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REDFLAG | 14 JUNE 2021 PUBLICATION OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE REDFLAG.ORG.AU

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JEFF BEZOS IS GOING INTO SPACE

Fingers crossed he

won’t come back

James Plested Jeff Bezos inspects
Blue Origin's Texas
launch facility in 2015
PHOTO: Blue Origin
he announcement that Amazon CEO
Jeff Bezos will be launching himself
into space on 20 July is welcome news
for a humanity starved of reasons for
T hope. The odds of a mishap aboard his
New Shepard rocket ship are, no doubt, small. But
the prospect of a month and a half of imagining
the door blasting open, and Bezos being sucked
out into the infinite, inky expanse of space, never
to be seen again, is cause enough for good cheer.
Should anyone feel bad about harbouring such
thoughts about a man who has proven, again and
again, his contempt for the vast majority of people
with whom he (no doubt begrudgingly) shares
a home on Earth? A man whose US$185.8 billion
fortune has been made off the back of a workforce
so exploited that, as documented in a 2019 Daily
Beast article, emergency services are regularly
called to Amazon warehouses to deal with “suicide
attempts, suicidal thoughts, and other mental
health episodes”?
No. It’s okay to hope that Bezos doesn’t come
back from his personal space odyssey. The world
would be better off without him. A portion of his
insane wealth could be used to improve the wages
and conditions of the 1.3 million Amazon workers.
The rest could be directed towards major challenges
facing humanity today, such as the climate crisis.
Bezos will be joined on the flight by his brother “You see the Earth from space, [and] it changes the actual problems facing humanity today.
Mark and the winner of an online auction finish- you”, Bezos said in a video shared on Instagram None of which seems very likely. What’s more
ing on 12 June. Bidding, at the time of publication, announcing his plan. “It changes your relation- likely is that to the extent that Bezos might ex-
is at US$3.8 million. The privilege of seeing the ship with this planet, with humanity.” If you were perience something like the “overview effect” on
Earth from space doesn’t come cheap. Bezos is yet to be charitable about the whole endeavour, you his trip, it will only reinforce his sense of himself
to announce how much a seat on the New Shepard might argue that his space trip could change as existing in a realm apart—separate from and
will set you back when flights open to the public. him for the better. What if he experiences the superior to the mass of humanity and our all too
But if the tickets already being sold by the Musk- phenomenon—commonly referred to by astro- earthly challenges.
led rival SpaceX are anything to go by, it’s likely to nauts—of the “overview effect”? This is a state of Perhaps the only thing wrong, then, with day-
be in the tens of millions of dollars. consciousness triggered by the view of Earth as dreaming about Bezos’s space adventure coming
It’s no surprise that billionaires like Bezos, Elon a small, isolated orb of blue and green, floating to a calamitous end is the passivity of it. Imagin-
Musk and Richard Branson are fixated on the idea in the vast, black expanse of space. Those who’ve ing Bezos or Musk disappearing into space might
of space travel and, in Musk’s case at least, the con- experienced it have described it as giving them be momentarily satisfying, but it does nothing to
struction of an “off Earth” utopia for the wealthy a new perspective on the fragility of human improve the disastrous state of human society to-
few. They belong, after all, to a class of people— society, and a painful awareness of the many day. Most likely they will return from their adven-
capitalists—whose pursuit of profit at all cost has challenges we face. tures unscathed, and just as unbearably assured in
both driven the Earth to the brink of catastrophic But what could the likes of Bezos and Musk their superhuman “mission” as they have been to
environmental breakdown, and brought them the possibly do with such a perspective? To take it date. And even if they don’t, there’s no shortage of
kind of immense wealth required to escape it. seriously would have to mean, for a start, recog- others to replace them.
If your daily life is already spent looking down— nising the fundamental obscenity of their own What we really need to do is organise, as one
from the comfort of boardrooms, mansions and position in society—of being among a billionaire Twitter user put it, to “change the locks”. If Bezos,
private jets—on a world beset by multiplying and class that, according to Oxfam, together has more Musk and Co. want to go “off Earth”, then let them.
intensifying crises, why not take it to the next level wealth than the poorest 4.6 billion people who Our task is to ensure that at some point, when they
and remove yourself from the planet altogether? make up 60 percent of the world’s population. It come back, they’ll find the completely irrational,
When your wealth has reached such unimaginably would mean doing whatever you can to oppose a exploitative system of capitalism on which their
vast sums, and you sit at the pinnacle of a global situation in which some people are so rich they obscene wealth was based has been dismantled
capitalist system so rigged in your favour that you can afford to build their own rocket ships to and replaced with a socialist society that, suffice
can be assured it will only continue to expand in launch themselves into space and have epiphanies to say, is unlikely to see space adventures for
the future, what’s left for you to do? about “one Earth” while doing nothing to address (ex)-billionaires as high on the list of priorities.