One step on a lot of fucking dust...
One step on a lot of fucking dust... NASA

On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos (the richest man on earth according to our culture, which is global) announced that his space program has big plans to send humans back to the moon. We have been there. We can be there again. Why not? What will make this mission—which will include contributions from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Draper, and the space-crazy Trump administration—different from those conducted by NASA from 1969 to 1972 is its colonial ambition. Bezos envisions a permanent human settlement on a world that is mostly dust. This is the "dirty secret" of those Apollo moon missions. The thing that the Apollo astronauts could not stop talking about was how the moon "was dust, dust, dust.” It's hard to believe things have changed much since then.

The humans of Bezos's lunar colony will spend much of their time vacuuming and sweeping. They will wake up, eat, look out of the window, see not much at all, and begin clearing the dust that never ends. The British primatologist Richard Wrangham claims, in his superb book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that chimps can spend up to six hours a day just chewing. For humans, it's about 30 minutes. Cooking, he explains, saved us from the madness of constant mastication. Wrangham even believes that our large brains owe much to this liberation from chewing. Cooking resulted in a smaller digestive system and the reallocation of our body's material and energetic resources to the expansion of the brain.

I want you to compare these images in your mind: the chimp chewing and chewing, and Bezos's human moon residents sweeping and sweeping with magnetic brooms (moon dust has iron in it).


My point? There is really nothing to do on the moon. And to make matters worse, the dust on this lifeless world is not like that on earth, which is soft and often organic in origin. The dust on the moon is like small pieces of glass.

The Geological Society of America writes:

The trouble with moon dust stems from the strange properties of lunar soil. The powdery grey dirt is formed by micrometeorite impacts which pulverize local rocks into fine particles. The energy from these collisions melts the dirt into vapor that cools and condenses on soil particles, coating them in a glassy shell.

These particles can wreak havoc on space suits and other equipment. During the Apollo 17 mission, for example, crewmembers Harrison "Jack" Schmitt and Gene Cernan had trouble moving their arms during moonwalks because dust had gummed up the joints. "The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack's boot," Taylor says.

And there is more. Lunar dust is also static, which means cleaning with wet wipes "only makes them cling harder to camera lenses and helmet visors." None of this kind of excessive maintenance exists on earth. One can go months without dusting a room or the lens of a camera. Also, there are other living organisms that do a lot of unpaid work for us. All of these services are not available on the moon, nor on Mars.

Lastly, the Apollo missions were all about the Cold War. And this war, which began almost right after the Second World War, was about the competition between two economic models that, as the great historian Moishe Postone pointed out, were in many ways very similar: Soviet socialism and American state capitalism. At the beginning of the Cold War, the USSR led the space race. The United States, however, took the lead with the Apollo missions. But by the end of the 1980s, the space race was already over. The US won. But there wasn't really much of prize: some samples of dust from the moon, some product spin-offs from the mission. Space exploration, it turned out, was not deep or about exploring other worlds, but about telecommunication satellites.

What is the Bezos mission about? And what does it tell us about the kind of economy we live in? Is there cheese to be made on the moon? If not, why else would a billionaire want to go there and make people stay there? Would they become the chimney sweepers of the 21st century? One other thing: Exactly who is Bezos racing against? The possibility of actually making good use of socially created wealth? Billions going to poverty? It's better to just blow it in space? Vice President Mike Pence is now talking about space property rights. His own words: “As more nations gain the ability to explore space and develop places beyond Earth’s atmosphere, we must also ensure that we carry into space our shared commitment to freedom, the rule of law and private property.” The mind of long-dead John Locke is exhumed by this lunacy.

What the moon mission points to is a possibility that the critics of capitalism have not considered deeply enough. The Marxists claim that the exchange value system depends, in the final instance, on the exploitation of labor (the source of surplus labor). But a billionaire spending billions of dollars of socially generated wealth to send humans to a big ball of dust rather than supporting a tax in Seattle that can really help alleviate homelessness, requires a reassessment of this Marxist reading. Maybe it's not labor that is crucial to the market system that makes billionaires possible, but extreme and very painful poverty. There is, in this way of thinking, another kind of economy. One determined almost entirely by cruelty. This might sound odd, but consider just two things.

One, the value that measures wealth in our society is not material at all. There is not an atom in it. It is purely conceptual, or, in the language of my economics, cultural. We do not strictly measure wealth by productivity, which presents all sorts of problems and contradictions—one of which is overproduction. If productivity (the endlessly accelerating generation of stuff, or, to use the German word for matter, stoff) was at the core of capitalism, then it would have passed into the region of shades, bones, and dust-to-dust long ago (around the 1930s).

The second thing is provided by the wonderful Pixar movie Monsters, Inc.. It imagines an economy that has the screams of children at its source of value. If this sounds absurd to you, then why also doesn't the fact that we live in an economy that has way too much stuff and money and, at the same time, has people sleeping on the streets, or soon to sleep on the streets, or in courts fighting hospital expenses? Value is cultural. It could easily be the screams of children or the groans of the homeless men and women in our urban jungles.