Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Sputniks, Space & Socialism

The Pathfinders feature in this month's Socialist Standard (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/oct07/page4.html)
has started a lively debate (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum.html)
on the theme of Socialism in the Space Age. Some of the points raised are echoes of those made my Socialists fifty years ago. The excerpts below are taken from a piece titled 'Sputnik Legacy LET'S LIVE ON THE EARTH FIRST!

"The sound made by the Sputniks is, in fact, not of man triumphant over nature but of one nation gaining prestige against another. Nobody knows whether Sputniks are weapons or not, but that isn't the point anyway. The big bangs, the bomb tests and other push-button horror displays are the nations making making muscles, like boys preparing for a fight that each hopes to scare the other out of; and now the Russians have made the biggest muscle of all, the visible proof of incredible technical development....

Admire if you like the prodigies of science, but ask, please: Will the Sputniks - trip to the moon and all - make man better off?...Edward Cranshaw has remarked in The Observer that it is "hard to reconcile the gleaming splendours of space travel with the squalid and ramshackle makeshifts which are a feature of life in Russia." Not only Russia, however. All over the world, life for most people is a series of makeshifts, more or less ramshackle and more or less squalid....

The Sputniks are augers of no new era, but fresh symbols of one which is only too long-standing and familiar. There is very little indeed to shout about in the solving of ballistic problems when the great problems of humanity remain unsolved and the need for their solution grows more urgent every day....

What is certain is that, when he is able to be sane again, man will concern
himself first with this planet and having things on it as they ought to be.
(Socialist Standard, December 1957)

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