For all mankind?
On celebrity space tourism
It’s one of the most nauseating spectacles you’ll ever witness. Lauren Sanchez (net worth $30 million) exits a space capsule owned by her union-busting fiancé (net worth $206.7 billion) and proclaims that 'we're all in this together...we're all connected', the preceding eleven minutes apparently teaching her what a lifetime of matrimonial wealth will not. How can such an obviously absurd statement be interpreted, other than as an unwitting mockery of those from whom all this wealth has been extracted?
Far from being ‘for the benefit of Earth’, the rise of space tourism is little more than a victory lap for the capitalist class. This isn’t space exploration, with its mythos of collective human endeavour, but rather a farcical simulation of it for those with enough cash to indulge themselves. These are not ‘missions’, they are trips. Their participants are not ‘astronauts’, they are passengers. These passengers did not, by many definitions, even go to space.
As a decadent power display for the super-rich, this whole affair provides a neat encapsulation of the post-neoliberal era. As the last vestiges of the social state crumble, in its wake come the beneficiaries of its destruction: the neo-feudal overlords, the oligarchs, the master-rentiers. As a result, there is even the possibility that we are moving to a post-state phase entirely, in which national governments are supplanted by a patchwork of fragments that are effectively ‘sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings’, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor recently put it.
In this milieu, the extraterrestrial activities of Bezos, Musk and their ilk are not successors of the soft-power projections of the national space program – the function of which is a relic of a bygone politics. Space travel is assuming an entirely private form, in which a post-national, disaster-capitalist asset-grab dovetails with increasingly ostentatious displays of personal power and prosperity. There are no Great Champions of a culture here, only adjuncts of its robber-barons: a pure display of wealth, signifying nothing beyond itself.
Yet while there is a sense that these financially-bloated individuals feel they have eclipsed previous (at least national, if not collective) zeniths of humanity, this is tempered by an odd form of self-consciousness, gnawing away at their lack of humility. There must be a latent anxiety that belies a need to justify such trips – and by extension such wealth-hoarding – to a mass audience, hence the ‘we’re all in this together’ pretence of Sanchez (and her fellow ‘crew members’, most of whom expressed similar sentiments upon their ‘return to Earth’).
This anxiety is evident in the common tendency among space tourists to graft some cod profundity to their ‘achievement’. And how do they do this? The same tried-and-tested way all multi-millionaires do, of course: absenting money from their self-presentation as much as possible, and reflexively framing their activities in such a way that their feats become not only their own, but also those of whoever belongs to the social identities they posit themselves as being representatives of.
It’s the same playbook of patronising faux-radicalism used by all members of the capitalist class when trying to cover their tracks and throw the dispossessed off their scent: invoke the long-hollowed language of liberation, neatly repackaged and individualised. The political struggles of generations whittled down to the narcissistic pursuits of a handful of particular individuals, while the overwhelming majority remain decidedly unfree – the logic of the capitalist at its purest. However they may try to portray it, they’re engaging in a pursuit that only a minuscule amount of people on earth can afford, while growing the reputation of an ownership portfolio built on the backs of obscene worker exploitation and disempowerment. Is this feminism? Is this Black liberation? They mock the very ideas, cheapen them with every breath.
There’s also a tendency among space tourists to reference ‘the overview effect’, the ‘expanded sense of connection after seeing an overview of Earth’. But much like the rhetoric of liberation, this too has been emptied of all meaningful relation to human collectivity, or indeed any reference to the human at all. This hints at a deeper truth: that space tourism is ultimately indicative of the post-human turn of the capitalist class, and indeed of capital(ism) itself.
The paradigmatic tension of capitalism has always rested in the reality that capital cannot be (re-)produced without relying on the exploitation of human labour power. It becomes the imperative of the capitalist to minimise this reliance as much as possible, and thus maximise the exploitation. This is the very essence of class struggle. From the spinning jenny to the assembly line to the AI boom, the capitalist class has forever been compelled to reduce the need for mind and hand, to generate as much capital from as little human input as possible. This they euphemistically call efficiency, or productivity, or modernisation. But really we know it as automation: not just automating the system of capitalism, but rather making the system autonomous.
And then, from the Luddites to trade unions to autonomism, labour too has been compelled, as a natural reaction, to resist: to assert itself in reaction to this erasure through mere survival instinct, to reaffirm their own power within the process of capitalist production. But in recent decades it has become painfully, indisputably clear: capital is winning the great game of automation like never before, and the overwhelming mass of humanity is being cast aside. And so, space tourism becomes symbolic not of a vanguardist desire to broaden the scope of human experience, but of an explosion of wealth that is slipping the surly bonds of labour while probing the true final frontier of capitalism: not extraterrestrial accumulation, but a system of capital-production that is no longer predicated on human labour.
It can’t be left unsaid, however, that alongside this sits another pathology of the financial elite. Augmenting this post-human (and essentially post-capitalist) desire is an increasingly millenarian turn. For it is not just labour upon which capital production is predicated, but land and natural resources too. And while capital may be working towards a solution for the labour-reliance problem, there is no equivalent to be found for land: raw material is proving to be finite, and the ecology which produces its conditions is not immortal.
Capital is not only leaving the workers behind, but the capitalist too – the whole system is being exhausted. The desire among the capitalist class, perhaps, is not to sustain capitalism post-labour, but rather to be jettisoned by autonomous-capital and make off with the spoils as society disintegrates and the planet breaks down. Absolute wealth and end-times prepping thus go hand in hand. And as this collapse occurs, the super-rich are building the ultimate gated communities: private islands, remote compounds, underground bunkers – and perhaps even leaving the planet altogether after all.
But, whether it’s metaphorical or literal, if the elite are leaving us behind, the least we can do is not let them patronise us with the fake claims of humanity on their way out. Hearteningly, nobody really seems to be buying what the space tourists are selling: this particular flight has been met with widespread ridicule, and in many cases outright disgust. Why? Because we know their words to be bullshit, in our heart of hearts. We see plainly the us vs them dynamic in their actions, whatever their vacuous words may try and tell us.
In response, let us salvage something edifying from the ruins they have left us. Let us build a new collectivity that shows up the words of the capitalist class for their true hollowness. They can put a boot on all of us and call it freedom, make us build their launchpad to the stars and leave us with nothing but the choke of exhaust fumes, but they cannot make us like it. To their vapid desires and narcissistic demands, we must say: fine, leave us behind, but take your regime of expropriation and exploitation with you. We long for the day you fulfil your dream of visiting deep space, never to return. Leave us to what’s left of our commons, please. We promise we’ll be fine without you.
This essay is also available to read at disposableeverything.com.