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The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution.36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “species exterminations” resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century.38¶ If present climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously close to a Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible.39 The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40¶ Nevertheless, major energy corporations continue to lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate denialism—while admitting the truth in their internal documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction and production of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up massive additional oil and gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In response to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-fuel reserves at its disposal.41 Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting the accumulation of wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity.¶ Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows that the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside the market are excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative “externalities,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in terms of the shortening and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment. As environmental economist K. William Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”42¶ We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.43

As we saw in the previous post, the U.S. has expanded its use of energy at a typical rate of 2.9% per year since 1650. We learned that continuation of this energy growth rate in any form of technology leads to a thermal reckoning in just a few hundred years (not the tepid global warming, but boiling skin!). What does this say about the long-term prospects for economic growth, if anything?

The figure at left shows the rate of global economic growth over the last century, as reconstructed by J. Bradford DeLong. Initially, the economy grew at a rate consistent with that of energy growth. Since 1950, the economy has outpaced energy, growing at a 5% annual rate. This might be taken as great news: we do not necessarily require physical growth to maintain growth in the economy. But we need to understand the sources of the additional growth before we can be confident that this condition will survive the long haul. After all, fifty years does not imply everlasting permanence.

Having made enormous fortunes on Earth, billionaires are now racing each other to space. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person on the planet, recently announced that he will be one of four “space tourists” on his private space company Blue Origin’s inaugural human spaceflight scheduled for July 20, 2021, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The news caused Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson to speed up his own planned space trip and launch himself into space this weekend, nine days before Bezos. The history of celestial exploration reveals how the logics of capitalism, colonialism, and corporations have always been violently intertwined. Fellow tech billionaire, and third richest person on Earth, Elon Musk is often the most vocal about his space company, SpaceX, and his plans to make humans an “interplanetary species.” Bezos, however, is just as obsessed with outer space as the Tesla founder is. The billionaires concur that it is humanity’s destiny to settle the stars. And, without much real public debate, private space corporations appear to have settled the matter: space will be humanity’s next frontier. The notion that private corporations ought to achieve something that states have been able to do since the 1960s—fly to space—is a peculiarly U.S. one. It combines domestic libertarianism and its idolatry of private individuals’ entrepreneurship with the more global ethos of neoliberalism and government outsourcing. However, despite these motivating philosophies, private companies have launched their schemes for space colonization using massive amounts of public money through government contracts. As previously examined in these pages, the space race of the Cold War was characterized by a triumphalism around the power and scientific capacity of nation-states. Today’s wave of space exploration, however, is being led by tech billionaires’ private space corporations for financial gain—and, if we believe Bezos and Musk, for the betterment of human civilization. But the rhetoric and history of celestial exploration reveal how the logics of capitalism, colonialism, and corporations have always been intimately, and violently, intertwined. And, as history shows us, allowing corporations the power to colonize space may result in outcomes that even states cannot control. In the early years of Blue Origin, Bezos personally funded his company (by selling one billion of Amazon stock per year, he revealed in 2017) and initially focused on space tourism as a potential source of revenue, as well as a way—he claimed—to acclimate people to the idea of space travel. But Bezos watched as Musk’s SpaceX quickly eclipsed his company, both in size and success. Musk had funded SpaceX through a combination of venture capital investment and billions in government contracts. While Blue Origin has never launched a rocket that achieved orbit, SpaceX has been flying NASA cargo to the International Space Station since 2012. Bezos and Musk spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to continue funding their projects, which already recieve massive amounts of public money through government contracts. When Tesla received a $1.3 billion tax break to open a battery plant in Nevada in 2014, Bezos sent off an email to a fellow Amazon executive asking why Musk had been so successful at securing big government incentives. But now Bezos has nothing to complain about. Blue Origin routinely competes with SpaceX for contracts, and both companies spend millions lobbying Congress to continue funding these projects. After SpaceX initially won a contract to build a lunar lander, a short-lived amendment to the Endless Frontier Act which would have authorized $10 billion to NASA’s moon program and established a second award was even briefly nicknamed the “Bezos Bailout.” It is true that Musk has a particular talent for securing government funding across his business ventures. In her book The Entrepreneurial State (2013), Mariana Mazzucato debunks the notion that free markets and small states, rather than government investment in technological innovation, create economic success. She documents how Musk’s companies SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity have received billions in government support, including grants, tax breaks, and subsidized loans. On top of that, they have also secured billions more in procurement contracts and direct investments in new technologies from NASA and the Department of Energy. (This government support is not marginal. Tesla only had its first full-year profit in 2020, although Musk has accumulated much of his personal fortune through ownership of the company’s stock.) But this outsourcing of colonization efforts to private corporations is not just a feature of the neoliberal state; corporations have long been embedded in the history of colonization. In the early days of colonization, though companies’ home states often provided them money and legitimacy for their ventures overseas, governments did not always tightly control these endeavors. For instance, the British East India Company—a “company-state,” as coined by Philip Stern—maintained armed forces, waged and declared war, collected taxes, minted coin, and at one point “ruled” over more subjects than the British state itself. As J. C. Sharman and Andrew Phillips noted in Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (2020), “in some cases, company-states came to wield more military and political power than many monarchs of the day.” Today states, not corporations, are perceived to be the truly dangerous actors in space exploration. But corporations have long been embedded in the history of colonization. Company-states were predicated on an understanding of sovereignty as divisible and delegatory, defying what we today consider “public” and “private” power. Compared to company-states at their zenith, even the largest modern-day multinational corporation—and certainly SpaceX and Blue Origin—has significantly less authority, with absolutely no military might to speak of. The monarchies that first granted monopoly charters to these voyaging companies, having evolved into modern states, have also consolidated sovereign authority and gained far more power than their antecedents in previous centuries. Today states, not corporations, are perceived to be the truly dangerous actors in space exploration. Particularly in the context of worsening U.S.-China relations, the militarization of space by states is often posited as the most likely way that celestial encounters may become violent. On this view, if private U.S. companies were to extract commercial resources from asteroids, it would be a much more peaceful prospect than the U.S. Space Force establishing a military base on the moon. However, this framing ignores corporations’ violent histories and the deep connection between private commercial pursuits and systems of capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, though states may help create and participate in these systems, they do not always control the forces they unleash. For example, there was nothing inevitable about the fact that the East India Company came under the control of the British state. Even when it did, it caused devastating impacts on both the places it claimed to “rule” as well as the state that had chartered and owned it, ushering in the age of the British Empire. As historian William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019), noted, “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company. . . [that] executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.” As contemporary companies set out to colonize space, we should ask whether modern states have a better grasp on how to control corporations and the violence that may result from battles over who ought to rule these settlers and resources. Though Blue Origin and SpaceX are indebted to the U.S. government for funding, U.S. regulators’ ability to manage these corporations—especially Musk’s—already appears limited. Musk’s remarks toward U.S. regulators, even those investigating him, are infamous for being outrageous and crude—and his behavior is no less intransigent. For instance, in December of last year, SpaceX refused to comply with Federal Aviation Association (FAA) orders to abort a high-altitude test launch of its Starship rocket after the agency revoked its launch license due to atmospheric conditions. And this was not the first time Musk defied government authority. In May 2020 he re-opened his Tesla factory despite an Alameda county health order to shelter in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, requesting on Twitter that police “only arrest him” if law enforcement took action. His companies have been repeatedly investigated and fined for various other regulatory and safety violations. (Reports have claimed that the Tesla factory does not have proper hazard signage because Musk “does not like the color yellow.”) Is it simply the case that Musk, like many powerful men before him, receives preferential treatment from the state? Or are the state and its regulatory agencies truly unable to control him? Colonial destruction was justified by a specific ideology that made a certain view of the world, and humanity’s role in it, appear natural and inevitable. Musk, for his part, does not seem particularly cowed. After the December rocket launch incident, the FAA announced that additional measures, including having an FAA inspector on site, will be imposed on SpaceX during future launches. In response Musk tweeted on January 28 that the FAA “rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.” For Musk, becoming an inter-planetary species is an existential matter for human civilization, far more important than rules and regulations. Both Bezos and Musk use the language of moral imperative when talking about space colonization: humanity must not merely explore space, but settle it, too. The two engineers can easily explain the technical dimensions of their plans to colonize the cosmos. Though these plans differ—Bezos wants to establish artificial tube-like structures floating close to Earth, whereas Musk wants to terraform Mars—the political philosophies underpinning them are remarkably similar. Both offer utopian visions of humanity in space that attempt to provide technological solutions to the political problems that colonialism and capitalism have caused. In 1982 Bezos said in his high school valedictorian speech that “the Earth is finite and if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.” His views have not changed much since then. “[Within a few centuries] we’ll be using all of the solar energy that impacts the Earth,” he told a crowd at an event hosted by Blue Origin. “That’s an actual limit.” This Malthusian logic underpins his arguments about the inevitability of humanity’s growth and the necessity of expanding into space. There are short-term problems, he explains, such as poverty and pollution, and there are long-term problems, such as running out of energy. If we do not want to become “a civilization of rationing and stasis,” Bezos warns, we must expand to the stars where “resources are, for all practical purposes, infinite.” For Musk space colonization is also a means to preserve human civilization, albeit as a hedge against eventual extinction. “I don’t have an immediate doomsday prophecy,” he told an international conference in 2016, “but history suggests that there will be some extinction event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and multi-planetary species.” Whereas Bezos emphasizes the cyclical logic of capitalist growth—we must expand, in order to keep expanding—Musk is more explicit in his plans for colonial settlement. One of his proposals—to allow individuals to purchase one-way tickets to Mars which can be paid off through promised jobs in the new colony— has been called Martian indentured servitude. “Mars would have a labor shortage for a long time,” Musk explained, so “jobs would not be in short supply.” And while Bezos imagines that humans will be able to travel between Earth and space often, Musk contends that the Mars colony should be self-sufficient, able “to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason.” Imperialist conceptions of ownership transform space into an “empty frontier” where certain individuals can project their political dreams. For two entrepreneurs whose businesses have been lauded as exceptionally visionary, their celestial utopias stand out for their lack of political creativity and awareness. Bezos’s notion that imperial expansion is the only way to support an ever-growing population is an old colonialist appeal, now repackaged for the stars. The infinite need for resources, as well as the “poverty and pollution” that Bezos dismisses as short-term problems, are deeply enmeshed in capitalism’s cycles of extraction and are currently causing Earth’s climate crisis. Given the green-orientation of his enterprises, Musk is presumably aware of the climate crisis—or at least the opportunities it presents for government funding. Yet he has not explicitly named climate change as one of the potential “extinction events” that a Mars colony might protect against. Putting aside the question of whether terraforming Mars is actually feasible—for the record, a Nature Astronomy article suggests it is not—settling space won’t be cost-free to Earth. As science writer Shannon Stirone pointed out in The Atlantic, “Mars has a very thin atmosphere; it has no magnetic field to help protect its surface from radiation from the sun or galactic cosmic rays; it has no breathable air and the average surface temperature is a deadly 80 degrees below zero . . . . For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground.” The environmental and human destruction necessary to make space habitable would dwarf any technological or political response needed to stop the climate crisis now. And—like capitalism and climate change—the impacts of colonizing space will be far worse for some rather than others, particularly in the Global South. For example, when Indonesian president Joko Widodo offered SpaceX the island of Biak in Papua, home to an ongoing secessionist campaign, local communities protested that the building of the launch station would cause vast ecological damage and community displacement. They had reason to worry. This is precisely what happened in Boca Chica, a small town on the southern tip of Texas where SpaceX had built a previous launch site. After SpaceX moved into town, residents of the Texas community were pushed out from their homes as the area became unsafe due to rocket activity, which has since damaged a wildlife refuge in the area. SpaceX has offered to purchase residents’ homes, but below the price many think is fair. An email from SpaceX to Boca Chica holdouts stated, “As the scale and frequency of spaceflight activities at the site continue to accelerate, your property will frequently fall within established hazard zones in which no civilians will be permitted to remain, in order to comply with all federal and other public safety regulations.” SpaceX’s impact on the area demonstrated little concern for its displacement and damage of the local community.

Nowadays every aspect of contemporary life is assessed in terms of technology and technical specialists. The modern era is characterised by rapid technological development. It is believed that, the more the amount of technology a state has, the greater the opportunity it creates for itself to collect and control resources, which are restricted on earth but limitless in space. As long as capitalism is motivated by the need for more profits, it will require space colonisation. The issue is who will be the first to arrive on the scene? Who will have access to the information? Who will be exploited, and who will be benefited from this situation? To address these questions, we must go deep into the subject of colonization, which capitalism has been using via various trends, with space colonization seeming to be a neo-capitalistic tendency, to develop a significant case. It may be claimed that the innovations or discoveries have benefited the interests of capitalists in the past, based on historical experience and observations. During the invention of mobile telephones and aircraft, for example, only a certain group of individuals benefited from the inventions in question. However, as time progressed, these things grew more democratic, albeit not entirely so, since only a tiny number of people fly by aircraft, resulting in restricted access and availability for everyone. Furthermore, colonialism had a profound influence in making and creating the north-south gap that occurred immediately after the Second World War, by making the newly independent state's part of it through economic incentives or what commonly is called neo-colonialism. The big powers were victorious in doing that by exploiting the natural resources and the lands of colonies, which led to the colonies to rely on the colonial powers and, therefore, leaving the colonies underdeveloped. Hence, the worldwide scramble for colonies, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had a tremendous negative impact on the socio-economic and political structures of indigenous, non-industrial societies. Therefore, making investments in space will no longer suffice the communities and states, less equipped with technology and expertise. Most Asian and African continent countries are still demanding their basic needs (clean drinking water, two-time meals, basic health facilities, education, sanitation, etc.) yet to be fulfilled in a place where they have been residing for ages. In such tumultuous conditions, how a state could think of living in an alien area (Moon, Mars) which is full of uncertainties. Yes, there is no question that the colonization and exploration of other locations in space will take place gradually over time and will include many nations that currently can launch spacecraft into space. As Alexander Bird in his article "We are not ready for space colonization," argues that "If what happened during the time of great navigations (or the age of discovery) happens again, then we will see companies and countries that are at the forefront of technologies involving space travel becoming great empires, such as were Spain, Portugal, and then also England, or the Dutch West India Company, or even the United States." We can discover an asteroid made of gold, a satellite of Jupiter composed completely of water, a planet that continuously generates a large amount of energy from ammonia clouds, an exoplanet with volcanoes that spew water and salt, and much more right here in our solar system. All of this may be converted into money with relative simplicity (just as it can be turned into power if money ceases to exist too)”. Nonetheless, a surge of interest in pursuing solar system colonization is developing, regardless of whether the first emphasis is on the Moon or Mars argues Fred Kennedy in his article entitled “To Colonize Space or Not to Colonize: That is the Question (For All of Us)”. Jeff Bezos has also argued persuasively for the relocation of heavy industry from Earth's surface, the preservation of the planet as a natural reserve, and the development of space-based infrastructure that will reduce obstacles and open the door to massive economic and cultural expansion (similar to how the Internet and a revolution in microelectronics have allowed Amazon and numerous other companies to achieve spectacular wealth). Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking also proposed the necessity for a "hedge" population of people on Mars to enable human civilization to reboot itself in the event of a catastrophe on Earth — a strategy that puts eggs in multiple baskets and compliments the arguments made by Bezos. Irrespective of all this, is it an equitable move to colonize space now that we know who will be able to go and live there? Not; it is another trend of colonization that will only benefit the capitalists, while the proletariat will continue to live in the terrible conditions of the planet earth, a situation that has been deteriorating for a long time due to the actions of none other than the capitalists. Take, for example, the industrial revolution and contemporary technology, both of which had a significant role in deteriorating what used to be the poor man's source of subsistence (the planet earth). Furthermore, the world has seen the consequences of colonialism and Neo-colonialism on the planet, which has only served to plunder natural resources while making circumstances worse for the general populace of the world. But, even if it succeeds in populating the whole solar system, at whose expense will they get there, and will there be any portion for the proletariat, whose contribution seems to be more hidden than apparent.

The private space races of billionaires like Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are staged as humanity‘s ticket to progress, transformation, and even immortality in outer space. The colonial rhetoric that continues to accompany this new industry, however, is a reminder that their plans are neither altruistic visions nor merely harmless pet projects of the super-rich. On July 11th 2021, Virgin Galactic founder, billionaire and self-declared new space tourism pioneer Richard Branson staged the first commercial flight of his company’s supersonic space-plane Unity – with Branson aboard himself and thus upstaging Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘ own flight by just a few days. Virgin Galactic lauded the perfectly orchestrated performance as following the path of the Apollo missions, while also heralding a new and invigorated phase of space exploration – this time with commercial flights and space tourism leading the way. Branson and the other so-called New Space Entrepreneurs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, might be competitors in their private race to space, yet all of them are deeply invested in surrounding their private enterprises with a shared narrative of a utopian future for humanity in outer space, and even as much as humanity‘s survival in face of climate change on Earth, by way of becoming a multiplanetary species. For the most part that story isn’t new, of course. The idea that entering and colonizing outer space provides a unifying experience for humanity has been popularized by science-fiction for quite a while now – a tune that many planetary scientists, by the way, have happily sung along with. What has changed is that in the latest version of that popular narrative, the only path leading towards utopia goes through a privatized space industry. Yet in spite of allegedly pointing the way into a better, more just, and more sustainable future for humanity, most of these imaginaries tend to wrap their visions into the rather stale and very earthly language of discovery and exploration, of new frontiers, terra nullius (“nobody’s land“), and of colonization – imageries and terms which have and continue to justify removal, extraction, exploitation and genocide. The billionaires’ space race is no exception to that rule: the quote that marked Branson’s entry into sub-orbital height – “Today space is Virgin territory“ – is not just a clever pun on the company’s name, but also revealingly invokes the misogynist and colonial notions of “untouched“ land and people that are ready for the taking. These notions have served Euro-American empires for centuries as justification for brutally claiming new territories and racially hierarchizing their population. But what’s the harm, one might ask, in rehashing these concepts in context of the exploration of outer space? With no Indigenous population (that we know of) that can be removed, no pre-colonial civilization in the way of Earth’s future colonies on Moon and Mars, isn’t space colonialism something truly new, completely divorced from the history of terrestrial colonialism? Branson, Musk and Bezos would most certainly agree. “Contrary to what the private space industry (and national space agencies, for that matter) wants us to believe, the exploration and colonization of outer space is a very terrestrial undertaking.” The question ignores the fact that contrary to what the private space industry (and national space agencies, for that matter) wants us to believe, the exploration and colonization of outer space is a very terrestrial undertaking. Steeped in capitalism – a system that Branson, Musk and Bezos have mastered and thrived in – and the geopolitical stratagems of Earth’s nation-states, space exploration today is not so much driven by changing humanity as it goes into space, but rather by changing outer space to make it fit into the logics of profit and territorial control on Earth. And we are in the thick of it: Branson’s latest attempt to establish space travel as a new branch of the tourism industry is just one of many recent steps – including the establishment of US Space Force, the ratification of the Artemis Accords, and the signing on of Musk’s SpaceX as a contractor for NASA – to make outer space safe for capitalism. The point of the performative character of the billionaires’ space race, the images of grandeur and individualism, the bells and whistles, its alleged subscription to a more just future for humanity, is to distract, then. It is a shiny packaging that wraps-up and obscures the mundane fact that if colonizing outer space is allegedly about fundamentally changing societally structures that govern Earth and humanity, the New Space Entrepreneurs are certainly not the ones to bring about that change – it would simply be against their self-interest. “Their vision of humanity in space is designed for the few and wealthy, and built on the back of the many.” In Earth’s past and present, the colonial language of virgin land and terra nullius served to obscure the human cost of colonization by dehumanizing colonized peoples. Space exploration, as imagined by Branson, Musk and Bezos, also has a cost. The wealth that all three of them have acquired through their business ventures, which puts them into the position to reach for the stars (and greater profits), builds on unleashed neoliberalism, capitalist exploitation, and, overall, less-than altruistic business models. Their vision of humanity in space is likewise designed for the few and wealthy, and built on the back of the many. And the cost could increase even further. While all of humanity is facing the unprecedented threat of climate change, which urges us to find sustainable solutions fast, Elon Musk and others offer us the seemingly quick fix of abandoning Earth altogether and to weather out the storm on Mars. In spite of being completely unfeasible from a scientific standpoint, the idea has still gained traction among technoliberalists, and is thus withdrawing attention and resources from communities mostly in the Global South for whom climate change is not a threat in the distant future. In addition, the noise and smoke created by the hyper-masculine performances of Branson, Musk and Bezos block our view of the tangible benefits that space exploration has to offer and that we should readily invest in. Current Mars exploration projects, for example, offer insights into how atmospheric changes impact planetary climates – information that could prove invaluable in our battle against climate change on Earth. All of this is a reminder that we should not abandon the idea altogether that space exploration can offer us new and vital insights. Space exploration is, however, not going to magically change humanity or how we live. If we want to continue to hope that space exploration will fulfill the promise of a better future for humanity, changing our perspectives on life on Earth must come first.

Imagine, for a moment, that the Axis had won World War II. In this nightmare scenario, the Germans and their fascist allies would rule much of the world's nations by proxy, relaxing into the easy chair of hegemony. It seems probable that the Third Reich would have put a satellite into orbit in fairly short order, followed, perhaps, by a man into space, and likely a man on the moon. The Third Reich was, like much of Europe, an imperialist nation; they had their own equivalent of American Manifest Destiny, although their expansion "front" was to the east. (A book by Carroll P. Kakel III, "The American West and the Nazi East," chronicles these unsettling parallels.) But after Earth had become fully colonized, they would likely find that space is the only remaining frontier. As Nazi scientists gained more knowledge of material science and the effects of space on human health, their citizens and top engineers would probably set their sights on the moon, and then Mars. The Nazi version of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would celebrate what it would mean to bring the Third Reich to the stars. Advertisement: If the Nazis were to follow imperialism to the next logical step, and establish human colonies on other worlds — asteroids, moons, space stations, or on planets like Mars — a social and political system rooted in oppression, hierarchy and racial superiority would spread, like an infection, to other distant bodies where they would be far more difficult to extract. Part of that is due to an intractable communication problem: even between the most distant regions of Earth, the speed of light is not a noticeable constraint on the amount of time it takes to communicate. The same is not true in space. Authoritarians, of both the Nazi and the corporate variety, are not necessarily fond of free speech nor free communication; they are powerful tools for upsetting the social and political order. Even here in the United States, supposed bastion of liberal democracy, we've seen this play out before. In 2011, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) public transit system suppressed communications networks in order to stifle dissent. As protests over the BART police shooting of Charles Blair Hill spread around the Bay Area, the regional transit system literally turned off the underground cell phone towers that would allow cell and data transmission while underground. The agency, unwisely, openly admitted it: On Mother's Day, celebrities reveal how their moms kept them grounded Keep Watching Skip Ad Advertisement: "Organizers planning to disrupt BART service stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police," the transit agency said. "A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators." The American Civil Liberties Union issued a harsh rebuke, and questioned whether the move was even legal for a government agency to do this. "All over the world, people are using mobile devices to protest oppressive regimes, and governments are shutting down cell phone towers and the Internet to stop them," said Michael Risher, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "It's outrageous that in San Francisco, BART is doing the same thing." If this is how an American governmental agency behaves when confronted with the prospect of a legitimate peaceful protest, imagine how pro-Martian colonizer Elon Musk — who notoriously detests labor — will behave when his Martian dishwashers strike for higher wages. Advertisement: My point is, if you think that social and political struggles are difficult on Earth, where oxygen is free and the outside is traversable without an airtight suit, just wait until you see what happens when you bring humans to Mars — a planet where round-trip communication with Earth takes forty minutes at a minimum, and nighttime surface temperatures vary between -100 and -195° Fahrenheit. On our capitalist planet, there are no workers whose employers can threaten to leave them stranded, 80 million miles from home, if they don't do their bidding. On Mars, a disgruntled worker's employer could compel them to work by threatening to ever let them go home to Earth again. The potential for slavery on the red planet cannot be underestimated. Historically, the worst capitalist labor abuses on Earth happen to the most powerless workers in situations where no one is looking. Horrific tales of sexual harassment in Antarctica made sense inasmuch as its barrenness makes it an ideal place to be manipulative without anyone noticing. Mines, given their remote nature, are often rife with exploitation — and the history of miner treatment should give us pause as to how workers on Mars or on one of Jeff Bezos's space stations might be treated. Advertisement: This warning is prescient currently because of the intense focus of both government and private actors on the potential to privatize space travel. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wants to create a "robust commercial marketplace" for space travel, has proposed a public-private partnership for the moon, and has spoken of privatizing the international space station. Elon Musk, one of NASA's suppliers in the brave new privatized world, is perfervid about building a Mars colony. Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, plans to build giant space stations; his rationale for space colonization is that "we are in the process of destroying this planet," something he actually stated with no palpable sense of irony. There are many who adulate Musk and Bezos, and view them as our generation's heroes. Yet the fact that these men honestly believe they are the ones to lead humans to space has nothing to do with any of their unique qualifications; it is due to a series of historical accidents that randomly thrusts sociopaths to the top of the capitalist food chain. Five decades of deregulation, neoliberal economic policy, and reduced taxation on the highest tax bracket have led us to a unique point in human history, where a few individuals are so wealthy that they have the ability to fund space travel. Again, this is not because these individuals are uniquely competent, nor qualified, to jumpstart colonization; it is an accident of history and economics that makes this situation possible. Nothing more. Advertisement: My fear with space colonization is that humans tend to think of it as inherently different than other political struggles, merely because humans haven't gone to space yet. The idea of space colonization as a cool, fun, exciting, sci-fi thing inhibits our ability to think critically about what it would actually mean to let a bunch of tech CEOs unilaterally colonize the solar system. There are precedents for the political aftereffects of space colonization: we have seen situations where a controlling institution tries to stifle communication on their property to prevent protest; we have seen how workers are exploited in cordoned spaces where their employers think no one is paying attention; we have seen how corporations entrap workers in hostile environments by giving them housing and food, and using that as a wedge to prevent dissent; and we have seen how corporations harvest the labor of the poor and vulnerable in order to avoid paying first-world wages to people who expect benefits. All of these scenarios seem likely to play out in our future if we don't fight back against the space imperialists. If you thought capitalism on Earth was horrific, wait till you see what it looks like in a vacuum.

The universalization of capitalism The 2010s may very well be remembered as the ‘Age of NewSpace', the decade when outer space was turned into a capitalist space, when private corporations pushed the price of launches, satellites, and space infrastructure downwards, exerting what industry insiders call the ‘SpaceX effect' (Henry, 2018), centered on the technological achievement of ‘reusability', recovering used rocket boosters for additional launches, promising to drastically reduce the price of going to space (Morring, 2016). As one report observes, ‘Not only has the number of private companies engaged in space exploration grown remarkably in recent years, these companies are quickly besting their government-sponsored competitors' (Houser, 2017). What the rockets, shuttles, ships, and landing pods will carry beneath their payload fairing or in their cargo hold, however, along with supplies and satellites, is the capitalist worldview, a particular ideology—just as Robinson Crusoe, in Marx’s ironic retelling in Capital, ‘having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck… soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books' (Marx, 1976, p. 170), brings with him English political economy—'Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham', as Marx (1976, p. 280) says elsewhere— to his desert island. In early 2018, astronomers across the world learned that a New Zealand start-up, Rocket Lab, which aimed to launch thousands of miniature satellites into orbit around Earth (so-called ‘smallsats'), had planned to launch a giant, shining ‘disco ball'—the ‘Humanity Star'—into orbit around Earth. It was an elaborate marketing stunt masked by humanistic idealism. ‘No matter where you are in the world, or what is happening in your life', said Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, ‘everyone will be able to see the Humanity Star in the night sky' (Amos, 2018). Many astronomers expressed outrage at these plans, fearing that the light from the Human Star would threaten their ability to carry out scientific observations. But while these astronomers were incensed by the idea of a bright geodesic object disrupting their ability to carry out observations, concerns with the effects of the arrival of capitalistkind on their ability to collect data were non-existent. The astronomical community was angered by the idea of a material, concrete, visible object polluting “pure” scientific data, but it paid less attention to the (invisible and abstract) recuperation of the night sky as it was brought into the fold of capitalism. In an interview, Beck was quizzed about the Humanity Star and asked by a reporter about the difficulties of generating profits in space (Tucker, 2018). To this Beck replied, ‘It has always been a government domain, but we’re witnessing the democratization of it…[I]t [is] turning into a commercially dominated domain'. Beck established an equivalence established between the dissolution of space as the rightful domain of states and the advent of profitmaking ventures as signs of ‘democratization'. In space, according to Beck’s logic, democratization involves the disappearance of the state and the rise of capital. The argument, of course, is impeccably post-statist: on this account, states are monolithic, conservative Leviathans beyond the reach of popular control; corporations, on the other hand, are in principle representatives of the everyman: in the age of the start-up, any humble citizen could in theory become an agent of disruption, a force for change, an explorer of space, and a potential member of the cadre of capitalistkind. Following this logic, the question for the entrepreneurs of NewSpace is how to monetize outer space, which means turning space into a space for capital; their question is how they can deplanetarize capital and universalize it, literally speaking, that is, turn the Universe into a universe for capital. In this light, Peter Beck’s distortion of democratic ideals appears eminently sensible, equating democratization with monetization, that is, capital liberated from its earthly tethers. PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 ARTICLE PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | (2019) 5:10 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 | www.nature.com/palcomms 3 Emblematic of this capitalist turn in space was the founding of Moon Express in 2011, composed of a ‘team of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs…shooting for the moon with a new private venture aimed at scouring the lunar surface for precious metals and rare metallic elements' (Hennigan, 2011). Following Google’s Lunar XPRIZE—an intertwining of Silicon Valley and NewSpace’s capitalistkind—which promised a $20 million prize for the first private company to land a spacecraft on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit high-definition images back to Earth, all by March 2018,9 Moon Express claimed that it would be capable of landing on the lunar surface and earn the cash prize. Their stated goal was twofold: first, to mine rare resource like Helium-3 (a steadily dwindling scarce resources on Earth), gold, platinum group metals, and water, and, second, to carry out scientific work that would ‘help researchers develop human space colonies for future generations' (Ioannou, 2017). The ordering is telling: first profits, then humanity. These were the hollow, insubstantial promises of a venture-capitalized NewSpace enterprise: in early 2018, Google announced that none of the five teams competing for the Lunar XPRIZE, including Moon Express, would reach their stated objectives by the 31 March deadline and they were taking their money back (Grush, 2018). In this sense, it was typical for NewSpace in its formative years: a corporate field populated by (overly exuberant) private enterprises who promised more than they could deliver. But the belief in NewSpace is real enough. In a tome bursting with the optimism of NewSpace, Wohlforth and Hendrix claim that ‘the commercial spaceflight industry is transforming our sense of possibility. Using Silicon Valley’s money and innovative confidence, it will soon bring mass space products to the market' (2016, p. 7). The trope of humanity plays a key role in the rhetoric of the adherents of NewSpace. To fulfill the objectives of NewSpace, including profit maximization and the exploitation of celestial bodies, the symbolic figure of a shared humanity serves a useful purpose, camouflaging the conquest of space by capitalism with a dream of humanity boldly venturing forth into the dark unknown, thereby also providing the legitimacy and enthusiasm needed to support bolster the legitimacy of NewSpace. So long as the stargazers and SpaceX watchers are permitted their fill of ‘collective effervescence', to use Durkheim’s (1995, p. 228) concept, capitalist entrepreneurs will be able to pursue their business interests more or less as they please. The spectacle of outer space is crucial in this regard. Crucially, however, and despite this spectacle, SpaceX’s technology might not necessarily be more sophisticated than its competitors or predecessors. Some industry insiders have rebuffed some of the more the spectacular claims of NewSpace’s proponents, arguing that launch vehicle reusability requires a (perhaps prohibitively) expensive refurbishing of the rocket engines involved in launches: ‘The economics will depend on how many times a booster can be flown, and how much the individual expense will be to refurbish the booster…each time' (Chang, 2017). Reusability may be a technological dead-end because of the inherently stressful effects of a rocket launch on the launch vehicle’s components, with extreme limitations on reusability beyond second-use as well as added risks of malfunctions that customers and insurers are likely to wish to avoid. Furthermore, the Falcon Heavy still has not matched the power and payload capacity of NASA’s Saturn V, a product of 1960s militaryindustrial engineering and Fordist state spending programs. What SpaceX and other NewSpace corporations do with great ingenuity, however, is to manage the spectacle of outer space, producing outpourings of public fervor, aided by a widespread adherence to the ‘Californian Ideology' (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), or post-statist techno-utopianism, in many postindustrialized societies. The very centrality of these maneuvers has initiated a new phase in the history of capitalist relations, that of ‘charismatic accumulation'—certainly not in the sense of any ‘objective' or inherent charismatic authority, but with a form of illusio, to speak with Bourdieu, vested in the members of capitalistkind by their uncanny ability to spin mythologizing self-narratives. This has always been part of the capitalist game, from Henry Ford and onwards, but the charismatic mission gains a special potency in the grandiose designs of NewSpace’s entrepreneurs. Every SpaceX launch is a quasi-religious spectacle, observed by millions capable of producing a real sense of wonder in a condition of (legitimizing) collective effervescence. Outer space necessarily reduces inter-human difference to a common denominator or a shared species-being. An important leitmotiv in many Hollywood science fiction movies, including Arrival (2016), is that a first encounter with an alien species of intelligent beings tends to flatten all human difference (including ethnoracial and national categories), thereby restoring humankind to its proper universality (see also Novoa, 2016). Ambassadors of Earth as a whole, not representatives of particular nations, step forth to meet alien emissaries. But even in the absence of such an encounter, the search for habitable domains (or rather, profitable locales) beyond Earth will necessarily forge a shared conception of the human condition, initiated with the Pale Blue Dot photograph in 1990. Typical of this sentiment are the words of the astronomer Carl Sagan, who famously observed of this photograph: ‘On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives'. This naïvely humanistic vision has been one of the dominant tropes in the discourse on space since the 1950s, and it remains strong today, as with the claims of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) that their task is to ‘uphold the vision of a more equitable future for all humankind through shared achievements in space'. This representational tendency mobilizes humanism to generate enthusiasm about space-related activities. But such representations are increasingly being recuperated by capitalist enterprise, so that it is not humankind but its modulation by space capitalists that will launch into the dark unknown. It is not humankind but capitalistkind that ventures forth. In early 2018, NASA was set to request $150 million in its 2019 budget to ‘enable the development and maturation of commercial entities and capabilities which will ensure that commercial successors to the ISS…are operational when they are needed', only one of many signs that space is becoming a space for capitalism. According to one estimate, the value of just one single asteroid would be more than $20 trillion in rare earth and platinum-group metals (Lewis, 1996), a precious prize indeed for profit-hungry corporations.10 Even the UNOOSA spoke vociferously in favor of the commercialization of space, appealing variously to the ‘industry and private sector' and elevating the ‘space economy' to a central pillar in its Space2030 Agenda (including the ‘use of resources that create and provide value and benefits to the world population in the course of exploring, understanding and utilizing space'), even as the UN agency falls back on a humanistic, almost social-democratic vision of the equitable distribution of benefits (and profits) from space mining, exploration, and colonization (UNOOSA, 2018). We find evidence of this strategic humanism in all manner of pronouncements from NewSpace entrepreneurs. To take but one example: Naveen Jain, the chairman and co-founder of MoonEx, a lunar commercialization firm, has claimed that ‘from an entrepreneur’s perspective, the moon has never truly been explored'. The moon, Jain has claimed, ‘could hold resources that benefit Earth and all humanity' (Hennigan, 2011). We should note the recourse to the trope of all of humanity by this ARTICLE PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 4 PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | (2019) 5:10 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 | www.nature.com/palcomms NewSpace entrepreneur, mimicked in the 1979 Moon Agreement, a UN treaty, which also held that the Moon’s resources are ‘the common heritage of mankind' (Tronchetti, 2013, p. 13).11 In a purely factual sense, of course, Jain is wrong: Google Moon offers high-resolution images of the lunar surface,12 and the moon has already been explored, in the sense of being mapped, albeit rudimentarily and with room for further data collection. Crucially, however, these cartographic techniques have not been put to capitalist uses: mapping minerals, for instance, or producing detailed schemata that might one day turn the Moon into a ‘gas station' for commercial space ventures, as Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, has proposed (Bryan, 2018). What is lacking, in short, are capitalist maps of the Moon, i.e., a cartography for capital. But as Klinger (2017: 199) notes, even though no one is ‘actively mining the Moon' at present, at least ‘six national space programs, fifty private firms, and one graduate engineering program, are intent on figuring out how to do so'; furthermore, Klinger draws attention to mapping efforts that have revealed high an abundance of rare earth metals, thorium, and iron in the Moon’s ‘Mare Procellarum KREEP' region (Klinger, 2017, p. 203). We have already noted that it is not humanity, conceived as species-being, a Gattungswesen, that makes its way into space. The term Gattungswesen, of course, has a long intellectual pedigree, harking back to Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and others. The term can ‘be naturally applied both to the individual human being and to the common nature or essence which resides in every individual man and woman', Allan Wood (2004, p. 17) writes, as well as ‘to the entire human race, referring to humanity as a single collective entity or else to the essential property which characterizes this entity and makes it a single distinctive thing in its own right'. Significantly, the adherents of NewSpace often resort to the idea of humanity in its broad universality (e.g., Musk, 2017), but this denies and distorts the modulation of humanity by its imbrication with the project of global (and post-global, i.e., space-bound) capitalism. It is precisely the sort of false universality implied in the humanism of the supporters of NewSpace that Marx subjected to a scathing critique in the sixth of his Theses on Feuerbach. Here Marx noted that the human essence is not made up of some ‘abstraction inherent in each single individual' (1998, p. 570). Instead, humans are defined by the ‘ensemble of social relations' in which they are enmeshed. Under NewSpace, it is not humanity, plain and simple, that ventures forth, but a specific set of capitalist entrepreneurs, carrying a particular ideological payload, alongside their satellites, instruments, and supplies, a point noted by other sociologists of outer space, or ‘astrosociologists' (Dickens and Ormrod, 2007a, 2007b). The spatial fix of outer space No longer terra nullius, space is now the new terra firma of capitalistkind: its naturalized terroir, its next necessary terrain. The logic of capitalism dictates that capital should seek to expand outwards into the vastness of space, a point recognized by a recent ethnography of NewSpace actors (Valentine, 2016, p. 1050). The operations of capitalistkind serve to resolve a series of (potential) crises of capitalism, revolving around the slow, steady decline of spatial fixes (see e.g., Harvey, 1985, p. 51–66) as they come crashing up against the quickly vanishing blank spaces remaining on earthly maps and declining (terrestrial) opportunities for profitable investment of surplus capital (Dickens and Ormrod, 2007a, p. 49–78). A ‘spatial fix' involves the geographic modulation of capital accumulation, consisting in the outward expansion of capital onto new geographic terrains, or into new spaces, with the aim of filling a gap in the home terrains of capital. Jessop (2006, p. 149) notes that spatial fixes may involve a number of strategies, including the creation of new markets within the capitalist world, engaging in trade with non-capitalist economies, and exporting surplus capital to undeveloped or underdeveloped regions. The first two address the problem of insufficient demand and the latter option creates a productive (or valorizing) outlet for excess capital. Capitalism must regularly discover, develop, and appropriate such new spaces because of its inherent tendency to generate surplus capital, i.e., capital bereft of profitable purpose. In Harvey’s (2006, p. xviii) terms, a spatial fix revolves around ‘geographical expansions and restructuring…as a temporary solution to crises understood…in terms of the overaccumulation of capital'. It is a temporary solution because these newly appropriated spaces will in turn become exhausted of profitable potential and are likely to produce their own stocks of surplus capital; while ‘capital surpluses that otherwise stood to be devalued, could be absorbed through geographical expansions and spatio-temporal displacements' (Harvey, 2006, p. xviii), this outwards drive of capitalism is inherently limitless: there is no end point or final destination for capitalism. Instead, capitalism must continuously propel itself onwards in search of pristine sites of renewed capital accumulation. In this way, Harvey writes, society constantly ‘creates fresh productive powers elsewhere to absorb its overaccumulated capital' (Harvey, 1981, p. 8). Historically, spatial fixes have played an important role in conserving the capitalist system. As Jessop (2006, p. 149) points out, ‘The export of surplus money capital, surplus commodities, and/or surplus labour-power outside the space(s) where they originate enabled capital to avoid, at least for a period, the threat of devaluation'. But these new spaces for capital are not necessarily limited to physical terrains, as with colonial expansion in the nineteenth century; as Greene and Joseph (2015) note, various digital spaces, such as the Internet, can also be considered as spatial fixes: the Web absorbs overaccumulated capital, heightens consumption of virtual and physical goods, and makes inexpensive, flexible sources of labor available to employers. Greene and Joseph offer the example of online high-speed frequency trading as a digital spatial fix that furthers the ‘annihilation of space by time' first noted by Marx in his Grundrisse (see Marx, 1973, p. 524). Outer space serves at least two purposes in this regard. In the short-to medium-term, it allows for the export of surplus capital into emerging industries, such as satellite imaging and communication. These are significant sites of capital accumulation: global revenues in the worldwide satellite market in 2016 amounted to $260 billion (SIA, 2017, p. 4). Clearly, much of this activity is taking place ‘on the ground'; it is occurring in the ‘terrestrial economy'. But all that capital would have to find some other meaningful or productive outlet were it not for the expansion of capital into space. Second, outer space serves as an arena of technological innovation, which feeds back into the terrestrial economy, helping to avert crisis by pushing capital out of technological stagnation and innovation shortfalls. In short, outer space serves as a spatial fix. It swallows up surplus capital, promising to deliver valuable resources, technological innovations, and communication services to capitalists back on Earth. This places outer space on the same level as traditional colonization, analyzed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which Hegel thought of as a product of the ‘inner dialectic of civil society', which drives the market to ‘push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has overproduced, or else generally backward in creative industry, etc.' (Hegel, 2008, p. 222). In this regard, SpaceX and related ventures are not so very different from maritime colonialists and the trader-exploiters of the British East India Company. But there is something new at stake. As the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 ARTICLE PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | (2019) 5:10 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 | www.nature.com/palcomms 5 Diamandis has gleefully noted: ‘There are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed!' (Seaney and Glendenning, 2016). Capitalistkind consists in the naturalization of capitalist consciousness and practice, the (false) universalization of a particular mode of political economy as inherent to the human condition, followed by the projection of this naturalized universality into space—capitalist humanity as a Fukuyamite ‘end of history', the end-point of (earthly) historical unfolding, but the starting point of humanity’s first serious advances in space. What role, then, for the state? The frontiersmen of NewSpace tend to think of themselves as libertarians, pioneers beyond the domain of state bureaucracy (see Nelson and Block, 2018). ‘The government should leave the design work and ownership of the product to the private sector', the author of a 2017 report, Capitalism in Space, advocates. ‘The private companies know best how to build their own products to maximize performance while lowering cost' (Zimmerman, 2017, p. 27). One ethnographer notes that ‘politically, right-libertarianism prevails' amongst NewSpace entrepreneurs (Valentine, 2016, p. 1047–1048). Just as Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the opponents to the Iraq War as ‘Old Europe', so too are state entities’ interests in space exploration shrugged off as symptoms of ‘Old Space'. Elon Musk, we are told in a recent biography, unlike the sluggish Big State actors of yore, ‘would apply some of the start-up techniques he’d learned in Silicon Valley to run SpaceX lean and fast…As a private company, SpaceX would also avoid the waste and cost overruns associated with government contractors' (Vance, 2015, p. 114). This libertarianism-in-space has found a willing chorus of academic supporters. The legal scholar Virgiliu Pop introduces the notion of the frontier paradigm (combining laissez-faire economics, market competition, and an individualist ethic) into the domain of space law, claiming that this paradigm has ‘proven its worth on our planet' and will ‘most likely…do so in the extraterrestrial realms' as well (Pop, 2009, p. vi). This frontier paradigm is not entirely new: a ‘Columbus mythology', centering on the ‘noble explorer', was continuously evoked in the United States during the Cold War space race (Dickens and Ormrod, 2016, pp. 79, 162–164). But the entrepreneurial libertarianism of capitalistkind is undermined by the reliance of the entire NewSpace complex on extensive support from the state, ‘a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups' that in the case of Musk’s three main companies (SpaceX, SolarCity Corp., and Tesla) has been underpinned by $4.9 billion dollars in government subsidies (Hirsch, 2015). In the nascent field of space tourism, Cohen (2017) argues that what began as an almost entirely private venture quickly ground to a halt in the face of insurmountable technical and financial obstacles, only solved by piggybacking on large state-run projects, such as selling trips to the International Space Station, against the objections of NASA scientists. The business model of NewSpace depends on the taxpayer’s dollar while making pretensions to individual selfreliance. The vast majority of present-day clients of private aerospace corporations are government clients, usually military in origin. Furthermore, the bulk of rocket launches in the United States take place on government property, usually operated by the US Air Force or NASA.13 This inward tension between state dependency and capitalist autonomy is itself a product of neoliberalism’s contradictory demand for a minimal, “slim” state, while simultaneously (and in fact) relying on a state reengineered and retooled for the purposes of capital accumulation (Wacquant, 2012). As Lazzarato writes, ‘To be able to be “laissez-faire”, it is necessary to intervene a great deal' (2017, p. 7). Space libertarianism is libertarian in name only: behind every NewSpace venture looms a thick web of government spending programs, regulatory agencies, public infrastructure, and universities bolstered by research grants from the state. SpaceX would not exist were it not for state-sponsored contracts of satellite launches. Similarly, in 2018, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the famed origin of the World Wide Web—announced that it would launch a ‘responsive launch competition', meaning essentially the reuse of launch vehicles, representing an attempt by the state to ‘harness growing commercial capabilities' and place them in the service of the state’s interest in ensuring ‘national security' (Foust, 2018b). This libertarianism has been steadily growing in the nexus between Silicon Valley, Stanford University, Wall Street, and the Washington political establishment, which tend to place a high value on Randian ‘objectivism' and participate in a long American intellectual heritage of individualistic ‘bootstrapping' and (allegedly) gritty self-reliance. But as Nelson and Block (2018, p. 189–197) recognize, one of the central symbolic operations of capitalistkind resides in concealing its reliance on the state by mobilizing the charm of its entrepreneurial constituents and the spectacle of space. There is a case to be made for the idea that SpaceX and its ilk resemble semi-private corporations like the British East India Company. The latter, “incorporated by royal charter from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 to trade in silk and spices, and other profitable Indian commodities,” recruited soldiers and built a ‘commercial business [that] quickly became a business of conquest' (Tharoor, 2017). SpaceX, too, is increasingly imbricated with an attempt on the part of a particular state, the United States, to colonize and appropriate resources derived from a particular area, that of outer space; it, too, depends on the infrastructure, contracts, and regulatory environment that thus far only a state seems able to provide. Its private character, like that of the East India Company, is troubled by being deeply embedded in the state. As one commentator has observed of SpaceX, ‘If there’s a consistent charge against Elon Musk and his high-flying companies…it’s that they’re not really examples of independent, innovative market capitalism. Rather, they’re government contractors, dependent on taxpayer money to stay afloat' (cit. Nelson and Block, 2018, p. 189). Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. As Bourdieu (2005, p. 12) observed, ‘The economic field is, more than any other, inhabited by the state, which contributes at every moment to its existence and persistence, and also to the structure of the relations of force that characterize it'. The state lays out the preconditions for market exchanges. Under neoliberalism, the state is the preeminent facilitator of markets. The neoliberal state is not so much a Minimalstaat, night watchman state, or slim state as it is the prima causa of market society (see, e.g., Wacquant, 2012). Similarly, in the political theory of Deleuze and Guattari, any economic development presupposes the political differentiation caused by the state (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a, p. 237–238). Even in the global environment of contemporary capitalism, the market cannot operate without the state becoming integrated with capitalism itself, as ‘it is the modern state that gives capitalism its models of realization' (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b, p. 480). For capitalism to survive in outer space, the state must create a regulatory environment, subsidize infrastructure, and hand down contracts – in short, assemble outer space as a domain made accessible in legal, technical, and economic ways. Universalizing capital As Earth’s empty spaces are filled, as our planet comes to be shorn of blank places, capitalistkind emerges to rescue capitalism from its terrestrial limitations, launching space rockets, placing satellites into orbit, appropriating extraterrestrial resources, and, perhaps one day, building colonies on distant planets like Mars. But why limit ourselves to Mars? As of mid-2017, NASA’s Kepler ARTICLE PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 6 PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | (2019) 5:10 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 | www.nature.com/palcomms observatory had discovered more than 5000 exoplanets—planets that seem like promising alternatives to Earth, located at an appropriate distance from their respective suns in the famed ‘Goldilocks zone'. These ‘planetary candidates', as they are known —that is, candidates for the replacement of Earth, capable of supporting human life with only minimal technological augmentation or cybernetic re-engineering—are above all viable candidates for selection by specific capitalists seeking to discover new profitable ventures beyond the limits of an Earth-bound capitalism. Space reveals the impotence of the neoliberal, postFordist state, its incapacity and unwillingness to embark on gigantic infrastructural projects, to project itself outwards, and to fire the imagination of (actual) humankind. Capitalistkind steps in to fill the vacuum left behind by a state that lacks what Mann (2012, p. 170) calls ‘infrastructural power'. The old question, the question of Old Space, was quite simply: is this planet a viable site for humankind, a suitable homeland for the reproduction of human life away from Earth? But the new question, the question for NewSpace, will be: can this celestial body support capitalistkind? Will it support the interests of capitalist entrepreneurs, answering to the capitalist desire for continued accumulation? While some elements of the astrosociological community, such as the Astrosociology Research Institute (ARI),14 insist on elucidating the “human dimension” in outer space, Dickens and Ormrod recognize that this humanization-through-capitalism really involves the ‘commodification of the universe' (2007b, p. 2). While Dickens and Ormrod develop similar arguments to those sketched here—from their concept of an ‘outer spatial fix' to their argument about outer space becoming woven into circuits of capital accumulation—they were writing at a time when their remarks necessarily remained speculative: the commercialization of space was still in its infancy. In an inversion of Hegel’s owl of Minerva, reality has since largely confirmed their ideas and caught up with theory. Above all, when considering the various ventures ongoing in space today, it is not so much the universalizing human dimension as the specifically capitalist dimension that is striking. With the advent of NewSpace, outer space is becoming not the domain of a common humanity but of private capital. The arguments laid out above mirror an ongoing turn in critical scholarship away from the notion of the Anthropocene towards a more rigorously political-economic concept of Capitalocene, premised on the ‘claim that capitalism is the pivot of today’s biospheric crisis' (Moore, 2016, p. xi). Just as the exponents of the concept of Capitalocene emphasize that it is capitalism, and not humanity as such, that is the driving force behind environmental transformation, so too does the notion of capitalistkind emphasize that it is not humankind tout court but rather a set of specific capitalist entrepreneurs who are acting as the central transformative agents of and in outer space, with the ‘ever-increasing infiltration of capital' into what was formerly the domain of the state (Dickens and Ormrod, 2007a, p. 6). We can also think about these issues in terms of what PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos (2015) terms ‘spatial justice'. This concept captures the fact that struggles over justice are often struggles to occupy space, as the term is more conventionally understood, as with urban battles over the ‘right to the city' (Harvey, 2008), to provide just one example. But the same also holds true for outer space: there is an ongoing struggle over the right to take up space in outer space. So far, the capitalist side appears to be winning. As the proto-communism of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty is abandoned—in tandem with the increased technological feasibility of exploiting resources and accumulating profits in outer space—spatial justice in outer space increasingly comes to mean the ‘justice' of capital, capitalistkind taking the place of humankind. It is comparatively easy to declare that outer space is a commons, as the Outer Space Treaty did in the late 1960s, when that domain is, for all practical purposes, inaccessible to capital; with the heightened accessibility of outer space, however, it is unsurprising that central political agents, such as President Trump’s administration, should seek to dismantle this regulatory framework and ensure the smooth functioning of capital accumulation beyond the terrains of Earth. What kind of capitalism is being projected into space? The complexity of state-market relations is sufficient to force us to hedge against a simplified reading of space commercialization: it is not a matter of states against markets, as if the two were mutually exclusive. Instead, as Bratton (2015) suggests, we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘stack', a complex intertwining of commercial, geopolitical, and technological concerns, which challenges previous notions of state sovereignty. This can be seen as a hybridized state-market form, with technology playing a central role in reciprocal processes of political and economic transformation. On the one hand, outer space was in some sense always already the domain of marketization, albeit to a limited extent, even during the Cold War, from the first commercial satellite launch in the early 1960s to President Ronald Reagan’s implementation of the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, which aimed to encourage private enterprise to take an interest in an emerging launch market. As Hermann Bondi, the head of the European Space Organization, wrote in the early 1970s, ‘It is clear…that there must be three partners in space, universities and research institutions on the one hand, the government on the second and industry on the third' (Bondi, 1971, p. 9). On the other hand, outer space still remains firmly within the domain of the state and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future, with the likely continued importance of military uses of satellite technology and the weaponization of Earth’s orbit— crucially, the Outer Space Treaty only prohibits nuclear arms and other ‘weapons of mass destruction' in space, not conventional weapons, such as ballistic missiles. One novel element in this phase of capitalism-in-space is the interrelationship between Silicon Valley, NewSpace, and the state (see, e.g., Vance, 2015). Silicon Valley’s capitalist class, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, play an outsize role in NewSpace. Behind and around these figures, however, remains the state—through its weighty fiscal, regulatory, military, and symbolic investments.15 To take but one example: In June 2018, SpaceX won a $130 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to launch an ‘Air Force Space Command' satellite onboard a Falcon Heavy rocket (Erwin, 2018). Fredric Jameson’s (2003, p. 76) oft-quoted observation that it is easier to imagine the end of humankind than the end of capitalism, is realized in the ideals and operations of capitalistkind. Elon Musk has observed that the goal of SpaceX is to establish humankind as a ‘multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet' whose purpose is to counteract the possibility of a ‘worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness' (Vance, 2015, p. 5). But couldn’t we view this idealistic assertion on behalf of humanity in another way? It is not human consciousness, over and against what the writer Kim Stanley Robinson (2017, p. 2) calls ‘mineral unconsciousness' (i.e., the mute, geological reality of the natural universe), so much as a specifically capitalist consciousness that is at stake. While the actions of capitalistkind may primarily be aimed at ensuring the future survival of the human species, an additional result is to ensure that the very idea of capitalism itself will outlive a (distantly) possible extinction event. Capitalism is a self-replicating system, pushing to expand ever outwards, using a territorializing strategy of survival. As David Harvey notes, ‘a steady rate of growth is essential for the health of a capitalist economic system, since it is only through growth that profits can be assured and the accumulation of capital be sustained' (1990, p. 180). In this PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 ARTICLE PALGRAVE COMMUNICATIONS | (2019) 5:10 | https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9 | www.nature.com/palcomms 7 respect, outer space is ideal: it is boundless and infinite. As Earth comes to be blanketed by capital, it is only to be expected that capital should set its sights on the stars above. The actions of capitalistkind serve to bolster the capitalist mode of production and accumulation: it is not only life but capital itself that must outlive Earth—even into the darkness of space

The world is in the grips of a global pandemic that has altered the daily lives of billions and killed more than 1.7 million people. You might think that that would refocus our attentions on ensuring the health and wellness of people around the globe, but as billionaires’ fortunes have soared, some of their number have kept their focus trained on the stars.

On 9 December, SpaceX launched its Starship SN8, a prototype of the spaceship it hopes will one day perform regular trips between Earth and Mars. The test flight ended in flames, but that didn’t stop space enthusiasts from declaring it a success — an important milestone in CEO Elon Musk’s ultimate plan to colonise the red planet.

As Harman noticed, the capitalists pursued the extra surplus value in competition with other capitalists. Consequently, Okishio was incapable of refuting the law of the falling rate of profit. On the contrary, Okishio completely ignored the capitalists’ pursuit of profit. In fact, the cost of luxuries was much higher than that of common merchandise, whereas capitalists would produce luxuries because high cost implies high price and consequently high profit.¶ Marx claimed that the high organic composition of capital would cause a fall of the rate of profit, but this does not mean the former is the only reason for the latter. So enumerating other possible reasons for a falling rate of profit is not sufficient to disprove the law of the falling rate of profit. This is especially so in this case because price cannot be taken as one of the factors that changes profit, since it is a dependent, not an independent, variable.

Hundreds of years from now, assuming someone’s left to critique world history humanity’s failings will be seen intersecting with global warming, climate change and political. Drawn to those same Cartesian coordinates, historians will easily connect the deaths of rainforests, bleached coral reefs, instability, forming an epicenter of reckless abandon, waste and environmental fallout melted glaciers and ice sheets, and intensified storms, not to mention their chaotic aftermaths, with a single primary cause: Capitalism. For roughly 150 years, any objective analysis or withholding consent for economic and political systems in which private profits (instead of public good) control trade and industry has been deemed “un-American.” But since the 1st Gilded Age (the last 40 years especially), dangers of industrial capitalism, while often ignored, are readily apparent. Among them are cyclically depressed economies, exploited labor, and profit-driven acts of violence such as wildlife and habitat destruction. Anthropogenic climate change and global warming have added droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, any combinations of which lead to crop failures.

In fact, industrial capitalism’s resource plundering has been a massive generator of waste and externalities, frequently producing unnecessary commodities while pumping an estimated 1.5 trillion metric tons of CO2 into the air since 1751. In the mere 65 years since Sputnik launched (Oct. 4, 1957), we’ve discarded enough “space junk” to form an orbiting belt of cosmic solid waste, not only posing collision threats to telescopes, satellites, and other spacecraft but menacing 7.7 billion people and countless nonhuman earthlings below. What goes up without maintaining orbital speeds of 16,500 mph eventually comes down and, if large enough, doesn’t necessarily incinerate completely from atmospheric friction. July 30th, 40% of a 25-ton Chinese rocket stage survived reentry to crash in Borneo. Weeks earlier, a charred 10-ft.-tall Space X remnant plummeted to Australia, embedding in the ground. Henny Penny (a.k.a. Chicken Little) may have been more prescient than hysterical after all.

Ten years ago, Oxfam first sounded the alarm at the World Economic Forum, about extreme levels of inequality. Since then, billionaires have almost doubled their wealth and astoundingly since 2020, the richest 1% have snatched-up almost twice as much as the rest of the world combined. ¶ Hundreds of millions are facing impossible rises in the cost of living, and millions are reeling from the pandemic which has already killed over 20 million people. These crises all have winners. The very richest have become dramatically richer and corporate profits have hit record highs, driving an explosion of inequality. ¶ The very existence of billionaires and record profits while poverty and inequality are both on the rise damning proof of a failing economic system. As a starting point toward reducing extreme inequality, the world should aim to dramatically reduce the wealth and number of billionaires between now and 2030, both by increasing taxes on the top 1% and adopting other billionaire-busting policies. ¶ To better understand the rise in energy and food prices, we need to look beyond the logic of supply and demand. Growing evidence points to corporate profits as a significant driver of inflation. Not only are companies passing increased input costs onto consumers, but they are also capitalizing on the crisis, using it as a smokescreen to charge even higher prices. ¶ Oxfam’s analysis of 95 food and energy corporations found that they made $306 billion in windfall profits in 2022; 84% of this being paid to their shareholders, making the already rich, even richer. Governments could raise vital revenue to help fight inequality by implementing one-off taxes on excessive profits and wealth during crises. ¶ The traditional explanation for soaring inflation is that it occurs when demand exceeds supply and pushes up prices, but this logic only partly explains the rising cost of energy and food. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia did lead to reduced gas supply which contributed to an increase in the global price of energy. In the case of food, prices were already rising sharply long before the war, and the interruption of grain supplies from Ukraine made this problem worse. ¶ Food and energy corporations have maintained high prices without the threat of being undercut by competition, and as prices on their end fall, these savings are being passed to their shareholders rather than consumers. This greed-flation led to food and energy companies more than doubling their profits in 2022, paying out $257 billion to wealthy shareholders, while over 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. ¶ There historically have been progressive measures to curb excessive wealth and power of the super-rich during global crisis by increasing taxation of the richest. We can learn from Costa Rica that increased its top rate of income tax by 10 percentage points, from 15% to 25%, and Bolivia and Argentina introduced wealth and solidarity taxes on their richest citizens. This spirit of solidarity boosts public spending and to fight inequality and limit suffering of ordinary citizens. ¶ When economic crisis hits, ordinary working people are first in line for pay cuts and job losses. In 2020, COVID-19 sparked lockdowns and an unprecedented global economic slowdown. This led to working-hour losses approximately four times greater than during the global financial crisis of 2008, with women and racialized groups being the hardest hit. ¶ Oxfam analysis shows that at least 1.7 billion workers worldwide will have seen a real-terms pay cut in 2022, making it more challenging to feed their families or keep the lights and heating on. We urgently need greater taxation of the ultra-rich and corporations as a measure to fight inflation and inequality.

Climate change has already increased the risk of nearly 60% of all known infectious diseases, including tick- and mosquito-borne diseases — like Lyme disease and dengue — and various food- and waterborne infections, according to an analysis published in the journal Nature Climate Change. ¶ The risks will grow as summers get longer and warmer, winters get shorter and milder, and weather events worldwide get more extreme and unpredictable. Growing risks from infectious diseases that thrive in these environments will come not only from known pathogens, experts say; new infectious diseases are also more likely to emerge. ¶ “Outbreaks of emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats are only accelerating,” says Syra Madad, an infectious disease epidemiologist and senior director of the system-wide special pathogens program at New York City Health + Hospitals. ¶ Years of a global assault from COVID combined with increasingly severe climate disruptions have given people worldwide a preview of what a future of unabated climate change may bring.¶ To promote better health, individuals and society will need to juggle immediate vigilance with long-term steps like sharply cutting heat-trapping carbon pollution and environmental degradation while putting more resources into educating the public about the risks of their local pathogens and the benefits of better nutrition, hygiene, and staying up to date with vaccines. ¶ Climate fever ¶ Climate change is creating increased exposure pathways by bringing humans and pathogens closer together while also selecting for pathogens that evolve to survive in higher temperatures. ¶ Some infections spread through vector-borne transmission, meaning through the bites of mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and other organisms. Warmer temperatures across greater geographical areas, shorter winters, and earlier springs encourage people to spend time outdoors and also allow these vectors to claim a foothold in more territory. This puts more people at risk of exposure to illnesses like Lyme disease, West Nile virus disease, and ehrlichiosis. The number of U.S. illnesses reported from flea, mosquito, and tick bites doubled between 2004 and 2018, according to the CDC. ¶ Higher temperatures and an increase in recreational activities around water also bring more people closer to the source of waterborne infections that can cause illnesses like diarrhea, intestinal infections, and in rare and more severe cases infections like primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, caused by an amoeba that can find a home in warm fresh water like lakes and rivers. ¶ Increased temperatures also increase the risk that infectious diseases will evolve to tolerate and thrive in warmer environments. This makes it harder for humans to fight infections with one of the best defense mechanisms against invading infections: mounting a fever. Pathogens that evolve a better ability to overcome this defense will be ever more dangerous. ¶ Along with risks for the spread and increased virulence — or strength — of known infectious diseases, we are living in an era with higher risks for exposure to completely novel infections.¶ “Our ecological footprint is expanding, and spillover events are increasing,” Madad says. Spillover events are those in which a pathogen jumps from an original host to a new species, as happened with MERS, or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, from a virus first reported in humans in 2012. A spillover event is also a likely explanation for the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19, which closely resembles viruses that circulate in bats. ¶ The dangers of an infectious disease to a host depend on many factors, but the first is the pathogen’s ability to actually infect a host cell. As humans encroach more and more on the natural habitats of wildlife, new pathogens gain opportunities to develop the right mutations to jump from an animal host to infect a human host. With additional opportunities, other mutations may arise that eventually allow for human-to-human transfer of a completely new pathogen. The combination of climate change forcing wildlife out of their habitats and the expanding footprint of humans into the habitats of wildlife will only increase the risks for novel infections in spillover events. ¶ Increasing human vulnerability¶ Human vulnerabilities also affect the ability of a pathogen to cause disease. In general, infection with a completely novel pathogen, meaning no previous exposure, means that a person has no immune protection from previous infection (though there are some exceptions, as exposure to a similar family of viruses may confer some cross-immunity). ¶ Other factors also play a role in underlying susceptibility. For example, preexisting chronic disease or frailty because of extremes of age can also greatly alter the severity of a given infectious disease. Climate change can exacerbate these problems, too: Extreme weather events can lead to displacement, droughts can lead to food insecurity, and wildfires may worsen air quality. All these factors can make people more vulnerable to more severe infections. And as with COVID and other global problems, climate change impacts often hit hardest at the people who are already marginalized or most vulnerable.

Support from the Left It is clear why UBI is so popular on the Right and within certain sections of capital. Needless to say, the Left case for a basic income appeals to a rather different sensibility. The Left discourse stresses the inherently exploitative nature of work under capitalism, with numerous studies finding that British workers spend far too much time at their jobs - impacting both physical and mental health - while inequality continues to rise (Jones, 2019; Day and Prins, 2020; Scurrah, 2021). After decades of neoliberalism, jobs have become increasingly precarious, which only adds to the stress and anxiety that modern workers experience. Reflecting this reality, Leftist advocates emphasise the emancipatory potential of UBI, which would see workers freed from meaningless, unsatisfying jobs and cushioned from the harshest aspects of the market. For example, van Parijs claims UBI would ‘liberate […] all men and women of the compulsion to work for a capitalist’ and enable ‘people who work too much to reduce their working time or take a career break’ (2018: 2; 15). In the same volume, Schachtschneider envisages ‘[t]he partial decoupling of work and income’ and a ‘life beyond market structures’ as a result of a basic income (Ed. van Parijs, 2018: 74–75). Meanwhile, Standing (2017) attempts to wrestle the argument for individual freedom away from the libertarian Right and in favour of UBI, while the likes of Louise Haagh (2019) and Rutger Bregman (2018) hail the aspects which support classical liberal arguments concerning leisure time and personal development. It is these kinds of arguments that have made UBI so popular on the Left, and in particular those younger members of the labour force who are confronted with a future of increasingly insecure work and low pay (Sloman, 2018; Fitzgerald, 2017). Much of this discourse draws on Marx’s early ‘humanist' writing regarding ‘alienation' and the exploitation of labour to justify their basic income proposals. Whether this engagement constitutes a rhetorical device to gain the backing of the radical Left or a genuine interest in Marxism is uncertain, but what is clear is that a reliance on Marx’s early work at the expense of his research in political economy is bound to be limited. The French philosopher Louis Althusser went as far as to identify an ‘epistemological break' in Marx’s writing between his early humanism and his later “scientific” work, which came after he had shed the influence of the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach (Althusser, 2005). I mention this not to say that Marx’s early works should be written-off entirely - indeed they are foundational for what emerged later - but to suggest that remaining on one side of this break while neglecting later Marxist interventions in political economy does not offer a solid foundation on which to base a justification for UBI. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx explores the degree of ‘coercion’ present in the worker’s decision to work, and defines alienating labour as that which is ‘external to the worker’ (1844: n.p.). These insights, taken up elsewhere by Marx, demonstrate how the worker is forced to sell their own labour in order to survive, living on wages while the capitalist extracts further value from them. The worker thus becomes a ‘commodity’ to be exploited, rather than - as the Right sees it - a voluntary agent meeting the employer within the market of free exchange (Marx and Engels, 2015: 12). The views such as those of van Parijs expressed above therefore appeal to some Marxists, who see UBI as a way of freeing the worker of this exploitation to some degree. So too does Micheal Howard, a researcher associated with BIEN, who regards basic income as a ‘step beyond alienation because it gives more workers the option to say no’ (2002: 4). But in their preoccupation with notions of alienation and individual freedom, some UBI proponents on the Left overlook the integral role that surplus value plays in this exploitation of workers. As has been outlined earlier, it is this process of surplus value extraction that the entirety of the capitalist economy relies on, without which it would simply collapse. However, UBI does nothing to address this key driver of capitalist expansion, meaning it cannot hope to solve the problem at the heart of the inequality that capitalism inherently produces. In defending this, van der Veen and van Parijs claim that for Marx the priority was ‘the expansion of freedom’ and ‘the abolition of alienation’, and so ‘we need not be bothered by the persistence of substantial inequalities’ (1986: 651). But this represents a glaring misreading of Marx, and reveals the ‘primary reason’ why conservative and liberal figures were attracted to UBI in the first place (Navarro, ed. van Parijs, 2018: 51). This vision of UBI is therefore perfectly compatible with that of the Right. For most UBI supporters on the Left, the policy is a way of ameliorating some of the harshest aspects of capitalism rather than an attempt to move beyond it. But for van der Veen and van Parijs, basic income also represents an opportunity to embark on “the capitalist road to communism”. In their eyes, UBI has the potential to form part of a gradual approach to systemic change that would ‘turn the capitalist transition to communism from a utopian dream into a historical necessity’ (van der Veen & van Parijs, 1985: 652). However, the authors overestimate the power of UBI in bringing about systemic change. UBI alone could not possibly transform the capitalist economy so emphatically due to the fact it fails to deal with such a core problem, and reform that does not concern itself with the ‘capital-labour relations in each country’ - as UBI fails to do - is therefore ‘dramatically insufficient’ for solving the growing problem of inequality and moving beyond the current parameters of capitalism (Navarro, ed. van Parijs, 2018: 50). Utopian predictions about the incoming technological revolution, which are often coupled with support for a UBI, are also unhelpful. This is by no means a recent phenomenon; just as Sloman shows that support for UBI tends to emerge as a result of political crisis, Benanav too sees ‘automation theory’ as ‘a spontaneous discourse of capitalist societies’ which appears repeatedly amidst these crises ‘as a way of thinking through their limits’ (2019a: 11–12). What the current discourse about UBI and automation overlooks - hailing both as an opportunity to transition to a post-work society - is that ‘the level of employment is socially, not technologically, determined’ (Wilson, 2018: 61). In other words, ‘[t]echnology can only create new material conditions’, and whether these are used to serve progressive goals or conservative ones depends on ‘the social and political project underpinning their implementation’ (Gorz, 1985: 40). We have covered already how labour-saving innovation coupled with UBI has the potential to merely serve the interests of the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. After all, the ‘technologies developed in capitalist societies are not neutral’, they are designed to aid capitalist expansion rather than bring about a post-work world (Benanav, 2019b: 143). The task for radical social policy in the event of such widespread technology-induced unemployment should therefore concern who owns these new means of production, rather than a focus on UBI, as it is this question of ownership which would determine the abolition of work in the capitalist sense. However, there is evidence that the danger of a technology-induced unemployment crisis has been greatly overstated. What seems more likely to occur - as has done throughout history - is a “partial” automation which will alter how certain jobs are carried out, rather than abolishing them altogether. Matthew Cole argues that technology is having much the same impact ‘it always had’, that is a ‘partial’ one, ‘changing the task composition of most jobs rather than eliminating them entirely’ (2020: n.p.). This is not to downplay the potential dangers technology still poses to workers, but demonstrates that a clamouring for UBI due to widespread unemployment misses the point. As Benanav suggests, ‘we are heading towards a “good job-less future” rather than a “jobless” one’ (2019b: 117). Marx explains how the potential technology possesses to make jobs simpler does not always result in an improvement in the working experience, but rather ‘deprives the work of all interest’ in addition to the likelihood of a wage squeeze (2013: 292). In contrast, Italian thinkers such as Franco Berardi and Maurizio Lazzarato claim we have reached a fundamentally new way of working, a so-called “cognitive capitalism” which relies on “immaterial” or “intellectual labour”, rather than manual work (Berardi, 2013; Lazzarato, eds. Virno & Hardt, 1996). With value creation becoming harder to define, UBI would step in to replace traditional wage labour and open up new ways of supporting workers outside of the wage structures that are now obsolete. Both men belong to the Autonomous Marxist milieu, often characterised as post-operaismo due to its shared intellectual heritage with the original operaismo movement. This earlier current emerged in 1960s Italy during the height of industrialisation and included among its ranks the likes of Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti. The movement was primarily concerned with recognising the working class as an ‘autonomous, self-constituting force’, a revolutionary class capable of shaping capitalism to its own needs before eventually defeating it (Collins, 2021: n.p.). The operaisti thus paid close attention to class composition and how certain reforms and changes in work impacted its potential.

Booth 17 [Adam, Political activist, Marxist, regular writer for Socialist Appeal, “Universal basic income: utopian dream or libertarian nightmare?”, marxist.com/universal-basic-income-utopian-dream-or-libertarian-nightmare.htm, 2/10/17] //adhi

Race against the machine¶ An apocryphal tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant.¶ “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company.¶ Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” (The Economist, 4th November 2011)¶ The story recounted above is likely fictional. Nevertheless, it draws upon – and highlights – a very real and grave concern amongst the more far-sighted bourgeois commentators today: the threat of “technological unemployment” – the so-called “race against the machine”.¶ Far from welcoming the advances in modern technology and the vast potential for liberating humanity that automation offers, the rapid pace of technological development today is seen as a dangerous and uncontrollable force that could make vast swathes of the working – and even middle – class obsolete in the not-too-distant future.¶ Who, in this scenario, the above anecdote asks, will buy all the plethora of commodities that the world economy’s vast productive forces continue to churn out?¶ Above all, this question of automation and machinery has begun to shine a light upon the contradictions of the capitalist system, exposing the rank hypocrisy of those politicians who demand austerity and attacks on ordinary people, whilst in the same breathe venerating the billionaire “entrepreneurs” who, between just eight of them, control as much wealth as half the world’s population put together.¶ It is becoming increasingly clear to those who have eyes to see that an army of robots has helped to create a “reserve army of labour”, as Marx described it: a mass of unemployed whose presence puts a downward pressure on wages for those in work. Those replaced by new technology are not retrained and re-educated in order to give them the skills required to keep up with this ever-accelerating treadmill of capitalism; instead they are thrown onto the scrapheap and forced into the rapidly expanding “gig economy” – a shadowy netherworld of bogus self-employment, insecure work, and zero-hour contracts.¶ The result is that, despite the array of automation and technology deployed in production, the growth in productivity across the economy has actually stalled; it is cheaper, from the point of view of the parasitic profiteering capitalist, to recruit from the ranks of the “precariat” desperately looking for a job than to invest in machinery that actually reduces the need for labour. From the perspective of capitalism, then, there is both “too much” automation – in terms of “technological unemployment” – and, simultaneously, “too little”, with the stagnation of productivity.¶ The system is broken¶ It is this context of a broken economic engine that we see the emergence of the demand for a “universal basic income”, or UBI: a uniform payment given to all in society, regardless of wealth or needs.¶ The idea behind the UBI, in theory, is that it would break the link between work and pay, providing – on the one hand – workers who have been made redundant by robots a safety net that prevents them from getting stuck in low-paid, precarious jobs, whilst also allowing them to transition from obsolete industries into new, more productive sectors. And – on the other hand – enabling the capitalists to invest in automation and new technology without the moral anxiety (or, more importantly, the practical concern) of adding to society’s legion of the unemployed. Et voilà! The wheels of capitalism are well and truly greased: investment goes up; productivity increases; the economy grows – and meanwhile workers are able to smoothly move from one job to another for the rest of their lives.¶ Would that it were so simple. The reality is that productive investment today is at an all-time low, not because of any principled apprehension about the fate of sacked workers, but because of the enormous levels of overproduction – or “excess capacity” as the bourgeois like to euphemistically describe it – that hang like an albatross around the neck of the global economy. The capitalists invest, not to provide jobs, meet needs, or develop the productive forces, but to make profits. If goods cannot be sold because ordinary families do not have the money to buy them, then industry will be mothballed. And if the bosses can get more profit out of ten exploited workers than from one shiny new machine, then the workers will stay in place and productivity will remain sluggish.¶ Indeed, the relationship between work and pay has already been broken – but not in any positive sense. In all countries – both in the advanced capitalist countries and the so-called “emerging” economies – the share of wealth going to labour has decreased, with real wages remaining stagnant despite an increase in GDP. The working week grows longer, and yet take-home pay stays the same.¶ In whose interest?¶ Despite being raised on the basis of fundamentally false premises, the call for a UBI has nevertheless found an echo in this epoch of eye-watering inequality. Already, social and economic experiments involving UBIs are underway in a variety of countries, including Canada, Finland, and Holland. In Switzerland, a proposal for a SFr30,000 per annum (around £24,000 per year) UBI was rejected by 77% to 23% in a referendum on 5th June 2016. In Britain, meanwhile, the demand for a UBI has been raised by the leaderships of both the Labour Party and the Green Party.¶ For those on the Left, the UBI is proposed as a progressive demand: a reinforced safety net, beyond the sticking plaster of the current welfare state, funded through increased taxation on big business and the rich. Raised in such a manner, it is clearly a demand – like any genuine reform – that should be supported and fought for.¶ UBI, however, is not an inherently left-wing or progressive measure. The idea of a universal payment, in fact, has many advocates on the libertarian right. Indeed, even prominent bourgeois economists such as Milton Friedman have made similar proposals in the past, with his idea for a “negative income tax”.¶ For these respectable ladies and gentlemen, the concept of a UBI has great appeal as an extremely streamlined version of – or, worse still, replacement for – the welfare state. In one fell swoop, these small government zealots suggest, one could “simplify” (read: slash) vast swathes of the taxation and benefits system, “eliminating bureaucracy” and “reducing market interference”.¶ At the same time, one can clearly see the attraction of the UBI to the Schumpeterian liberals who preach the virtues of the invisible hand and the powerful transformative forces of “creative destruction”. Provide a primitive safety net, eradicate “barriers” to job creation such as the minimum wage, and give the anarchy of the market a free hand to destroy industries and jobs, without any planning or provision of education and retraining. It’s a libertarian’s dream – and a nightmare for the working class.¶ Some free-market fanatics, meanwhile, have even advocated the idea of a relatively large UBI payment, but (and here’s the catch) only on the proviso that pesky public services – such as healthcare and education – are scrapped, i.e. privatised, and opened up to profit.¶ Far from strengthening the conquests made by previous generations, therefore, one can see how the demand for a UBI can equally be raised by those looking to roll back and destroy such gains. Rather than increasing the welfare state in a progressive way by redistributing society’s colossal wealth, a UBI could instead become a deeply regressive fig leaf for a wholesale attack on – and privatisation of – public services, bolstering the capitalist market instead of weakening it.¶ Marxists will fight for any reform that genuinely improves the living standards of workers and the poor. But in order to ascertain whether we can support this-or-that demand, we must first ask: is it really a reform that is being proposed, or – in fact – a counter-reform?¶ In this respect, the call for a UBI in the abstract is meaningless. The devil is in the detail. Above all, it is necessary to analyse the question from a class point of view and look at who is raising the demand, and – most importantly – in whose (class) interest.¶ Who pays?¶ As with all such reforms, the most pertinent question is: who pays? Where, one must ask, would the money come from? Indeed, it is this key point that right-wing opponents to UBI highlight.¶ In the case of the Swiss referendum last year, the government came out against the £24,000 per year that was being proposed on the grounds of this amount being unaffordable (to put the proposed level in perspective, however, bear in mind that the cost of living in Switzerland is painfully high, and average salaries are around twice this suggested UBI amount). In places such as Finland, the “more reasonable” UBI suggested is the miserable sum of approximately £5,700 per year – a value that would be small change to the millionaires receiving it (don’t forget, it is an unconditional universal payment, after all), but that would actually leave the poorest who currently rely on the provision of means-tested benefits worse off.¶ In order to provide a UBI payment better than what is currently on offer through the welfare state, some fairly significant tax increases would be required, as the Economist highlights with some hypothetical estimates:¶ “Setting up a basic income would be no easy matter. To pay every adult and child an income of about $10,000 per year, a country as rich as America would need to raise the share of GDP collected in tax by nearly 10 percentage points and cannibalise most non-health social-spending programmes. More generous programmes would require bigger tax increases still.”¶ Before continuing, let us make one thing crystal clear: the money clearly does exist to provide a decent UBI payment to all – and at levels far beyond $10,000. As has already been noted, according to the recent Oxfam report on global inequality, just eight billionaires own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Meanwhile, big business in the USA sits on an idle cash pile of around $1.9 trillion dollars.¶ The problem, however, is not economic, but political. To implement a genuinely progressive UBI would constitute the most ambitious and radical shake up of the redistributive taxation system since the cradle-to-grave welfare state was introduced in the post-war period. And yet, at a time when all these gains of the past are under attack from austerity, we see various well-meaning left-wingers calling for the UBI and proposing a titanic challenge to capital, with huge tax increases on the rich and corporations.¶ Everywhere we look, social democracy and reformism is in retreat as a result of the crisis of capitalism. Elected “left” governments, such as Syriza in Greece and Hollande’s “Socialists” in France, far from carrying out progressive programmes of tax-and-spend, have been forced by the dictatorship of the banks to implement cuts and counter-reforms. But never mind all that: double or nothing!¶ Utopia¶ In this respect, the demand for a UBI is only the latest utopian proposal from a naïve layer of the left who imagine that austerity is ideological, and that we can – somehow, surely – persuade the rich and wealthy to kindly and quietly pass over the money for the good of society. This, at root, is what the advocates of UBI are relying on and hoping for: the benevolence and philanthropy of the capitalists and the establishment politicians who represent them.¶ Whilst the occasional multi-billionaire such as Bill Gates might well part with a small portion of their vast fortune voluntarily for charitable causes (and even then, often only as a cynical PR stunt), the capitalist class as a whole – in the final analysis – are in business to make a profit. And they do not – and never have – appreciated having their private wealth forcibly taken from them to fund the rest of society; hence the almost farcical tax-dodging schemes that the world’s biggest businesses are scandalously embroiled in. As Warren Buffett, the renowned billionaire investor, stated emphatically after pointing out that he pays less tax than his receptionist: “there’s class warfare, all right – but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning!”¶ Again, we should stress that the wealth is most definitely there in society to fund a genuinely progressive UBI system. But the only way such a reform would ever actually be introduced in any meaningful way is if the capitalists felt threatened to the point that they feared losing everything; that is, if the class struggle reached such intense and heightened levels that the ruling elites offered reforms from above to prevent revolution from below. And even then, in such a situation, the demand would have to be not for UBI, but for socialist revolution!¶ If the demand for UBI is to be posed and fought for by the Left, then it cannot be done so in a manner divorced from the question of class struggle. We cannot rely on the altruism of the rich and the compassion of the capitalist state, the essence of which – as Engels explained and Lenin underlined – consists of “special bodies of armed men” in defence of the property and interests of the ruling class.¶ Particularly at a time when governments everywhere are prostrating themselves before the “invisible hand” of the market, therefore, it is pure utopianism to suggest that the capitalists will happily and calmly agree to hand over their wealth to fund a decent UBI, or that the bourgeois state would ever be willing to begin on undertaking such a task.¶ Distribution vs production¶ The main limit of the call for a progressive UBI, as with all reformist demands, is that it fails to pose the question from a class perspective – that is, to analyse who actually owns and controls the wealth and technology in society, and, most importantly, how they have come to have such control in the first place.¶ The problem with the UBI (and reformist policies in general), in other words, arises from its almost exclusive focus on the issue of distribution, rather than production. As Marx comments in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (a similarly reformist and utopian programme put forward by Marx’s socialist peers, the Lassalleans):¶ “Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.¶ “Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.¶ “Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?” (our emphasis)¶ These words ring even more true today. By focussing on the question of taxation and redistribution, the modern leaders of the labour movement actually end up aiming their fire at the wrong people, alienating the middle classes with talk of taxes on incomes and personal property, rather than attacking the super-rich of the capitalist class, whose wealth is tied up in profits and capital – often far beyond the reaches of the state’s tax collectors.¶ The emphasis for socialists, therefore, as Marx stresses, should not be on redistributing the wealth that has already been created in society (through taxation and welfare, etc.), but rather on having collective and democratic control over the means by which new wealth is created – that is, the means of production. If such a rational plan of production was implemented, then questions of taxation, inheritance, redistribution, welfare, and so on, would quickly disappear.¶ For Marxists, the question of inequality, whilst important, is secondary. At root, our criticism of capitalism lies primarily not with these symptoms of the senile system, but with its fundamental disease: the laws of capitalism itself; the barriers of private ownership, competition, and production for profit, which stand in the way of the development of the productive forces – of industry and science, technology and technique, and art and culture. As Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary and theoretician, commented in his Marxist masterpiece Revolution Betrayed,¶ “The fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay.” (Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, chapter 1)¶ Today we see this “fundamental evil” of “anarchy and decay” vividly displayed by the contradiction of enormous cash piles in the hands of the big business alongside historically low levels of investment and stagnant productivity growth; by the absurdity of the potential for mass automation alongside fears of technological unemployment; by the concerns over forced idleness for millions, instead of the realisation of voluntary leisure for all.¶ UBI, for all its attempts to paper over the cracks, does nothing to stop this anarchy of the market and resolve the crisis of overproduction that has led society to this impasse. Indeed, as Marxists have always emphasised, no amount of reforms can unravel these fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Only the revolutionary transformation of society can cut through this Gordian knot.¶ “Wages for housework”¶ Notably, there are also feminist advocates of UBI who support the demand on the grounds that a payment of this nature would challenge present notions about work, demonstrating the value of currently unpaid – but socially necessary – labour, such as housework. But the associated call of “wages for housework” is not a socialist demand. Marxists do not wish for women (or men) to be compensated monetarily for their domestic labour – that is, to create wage labourers in the home alongside wage labourers in the workplace.¶ Instead, Marxists wish to do away with the concept of domestic work altogether: to take these currently privately performed tasks out of the hands of individual families – out of the walls of isolated homes – and to organise these socially necessary tasks in a social manner, as part of a rational plan of production. Only by socialising the question of childcare and domestic tasks, and removing this burden of labour off the shoulders of working class women, can we expect to achieve genuine gender equality in society.¶ As Engels remarks in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State:¶ “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labour over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labour by changing it more and more into a public industry.” (Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, chapter 9)¶ The only way to instigate real, permanent change in society, therefore, is not to pay women for their domestic work, but to take domestic, unwaged labour outside of the individual home altogether; to make this labour a social task that is the responsibility of society as a whole; and ultimately to invest in new machinery and technology that allows for us to abolish this work altogether.¶ The invention of household machines such as the microwave, the dishwasher, and the washing machine have helped to massively reduce the time needed for domestic duties. The challenge now is to take this technology and put it under public and democratic control; to socialise these tasks as part of a socialist plan of production; and thus to liberate both working women and working men from the scourge of domestic labour.¶ Wages, income, and the UBI¶ Within modern capitalism, where the working class has managed to secure for itself – through struggle – publicly-funded services, such as the NHS, and a welfare state, the “income” a worker receives is effectively split into two parts: a wage paid by the employer in exchange for labour-power; and a “social wage” of publicly-provided benefits and services that are free at the point of use and provided on the basis of need, without any money being handed over.¶ Under socialism, the ratio between these two components would shift dramatically towards the latter. The unseen “social wage” would vastly increase, whilst the wage paid in exchange for labour-power would be diminished (in relative terms – the total would of course increase as society’s wealth grows). Instead of just receiving healthcare without any monetary transaction required, transport, housing, electricity, food, clothes, etc.: all of these, and even things currently considered “luxury items”, could be provided without any exchange as part of a socialist plan of production. The concept of value would gradually become meaningless and the money system would wither away.¶ With UBI, however, a third income variant is introduced: alongside the paid wage and “social wage”, we now have also the unconditional monetary payment of the UBI. For those on the libertarian right who are in favour of UBI, the introduction of this universal payment acts not to strengthen the socialist element of the “social wage”, but to weaken it, (as discussed earlier) by using the UBI as a pretext for opening up public services to privatisation.¶ Similarly, the introduction of UBI might also be used to justify the elimination of important reforms such as the minimum wage, putting workers on the back foot in the battle against the bosses. Far from eroding the power of money and the market, then, the UBI could serve to consolidate and bolster these forces.¶ Those on the Left who most enthusiastically and unthinkingly call for a UBI must therefore be careful what they wish for. Again, rather than embracing the ambiguous and dubious demand of UBI, the leaders of the labour movement should be pushing the call for nationalisation and workers’ control back to the fore.¶ For a socialist society¶ The greatest irony regarding UBI is that those on the Left calling for it openly recognise all the glaring contradictions present in capitalist society, but then choose to turn the problem on its head, suggesting everything but the solution itself. They see the irrationality of mass unemployment alongside overwork; of inequality increasing whilst technology advances; of automation that enslaves us rather than liberates us: and yet they accept these irrationalities as a given fact – admitting to capitalism’s failings, but refusing to recognise capitalism as the root of the problem.¶ As with all reformist demands, the advocates of UBI are willing to propose the most extraordinary and utopian measures, as long as these do not challenge the one right that they consider to be the most inviolable and sacrosanct of all: that of private property. Indeed, it has even been suggested that UBI could be a “capitalist road to communism” – that is, to Marx’s maxim, “from each according to their ability; to each according to their needs.”¶ For such venerable ladies and gentlemen, competition and the pursuit of profit may be responsible for the scourge of inequality, unemployment, and economic crisis that blights society – but to suggest abolishing the anarchy of the market is pure blasphemy. After all, as we revolutionaries are so frequently reminded – we must be realistic!¶ Indeed, for some, as Thomas Paine – the English-American Enlightenment political philosopher and one of the Founding Father of the United States – argued, a form of UBI would be a tit-for-tat entitlement to all citizens conditional on them accepting the very existence of private property. As the Economist notes:¶ “Thomas Paine would have relished such a prospect. His case for a basic income justified it as a quid pro quo for the existence of private property. Before the advent of private property, he believed, all men had been able to support themselves through hunting and forage. When that resort is taken from them, they should be compensated by means of a ‘natural inheritance’ of £15 to be paid to all men every year, financed from a ‘ground rent’ charged to property owners.”¶ Instead of calling for a UBI, socialists should be using this question to expose the irrationalities, absurdities, and contradictions of capitalism. Our demand should not be for a UBI, where economic control remains in the hands of a tiny rich elite, and where money continues to flow into the pockets of parasitic capitalists. Our demand must be for nationalisation of the key levers of the economy and for workers’ power.¶ Rather than demanding a basic income for those who are made obsolete by automation, we should be calling for necessary work to be shared out, with the hours of the working day reduced for all. But this is only possible on the basis of an economic system based on needs, not profits. Furthermore, we should highlight the potential for a genuine socialist society, where mankind and machine exist in harmony: a society of superabundance; of “fully automated luxury communism”, where the motto “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need” can finally be realised in practice.

The above arguments focus on the analytic weaknesses of the three legs of the MMT triad. However, behind the scene lies a further deeper critique concerning MMT’s macroeconomic conception of capitalism. That critique is illustrated in Figure 3 which describes competing non-mainstream (heterodox) conceptions of capitalism. Those conceptions are divided into Keynesian and Marxist.

Keynesians believe capitalism’s tendency to exploitation and instability can be contained and managed by appropriately designed economic institutions and policies (Palley, 2010b). In contrast, Marxists (Foster and McChesney, 2010) believe capitalism is subject to systemic contradictions that can only be resolved by changing the system.

During a crisis, ideas developing in the background seem to foreground themselves. In the pandemic catastrophe we are experiencing today, new economic theories purporting to present alternatives to the existing neoliberal regime have gained traction. Keynesianism or its updated variant named “Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)” is a paradigmatic example of this.

One of the central tenets of this theory is that state spending, a public debt, can be used to combat recession. Raising overall demand in a given country will facilitate a recovery insofar as there is disposable productive capacity (unemployed workers, stocks of raw materials, machines working below capacity). These unused resources are mobilized by the additional purchasing power created by the budget deficit. Only when these reserves are exhausted do you get the onset of inflation.

I have been arguing above that when we engage in debate over global health policy and practice we would do well to have a clearer sense of the way in which particular approaches to global health relate to underlying models of justice. This is not just because global health problems raise difficult normative questions but because recourse to competing models of justice shapes political outcomes too. When it comes to the question of global health inequality in particular, the particular model of justice that is in play matters greatly: more so, even, than the particular instruments and levers (be it market mechanisms, states, or anything else) that are the immediate subject of the policy. As also alluded to above, it is in relation to inequality that some of the weaknesses of the dominant mainstream approach to global health are most starkly revealed. Mainstream global health today seeks to fill in the potholes of global ill health; it does not seek to reconstruct the road itself. ‘[M]odern conceptions of global health rarely focus on fundamental public health services’, Lawrence Gostin reminds us (2015: 415). But this is not because, as he suggests, global health actors ‘forget’ to provide the basics of good health (ibid.: 416). Rather it is because, like its twin sisters, humanitarianism and human rights, global health quite explicitly seeks to avoid challenging the systemic aspects of global health problems on the assumption that to do so is to raise the spectre of a possible greater harm (cf. Easterly, 2014). Global health policies today may well achieve considerable targeted success, therefore (indeed, it is hard to obtain funding for global health programmes unless there is a clear pathway to just such measurable progress). Since good health is a function of many things (even if not quite as many things as can be envisaged in the WHO's founding declaration) hitting one's targets may indeed be the quickest way to missing the goal (Freedman, 2003). Successfully providing a certain percentage coverage of anti-retrovirals, or even successfully eradicating smallpox in a given territory, does not necessarily impact upon the wider health landscape, nor alter which people are most affected by it. The core of the problem, then, is that there is — and will always be — plenty of scope to increase the floor of protection for a given health problem, while leaving the wider canopy of the social determinants of ill health largely untouched, if not expanding (Moyn, forthcoming). This is not just a technical issue, or a consequence of the wrong political priorities (and this is the big weakness of a debate that at present always falls back on a dualism of market versus state). It is an historical problem and a geographical problem. Let me take each of these in turn by way of explaining how it is that mainstream global health has increasingly extracted itself from the question of health as a social or public good, one deeply embedded in wider social and political structures, how it has leveraged the model of ‘market justice’ as a way of doing this, and why re-embedding it may be a useful first task for ‘social-justice’ approaches to undertake. Historically, international health was taken up as a question of sovereign necessity. In the nineteenth century liberal societies would intervene on behalf of ‘public’ health only in times of emergency (outbreaks of disease) or in relation to wider questions of political economy (standards of hygiene in urban and industrial spaces). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘progressive era’ and in particular in the ‘embedded liberal’ era of international health following World War II, that changed (Rodgers, 1998; Ruggie, 1982). From around the 1970s, in particular, in step with changes then underway within the liberal democratic West, interest in global health began to shift towards a more market-based rationality, emphasizing, as Beauchamp put it, ‘individual responsibility, minimal collective action and freedom from collective obligations except to respect other persons’ fundamental rights’ (Beauchamp, 1976: 102–3). Beauchamp was writing here in the 1970s, and in relation to the American domestic context. But this emphasis on negative rights is precisely where global health is today. Global health today is the product of an epochal shift in political values whose combined effect has been to persistently separate off the problem of global ill health from wider social forces. This raises, in turn, the matter of geography. Geographically, the separation of global health from its public arises from the way that the mainstream global health specifies its proper object. The ‘problems’ that contemporary global health seeks to address are invariably located in poor countries. This works to deflect attention from what has changed in rich countries too, changes which impact upon the wider global health landscape. In so doing, it enables partially grounded diagnoses to sustain universal solutions: the solutions of market justice. This is the problem of ‘the poverty of elsewhere’ that I have raised in another setting (Reid-Henry, 2015). It is important that we bear it in mind in considering the way in which global health today operates. It is one of the reasons why only particular sorts of problems get to count as ‘global health’ problems (tuberculosis and not mental health or blindness, for example) and in certain sorts of ways (as an epidemiological problem of projected future infection, rather than as a function of existing social inequalities — for all that many national AIDS programmes are very clear on this). Mainstream global health is thus best thought of not so much as a solution to the problem of actual health need, but as a solution to the problem of ill health as an externality of global capitalism. The difference is subtle but significant. The logic of prevention largely disappears in the latter, along with any commitments to institutionalized forms of welfare provision: the tax regimes that might pay for health services ante, or the commitments to underwriting healthier environments ex post. Instead what the market-based model of justice resolves to is the principle of ‘equal inequality’ (Donzelot, 2008): the principle that inequalities are to be maximized to the extent that they are effective because they then operate most powerfully as corrective incentives. Health policy, which is so open to the discourse of incentives, is particularly vulnerable to this. This presents the inverse of Rawls's condition that inequalities are to be tolerated to the extent that they work to the benefit of the least well-off. Rawls's theory of justice may have been avowedly liberal but it was also an avowedly social theory of justice concerned with society in the round. This is of course precisely what contemporary global health is so reluctant to address. How does such reluctance come to be seen as reasonable and right-thinking behaviour? It is here that we glimpse the true value of the market-justice approach in action. Global health requires the vernacular of market justice in order to be able to exclude these wider social obligations. Dis-embedded as it has now become, market justice enables global health to present itself as concerned with the problem of global health inequality without committing itself either to addressing the upstream ‘social determinants’ of that or needing to concern itself with those health issues and interventions that might do most to enable the greatest endowment of individual capability. Like all divestitures it is ultimately a way of saving money as much as it is of saving lives. It is for this reason that global health has become — seemingly unaware of the paradox — both an intensely moralized domain (so many advocacy coalitions, global compacts, Commissions and so on) and ethically monotone. Yet it is only by confronting this paradox that we can appreciate why it is that global health, conceived of as market justice, will always fail to address the issue of health inequality as understood within the terms of Daniels's ‘realist’ theory of health justice. That being so, where might an approach to global health that conformed to ‘social-justice’ principles in a ‘market-justice’ world best begin? This is the question I now want to take up in the final part of this article.

The 2016 election cycle has shown that health care is lining up to be a key fight in the next few years. The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is looking increasingly weak as soaring costs of insurance, drugs, and equipment are eroding whatever meager benefits there were in reigning in the all consuming burden of the American health system.⁠1 Bernie Sanders made a medicare-for-all proposal a cornerstone of his campaign, something which the National Nurses United (NNU) and Our Revolution has vowed to keep fighting for.⁠2 Colorado had a similar single-payer plan on the ballot where insurance bureaucracies would have been replaced by a state-run insurance program, but would retain private health institutions and medical industries.⁠3 Hilary Clinton fended off the insurgent challenge of Bernie supporters, but not without having to pay lip service to their cause.⁠4 Poll after poll demonstrates popular support for nationalized health programs across Americans.⁠5 While Clinton indicated a need to revisit the vague “public option” Wikileaks later exposed her method of dividing her private positions, disclosed to Wall Street firms in her infamous paid speeches, and a separate public one.⁠6 None of this is earth shattering, but it shows that all the power brokers have been honed in on health. A slow moving crisis It looks to become even more central however. Estimates are the medicare funds will have to reduce benefits within two decades.⁠7 States that did not expand Medicaid have offered private market based plans that within a few years are already not affordable even with subsidies.⁠8 Where Medicaid was expanded projections for expenses are to rise significantly putting strain on already underfunded systems that suffer from severe shortages of specialists and resources.⁠9 In reality we are witnessing the slow unfolding of a multi-decade health care crisis. Health-related spending makes up roughly a quarter of the entire federal budget and is expanding rapidly. Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Programs alone represent 16% of the federal budget and are projected to grow substantially.⁠10 It is the largest portion of federal spending outpacing both social security and the military. The drivers of this are our nearly singular combination of unregulated profiteering industries and particularly pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and a multi-layered mediating bureaucracy that introduces inefficiencies into an already top heavy industry. The American health crisis is deepening not only because of excessive bureaucracy introduced by the byzantine insurance system, but also due to its embrace of both protecting industry through strict intellectual property rights and placing barriers to any regulation of prices for pharmaceuticals and equipment. It’s worth noting that health insurance and hospitals themselves are barely profitable with the median around 3% which is near inflation levels only. The profit tends to go to all the feeder industries selling products used by patients and purchased by health institutions.⁠11 An Institute of Medicine report identified nearly 800 billion dollars in waste created by unnecessary services, excess administration, inefficient service delivery, overcharging, fraud, and failing to utilize potential preventative measures.⁠12 These factors have made it the most expensive health system in the world.⁠13 The people of the United States pay more than any other country for our health care, and with poor outcomes across a wide array of metrics. The political implications of this are not hard to see. The more political discourse digs in around the health system as a test of capitalism itself, the stiffer the resistance to reforming the obvious and preventable issues with it. The main players still see defense of vested interests in health care as an ideological defense of capitalism. Holding to that position increases public spending however and is increasing the federal deficit each year. Dismantling the drivers of those costs, in private hands, would lead to real economic losses with implications for the world market. Some authors have noted that pharmaceuticals were the stars of the market for decades, and have been in a decline that has not been recovered.⁠14 Further cutting into those losses may have more disruptive effects in an economy that already has challenges ahead represented by geopolitical conflicts in Asia and Europe, and an anemic recovery to the global economic crisis of 2008. With the failure of Colorado is to forge ahead (and other states before it) and the victory of the Republicans across the board in this year’s election, meaningful reform seems quite unlikely in absence of a movement that can force their hands. Some other states may try the route of the ballot initiatives that failed in Colorado, Oregon, or Vermont’s legislature’s push. The disparity of forces between vested capitalist interests and their lobbying power and the electoral process itself makes it a near certainty of failure without a widespread popular change in attitude and action. Can single-payer save us? These problems will not go away for the rulers simply by ignoring them. With a single-payer program there would be substantial savings for the country as a whole and indeed millions of people will have their lives changed for the better. Any reduction in the vast waste that we’re chained to and an expansion in access to quality care is something we should cheer and fight for. Single payer would reduce some of these costs, in part through eliminating unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and negotiating lower prices through economies of scale. This has been the traditional progressive answer for these reasons to all things health related. Despite whatever positives however the fundamentals would remain, with much of the control in the hands of the same drug companies, equipment and product manufacturers, and broken institutionalized practices of American medical professionals (such as reliance on specialists, the persistence of fee for service payment, and over use of capital intensive health techniques). Cutting the costs of the insurance industry would be a positive step, but it’s not a panacea, and it’s not clear whether it could prevent a crisis that is already happening. Universal Medicare would certainly be more expensive than the system of the Veterans’ Administration (VA). One Congressional Budget Office study showed the VA to be twenty one percent cheaper than care under Medicare.⁠15 The VA which shares some similarities to the National Health Service of the UK wherein the system owns the entirety of health services from hospitals, pharmacies, equipment, and hires the staff. By eliminating paying outside private entities, the VA and NHS thereby reduces the profit otherwise paid to private companies at each stage. While Medicare-for-all would eliminate insurers as secondary payers, such companies are deeply entangled in Medicare itself. Private companies provide supplemental plans for necessary services not covered by Medicare and as well as processing claims for Medicare itself.⁠16 Without an elimination of private billing for services those additional administrative costs would remain. Medicare-for-all would not mean an end to Blue Cross, Aetna, or United Health necessarily. Nor should health advocates glamorize European style public health. Across the world public health is under attack. Right and left governments have target slashing spending and limiting access. Ideology certainly is a component of this, but objective budget pressures are driving these forces. Universal public health care is worthy, but it is not a panacea. Americans would likely face the same attacks even were there such a victory as institutional pressure to put the burden of care onto the working class will remain. If legislation granting universal Medicare is unlikely, VA-for-all is a lone voice in the wilderness. One could imagine the resistance likely to nationalizing private hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. And yet if there is no substantial reform, what is the real cost paid to all of those services with a shrinking working population, jobs being lost to automation, and a growing base of those who will need care for decades? Should conflicts heat up, what would be the effect on the market if health advocates won such a struggle and take health institutions outside of the world of profit so to speak? Health care is at the center of stressing both market and state forces and this presents an opportunity for movements that challenge capitalism. This crisis in health is not just about the policies of different players (liberal and conservative, socialist and reactionary), but about more fundamentally capitalism’s capacity to provide for health needs. Market allocation and private industry are central to the failures of the American system, things not easily hidden when confronted head on. Globally speaking the industries that profit off health, both public and private systems, have been some of the leaders for investors generally. Losses within health care could spell deep trouble for the economy across the board and perhaps tip us back into recession or depression in the context of a world that has not fully recovered from the shocks of 2008. Even in countries with overtly state-provided healthcare similar elements of crisis have been building in the past decades around run away costs, shortages, and declining quality of care. Health care is a key sector for radicals to make our case and put the ruling class on the defensive. Health is bigger than our health care Demanding universal health care has been a broad call amongst US progressives for the past 50 years or so. Is that really the main issue though? At its heart single-payer is about how we allocate existing health resources. Yet we do not only want to more equitably and economically distribute health, but also improve it. If you think about it, universal health is a fairly open demand. It could be redirected to any number of outcomes including universally terrible health. There is an insidious medical apartheid that punishes various sectors (workers, women, blacks, latinos, and indigenous, etc.) while granting luxury health services to a tiny elite. There is a clear move towards diminishing care for the public in general with overall declining standards of living. This year life expectancy declined for the first time in decades without much protest or reaction from the political establishment.⁠17 Instead we are utilizing our collective resources towards the high-tech capital intensive care that benefits a tiny section of the population. Merely asserting universal care without contesting the monopoly on wealth and power that the entrenched capitalist class wields would not fundamentally change the exclusion of the working and under classes from quality health care.

[Katherine A. Moos (Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Economist at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI. Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research), 8-13-2019, "Neoliberal Redistributive Policy: The US Net Social Wage in the Early Twenty-First Century," Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613419848097] //damien jiu

The data presented in this paper describe the ex post incidence of fiscal policy in the United States. Much of the positive net social wage is being driven by growth in income support spending, particularly on Social Security, healthcare, and tax expenditures. While the effect of the Great Recession and the response of deficit spending are observable following 2008, the upward trend in the net social wage began as early as 2002. How can we explain these observed patterns despite the fact that the United States has not had a structural break from the main ideological tenets of neoliberalism?

This claim, however, is questioned by scholars who note how considering human creativity as free-floating means overlooking the role of precarious work conditions and prescriptive cultural and organizational models of fulfilment, achievement, reward and orientation to client demand (Dardot & Laval, 2014). These objections can be extended to the emancipatory force of nonhuman labour. The more the economic value of ecosystem services is recognized, the more the self-organizing, regenerative capacities of nature become the object of appropriation and commodification. ‘Valuing nature’ may be a complex and controversial endeavour, yet this is not hampering the expansion of the ecosystem services economics (Robertson, 2012). Celebrating today the self-normativity of life means downplaying how capital is ever-more committed to directly extracting value from reproductive forces, including gamete donation, gestational surrogacy and other forms of ‘clinical labour’ (Cooper & Waldby, 2014) where the human (especially female) body becomes itself a ‘service’. Nor do unpredictability and surprise, usually taken as expressions of the unbounded creativity of life, represent anymore hindrances to accumulation, as financial derivatives on weather instability testify (Cooper, 2010). Degrowth theory gets caught up in similar problems. Prefigurative activists may be more or less happy with being associated with it, yet there are undeniable affinities between the type of initiatives enlisted in prefiguration and degrowth scholars’ case against endless value extraction and commodification of human and nonhuman pro- ductive and reproductive forces, and for a downscaling of production and consumption aimed at improving social equality, human well-being and ecological conditions. Part of degrowth theorization, however, has increasingly emphasised that scarcity is socially produced. Not that physical limits to growth are now deemed inexistent. The claim is rather that their relevance in the socio-ecological crisis should not be overestimated, not type of micro-politics, rather than undermining capitalist relations, may, unintentionally, (re)produce exclusionary relations and strengthen the consumer paradigms it aims to oppose. Activists, in other words, worry that their ‘constructive resistance’ (Sørensen, 2016) ends up being nothing more than ‘simulation exercises’ (Blühdorn, 2017) – lifestyle choices which are harmless to capitalism or even welcomed by it as being lucrative, and which, by divault energies away from open contestation, are post-political in outcome, if not in purpose. The above does not necessarily mean that the fate of prefiguration is sealed; yet, in order to assess its emancipatory capacity, more attention needs to be paid to the features of the power with which it is confronted. In this regard Foucault and governmentality studies are instruc- tive. They have extensively accounted for how, since the dawn of the liberal state, the sovereign power of ‘taking life or letting live’ has increasingly been complemented by the biopolitical power of ‘making live or letting die’. The latter, instead of prohibiting and destroying, seeks ‘to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces under it, [. . .] making them grow, and ordering them’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 143). This variety of power characterizes the neoliberal way of governing to the extent that neoliberal thinking traces the whole of human life to the market- and homo economicus-form, making it governable through the promotion of a relentless drive to self-valorization within a setting dominated by uncertainty and insecurity (Dardot & Laval, 2014; Foucault, 2008; Rose, 1998).