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)
Do we now have to start a campaign to stop litter in space? Its bad enough on our streets and in our parks. Now it has downed the Atlantis return mission. Not once, not twice, but three times. Mysterious objects in space, UFOs, or that's what happens when you flush your garbage into the galaxy. Shuttle Landing Delay: UFO or Litter? Sheesh. How do they know it ain't the three missing bolts that floated off during the repairs. Of course space litter could also be from exploded satellites from the undeclared war in space.
Litter, garbage, the result of the planned obsolescence the throw away culture of of capitalism in space. And wait till we get more space tourists. More litter. Duck here comes another one.....
Tossed in space, litter-ally It's a junkyard out there in space, and sometimes astronauts accidentally contribute to the litter.
In 1965, the first American spacewalker, Ed White, lost a spare glove when he went outside for the first time. From that time on, astronauts have accidentally added some of the more unusual items to the 100,000 pieces of space trash that circle Earth.
In July, spacewalker Piers Sellers sheepishly reported that he lost a spatula. Nicknamed "spatsat" by space junk watchers, it will return to Earth in a fireball early next month.
This week the Atlantis astronauts made their own contributions to the space debris in low orbit when a couple of bolts escaped from the addition they were connecting to the International Space Station.
ESA Science & Technology: Space is big, but not big enough According to Douglas Adams, in his famous book The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, space is big. However, it seems near-Earth space is not big enough. In December 2001, the Space Shuttle pushed the International Space Station away from a discarded Russian rocket booster that was due to pass uncomfortably close. Space litter is a growing problem but smarter satellite design may help in the future
MSW Management | Beyond The Pail "Marking" litter is currently an especially acute problem in space. When we earthlings began our space exploration, we followed an age-old tradition. Pioneers and explorers have always done whatever it takes to "get there" the first time and have given little or no thought to what they leave behind or no thought at all to cleaning up after themselves. Note that the Mars record to date is that two out of every three "lander" missions have produced nothing but space junk!
When, however, standard roadside litter is compared to the discard of "official" EPA hazardous wastes - lead-acid car batteries or industrial canisters full of used solvents or nuclear wastes - many of us also believe that the litter we're used to seeing takes a secondary place.
But what happens to this view when items common in refuse and litter - such as French fries or plastic bags - get frozen solid and hit you or anything else at a speed of 20,000 ft/sec? If you are traveling in the same direction at the same speed, the litter will just float alongside; but if you are going at some other angle, and especially if you are moving in the opposite direction, it could shoot right through you! Ouch!
COSMIC LITTER: Japan Moves to Counter Space Debris (June 30, 1998)
Space is getting to be a crowded neighborhood. (Courtesy of NASDA)
Japan is taking steps to clean up the space debris that is hurtling around Earth at tremendous speeds, threatening to collide with satellites and render them useless. There are said to be about 35 million objects, large and small, that can be classified as space debris, including pieces of rockets and satellites launched in the past. Japan's countermeasures include construction of a facility to monitor debris by radar and a telescope to help skirt collisions. In the future, Japan hopes to apply its strength in unmanned robot technology to develop a satellite that could collect the litter flying around Earth.
President Trump has decided to turn his attention to mining the moon during this difficult time for the nation. According to documents released by the White House, Donald Trump paused his efforts around the growing coronavirus crisis to sign an executive order. This order will leave the US free to mine the moon for resources. The document says the order rejects the 1979 global agreement known as the Moon Treaty .
The Moon Treaty of 1979It was deliberated and developed by the Legal Subcommittee for the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) from 1972 to 1979. ... Specifically, the Moon Treaty applies to the Moon and other celestial bodies in the solar system excluding the Earth.Oct 24, 2011
This treaty says any activity in space should conform with international law. The order states: "Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space. "Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons." Trump now wants to 'mine the moon for resources' because causing havoc on Earth obviously isn't enough for him
INDEPENDENT UK Picture: CHRIS KLEPONIS / POOL/iStock/Getty/Twitter
In news that no one expected to read in the middle of a pandemic, Donald Trump has signed an executive order to mine the moon for resources.
Yes, that is something that the president of the United States actually did while hundreds of thousands of his citizens are being impacted by a deadly virus. Priorities!
In a document released by the White House, Trump's order controversially rejects the 1979 global Moon Treaty agreement, which stated that any activity in space should abide by international law.
According to Trump's order, it states that:
Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space.
Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.
In response, the Russian space agency has accused Trump of trying to 'privatise space.' In a statement, Roscosmos said:
Attempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of other planets hardly set the countries (on course for) fruitful cooperation.
For some, this may bring back memories of the Cold War 'space race' between the US and the Soviet Union but for many, they have just been left baffled that Trump would choose to concentrate on this during one of the most testing periods the world has experienced for a generation.
This isn't a million miles away from the premise of the sci-fi film Moon, where mankind attempts to harvest minerals from our lunar friend. Even that movies director, Duncan Jones, was a bit taken aback when he heard this news.
Let's not forget that in June 2018, Donald Trump tweeted that the moon was 'a part of Mars' so we cannot wait to see how this is going to play out.
Aug 19, 2015 - Hans-Kurt Lange, who worked as an illustrator in NASA's Future Projects Division, modeled 2001's space suits on NASA's, using the same ...
Mar 27, 1997 - The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in "2001: A Space Odyssey," but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely ...
Apr 4, 2018 - Kubrick may have set out to make a science-fiction film, but 2001: A Space Odyssey, which turns 50 this week, is closer to home than we think, ...
Monday, March 29, 2021
LANGUAGE OF SPACE EXPLORATION RHETORIC CAN AFFECT PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF SPACE ACTIVITIES
Would we want futuristic Mars settlements to operate like modern-day Earth towns, or could we do better?
Last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars to much fanfare, just days after probes from the UAE and China entered orbit around the Red Planet. The surge in Martian traffic symbolizes major advancements in space exploration. It also presents an opportune moment to step back and consider not only what humans do in space, but how we do it — including the words we use to describe human activities in space.
The conversation around the language of space exploration has already begun. NASA, for instance, has been rooting out the gendered language that has plagued America’s space program for decades. Instead of using “manned” to describe human space missions, it has shifted to using gender-neutral terms like “piloted” or “crewed.” But our scrutiny of language shouldn’t stop there. Other words and phrases, particularly those that invoke capitalism or colonialism, should receive the same treatment.
To some extent, language influences the way we think and understand the world around us. A dramatic example comes from the Pirahã tribe of the Brazilian Amazon, whose language contains very few terms for describing numbers or time. A capitalist culture in which time equals money likely wouldn’t make sense to them. Similarly, language likely affects humans’ thoughts and beliefs about outer space. The words scientists and writers use to describe space exploration may influence who feels included in these endeavors — both as direct participants and as benefactors — and alter the way people interact with the cosmos.
Take, for example, John F. Kennedy’s 1962 Moon Speech, in which he three times used the words “conquer” and “conquest.” While Kennedy’s rhetoric was intended to bolster U.S. morale in the space race against the USSR, the view of outer space as a venue for conquest evokes subjugation and exploitation and exemplifies an attitude that has resulted in much destruction on Earth. By definition, conquering involves an assertion of power and mastery, often through violence. Similarly, former President Donald Trump is the most recent American president to use the term “Manifest Destiny” to describe his motives for exploring space, tapping into a philosophy that suggests humanity’s grand purpose is to expand and conquer, regardless of who or what stands in the way.
In a recent white paper, a group comprising subject-matter experts at NASA and other institutions warned of the hazards of invoking colonial language and practice in space exploration. “The language we use around exploration can really lead or detract from who gets involved and why they get involved,” Natalie B. Treviño, one of the paper’s coauthors, told me.
Treviño, who researched decolonial theory and space exploration for her Ph.D. at Western University in Canada, is a member of an equity, diversity, and inclusion working group that makes equity-related recommendations in the planetary science research community. She notes that certain words and phrases can be particularly alienating for Indigenous people. “How is an Indigenous child on a reserve in North America supposed to connect with space exploration if the language is the same language that led to the genocide of his people?”
Perseverance rover's MASTCAM-Z has captured its first high-resolution panorama of its landing site in the Jezero Crater on Mars. The image will help the mission team narrow down rocks of interest to return to Earth for study. Image: NASA
In a 2020 perspective for Nature Astronomy, Aparna Venkatesan of the University of San Francisco, also a coauthor of the recent white paper, wrote with colleagues that in the dialects of the Indigenous Lakota and Dakota, the concept of thought being rooted in language, space, and place “is epitomized by the often used phrase mitakuye oyasin, explained by Lakota elders as a philosophy that reminds everyone that we all come from one source and so need to respect each other to maintain wolakota or peace.” It’s difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the ideas of wolakota and conquest, especially given the increasing weaponization of space.
Treviño argues that the word “frontier,” the guiding metaphor for American space exploration, is also problematic. The crossing of new frontiers — because frontiers always must be pushed or crossed — is inevitably “tied to nationalism, and nationalism is tied to conquest, and conquest is tied to death,” she says. When humans push frontiers, they often do so with the belief that it is their right as individuals or as representatives of a country or state. Throughout history, this sense of entitlement has been taken as license to wipe out Indigenous people and fauna, pollute rivers, and otherwise demonstrate ownership and mastery.
Foundational concepts such as “conquest,” “frontier,” and “Manifest Destiny,” can affect not only how people think about space but also how they act toward it. In their Nature Astronomy paper, Venkatesan and her colleagues argue that in addition to promoting colonialist ideals, such concepts promote space capitalism and a lack of regulation. Potent symbols of this trend are the more than 3,000 operational satellites currently orbiting Earth, many of them privately owned. For people who use the stars to navigate, or who incorporate celestial bodies into cultural, spiritual, and religious practices, this intrusion into the skies threatens to compromise a way of life. And it is a sobering reminder that space and the sky don’t really belong to everyone after all. The lack of protections and regulations for the night sky — as well as monetary incentives for commercial satellites, which make up almost 80 percent of U.S. satellites — make it vulnerable to the highest bidder.
“Treating space as the ‘Wild West’ frontier that requires conquering continues to incentivize claiming by those who are well-resourced,” writes Venkatesan and her colleagues. In fact, the staking of claims in space has already begun, with space tourism predicted to develop into a lucrative industry, and with the U.S. government opening the doors to commercial endeavors such as the mining of asteroids and the colonization of Mars.
While scientists often devote themselves to questions of feasibility, scalability, and affordability, they rarely give as much thought and effort to questions of inclusivity and morality. “In the space community, when ethics or values or planetary protection come up, they’re immediately coded as feminine and they’re immediately coded as not as important,” Treviño told me. For many scientists, she says, “thinking about ethics isn’t nearly as important as building the rovers that are going to go to the moon.”
The “act first, ask questions later” approach typifies the mindset that has led some to argue that humans need to colonize space to survive. But attitudes and ethics cannot be applied retroactively. Science might get people to Mars, but without ethics, what are the chances of survival?
In Kennedy’s words, space exploration is our species’ most “dangerous and greatest adventure.” It makes sense to address factors that influence human behavior in space — and that will ultimately determine our odds of success there — sooner rather than later. That includes asking everyone, not just NASA or Elon Musk, what we want an interplanetary future of humanity to look like. Would we want futuristic Mars settlements to operate like modern-day Earth towns, or could we do better?
Crafting a code of ethics for space exploration may seem daunting, but our words offer a potential starting point. Space is one of few places humans have gone that thus far remains peaceful. Why, then, use the language of war, imperialism, or colonialism to describe human actions there? Eliminating the language of genocide and subordination from the space discourse is one easy step anyone can take to encourage the great leaps for humankind that we dream of for the future, on Earth and beyond.
Joelle Renstrom is a science writer who focuses on robots, AI, and space exploration. She teaches at Boston University.
As private corporations begin to stake claims and enclose the commons of space, the rest of us lose our rights to it. We must avoid this outcome at all costs. Space cannot be privatised or exploited for profit, but must remain a commons for the benefit of all humanity.
ELON Musk and his company SpaceX have become a regular feature in news cycles. SpaceX succeeded in landing a team of astronauts on the International Space Station in November 2020, in partnership with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The next month, the company lost a rocket in an explosion while attempting to land after a test flight. Another rocket exploded during landing in early February. In mid-February, SpaceX launched sixty satellites as part of the Starlink programme to provide broadband internet access to the globe, and is now working to double the speed of this internet service and extend it to most of the planet by the end of 2021. Additional crewed missions to the International Space Station are planned for the coming months, as is a four-person civilian-only space voyage.
These accomplishments and setbacks from SpaceX and the world’s richest man are the most recent in a long series of launches by the first private company to engage in spaceflight. SpaceX is pushing many new boundaries to popular acclaim, but they are also simply the most recent continuation of a decades-long effort to privatise space travel, albeit an effort that is accelerating in recent years.
Yet, while SpaceX may be developing beneficial new technologies and finding ways to lower the costs of space travel, their free-market perspective on space exploration will not provide the benefits they claim. Such privatisation will only reproduce the earth’s current exploitative economy and environmental destruction in outer space.
Our climate and economic crises today are not inevitable outcomes of human existence, or of human population growth as other space-obsessed technocrats like Jeff Bezos have argued. They are instead the result of a particular set of social and economic forces, mostly arising during the last five centuries, which constitute capitalism. Capitalism requires the exploitation of both nature and people, leads to outward expansion and colonisation, and is really the root cause of climate change.
Yet instead of working to develop new social and economic structures here on earth, Elon Musk is planning the colonisation of Mars explicitly as a backup plan for earth. He is not alone, as Jeff Bezos’s own aerospace company, Blue Origin, operates with the long-term goal of outsourcing destructive manufacturing to space in order to save earth by shifting the exploitation of nature and people into orbit. With plans such as these, SpaceX and related companies are advocating escapism instead of dealing with the reality of deteriorating conditions on our own planet. By failing to acknowledge that privatising industry and taking advantage of workers and the environment are the true causes of these earthly crises, SpaceX will inadvertently reproduce the same conditions that are destroying the earth in space.
We need not engage in speculation informed by science fiction to know this, either. History is full of examples of privatised, for-profit exploration and colonisation that have caused more harm than good. For some of the clearest lessons, we can look to the colonisation of what is now the United States, just a few hundred years ago.
***
THIS past autumn marked the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower landing on the shores of what is now Massachusetts. Stories of this ship and its pilgrim passengers are familiar to many people who were educated in the American school system. As the common narrative goes, these Puritan settlers sought freedom from religious persecution in England, and thus set sail to the ‘new world.’ The Mayflower arrived in North America, and finding the land beautiful and productive, the pilgrims ‘fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven’ for delivering them to safety and freedom.
Yet key details of this story were not emphasised in our elementary school educations, such as the motivations behind the actual owners of the Mayflower. The pilgrims did not own the ship they sailed upon, nor could they have afforded the voyage on their own. They needed investors, and the financial backers of this journey were not religious separatists seeking freedom, but some of the modern world’s first international venture capitalists. They funded the pilgrims in the hope that they could reap the rewards of a profitable colony in North America capable of yielding cheap goods for European markets: largely fish, timber, and furs. The pilgrims who established a colony at Plymouth may have been seeking liberty, but the financiers who backed them hardly cared. They were just in it for the money, and there was a lot to be made.
There was also a lot of damage to be done. Within fifteen years of the Mayflower making landfall, epidemic disease had decimated the indigenous population of New England. Wars and genocide followed, with indigenous peoples being killed and enslaved across the continent, before largely being forced onto reservations which still experience shockingly poor conditions today.
All the while, the land of New England was gradually being divided into privately owned parcels of land in a process known as enclosure. When European colonists arrived in New England, they entered into a variety of agreements with native peoples pertaining to land rights. European settlers often paid indigenous tribes or leaders for the right to limited use of tribal land, but the colonists often interpreted these transactions as wholesale, permanent purchase of land. These lands which were often communally owned by the tribe and managed as a ‘commons’ — land or resources collectively owned by a community — were slowly carved up into privately owned parcels over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.
This privatisation of land ownership and the incorporation of colonial New England into a globalised market economy led to profound environmental destruction nearly immediately. Settlers cleared forests for timber and farmland, nearly deforesting much of New England by the early 20th century. Beaver and deer were all but exterminated in the region by the 19th century, hunted for their pelts which were sold for profit in European markets. As early as 1646, Portsmouth, Rhode Island established the first prohibitions on hunting deer out of season, recognising that the species’ population was dwindling. All of this local extirpation and deforestation occurred within a few decades of European arrival in New England, while the indigenous peoples of the region had hunted deer and beaver and managed their forests sustainably for millennia prior.
Exploitation of labour arose alongside this exploitation of nature. European settlers in 17th century New England exploited indigenous hunters to acquire beaver furs, obtaining these pelts at little cost to themselves through the exchange of cheap cloth, metal trinkets, and shell beads. Merchants then in turn exploited these European settlers, paying only a small fraction of what these furs would be worth, and manufacturers back in Europe exploited their workers, paying them less than their labour was worth to produce products like fashionable felt hats for sale to the high-society aristocrats of the time.
This exploitation of nature and labour is not a bug, but a feature of privatised, for-profit capitalist ventures. It is inherent in a capitalist economic model, as history has shown time and again. If profit maximisation for the benefit of investors and owners is the goal, as it was for the owners of the Mayflower and as it is for SpaceX, the necessary materials and labour must be cheaply obtained. If they are not cheap, earnings will suffer.
Colonisation is a short-sighted solution to this problem. Colonialist companies and nations incorporate peripheral locations into their global economic system, where resources and labour can be cheaply obtained. The mercantile capitalism of the 17th century Atlantic world reflected this economic structure, with abundant timber, furs, and fish being obtained at low costs in New England and returned to European markets where they had greater value. Whether in the form of colonialist extraction of raw materials or the contemporary outsourcing of jobs, this search for cheap labour and resources is necessary for the perpetuation of capitalism, and remains the structuring force behind the global economy to this day.
This same outward expansion in search of cheap raw materials and labour is exactly what will end up driving the colonisation of space. The moon, Mars, and even asteroids may all become the peripheral, privatised, and exploited locations that permit corporations on earth to profit. Similar to indigenous understandings of certain land rights in pre-colonial New England, space is currently viewed as a global commons. This means that all people have rights to it and none should be able to claim exclusive rights over it. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prevents any nation from claiming territory in space, although the treaty is known to be vague concerning the power of corporations in space and will certainly be challenged legally in the coming years. The enclosure and privatisation of space may therefore lead not only to the direct and immediate exploitation of the environment and of people, but may also lay the groundwork for long-term systems of exploitation and dispossession.
***
ELON Musk intends to colonise Mars as soon as possible. Thankfully, there is no potential for genocide of indigenous Martians as there was for indigenous ‘Americans’ and other indigenous peoples around the world under European colonialism. Yet because the endeavour is privatised and operating under centuries-old colonialist mindsets, exploitation and destruction will assuredly manifest in other ways.
Mining and resource extraction is one avenue for profit, although Musk acknowledges that it is unclear if the natural resources on Mars could be extracted for the profit of companies on earth. Even if the costs of transporting raw materials back to earth are too great, natural resources extracted in space could be manufactured in space and shipped to earth. Colonisation of Mars may therefore differ slightly from cases of colonisation on earth, but the fundamental exploitative relationship remains.
Plus, there are other ways to profit besides the extraction of raw materials. Space tourism by wealthy thrill-seekers is poised to be a cash cow for companies, and a relatively autonomous SpaceX colony on Mars could also have a potentially great degree of freedom to profit from all sorts of business ventures, especially if they are legally independent of the United States government as has been hinted. Musk has also alluded to other ‘extraordinary entrepreneurial opportunity’ on Mars, ranging from manufacturing to restaurants to tourism. However, it remains to be seen just how the financing, ownership, and taxation of these enterprises will be handled in what may be a semi-autonomous colony. In the case of English colonists arriving in North America, it was often the case that the company financing the colony claimed ownership over all property and all economic products of the settlers for a set number of years. Any colonists on a settled Mars will certainly be exploited as well, in one form or another, for the profit of shareholders and company executives. More than a colony of earth, Mars may become a colony of SpaceX, and this is a troubling thought.
Resisting exploitation is exceedingly difficult in a privately funded, owned, and operated colony because such a colony is, by its very nature, undemocratic. Private companies like SpaceX are not democracies. Chief executive officers are not elected representatives of the employees and business decisions are not voted upon by all workers. Thus, with a corporation calling the shots, settlers on Mars may have disturbingly little input in decision-making processes concerning their businesses and lives.
Fundamentally, the privatisation of space exploration is not the beneficial solution that many think it is. It will simply result in a continuation of the colonial exploitation of nature and people as our capitalist global economy transcends our own atmosphere. Exploitation is an inherent part of such for-profit ventures in a capitalist system, and this will carry over into space. Privatised exploration of our solar system will be biased towards profitable ventures instead of those with public benefits and will certainly have numerous detrimental environmental impacts.
As private corporations begin to stake claims and enclose the commons of space, the rest of us lose our rights to it. We must avoid this outcome at all costs. Studying the repercussions of historical and contemporary colonialism on earth permits us to engage with questions of space exploration from a decolonial and democratic perspective. Space cannot be privatised or exploited for profit, but must remain a commons for the benefit of all humanity.
DissidentVoice.org, March 9. Elic M Weitzel is a human ecologist, anthropologist and archaeologist interested in understanding humans in their environmental and social contexts. He is affiliated with the department of anthropology at the University of Connecticut.
Monday, April 29, 2024
What Does Billionaires Dominating Space Travel Mean for the World?
Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk are making significant investments in space travel.
Private space companies are developing technologies that could revolutionize space exploration and satellite communications.
Concerns are rising about the geopolitical implications of billionaires holding immense power in space.
For decades, when people discussed space travel they thought of NASA. After all, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration accomplished the first moon landing in 1969 and has achieved many more feats since. However, over the last few years, several billionaires have been investing in space travel in a bid to offer passenger flights to space and enhance satellite technology. But where can these billionaires’ ventures take us and what does it mean for just a few players to be holding so much power?
In 2021, two world-renowned billionaires - Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, each took a flight into space on their own spacecraft, as their private-sector companies finally achieved the technological advances required to offer space passenger flight. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company achieved flight shortly after. Branson and Bezos spent several years developing spacecraft under their respective space companies, to create aircraft capable of transporting passengers on short, supersonic trips.
Musk’s company SpaceX, founded in 2002, has launched over 4,500 Starlink satellites over the past five years, which contribute more than 50 percent of all active space satellites in orbit. These satellites are capable of delivering internet access around the world, enhancing global communications, and providing Musk with a great deal of power. SpaceX has over 1.5 million users around the globe. It has requested to be allowed to send a total of 42,000 satellites into space.
Meanwhile, Bezos sent up his first two satellites at the end of last year, after failing to launch two satellites the previous year. Despite setbacks, Bezos hopes to launch 3,236 satellites by 2029. While this would be an impressive feat, Blue Origin has been hugely overshadowed by SpaceX’s recent success.
There are growing concerns about what having so much power in one man’s hands may mean for geopolitical and other issues. In September 2022, Musk refused to activate SpaceX services to support a surprise drone attack on Russian ships by Ukraine. Musk said that he did this to avoid the potential retaliation by Russia. However, this has led to questions about what it means for a billionaire – not a country leader – to have so much power.
Moriba Jah, an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, explained, “Elon couldn’t just have 53% of all the satellites out there that are working if it weren’t because the US government allowed him to do that. So, I don’t blame Elon for this. I’m just saying the US government-backed him and is encouraging this sort of orbital occupation – and this is going to piss other countries off.” Jah added. “Occupation is not a good thing. Occupation is a sort of behaviour of colonizers, and just because something is legal doesn’t mean that it’s right.”
Musk, Bezos and Branson are not the only billionaires looking to claim a stake in the space game. IBX’s Kam Ghaffarian has grand ideas for the future of space travel. He hopes to explore alternative homes for Earth’s inhabitants in the stars. At the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs Ghaffarian stated, “There’s this common denominator of combining altruism, to do something purposeful and good, and combine it with capitalism to make a positive impact.” He added, “The vision for IBX is protecting our home, our planet, and then finding new homes and stars and everything involved to do that. So, on the space side, if we say that the ultimate destiny for humanity is interstellar travel, and going to the stars, then we need to take a lot of intermediary steps to do that.”
Ghaffarian is the co-founder of Intuitive Machines, which recently became the first company to land a commercial lander - its Odysseus spacecraft – on the moon. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Axiom Space, a company that sends private astronauts on commercial missions to the International Space Station (ISS). It is the first company to be given permission to connect with the ISS and is doing so to develop its own space station. Ghaffarian is also the executive chairman at Quantum Space and the founder of X-Energy.
Rather than competing on all fronts, Ghaffarian, Musk and Bezos plan to work together to achieve the first low earth orbit (LEO) to be able to go to the moon and Mars, and eventually beyond. Ghaffarian believes the space economy could soon be world trillions of dollars, spurred by technological advances, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
As several billionaire-funded space companies emerge, so do a vast array of questions. Will private space companies take the lead in space exploration? What does it mean for just a few billionaires to hold so much geopolitical power? How can these companies support international efforts to advance space travel? To ensure the safety of the world, governments must regulate private space missions and establish transparency and security standards. However, where the private advances in space travel will lead, we do not yet know.
By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Ilya Matveev: ‘Lenin’s theory only goes part of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism’
[Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of the speech given by Ilya Matveev on the “Imperialism(s) today” panel at the “ Boris Kagarlitsky and the challenges of the left today” online conference, which was organised by the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign on October 8. Matveev is a political scientist formerly based in St Petersburg, Russia. Currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Transcripts and video recordings of other speeches given at the conference can be found at the campaign website freeboris.info, from where the below is republished.]
Thank you. It is a pleasure to be speaking at this event, in such esteemed company, and to be able to support Boris in this way. To continue this theoretical discussion of imperialism, I want to take up some of the themes discussed by Robert Brenner in his presentation, but I think I have a slightly different perspective on the nature of Russian imperialism. What I propose to do is to use three authors who wrote about imperialism and to look at the Russian case through the lens of three different theories.
The first has already been mentioned, that is Vladimir Lenin’s theory. For Lenin, imperialism was ultimately an outgrowth of contradictions and tendencies inherent in capitalism, such as a tendency towards monopoly. The tendency towards overaccumulation of capital drives capital’s need for external expansion, and this in itself leads to inter-imperialist rivalries and ultimately world wars. This is Lenin’s theory in a nutshell.
Interestingly, a few years after Lenin published his famous essay on imperialism, the liberal thinker Joseph Schumpeter put forward a kind of liberal interpretation of imperialism in response to Lenin’s theory and the theories of other Second International Marxists such as Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg. According to Schumpeter, imperialism is inimical to capitalism, especially capitalism in its pure form, and imperialist impulses represent ideologies and social structures from the pre-capitalist past. This was Schumpeter’s major thesis, namely that imperialism is essentially a legacy of the absolutist state and ruling classes and ideologies from the absolutist period. They survive in a new capitalist era. And this is why states adopt aggressive imperialist policies. For Schumpeter, imperialism could ultimately be compatible with capitalist interests, but it is a sort of artificial combination. And like other liberals, Schumpeter thought that the development of capitalism somehow would lead to the withering away of imperialism and war. So that is the second theory I want to look at.
The third theory is that of John Mearsheimer, a contemporary of ours, unlike Lenin and Schumpeter. His main point is that country-specific factors are ultimately irrelevant for this whole discussion; internal capitalist contradictions are irrelevant, and ideologies and social structures are irrelevant because imperialism, or what he calls “great power politics,” stems from the very nature of the international system. In this view, every state struggles for security and makes other states insecure. Thus inter-imperialist wars are built into the international system. When one state threatens another state, the threatened country will respond with aggressive measures. This is basically inevitable and does not depend on the domestic, social and geological structures in the threatened country.
So here we have three kinds of guiding ideas. And we can analyze Russian imperialism using these three perspectives.
I want to start with Mearsheimer because I think this is the easiest sort of case to consider. We can ask whether Russia was actually threatened when it initiated its aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Objectively speaking, Russia was not threatened by NATO. It was not threatened by Western imperialism. The major argument for the proposition that Russia and its security interests were somehow threatened by the West is the expansion of NATO. But this should be seen in the context of actual developments on the ground, which demonstrate that NATO was in fact becoming weaker as a conventional military alliance. It was expanding, but it was also becoming weaker.
NATO presence in Central/Northern Europe, 1991-2016
This chart shows that NATO armies were becoming smaller, and the US was withdrawing its troops from Europe. Back in the 80s, there were 300,000 American soldiers in Western Europe, and by 2014 it was something like 30,000, or ten times fewer. It is the same story with equipment. The chart comes from a report published by the Rand Corporation, a US national security think tank. The report states that Russia was, in fact, becoming stronger than NATO in the specific Eastern European potential theatre of war.
Mearsheimer himself admitted this fact. In his famous — or infamous — article in 2014, he stated that NATO was expanding, but that it was also very careful not to provoke or threaten Russia in terms of conventional military strength. But he went on to make an interesting argument. He said that it does not matter that NATO was not objectively a threat. What matters is that Russia felt threatened, so the Kremlin perceived the situation as threatening. But this is a different argument, of course. It is not about objective developments anymore. It is about perceptions and, therefore, about ideology. So, I think that Mearsheimer’s theory is actually the weakest of the three theories we are looking at in terms of explaining Russian imperialism.
Then we have Lenin. His theory is actually stronger, in my opinion. We can see the emergence of certain criteria for imperialism in Russia in the post-Soviet period, especially during the period of economic recovery in the 2000s and the early 2010s. The criteria that Brenner already mentioned began to appear in Russia: the concentration of capital, capitalist monopolies, the over accumulation of capital, and the need for external expansion. This was all present in Russia in the 2000s.
Russian companies were extremely interested in post-Soviet countries because they could rebuild Soviet-era supply chains under their control. They could benefit from those old Soviet industrial economic ties. And they also sought new markets in post-Soviet countries. This economic expansion created pressure for political assertiveness as well. I would argue that any Russian government, and not just Putin’s government, would feel some pressure to be more assertive, maybe even more aggressive, in the post-Soviet space because of the needs of capital accumulation. So, this argument is valid to a certain extent.
But at the same time, what is different from the pre-1914 period, for example, is that Russia was integrated into global capitalism in a very specific way. On the one hand, it was quite influential in its region, the post-Soviet region. On the other hand, Russian capitalism was a dependent form of capitalism. In fact, it is dependent on Western centres of capital accumulation. And so Russia was in an intermediate position: a classic case of semi-periphery. So, I do not believe that the impulse for this extreme confrontation with the West could have come from the economic sphere, from the sphere of capital accumulation. Russian capitalism was just not built for this confrontation.
The impetus could only come from outside the economic sphere, probably from the political sphere. So, the impulse not just towards imperialism, but towards a specific form of imperialism that would not only break with the West but engage in this extreme confrontation with the West, could only come from elsewhere, not from Russian capitalism, because Russian capitalism really benefited from the way it was integrated into the global economy.
The Russian ruling class derived huge benefits from this intermediate position, or what we could call its sub-imperialist position in post-Soviet countries, where Russian corporations were very influential and sometimes even dominant. At the same time, Russian corporations had deep ties with Western companies and Western centres of capital accumulation. In fact, Western capital was exploiting the post-Soviet region through Russian capital — not directly, but through Russian capital. And this is the essence of a sub-imperialist position. So, speaking strictly in economic terms, that was the essence of Russia’s global integration.
An illustration of this was Russia’s participation in the Davos forum. Take Dmitry Medvedev, for example; he was not a bloodthirsty nationalist back then. He was a kind of a moderate semi-liberal politician. And he spoke at Davos. This demonstrates that the Kremlin’s intention was to maintain its sub-imperialist role.
In sum, Lenin’s theory goes some of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism, but not all the way, in my opinion. Then we have Schumpeter, who offers not just a non-Marxist explanation, but to some extent an anti-Marxist explanation. Nevertheless, I think it is compelling in some respects, because Schumpeter emphasises historical elements in imperialist policy. He sees it as a kind of revenge of the past.
And if we look at Russia’s imperialist discourses we find in them an echo of the Soviet and especially the imperial past. The arguments that the Kremlin and Putin use resemble the arguments of the Russian Empire and specific ideological tropes about how Ukrainian identity was somehow invented by foreign intelligence specifically to weaken and destroy Russia. All that was already present some 120 years ago. These discourses have made their reappearance in Russian politics. So, the idea that Russian imperialism is a product of the past is compelling.
One obvious argument is that Putin is preoccupied with the past. He is constantly reading history books, and his obsession with Russia’s place in history and his own place in history is evident in his thinking, in his public speeches, and in the articles that he publishes. In terms of ideology, the influence of the past is very clear.
But then there’s the question of Putin’s transformation from a cynical materialist into an ideological imperialist. Why did he suddenly develop this interest in historical ideas? For me, that points to limitations of Schumpeter’s theory, as it does not really explain how the past reasserted itself in the present in Russia. I think that the explanation ultimately lies in contemporary events and not just some kind of metaphysical revenge of the past.
More specifically, the Kremlin’s ideology is based on the experience of primitive accumulation in the 1990s, when people, including Putin, participated in a kind of dog-eat-dog free for all in which you need to be on the offensive all the time or else you will be destroyed by your competitors. This was the essence of Russian capitalism in the 1990s, and this kind of experience was projected by the Kremlin elites onto the world stage. In Putin’s view, the world works just like Russian capitalism in the 90s: it is the Wild West. You cannot show weakness. You need to take the offensive at every opportunity, and you can never bluff. Bluffing is a sign of weakness, and weakness means you will be destroyed.
Based on this kind of experience and habitus, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term, the ideology was fashioned after the Kremlin was radicalised by the Arab Spring and by the colour revolutions in the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin felt threatened by these events, and they interpreted them as an attack by the West — not as genuine popular protests, but as something inspired by the West to weaken these countries and destroy these political regimes. The conclusion was that the West is plotting the same thing against Russia, and so the Kremlin needs to strike first in order to neutralise the threat of a colour revolution or something similar to the Arab Spring. These were the triggers that dredged up those discourses and ideologies from the past and made them so relevant to the Kremlin in the present moment.
This ultimately explains the ideological consolidation of the Kremlin. In my opinion, ideology is the crucial factor in Russia’s aggression in 2014 and 2022. It cannot be accounted for simply with reference to objective contradictions, such as the contradictions of capital accumulation or geopolitical contradictions. By themselves they cannot explain the Kremlin’s decisions and actions, such as the decision to annex Crimea or the decision to invade Ukraine. Ultimately, the explanation lies in the sphere of ideology.
