At a time when millions of workers are forced to make fruitless trips to employment offices in search of jobs, the Pentagon has in mind a trip of another kind--a trip to Mars, with a conceived budget that staggers the imagination.The Bush administration, while cutting social services on the widest scale imaginable, is at the same time engaging in utterly shameless demagogy. It is promising in the most fraudulent and vague terms that the growth of industry and technology will ultimately, after the big layoffs, bring jobs. The record of the last 15 years, however, shows just the opposite.
None of the hardships which millions of workers are being subjected to by the deteriorating economic situation have affected the plans of the Pentagon. Of course, every day the Pentagon's public relations office concocts press releases telling how they are working on plans to cut expenditures now that, as they put it, the Cold War is over. But when you get down to brass tacks, the military planners are going full steam ahead to develop new and even more exotic weapons.
Right now they have latched onto the idea of developing a nuclear-fueled rocket, one which can considerably enhance the prospect of faster space travel. They're talking about traveling as far as the planet Mars, an idea whose time they think is rapidly approaching. Before the ink has even dried on the initial stories announcing this scheme, we learn that the laboratories of the military-industrial complex are already receiving untold sums of money to get this project off the ground.
The Pentagon considers the scheme to be a real feather in its cap because the technology comes from rocket scientists who got their training and developed their expertise in the advanced space program of the USSR.
Science or militarism?
Interest in scientific development, especially in high technology, is probably higher than ever and is engaging more and more students.
As a scientific idea, the nuclear-powered space rocket could be unassailable. Travel into space has always excited the imagination, especially of younger generations involved in scientific endeavors.
But why does the Pentagon have to be the one to carry this out? Why should they have the budgetary control? Traveling deep into space as a scientific project is civilian in character. Why is no voice raised against the very idea that a peaceful scientific project is being administered by a military agency?
The point to be made at this time is that the vast majority of scientists in the United States are caught in the net of the Pentagon and the military-industrial contractors. Even the largest and most eminent universities are dependent on the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex for funding. The era of dismantling the vast Pentagon military machine is still a dim and distant prospect.
The capitalist economic crisis is spurring demands to shift funds from the military to social needs. This is not at all what is happening, however. Instead, the impact of the crisis is to make civilian scientific endeavor more tentative. It raises the specter of layoffs even among specialists who until now have been relatively immune from such pressures. Times are particularly hard for independent scientists, even when they show great merit in their specialty. They find it extremely difficult to conduct their own research as the capitalist economic crisis dries up their financing.
Ordinary workers in the United States must ask themselves what comes first. Should untold billions be spent on a projected trip to Mars, or should the resources of the U.S. government be used to help the millions of unemployed and partially employed, the homeless, the sick and disabled?
Soviet scientists involved?
It is astonishing to find that the Pentagon is advancing its space-rocket scheme with the participation of a team of top Soviet scientists, who are in the United States with a plan for the development of the powerful nuclear-powered engine. Who are these scientists representing? The Soviet Union, which is being dismantled with the covert participation of the U.S.?
In Russia and the other republics where counterrevolutionary forces continue to try and dismantle socialist planning, the economic situation is now so desperate, the food supply has dwindled so much, that it is reported the average working class family doesn't have enough to eat. This in a country with the most developed space technology in the world!
For the Soviet scientific-technological apparatus to now project undertaking a joint venture in space shows how removed they are from the needs of the population.
Such a project would divert Soviet scientific knowhow into fields that have only speculative interest for the mass of the people and undermine whatever is left of the independence of the scientific community of the USSR.
Shouldn't the scientific-technological institutes built up by the USSR, which are acknowledged to be at least the second best in the world, be primarily engaged in solving this most urgent problem, the problem of food, instead of getting involved in a joint venture with an imperialist monster whose only aim is world domination?
Of course, a scientist involved in space technology isn't necessarily qualified to work in the development of agriculture. That takes different areas of expertise. But it shouldn't take too much imagination to figure out how the scientific establishment in the USSR could shift its focus to solving the most pressing problems of daily life, such as the transportation of agricultural products from the farms to the table. Loss of foodstuffs due to insufficient transport and storage facilities is reported to have cost the Soviet Union a very large part of each year's harvest.
Gap between town and country
The gravest contradiction facing the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics some 70 years ago was the social inequality between the underdeveloped republics and Russia itself. The task was to solve the age-old contradiction between town and country, as Karl Marx had put it in the Communist Manifesto. The greatest source of social inequality was the contradiction between agriculture and industry, between the rural peasant and worker and the industrial proletariat. Progress in setting a course for the construction of communism was measured in terms of diminishing this wide gap.
Isn't it a fact of life that the development of the USSR's scientific-technological apparatus depended on diverting hundreds of billions of rubles, not to speak of millions of people, away from the agricultural and consumption industries in order to build up a mighty industrial apparatus? Millions of peasants left the countryside to be employed in the great basic industries of the USSR and to fulfill the needs of the scientific-technological apparatus. Eventually, it became second only to the U.S.
What was the objective of diverting so much labor power? Was it not so that ultimately there could be a quantitative and qualitative increase in human consumption? Wasn't the development of science seen as not just an end in itself but one that would serve the needs of the masses? Is it not true that socialist development of the means of production is to produce consumer goods to serve the needs of the people, the workers and peasants first of all?
However, a great proportion of the productive resources of the USSR were diverted to military purposes because of the aggressive character of U.S. imperialism.
The USSR's launching of Sputnik, the first space satellite, in 1957 electrified the world because it showed how much progress the Soviet Union had made in its scientific-technological apparatus. This would make it possible to not only ward off U.S. imperialist aggression, but to develop the technical basis for the production of consumer goods, especially in agriculture.
Pacifist illusions
In proposing a joint venture with the U.S. to travel to Mars, these Soviet scientists are reviving an old, bankrupt idea. The idea of a joint space trip was raised during the Brezhnev period. Joint exploration of space, it was believed, would soften the hard-line, vicious, anti-Soviet attitude of the U.S. imperialist government. It would help create an atmosphere of friendliness, even of trust, and ward off imperialist aggression.
But it was an illusion to believe that cooperation in the scientific field could weaken or overcome the class antagonisms that separate the two social systems.
One or the other could make temporary gains in the scientific exchanges, but the whole course of development showed that they did not lessen the class antagonisms one iota. They only engendered pacifist illusions and disoriented the anti-war movement.
These joint ventures in space and the exchanges between the Soviet Union and the U.S. turned out to be one-sided affairs. The U.S. appropriated whatever it could from the USSR in the way of high space technology, and at the same time continued its ban on the export of a whole range of technologies to the USSR, coordinating the restrictions with its imperialist allies.
What Sputnik showed was that the planned economy of the USSR had allowed it to forge ahead of the capitalist countries in certain key areas. That's what made Sputnik possible. The eagerness of the U.S. to collaborate with the USSR in this field was because the USSR was ahead, and still is, as this proposal by the scientists shows.
However, the very victories the USSR got as a result of the development of the scientific-technological sector brought about social differentiation, a shift of social weight away from the proletariat and the mass of industrial and agricultural workers. A stratum of bourgeois intelligentsia was cultivated that carried more weight than the proletariat. This stratum is a prey to imperialist enticement, the infamous brain drain.
Regardless of where the scientists stand politically, there is a resurgence of mass protests, even at this very early stage in the vaunted triumph of the counter-revolution. The angry heckling of Yeltsin over prices and a strong communist demonstration in Moscow show that all the Soviet workers need is a reinvigoration of their revolutionary heritage.