Room for Improvement

Another in a series of examples of facts lying around deliberately unseen...

Capitalism is often presented, even by anti-capitalists, as the system of production and distribution whose perfection was forged by centuries of progress, whose emergence across Europe from the cocoon of the pre-capitalist marketplace was a pinnacle of human discovery-- in a time of decreasing evidence of heavenly insinuation into daily human affairs, an advanced and worthy object of devotion*-- made possible by advances in human knowledge and technology that unfettered capitalism from the mere potentiality inherent in the market.  

The story that Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism tells, based as it is on a study of the facts is quite different and to my mind, far more plausible.  While the market always existed, it was historically used primarily for luxuries,  for trade of resources originating in one part of the world for resources plentiful in another, and for artisanal goods and crafts.  The explosion of mercantilism in the 17th century that brought wealth and maritime adventurism to the Netherlands was not and did not engender capitalism according to Wood.  Instead, capitalism had its origins in agriculture in England.  

The twin engines of this innovation were the two innocuous sounding concepts of enclosure and improvement.  Under feudalism, peasants lived on and worked the land for themselves.  Annually they were taxed a portion of their yield to the king or local lord for the privilege of keeping their kneecaps intact.  By the sixteenth century, this had changed as the practice of enclosure in which -- under the auspices of government and with the aid of government forces-- common lands were sealed off from the peasants who had worked them as a concept of property ownership caught vogue among the idle upper classes.  Now, the right to work and live off of arable land had to be leased from a landlord, forcing all but the most successful farmers into homeless vagrancy. In order to remain viable as tenants of the land, farmers engaged in a process of "improvement"-- literally devising ways to increase the profitability of the land through greater yields with less labor.  This drove the search for better technology, and for the first time markets for the sale of factory farm-produced crops and meat.  

The peasantry that was driven from the common lands, now homeless and impoverished was forced into cities where they were now required to sell their labor in return for meager sustenance  (procured now exclusively from the marketplace) and cramped shelter in vast tenements.  The production of food needed to live was thereby taken from the masses and given to a class of agrarian capitalist.  The locus for the procurement of food was now transferred from one's own garden to the marketplace, which became also the primary seller of all household goods, such as pottery and clothing, now manufactured in the largely urban enterprises that hired the landless masses. 

The transition from feudalism to capitalism gave England an edge in the international trade of goods that had to be maintained by transplanting the agrarian revolution to Ireland and other overseas colonies; moreover it raised the stakes on the continent to follow England's lead with varying degrees of difficulty and success. In time, the capitalist forces and relations of production, circulation and reproduction were everywhere. The priorities of the owning and political classes became centered the world over on profit, and capital "improvement".  As Wood notes at the conclusion of her history,

Then there are the corollaries of ‘improvement’: productivity and the ability to feed a vast population set against the subordination of all other considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, among other things, that people who could be fed are often left to starve. There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers. The ethic of ‘improvement’ in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.

Capitalists have claimed the Enlightenment for capitalism, but Wood, without going into a lot of detail puts this notion to bed, saying that although capitalist England contributed to the enlightenment (via Newton, Bacon and Locke in particular) it was basically a product of the non-capitalist continent, which is why its most salient values-- individual freedom and rationality-- have little to do with business and more to do with human progress.  In fact, the consequences and prerequisites of capitalism-- inequality, growth for growth’s sake, poverty and homelessness-- are antithetical to enlightenment values. The whole book is basically a reminder that capitalism is just a societal organization that originated as an accommodation to the particular circumstances of an insular European province, that then trended-- not the apotheosis of human history.  The trick for all of us (and it’s a tough one unfortunately) is extracting the world from the organization that capitalism requires.

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* See The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher.

Whose moon?

William Blake, 1793.

In 1970, an anthropologist in Alaska asked the members of the Inuit village she was visiting if they were aware that NASA had landed a crew on the moon the previous summer.  As reported in a 1987 article by a colleague recounting the incident, she informed them of the mission and the artifacts that were left by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969 including their footsteps, containers of human waste,  and an artificially billowing American flag (thanks to springs and wires) that had been difficult to raise and that had toppled in the blowback of the lunar lander as it rose from the surface of the moon to reunite with the orbiter.  Told of the achievement,   

[t]he Inuits began laughing, and when the anthropologist inquired why, they replied: ‘We didn’t know this was the first time you white people had been to the Moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time. . . . The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go.

In 1970 it was easier to find pockets of uncolonized peoples from Alaska to Brazil to Africa to Asia and Oceania, and we know that the Inuit reverence and affinity for the moon was not unique among those less tuned into the strains of the developed world.  But you didn't have to be an Inuit to be alarmed a few decades later at intimations from the Latrobe Brewing Company division of Anheuser Busch  that it intended to beam advertisements for its Rolling Rock Beer on the surface of the moon to be visible to all on Earth.  The feat, which at various other times has been hinted at as a PR aspiration by both Coke and Pepsi, turns out to be prohibitively expensive to engineer and may even be impossible, and the threat turned out to be the extent of it, but experience with capitalism was all you needed to feel violated by the mere suggestion that it was a corporate ambition.

The topic of Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Astrotopia is the subtitle: "The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race."  In short it is about the unacknowledged religious foundation to the impetus of certain billionaires of the Western hemisphere to turn capitalism's destructive tools toward the heavens (having nearly depleted the home planet with them).  Never mind the "for all mankind" pretext of NASA's mission statement; the space race was undertaken as much for American glory and pwning of the Soviets who with Sputnik and subsequent orbits of the earth with manned (or rather "dogged") spacecraft had caught Washington off guard in the Eisenhower years-- Rubenstein demonstrates that in this privatized age of exploration, the hobby of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and  Richard Branson (for which we are all paying thanks to generous grants to these billionaires to the tune of billions and billions of dollars on our behalf from our Federal government) is for very little mankind.  

David Gruber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything argues that the organization of human society is not an inexorable linear march to the logical conclusion of neoliberalism but rather a fluid thing that has taken turns in multiple directions and degrees of egalitarianism at every point in human history -- and is not prohibited from turning again.   But Rubenstein notes that the religious foundation of Western colonial capitalism in the first chapters of Genesis-- in which God grants those he created in his image dominion over creation-- is what fueled and rationalized European dominance of the planet in its Christian origins* and, in the absence of planetary consensus continues to justify agnostic capitalism's designs on the extraterrestrial.  In this view, the moon belongs to whoever exploits it first-- the hell with Inuit shamans, lunar relatives and the rest of us.

There have been strains of commonality in the attitude of the international community to space exploration even since Sputnik.  In 1957, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) was founded with headquarters in Vienna, as a means of monitoring that the nascent era of extra-planetary exploration be to the benefit of all nations (if not explicitly all humans).  From the beginning, the mission of keeping outer space de-militarized was waylaid by the ongoing heating of the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union.  Nevertheless, COPUOS in spite of periods of inactivity managed to carve out several treaties. including the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 and the Moon Treaty in 1979,  promoting peaceful cooperation between nations with emphasis on scientific investigation rather than belligerent competition in the service of commerce in whatever would come as earth expanded its reach into the heavens.  The trouble was getting signatories beyond non-spacefaring nations. 

Over the decades-- as the smog of space junk surrounding the planet and obscuring the view of the universe even to the dwindling few who remain uncolonized to the developed world has exploded to millions of objects of varying size-- the list of spacefaring nations has grown beyond the original 2 to 17, with China joining the US and Russia in sending manned craft since 2003.   India intends to follow suit with a crewed mission by 2025 and to follow it up with a permanently crewed space station by 2035 and eventually its own lunar base.  China and Europe are cooperating on plans for their own base, with the US shut out thanks to its unfriendliness toward an Asian superpower.  Privatization of Space has been on the American agenda from its origins as envisioned by  Wernher von Braun in influential popular writings about the promise of space that began debuting in the 1950's after the ex-Nazi was welcomed into the bosom of American rocket science shortly after surrendering to the Allies in 1945.  American presidents had always emphasized American superiority over international cooperation in the space race-- those were American flags it planted on each landing on the moon, not Earth flags.  But naturally it was during the Reagan era that participation of the private sector in the development of the American space program became official policy.  Subsequent legislation by Bush elder, Clinton and Bush younger guaranteed that the future of the American program lay in private enterprise, but it was  Barack Obama's Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), a bipartisan achievement that made it law that whatever resources any US citizen was able to extract from outer space exploration was the property of the citizen that really opened up the floodgates to the ambitions of Musk, Bezos and Branson.  

The question of whose sky, moon, sun, stars and universe we see as we look upwards was answered by fiat during Trump's last year in office.   As Mary-Jane Rubenstein notes in Astrotopia, 

In the language of Executive Order 13914, “the United States does not view [outer space] as a commons. Accordingly, it shall be the policy of the United States to encourage . . . the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space.”

In a symbolic gesture NASA has already sold you down the river with a dime.  As Rubinstein writes, 

since “practical purposes” are all that really count, NASA decided to prove space isn’t a commons by buying some of it. In September 2021, the space agency paid Lunar Outpost ten cents as a down payment for some lunar soil. Once the space-mining company gathers the regolith and deposits it elsewhere on the Moon, NASA will pay the firm ninety more cents for the “delivered” materials. As NASA explains, “this process will establish a critical precedent that lunar resources can be extracted and purchased from the private sector in compliance with Article 2 and other provisions of the Outer Space Treaty.” In other words, buying lunar resources will demonstrate that it’s possible to buy lunar resources. And if anyone objects, they can bring it to COPUOS, which will dutifully record the objection in minutes that nobody reads.

So much for the benefit of all humanity.   The best things in life may be free, but the sky and everything in it are not among them.

~~~~~

* Characterized by a brutal exploitation and extermination of otherness emulated, with unambiguous American encouragement and assistance, by the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu's policy toward Palestinians and playing out in real time in Gaza before our very eyes.