By Arun Gupta (July 20, 2018)
Consider this.
Jeff Bezo’s wealth has surpassed $150 billion.
There are at least 11,600 homeless people in King County, where Amazon is located.
Amazon recently strong-armed the Seattle City Council to repeal a small $275 annual head tax on large corporations to address the soaring homelessness in the wealthiest city in the Western Hemisphere.
Bezos sees no use to spending his fortune on planet Earth. His explicit plan is to sell $1 billion of stock a year to colonize space.
“I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work that I’m doing. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune.”
A grumpy old German bro described all of this nearly two centuries ago:
“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”
If you’re not a Marxist, you’re not paying attention.
I am glad that Mr. Gupta took the time to mention this issue, as it seems to be going largely under-examined. Although I’m very much in favor of continued space exploration, allowing such endeavors to be privately controlled by the ultra-capitalists will certainly not produce the Star Trek-like results most people envision.
Both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have expressed desires to establish off-planet settlements or colonies. The former has even laid out a vision to move most of earth’s industrial production into space (https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/27/jeff-bezos-outlines-blue-origin-space-colony-ambitions/).
Yet we all know how poorly both men have treated the blue collar workers at their respective enterprises. And neither seem even remotely interested in aiming their considerable intellectual or financial resources towards solving the mounting problems facing earth-bound working people. So that just begs the question: won’t all of this extraterrestrial-capitalism simply reproduce the same inequalities, oppression, sickness, suffering and hyper-isolation that are hallmarks of our terrestrial-capitalism?