The Apollo 13 space mission should be the last for a very long time. These particular extravaganzas of the capitalist spectacle have already consumed enough of the world's resources and technology. They have already sickened people enough with their flag-waving ballyhoo and their shoddy chauvinism.
The first landing on the moon was a great triumph for mankind and socialists would be cold fish if they didn't share a sense of excitement over it. But for the Venezuelan peasant whose children die of hunger while Rockfeller makes millions out of his Venezuelan ranches, the achievements of the U.S. on the moon seem very uninspiring. Their appeal must be even more limited for the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people who find that same American technology employed in obliterating their homelands.
This last moonshot, which nearly killed three men and achieved absolutely nothing, cost f180 million. The total U.S. space programme costs t8,000 million a year. That this kind of money should be poured into space while millions of human beings here on earth suffer needlessly from poverty, drudgery and disease is, quite simply, lunacy. It cannot be justified, whether it happens in the United States or in the Soviet Union.
But it is not merely the waste and misdirection of resources that calls these exploits into question. Equally important is the twisted concept of human progress, the grotesque distor tion of human potential, that the space race represents. Space travel is an activity that the majority of the people are totally alienated from. Blather about it being a collective enterprise because it involved thousands of technicians obscures the act that for the American people as I'ne Dwarf is moving into new offices. We urgently need a large table, chairs, desks, filing cabinets and other office have been trying to give away for ages.
has increased its size to 16 pages in order to make room for more news and information and special features. This £l for 6 months—13 issues. £2 for 1 year—26 issues. a whole it is just one more Television show. It may bedazzle them, they may get sucked into the orgy of national tub-thumping that surrounds it, they may "itentify" with the glamourised stars at the centre of it all. But they are not involved in it. they have not helped to create it, and they are certainly not the ones who make a profit out of it. The idea that the American people-still less hum anity as a whole-make any real progress as a result of the moonshots is a monumental trick.
When we understand the values inherent in these efforts, we begin to understand why the American Government is prepared to invest such vast sums of money in space investigation. The space programme says some very important and very destructive things to the world: ordinary people are impotent and useless, they cannot do anything significant about their fate, progress means leaving it to the experts, technology is the answer to all our problems, America is biggest and best, it doesn't matter anyway so long as it's a good show, meanwhile, just sit back in your armchairs and enjoy it on the telly, worship the superstars served up for you by the system, and wait for Uncle Sam to pull his next trick out of the bag To this false and anti-human ideology, we must oppose our own revolutionary concept of progress. People can and will control their destinies, and not even the technology and might of American Big Business will stop them. It is the masses-the ordinary people of the world-who will collectively create the future. It will be a future free of poverty, free of fear, free of the rotten values of And they will build it here on earth, not up in the sky Also—a reminder. As stated in our last issue, the Dwarf
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