fascism in the late 1940s, it claimed to be returning not to Labriola but to Gramsci’s “anti-Croce.” True, Gramsci had indeed “put back into circulation” quite a few of Labriola’s concepts, from the need for a united front between city and countryside in his writings on the Southern Question, to the idea of Marxism as a “philosophy of praxis” and the dialectics of “critical communism” as a process of continuous verification and falsification between theory and action.
Behind those pointers, however, the name of Labriola long remained unheard, unfelt, unseen. It is only in the twenty-first century that Labriola’s thought has begun resurfacing, culminating in the prestigious National Edition of his works that is now underway in Italy.
As capitalism keeps escaping the self-inflicted disasters of financial crises and unprecedented exploitation of resources, both human and natural, the work of an eminent nineteenth-century Marxist seems timely. That work can still make a valuable contribution in clarifying the direction that theory, as the “plagiarism of things,” ought to follow in the organization of a movement aimed at the construction of socialism.
CONTRIBUTORS Roberto Dainotto is a professor of literature at Duke University. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of Antonio Labriola.
OECD: 60% of finance and manufacturing workers fear AI replacement
But it's not all doom and gloom yet
July 12, 2023 -
While AI’s impact on the labour market has been limited so far, concerns about job security are heightened, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found.
To assess the emerging opinions around artificial intelligence in the workplace, the OECD surveyed over 2,000 employers and 5,300 workers in finance and manufacturing across seven of its member countries.
The survey showed that three in five employees working in these sectors fear they’ll be replaced by AI in the next decade. Two in five are worried about AI-related wage decreases.
Overall, jobs with the highest risk of automation (those relying on more than 25 out of the 100 skills considered easily automable) account for 27% of the labour force in the 38 OECD countries. The most exposed among them are Eastern European nations, including Hungary, the Slovak Republic, Czechia, and Poland.
On the bright side, 63% of the respondents said AI has increased their enjoyment at work, by automating, for instance, dangerous or tedious tasks. Eight in ten employees have seen their performance improve, and a little over 50% said AI has boosted their mental health. Around the same number of employers reported that artificial intelligence can help disabled workers.
But despite the positive feedback, a number of tangible concerns remain. These include not only job loss, but also work intensification and ethical challenges.
The OECD is urging its member countries to act fast and ensure that AI’s benefits in the workplace outweigh the risks. It stresses the need for training programmes and — most importantly — policies to facilitate AI’s deployment in a responsible, trustworthy, and unbiased way.
These antimicrobial spacesuits could solve astronauts’ laundry woes
Textile tech has come a long way since the Apollo missions
July 28, 2023 - TNW
Wardrobe malfunctions are never fun. When on Earth, they might be a nuisance or prove somewhat embarrassing. In space however, they could be a matter of life and death. Not to mention, how do you handle, uhm, laundry on the Moon?
The European Space Agency (ESA) says that the next generation of lunar explorers will be kitted with a wholly upgraded set of spacesuits. And textile tech has come quite a way since the iconic string of Apollo missions in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Other than having to stand up to an extra-terrestrial environment characterised by high vacuum, radiation, extreme temperatures, and space dust, spacesuits are also subject to good old fashioned germs.
As we gear up to send humans to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, ESA is conducting a project called PExTex to assess suitable materials for future spacesuit designs. Keeping your underwear clean, in space
It is joined by the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF), which is leading a sub-project called BACTeRMA, trying to find ways of limiting microbial growth in the inner lining of the material. (The abbreviation stands for Biocidal Advanced Coating Technology for Reducing Microbial Activity.)
“Think about keeping your underwear clean; it’s an easy enough job on a daily basis, thanks to detergent, washing machines and dryers,” ESA materials and processes engineer Malgorzata Holynska commented. “But in habitats on the Moon or beyond, washing spacesuit interiors on a consistent basis may well not be practical.
“In addition, spacesuits will most probably be shared between different astronauts, and stored for long periods between use, potentially in favourable conditions for microorganisms. Instead we needed to find alternative solutions to avoid microbial growth.”
Bacteria can be vibrantly colourful. Credit: ESA
The researchers had to forego traditional antimicrobial materials such as copper and silver as they are likely to tarnish over time, not to mention chafe. The team then turned to what are called “secondary metabolites.”
These are organic compounds produced by plants, fungi, and microorganisms, but they are not directly involved in basic cellular processes required for growth, development, and reproduction. Their functions involve protection from pathogens and other organisms, which is what lends them their antibiotic qualities. Austrian textile startup has ‘unique collection’
To work out the details on how to actually get these materials onto fabric, the OeWF has enlisted the Vienna Textile Lab. Apparently, the Austrian startup, which focuses on developing organic colours for textiles using microbes, is in possession of a unique “bacteriographic” collection.
Violacein pigment produced by bacteria. Credit: ESA
The two have collaborated on various “biocidal textile processing techniques,” such as dying cloth with the metabolites and then exposing them to both human perspiration and all other kinds of stressors they will encounter in space.
These newly developed fabrics are currently being integrated into a spacesuit simulator, and are scheduled to undergo field testing in March 2024.
Where humans go, bacteria will follow. Many of these microorganisms are literally vital to life on Earth. They may also become essential in everything from producing rocket fuel to manufacturing food on longer space missions to Mars. However, as anyone who has ever suffered from food poisoning can attest, they can also be downright nasty little buggers. What’s more, there is evidence some species can survive in the harsh environment of space for years.
Keeping harmful bacteria at bay is crucial to a successful space mission. NASA says it “puts a lot of effort” into knowing which microbes might hitch a ride on the spaceships heading out to orbit, and continuously monitors what’s going on with bacteria on the International Space Station (ISS). Some teeny-tiny astronauts are even brought along on purpose, for space microbiology research.
European satellite plunges back to Earth in first-of-its-kind assisted re-entry
The European Space Agency deftly guided one of its satellites toward a fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere Friday, demonstrating a new method of post-mission disposal to ensure the spacecraft would not fall into any populated areas.
The Aeolus satellite was relatively modest in size and mass—about 1.1 metric tons with its fuel tank empty—but ESA hailed Friday's "assisted re-entry" as proof that the space agency takes the stewardship of space seriously.
When the Aeolus mission was conceived in the late 1990s, there were no guidelines for European satellites regarding space debris or the safety of their re-entry. Aeolus took nearly 20 years to get to the launch pad, operated in space for five years, and now regulations have changed. Future ESA satellites will need to be capable of a targeted re-entry, where rocket engines steer the spacecraft toward a specific patch of ocean or are designed to burn up from aerodynamic heating.
Because it was designed two decades ago, Aeolus did not have to meet these standards, and the satellite didn't have a propulsion system that could target a pinpoint re-entry. Engineers originally anticipated Aeolus would naturally re-enter the atmosphere after running of fuel. Because it was in a polar orbit, Aeolus could have fallen nearly anywhere. ESA expected about 20 percent of the spacecraft would survive the scorching temperatures of re-entry and make it to Earth's surface.
Officials decided to end Aeolus's science mission measuring winds from space in April when the satellite still had some gas in the tank—enough for a series of thruster firings to steer the satellite toward a re-entry corridor well away from any people.
“This is quite unique, what we are doing here," said Holger Krag, head of ESA's safety office, before Friday's final re-entry maneuvers. "You don’t find examples of this in the history of spaceflight. The re-entry of the Skylab space station in the late ‘70s—that was a bit of a similar type of assisted re-entry by changing the attitude and therefore changing the exposed area (to atmospheric drag)."Advertisement
NASA put Skylab into a tumble in an attempt to better control where the spacecraft fell to Earth, but debris from the 76-metric ton space station was scattered across Western Australia when it re-entered the atmosphere in 1979. NASA's efforts in 1979 had a "far lower level of control than we have here today," Krag said.
“We are doing this with the best standards that we have today," said Simonetta Cheli, ESA's director for Earth observation.
Krag said he hopes ESA becomes a "role model" for other space agencies and commercial companies to commit to tackling the problem of space debris and the dangers of uncontrolled re-entry. ESA is partnering with a Swiss company for a mission in 2026 to demonstrate the removal of a piece of space junk from orbit. An 'impossible mission'
During its nearly five-year mission, Aeolus flew in a polar orbit at an altitude of about 200 miles (320 kilometers), already lower than the height of the International Space Station and most other satellites. Aeolus was a pioneering Earth science mission that measured wind speeds around the world using a sophisticated on-board laser, and it was so successful that ESA and the European weather satellite agency Eumetsat plan to launch a follow-on mission called Aeolus 2 planned for launch at the end of the decade.
Aeolus was originally designed as a science and technology demonstration mission, but its global wind measurements proved so valuable that the data were incorporated into operational numerical weather forecast models, an eventuality not foreseen before the satellite's launch. The mission was delayed for years until it finally launched on a European Vega rocket in 2018, and challenges with developing the satellite's space-based laser instrument earned it the nickname the "impossible mission."
ESA called it quits on the more than $500 million mission in April, then prepared to bring down the satellite. Aeolus first descended to an altitude of about 174 miles (280 kilometers) with nothing but the effect of aerodynamic drag. Then a sequence of thruster burns began lowering the orbit until a final maneuver Friday brought the altitude of the orbit's perigee, or lowest point, to just 75 miles (120 kilometers).
Nature took care of the rest. The gentle push of drag from the uppermost wisps of Earth's atmosphere would have pulled Aeolus closer to Earth until it broke apart around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the surface. ESA's ground team in Germany put the satellite on a trajectory where it was expected to burn up over the Atlantic Ocean.
"Operations are over for Aeolus," tweeted Josef Aschbacher, ESA's director general. "Latest tracking data confirms our final maneuver was successful, and the hard work and dedication of the teams has given Aeolus a great chance for safe re-entry tonight."
STEPHEN CLARK is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
ESA’s Aeolus assisted reentry is ‘pushing the limits’ of space tech and safety
The only satellite to measure the globe’s wind profile from space, Aeolus, has concluded its mission and returned to Earth through a first-of-its-kind assisted reentry on Friday, July 28. The satellite exceeded its mission by two years since its launch in 2018, and with limited propellant left over, ground teams were able to lower the spacecraft to an altitude of 120 kilometers before reentering the Earth’s atmosphere on its own. The US Space Command confirmed the satellite’s reentry occurred around 9:00 PM CEST (19:00 UTC) above Antarctica, exactly where ESA hoped Aeolus would be.
Aeolus is the fifth in the family of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Explorer missions, which focus on observing the interactions between Earth systems, and was built by Airbus Defence and Space. The Aeolus return is part of a broader effort of reducing the already low risk of spacecraft reentry, and to pioneer a safer way of de-orbiting satellites nearing the end of their life.
As the space agency commits to achieving an assisted reentry of a satellite for the first time, ESA’s Aeolus operations director Isabel Rojo sat down with NSF to discuss why this mission is significant, and how accomplishing it will be a difficult feat.
All about Aeolus
While the spacecraft launched in 2018, the overall program was in the works for almost 20 years before flying into space. Aeolus was approved in 1999 and was scheduled to lift off in 2007 but was delayed for over a decade due to continuous technological hurdles.
However, on Aug. 22, 2018, the $560-million satellite finally launched into space atop a Vega rocket from the Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG) in Kourou, French Guiana. During its five-year mission, the satellite resided at an altitude of 320 kilometers above the Earth.
Aeolus lifts off from French Guiana atop a Vega rocket. (Credit: ESA)
The main objective of the mission was to “address the lack of global wind profiles in the Global Observing System,” according to ESA.
“Direct global profile measurements of wind fields are lacking, representing one of the largest deficiencies in the observing system and limiting improvements to numerical weather predictions and climate models,” the agency said.
Before Aeolus, the most direct observations of wind were from radiosondes that were launched from stations every day, mostly in the northern hemisphere. “Wind-field information in remote regions, over the oceans, in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere is largely indirect,” ESA continued.
But Aeolus was able to measure wind to an accuracy of just one meter per second in the planetary boundary layer, and two meters per second in the free troposphere. It was also able to determine the average wind velocity over 100-kilometer tracks and measure 100 wind profiles per hour.
The satellite masses 1,360 kilograms and carries one instrument, called the Atmospheric Laser Doppler Instrument (ALADIN). According to ESA, “ALADIN fires short pulses of UV light towards the planet, which bounce off air molecules and other particles as they are blown through the atmosphere. By measuring the shift in frequency of the light that is scattered back to the satellite, Aeolus can determine the speed and direction of the wind in the lowermost 30 kilometers of the atmosphere”.
ALADIN is equipped with two lasers to help observe the Earth’s wind. (Credit: Airbus Defence and Space)
The satellite has been deemed more than a success, after not only exceeding its expected lifetime but providing information almost impossible to measure from Earth. Its data has been used by meteorological organizations across the world to inform enhanced weather predictions. In April 2022, the British Met Office claimed Aeolus’s data improved nearly all the organization’s weather observations.
Aeolus also became a prominent tool during the COVID-19 pandemic. The decline in commercial flights led to fewer measurements of weather forecasts, and Aeolus was able to pick up the slack and provide accurate data on the weather in the weeks ahead.
First-of-its-kind assisted reentry
After completing scientific observations for five years, the teams involved in Aeolus decided to use the remaining propellant for an assisted reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Aeolus was built to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere naturally at the end of its life, but ESA found that it was possible to reduce the already minimal risk to life or infrastructure through assisted reentry.
The task was unique because missions designed years ago didn’t have to adhere to today’s casualty risk regulations, but the satellites that are designed now are required to either completely burn up or undergo a controlled reentry. A controlled reentry wasn’t possible for Aeolus by design, due to its lack of propellant and inadequate propulsion system among other reasons, as it would require ground teams to maneuver the satellite to an altitude of 50 kilometers.
“This first attempt at an assisted reentry sets a new precedent for missions that didn’t fall under such regulations when they were designed, but could be made to retroactively adhere to them,” ESA said.
But the mission would not go without its challenges.
ESA Main Control Room in Germany helping guide Aeolus. (Credit: ESA)
“We’re trying to push the limits of what the spacecraft can do and also what ground can do because the whole concept was built around assisted reentry, which for now was never proven that it can work,” Isabel Rojo told NSF. “So, the difficulties are implementing the maneuvers, and acquiring the spacecraft between such large maneuvers, because if they substantially misperform, it could lead to needing to search for the spacecraft. So, there’s a lot of technical difficulties inherent to the maneuvers themselves because they are quite large”.
To aid the spacecraft in its return, ESA’s Main Control Room in Darmstadt, Germany, was tasked in completing several difficult maneuvers to lower its orbit, and ensuring that they found the way to configure the satellite such that it withstands the difficult conditions of flying at lower altitudes. The first was achieved on Monday, July 24, when Aeolus completed the largest firing of its thrusters, lowering it to an altitude of 250 kilometers. The burn lasted for 37 minutes and 24 seconds – more than three times the size of Aeolus’ routine burns. According to ESA, the burn consumed six kilograms of propellant.
“It was the first time we performed such a large maneuver in this direction,” said Rojo. “It’s pretty much the same kind of maneuver that we’re going to be performing from now on in order to lower the perigee of the satellite. We needed that confidence to make sure that all the systems on board are responding properly to this sort of maneuver.
“That’s why this was a big first, and it’s in such a way that the attitude of the spacecraft is in retrograde… due to the position of the thrusters on the spacecraft body, we need to turn the satellite around to be able to thrust it against the flight direction, which then reduces the speed and gets it lower,” continued Rojo.
The days following were spent preparing for the next maneuver on Thursday, July 27. This one lowered its altitude from 250 kilometers to 230 kilometers. Aeolus completed several more burns throughout the night, and lowered even further to about 160 kilometers in altitude. “Orbiting at 150 [kilometers] is very low indeed. Aeolus was not made for this. The spirit at Mission Control is determined, excited, and a little tired. This week has been a long time coming,” ESA said in an updated blog post.
According to ESA, for a moment it seemed like there was an anomaly with the thrusters, but minutes later the team was able to resume the mission. The agency has not provided further details on the anomaly.
The low altitude of the satellite presented several complexities, such as the tug of the Earth’s atmosphere, and the dynamics of solar weather that could speed things up, or potentially slow them down.
Once Aeolus reached 150 kilometers, a final maneuver guided the satellite towards the “optimal position” for reentry, ESA said. Just after 2:00 PM CEST (12:00 UTC), ground teams sent the final commands to the satellite, before it returned in a matter of hours, seeing 80% of it burn up in reentry. The rest of the satellite fell harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean.
If any issues were to arise, ground teams would have aborted the mission and let Aeolus reenter the Earth’s atmosphere naturally.
Paving a safer future
The ongoing call for a safer space environment sparked ESA’s interest in achieving an assisted satellite reentry. The ability to guide a spacecraft out of orbit reduces the possibility of it becoming space debris and posing a risk to other infrastructure in orbit or on Earth.
“If it works, I think we’d be demonstrating that with a satellite intended for flight at a certain altitude, something can be done if sufficient efforts are in place from the ground to be able to guide it in a more improved track,” Rojo said. “Then, we would be acquiring an awful lot of knowledge on the ground side, and how to best ensure we can compute its orbit and how best to configure and operate the satellite under these difficult conditions”.
Uncontrolled reentries of satellites occur frequently, and even some of the biggest spacecraft – like the 74-tonne Skylab which returned to the Earth’s atmosphere in 1979 – have posed very little threat to populations.
However, the growing number of satellites in orbit has called for greater attention on how spacecraft can continue to safely return to Earth.
An assisted reentry solution would join the many other de-orbiting plans already in motion across the globe. Several companies, such as US-based Momentus, Japan-based Astroscale, and others are developing orbital transfer vehicles (OTV) – or space tugs – that would be able to relocate defunct satellites to custom orbits, or even de-orbit them.
(ESA’s Aeolus spacecraft shooting lasers to observe the Earth’s winds. Credit: ESA)
U.S. Congressman Slams Alito’s “Wrong, Arrogant” Claims, Gives Evidence
Supreme Court JusticeSamuel Alito took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal for the second time in recent months, this time not to defend his own ethics but to argue that Congress has little jurisdiction over the Supreme Court and therefore no business trying to impose ethical standards on its Justices.
[NOTE: Alito is responding to the uproar over the Justice Clarence Thomasrevelations and subsequent legislation that advanced in the Senate to impose on the Supreme Court similar ethical standards that all lower courts must already adhere to by law.]
Alito, famously a constitutional originalist, claims that the SCOTUS was not created by Congress but by the Constitution, in which he finds no provision allowing for the imposition of ethics on the Court by Congress.
But if Congress can’t mandate the compliance of Supreme Court Justices, U.S. Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) asks, then why do all the SCOTUS Justices already file “congressionally mandated reports” — even if, in the case of Justice Thomas, the accuracy of those reports has been questioned?
Rep. Lieu, who is a lawyer, says it’s simply because Alito’s “extreme and arrogant” argument is “so very wrong.”
Lieu also writes directly to Alito, albeit in the public forum, with another claim about congressional oversight of the Supreme Court, offering evidence proving such oversight is already manifest.
“Dear Justice Alito.” Lieu writes. “You’re on the Supreme Court in part because Congress expanded the Court to 9 Justices. Congress can impeach Justices and can in many cases strip the Court of jurisdiction. Congress has always regulated you and will continue to do so. You are not above the law.”
Longtime Democratic Rep. John Dingell, who helped make the NRA's lobbying arm into a political force, privately sought to repeal the 1994 assault weapons ban that he voted for: report
The late Rep. John Dingell played a major role in the rise of the NRA's lobbying operation in DC.
In the 1970s, Dingell advocated for the NRA, in an era where many Democrats backed the group.
The New York Times examined a trove of documents which outlined Dingell's relationship with the NRA.
The late Democrat Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, an institution in US politics who served in Congress from 1955 to 2015, played a significant role in enacting countless pieces of legislation over the course of generations, with his eye always on the constituents that he represented in his Detroit-area district.
But a trove of documents recently examined by The New York Times also reveals the role that Dingell played in the rise of the National Rife Association's political influence beginning in the 1970s, with the congressman's efforts playing a major role in the development of the organization's lobbying outfit.
"An organization with as many members, and as many potential resources, both financial and influential within its ranks, should not have to go 2d or 3d Class in a fight for survival," Dingell wrote in a 1975 memo obtained by The Times, where he outlined how the NRA could become a force on Capitol Hill. "It should go First Class."
In addition to his congressional work, Dingell for years also served on the board of the NRA, stepping down in 1994 after supporting that year's highly consequential crime bill — which included the landmark assault weapons ban that was overwhelmingly supported by most Democrats and vehemently opposed by Republicans.
Although Dingell voted for the crime bill after intense lobbying from then-President Bill Clinton, the congressman almost immediately sought out ways to repeal the assault weapons provision after the larger bill was signed into law, according to The Times.
In that year's midterm elections, Republicans flipped both houses of Congress fueled in part by intense opposition to gun control in a slew of rural districts anchored in the Midwest and South.
As Dingell's staff pondered a potential repeal push in a 1995 memo, they also realized that "a solid explanation will have to be made to the majority of our voters who favor gun control."
Rep. Debbie Dingell, who succeeded her husband in Congress in 2015, told The Times that the congressman needed police protection for several months after the assault weapons ban went on the books. (The ban expired in September 2004 and has yet to be renewed.)
"We had people scream and yell at us. It was the first time I had seen that real hate," she told the newspaper.
John Dingell continued to have talks with the NRA over gun policy throughout the rest of the career — notably after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
But according to Debbie Dingell, her late husband's views on the NRA and guns had shifted during his nearly 60-year political career.
"I can't tell you how many nights I heard him talking to people about how the NRA was going too far, how they didn't understand the times," the congresswoman told The Times. "He was a deep believer in the Second Amendment, and at the end he still deeply believed, but he also saw the world was changing."
John Dingell died in February 2019. He was 92 years old.
