The ansible can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance whatsoever with no delay. Ansibles occur as plot devices in science fiction literature.) Unlike Snapchat, is this the virtual capital metaphor for communication in the 21st Century.
Utopian socialism was a precursor to scientific socialism but often is a residual idea when developing a materialist discourse for labor and class struggle. Just as we have discussed William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement here, the critique of the forces of production as exploitative prompted the artistic revival that signified a return to humanized artisanal production as a vanguard act of revolution. Descaling and deskilling were seen as identical then, much as they are now in terms of redefining postfordist production. The question remains as to whether natural capital(sic) products are less collectively exploitative, and whether that is a prime mover in organizing the overthrow of neoliberal globalization. Ancillary to this is the question of whether exploitation exists under socialism.
“Freedom … can only consist in this, that socialised [humans], the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control rather than being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.”
Elon Musk has been compared with Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. Doing the impossible—whether creating the Tesla electric car or launching rockets with SpaceX—is second nature to him. He was also the co-founder of PayPal.
His passion for innovation has made him one of the richest men in America, with an estimated worth of $10 billion. At the same time, he has been criticized for his hard-driving methods as a boss and for some of his more outlandish ideas, like establishing a human colony on Mars.
OTOH, what would Tesla’s wage rates be on Mars, much less Fremont California’s NUMMI plant.
The electric car company used roughly 140 workers from eastern Europe, primarily Slovenia and Croatia, to build a paint shop in Fremont in northern California as part of its production of the Model 3 sedan.
Workers hired by subcontractor Eisenmann, a German-based manufacturer, received hourly wages as low as $5, which is a fraction of the prevailing wages for local sheet metal workers – $52 an hour plus $42 an hour in benefits and pensions, according to a report by the Bay Area News Group.
So can Marxists be Marsists.
MarxOnMars is an anti-capitalist, socialist, extraterrestrial, idealist and non-hierarchical organization. We are committed to dedicating the MarsOne mission to throwing off the yoke of capitalism once and for all, and to creating a Marxist society for the people, by the people, on Mars. We view capitalism as a profound moral failing and the root of all social ills on Earth, and reject its expansion to Mars. We demand a new extraterrestrial social order that recognizes the humanity of all people and treats them as such…
Or does it just “undermine the possibility of making a dialectical analysis of the present as a temporal dimension in which the future already appears as a potential; ”
(2) there is no basis for determining if a vision constructed in this speculative manner is desirable, if it really is the “good” society;
(3) equally, there is no clear way of determining if it is possible, that is whether people will ever be able to build such a society, and, if they do, whether it will function as expected;
(4) by taking up the space allotted to the future in our thinking, utopian visions undermine the possibility of making a dialectical analysis of the present as a temporal dimension in which the future already appears as a potential;
(5) utopian thinking results in ineffective ways of arguing; and
(6) it also leads to ineffective political strategies.
As regards the role a vision of the future that is anchored in the analysis of the present can play in raising class consciousness, here too the situation has changed from what it was in Marx’s day.
Now as then, helping workers grasp the specific nature of their exploitation within capitalism remains the key to raising their class consciousness, but, with capitalist ideologists trumpeting the failure of the Soviet and social democratic models of socialism as the failure of socialism as such, a more direct assault on the pervading pessimism of our time is also needed.
Hence, projecting communism as a realistic and desirable alternative inherent in the workings of capitalist society, providing sufficient detail to make it comprehensible, attractive, and believable, has become one of the more urgent tasks of socialist scholarship.
And, it is just because we must do more and better on this score than we did earlier that the need to distinguish our vision from utopian thinking, with its numerous wrong turns and cul-de-sacs, has become more important than ever.
Qian Xuesen
A Chinese film production Qian Xue Sen, directed by Zhang Jianya and starring Chen Kun as Qian was released on December 11, 2011 in both Asia and North America,[38] and on March 2, 2012 in China.
The name he used while in the United States was Hsue-Shen Tsien, or H.S. Tsien.
Qian was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in November 1943. The laboratory became one of the early pioneers of rocketry and ballistic missile technology in the United States.
During the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, the United States government accused Qian of having communist sympathies. Despite protest by his colleagues, he was in 1950 stripped of his security clearance. Qian then decided to return to China, but instead was detained at Terminal Island near Los Angeles.
Qian Xuesen“It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go.”[3]
After spending five years under virtual house arrest, Qian was in 1955 released in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots captured during the Korean War. Notified by U.S. authorities that he was free to go, Qian immediately arranged his departure. He left the United States in September 1955 on the passenger liner SS President Cleveland of American President Lines, arriving in China via Hong Kong…
In October 1956, he became the director of the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, tasked with ballistic missile and nuclear weapons development. He was part of the overall effort that cumulated in the successful “596” atomic bomb test on October 16, 1964, and the “Test No. 6” hydrogen bomb test on June 17, 1967. This was the fastest fission-to-fusion development in history at 32 months, compared to 86 months for the United States and 75 months for the USSR, and gave China a thermonuclear device ahead of major Western powers like France.
Qian’s reputation as a prominent scientist who essentially defected from the United States to China gave him considerable influence in the era of Mao Zedong and afterward. Qian eventually rose through Party ranks to become a Central Committee member. He became associated with the China’s Space Program – From Conception to Manned Spaceflight initiative.