In this article, Shukaitis surveys “the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination.” In particular, he sees , and a way to construct utopian worlds that give meaning to our struggles for justice in this world here and now. In autonomist Marxist terms, it presents fictional scenarios of what autonomists call “recomposition” — rebuilding, under our own hegemony, the social spaces and institutions that have been destroyed and atomized by capitalism — in an outer space setting. It was “a forward projection of an outside to capitalism enabling a space of possibility in the present.”

Leftist social criticism has displayed an ambivalent set of attitudes towards outer space — attitudes that mirror the dichotomy between the techno-utopian and primitivist or technophobic strands of the Left. Although many see outer space (whether in fictional scenarios or real agenda) as an arena for building post-capitalism and lifting the earth itself out of its current state, some quarters see it as a frivolous diversion of resources from fixing poverty and inequality here on earth.

Perhaps an interesting question… is not so much a question of whether there is a presence of outer space imagery and extraterrestrial travel residing within the workings of the social imaginary, but of their function. Their presence is felt both when the poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron complains that he can’t pay his doctor bills or rent and wonders what could be done with all the resources that would be available if they weren’t being spent on getting ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1971), and when Stevie Wonder contrasts the utopian conditions of ‘Saturn’ (1976), which are peaceful and free from capitalist exchange, with conditions and problems of the urban ghettos.

Outer space is a favorite setting for radical treatment, Shukaitis argues, because “the unknown and the mysterious are almost by definition of particular fascination to those crafting mythopoetic narratives and imagery.”

This has long been true of imaginary settings other than outer space, I would note, going back to ancient festivals (recounted by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance) in which the world was turned upside-down for a day and the social order inverted, medieval peasant utopias like Cockaigne, the 20th century hobo utopia of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an Atlantean escape from the ugliness of war and capitalism in the “1983” suite.

The ruling classes have been aware of the subversive potential of such speculation, Shukaitis writes, as demonstrated by the post-WWII wave of repression against utopian collectivism in fiction and the corresponding popularity of anti-collectivist themes in works like 1984 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that treat any alternative to “our free enterprise system” and the American model of individualism as a totalitarian dystopia. And as the latter example indicates, themes of alien invasion have been used to play up xenophobia against other nations of our own species.

This does not mean, of course, that technological utopianism as such has not been used in the dominant narrative. As Shukaitis points out, American-style “rugged individualism” and the export of the “pioneer spirit” to the frontiers of space were recurring theme in Golden Age science fiction.

At the same time, libertarian socialist techno-utopian themes were seen as a threat not just to corporate capitalism as a system of power, but to authoritarian state communism. Although “early efforts towards cybernetic communism were initially developed within the Soviet Union,” they were ultimately repressed because the party “feared, rightly, that they could not control it.” (Actually, if I recall correctly, it was the Soviet military leadership that vetoed conversion of the military’s computer network into the backbone of a civilian Internet as was done with Arpanet in the United States.)

Shukaitis can’t let the theme of radically utopian treatments of outer space pass without mentioning one of the most bizarre examples, that of the dissident Trotskyite Juan Posadas, who not only hoped advanced aliens would export communism to the earth, but looked forward to a devastating nuclear war as the trigger for revolution and post-capitalist transformation.

Getting back to our earlier dichotomy between positive and negative views of technology on the Left, anarcho-primitivism “does not find much considered redeemable” in the space travel genre, any more than it does in technology in general. This determinist view of technological development, Shukaitis says, is a form of mystification that reflects their unfamiliarity with it, and ignores the radically divergent alternatives presented by technology depending on the nature of the structural power framework into which it is integrated.

In language that echoes David Graeber, Shukaitis notes that the actual development of technology under late capitalism has been a considerable disappointment, compared to the utopian predictions in popular fiction. Technological development has been disproportionately diverted into servicing institutional needs like the Military-Industrial Complex, waste consumption to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation and idle production capacity, and the control and distribution infrastructures required by corporate globalization, and not to reducing hours of labor or making daily life more fulfilling.

This leaves us with the necessity of contesting state and capitalist control of the process of technological development, and harnessing it to our own liberatory ends. And speculative fiction, Shukaitis argues, functions as a sort of cognitive map for this purpose: “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” In this regard, the fictional setting of outer space is more symbolic than literal, implying not so much “a conception of exodus in physical terms” as “one in terms of intensive coordinates.”

In other words a shift towards an exodus that does not leave while attempting to subtract itself from forms of state domination and capitalist valorization.

Shukaitis mentions hippie dropout communities and Italian autonomist social centers as examples of such exodus within the physical surroundings of capitalist society.

Similar themes of exodus were developed in Afrofuturist science fiction, “which as a literary and cultural movement is based on exploring the black experience through the relation between technology, science fiction and racialization.” In particular he mentions the fascinating decades-long trajectory of the Sun Ra Arkestra (including the 1974 film Space is the Place), which fused themes of libertarian alien societies, Afrocentric history and advanced technology, and related them to issues of racial oppression in the United States.

In recent decades space has become a setting for explicit Leftist development of radically utopian and anti-capitalist visions. Shukaitis quotes Eduardo Rothe, who put it as plainly (and messianically) as anyone could want in a Situationist journal in 1969. Rothe directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils.

(Leaving aside, obviously, the question of whether there are other people on the worlds out there who aren’t quite ready to be “pillaged.”)

As the example of Rothe suggests, the use of outer space by radical Leftists is not always utopian or fictional. There are efforts here and now to take back space exploration from government agencies and capitalist corporations, and bring it within the domain of free, cooperative, and self-organized human endeavor. Shukaitis mentions the formation of the Association of Autonomist Astronauts in 1995, in protest against the Pentagon’s militarization of space. Although they initially emerged from the radical artistic scene, they formulated (admittedly for the most part as a spur to the imagination) a five-year plan to “establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space.”

A more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts vision along similar lines was presented in the fictional short story “Open Shot” in Analog science fiction magazine, about the Stallman, an open-source hardware group’s victorious entry in a private moonshot competition in a field otherwise dominated by capitalist corporations.

Although Shukaitis’s 2009 article predates most of these developments, the continuing development of cheap micro-manufacturing tools and open hardware communities since then has led to a proliferation of real-world open hardware space projects. Elon Musk’s space ventures have, at the same time, been the source of misguided but understandable hopes along the same lines. In an earlier commentary (“One Cheer for SpaceX”), I surveyed some of the current FOSS space projects and noted that even though Musk’s own corporate vision is toxic, he is nevertheless pushing space technology in cheaper, more modular, and ephemeral directions that can be pirated and otherwise recuperated by commons-based peer production for the eventual post-capitalist expansion into space.

I’m disappointed that Shukaitis didn’t give Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the attention it deserved, as a fictional scenario of a viable libertarian socialist society being developed on another planet, and providing a demonstration effect for the oppressed peoples of earth that was a real and present danger to the power structure.

In contrast to Robinson’s relatively optimistic visions in the Mars Trilogy and 2312, the television series The Expanse presents a dystopian vision of a solar system under the hegemony of exploitative capitalist corporations.

My own guess is that the truth is a lot closer to Robinson’s vision than to that of the TV show, and capitalist and state technologies of control are simply not equal to the requirements of maintaining hegemony over people living and working off-planet. Once the first mining colonies and space habitats are set up in the asteroid belt, or the first colonies on the moon and Mars, I suspect earth’s government agencies and corporations will quickly discover that whatever contractual arrangements they’ve made with the inhabitants of space — and whatever absentee titles they have to the land and resources those people are working — aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In that case the future of space will be post-capitalist regardless of what happens here on earth, and may well provide leverage for the transition here at home.

Photo by SerenityRose

The post Essay of the Day: “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

SpaceX has had considerable success developing reusable spacecraft and orbital boosters — the Dragon spacecraft has resupplied the International Space Station — and has achieved a controlled descent with tail landing by a Falcon booster.

Starting with the first Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2018, Musk has committed himself to regular Mars runs every 26 months, using low cost vehicles (Tim Fernholz, “Elon Musk is building a supply chain to Mars,” Quartz, June 13, 2016). The goal is an affordable and predictable cargo route, in order to encourage Mars-related research and industry.

Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars. It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments.

According to Tim Fernholz,

This is akin to the way that massive container ships ply the oceans to bring components between far-flung factories. Planners don’t rely on a specific ship to make it across the Pacific at a discrete time, but instead imagine the ships as a kind of conveyor belt, constantly in motion, and plan their operations around the idea that goods are constantly in motion between two given sites.

The 2018 mission will be followed by several Dragons in 2020, and in 2022 a larger number carrying the infrastructure for a permanent base on Mars — laying the groundwork for the planned transportation of human passengers in 2024.

Speaking of which, SpaceX’s Mars project — which envisions humans living in a permanent base constructed there — is easily the most famous.

But if state-directed space exploration fizzled out, let’s not accept, as the alternative, human expansion into the solar system under the direction of corporations and billionaire venture capitalists.

Even now, there are all sorts of interesting space projects operating on relatively little capital, and taking advantage of cheap, ephemeral micro-manufacturing technology.

Copenhagen Suborbitals, for example, is an amateur, crowdfunded spaceflight program based in Denmark (Xavier Aaronson, “Spaced Out:  Open Source Outer Space,” Motherboard, Dec. 18, 2012). They use a sea-based launch platform. At the time of Aaronson’s 2012 article, the venture was “comprised of a coterie of 20-plus specialists determined to create the first homemade, manned spacecraft to go into suborbital flight.” The estimated cost of such a mission is expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, eventually falling to $63,000 a shot.

The project achieves enormous economies over government (and presumably corporate) bureaucracies by using off-the-shelf components whenever possible.

One man’s kitchen sink valve is another rocket man’s missing component. A D.I.Y. spaceflight project can start with a good rummage at your local plumbing or hardware store. With everyday, off-the-shelf products, the guys behind Copenhagen Suborbitals found cheaper solutions to expensive, complex systems.

“Instead of trying to invent our own valve for instance, why not buy one that’s been produced maybe a million times,” explained Kristian.

The peer-to-peer nature of the project means much faster turnaround times or iteration cycles — “OODA loops,” in the late Col. John Boyd’s words — than is possible in government or corporate bureaucracies.

Since Copenhagen Suborbitals is bereft of the red tape and regulations characteristic of federally or commercially funded space projects, Kristian explained that his team can go from a revised sketch to an improved prototype, sometimes in less than five minutes. That’s far quicker than NASA, of course, where he helped to design new moon rovers and co-authored the agency’s Human Integration Design Handbook.

As for their achievements,

so far, their accomplishments are impressive: their solid-and-liquid-fuel rocket, the HEAT-1X, is the first “amateur” rocket flown with a payload of a full-size crash test dummy, and the first to perform a successful Main Engine Cut-Off, or MECO command, and the first launched from a “low budget” sea-based platform. It’s also the most powerful amateur rocket ever flown.

Since then, Copenhagen Suborbitals has tested the Sapphire (with improved guidance and maneuver systems), and has a Nexø I & II in the work. The Spica II, the rocket actually intended to send a live person into space, is expected to be tested in 2017 (Anthony Wood, “Copenhagen Suborbitals dreams big with Spica rocket,” Gizmag, August 25, 2015).

Bitnation — a transnational network created to organize a variety of non-state governance services using the Blockchain infrastructure — has created a Bitnation Space Agency. The Agency intends to be a coordination platform for open-source space efforts around the world, and has its own Five-Year Plan for crowdfunded technology development and space missions. Iman Mirbioki (“Bitnation Space Agency,” A Blog About Nothing Particular, June 2, 2015), who co-founded the venture with Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, estimates BSA will radically cheapen spaceflight by eliminating administrative overhead altogether (an 80% cost reduction by itself) as well as open-sourcing all technologies. Tempelhof argues that corporate efforts like SpaceX are “just the beginning of democratizing the technology”; BSA will “take it further, not just make it accessible to people outside of the government, but also make it open source, and DIY friendly” (Jamie Redman, “BitNation and Spacechain: The Mission to Decentralize Space Exploration,” Coin Telegraph, June 22, 2015).

The Agency’s Five Year Plan (written in 2015) states a list of objectives:

1. Create a decentralized and open-source space agency.

2. Research and develop new and better technology for space-travel/space-missions.

3. Develop new eco-friendly fuel for space vehicles. (Rocket fuel)

4. Develop a new generation of navigational systems, as the current GPS accuracy and maximum performance (speed and altitude) is limited due to enforced rules by the U.S military.

5. Create a cheaper technology and platform on an open source basis that enables those with limited budgets to reach space and/or do experiments in microgravity environments.

6. Develop new and cheaper space vehicles able of reaching LEO (Low Earth Orbit), GSO (Geostationary Orbit) and other celestial bodies like the Moon or asteroids.

7. Research alternative energy sources, mainly anti-matter trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field.

8. Research and develop technology for mining minerals and resources on other celestial bodies, like the Moon or asteroids.

9. Creating communication networks and datacenters in Earth orbit, beyond the reach of any state or regime to work toward total immunity and neutrality of the future IT-infrastructure.

10. Building fuel-depots and an international network based on virtual currencies for refueling of satellites and other space vehicles.

11. Doing research in the field of space-medicine and the effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation on living organisms.

12. Doing research on the effect of cosmic radiation on electronic components in order to

develop new technology that is able to withstand the harsh environment of outer space.

The agenda of milestone projects in the Plan — including orbital satellite launches, moon shots, probes to near-earth asteroids and the deployment of a permanent space station by the end of 2020 — seems implausibly ambitious. But to be fair, even the fully and partly funded items at the top of the list (e.g. the BULLDOG rocket launch for deploying a payload in low-earth orbit is partly funded) are quite impressive. Extrapolate the Copenhagen Suborbitals and BSA model far enough and you get something like Openshot, a fictional open source moon shot in a short story by Craig DeLancey (“Openshot,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2006). The open source hardware spacecraft, the Stallman, was the product of a network of ten thousand volunteers worldwide — and it beat the big corporate players in a competition to be “the first non-governmental organization to put a person back on the moon.” Cutter, leader of one of the corporate-funded teams, warned that “the Opensource Rocket Program will have a tremendously pernicious effect on humanity and human destiny by destroying the benefit of privatizing space exploration with an unscalable stunt.” And in the ultimate irony, the Stallman‘s crew rescued Cutter’s crew and repaired his disabled ship based on crowdsourced advice from the Openshot global network.

Once you’ve bootstrapped affordable orbital ferries, the addition of 3-D printers and other cheap, open-source micromanufacturing technologies that can be used to construct interplanetary craft in orbit or construct buildings on the surface of other worlds means that the path to the entire solar system lies open. The focus by both corporate ventures like SpaceX and open-source ventures like Copenhagen Suborbital and Bitnation Space Agency, on developing bottom-up infrastructures, one step at a time, arguably amounts to backtracking to a crossroads and getting on the path that space exploration should have taken in the first place.

Blogger Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings, in a comment at Pixel Scroll, noted that the Apollo project essentially destroyed the long-term future of the U.S. space program by diverting it away from the necessary work of building a sustainable technological ecosystem:

When I was but a lad, reading Golden Age Science Fiction like Grandpa used to write, because it was what was in the middle-school libraries back in the early 70s, I was struck by how late the dates for a first moon-landing were in stories from the 40s and 50s. I think the earliest date I encountered was maybe 1978, and some of them placed it in the 1990s. And I thought, “Hah! We already got there!”

But the mistake those Campbell-era authors made was assuming we’d do it right. That first we’d build a real space station, and develop a sustainable outer-space infrastructure, and then when we went to the Moon, go for keeps.

Instead we raced to get there with a few cans full o’ humans, hit some golf balls, planted a flag, and – bagged the whole business. By 1978, that earliest date for a moonshot I’d encountered in fiction, it was like we’d never been there at all.

Rather than organically building an entire technological ecosystem from the ground up, with infrastructures that were immediately useful in their own right at each stage, and then using the existing stage of infrastructure as the jumping off place to build the next stage when it became necessary for the needs of the existing system, Kennedy chose an arbitrary goal for its symbolic value — and the moon has since gone unvisited for forty years while the U.S. space program atrophied.

Henley also, anticipating those who point to Elon Musk’s space ventures as a hopeful sign, points out that “the private Mars foundation gang admits that their strategic plan way underestimates the likely cost.”

But it’s worth considering that the same blockbuster projects that diverted the space program from sustainability also tended to push it towards high-cost technologies beyond the reach of voluntary associations.

The effect of the space program’s focus on blockbuster projects like Apollo was to push space travel technology towards extreme capital-intensiveness, and away from the kinds of modular, granular, multi-purpose and reusable building blocks that could evolve into a sustainable technological ecosystem.

Corporate space efforts like Musk’s are a first, intermediate step towards developing an affordable, sustainable infrastructure for exploring and developing outer space. And projects like Copenhagen Suborbital and Bitnation Space Agency are completing the evolution by relying entirely on open-source hardware, and replacing high-overhead managerial bureaucracies with peer-network governance.

Things look genuinely optimistic for the future of space exploration and human expansion into the solar system. The reason for hopefulness doesn’t lie with the state; and with luck, maybe it won’t lie with Elon Musk for much longer either.

Photo by Sweetie187

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