Communizing The Moon

It’s time to stop thinking about the moon as the next frontier for labor exploitation.  

by Mar Esclanate

As the closest source of planetary mass for humans to envision doing what they love most—finding stuff in a limitless empty field, planting flags in it, building structures out of it, then walking around admiring them—the moon is where it’s at.

This has been easy to forget in the decades since the Cold War, with no clear rival power for the U.S. to position itself against. But as a new superpower emerges to challenge U.S. hegemony, the moon has reemerged in politics and science fiction as a symbol for the cultural hopes and dreams of the Western world.

The Chinese lunar program has been in full swing since it soft-landed the Chang’e-3 rover in 2014, making it the first human creation to soft-land on the moon since 1976. Being fully state-funded while engaging with global capital markets, the state capitalist Chinese program has more in common with NASA of the 1960s than the present-day U.S. space program does. 

There has been a steady trickle of headlines about SpaceX, moon mining, and corporate partnerships to reassert Western lunar dominance.

In 2017, President Trump signed a decree that we should return to the moon and “expand across the solar system” by relying on private companies, and since then there has been a steady trickle of headlines about SpaceX, moon mining, and corporate partnerships to reassert Western lunar dominance.

In late 2017–early 2018, several sci-fi novels about frontier moon colonies were published by mass market publishers, with varying takes on the present day moon rush. Some of these are hesitant about privatization trends in lunar exploration in the West, taking a liberal view that the moon can instead represent a catalyst for resisting current state capitalist, corporatist or fascist models of present-day governance. The apocalyptic drivers in these books are presented as inevitable and often based in climate change, and they either ignore or consign the growing mass of working poor to widespread poverty and death, which they deem unavoidable, focusing instead on the adventures of the survivors – scientists, engineers, military specialists.

We see ivory tower fantasies about events on the moon triggering a spontaneous nonviolent uprising against the Chinese Communist Party (Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson), or occasionally working class fantasies of disengaging outer space from politics altogether, bringing the vision back to crew camaraderie and the audacity of exploration (Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira). There are feminist fantasies that a moon rush could trigger a struggle for a more diverse professional and ruling class – reflected in the series name, “Lady Astronaut” – and thus restore hope for the human future (Hugo, Nebula and Locus-award-winning The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal). 

The apocalyptic drivers in these books are presented as inevitable and based in climate change, and they either ignore or consign the growing mass of working poor to widespread poverty and death.

Let’s call this trend “lunar liberalism”—the fantasy that we are still living in the 1960s, Tom Hanks is our astronaut dad, outer space is still a scientific frontier, and we can achieve a better future for our children by working hard and allowing the slow arc of history to bend toward justice.

The reality, of course, is quite different. The funders of space exploration in the West are billionaires enriched by abusive labor practices. They do, however, share the liberal view that inevitable climate change requires us to become a multiplanetary species. We can envision a bright future emerging from the cosmos all we want, but when the push toward outer space is informed by a desire to grow our way out of self-destruction rather than improve the human condition, those dreams become warped, because, well, what are we envisioning toward? We will carry the seeds of our undoing everywhere we go.

The fantasies of lunar liberalism are undermined by the libertarian views in other recent moon-based sci-fi, which embrace the trends toward privatization. These books are based on the notion that humans will only live on the moon if someone profits from them doing so, and the only way profit will be assured is if there is an exploited labor class. Artemis by Andy Weir details how poor people are relegated to eating flavored algae and paying rent to absentee landlords in spherical resort towns, where the literal underground half of the population are service workers, and the aboveground half are upper-middle-class-to-wealthy thrill-seekers. In Luna New Moon by Ian MacDonald, contract law is the only law in a neo-feudal corporatocracy, and payments for biometrically-tracked air and water usage must be regularly made or risk immediate death.

The fantasies of lunar liberalism are undermined by the libertarian views in other recent moon-based sci-fi, which embrace the trends toward privatization.

In these anarcho-capitalist paradises, poverty is a challenge to be overcome through pulling oneself up by bootstraps with the benefit of a narrator giving a protagonist an opportunity. The plight of the lunar lower classes not given special narrative treatment seems inspired by the dystopian, post-apocalyptic sci-fi of the early 2000s, but because they’re on the moon rather than the earth, their settings are celebrated as exciting frontier worlds full of intrigue and possibility, rather than the husks of dying empires. In contrast to liberal fantasies about the human race coming together around space exploration for mutual benefit, these cheerleaders of a corporate future among the stars insightfully foretell the driving factors and consequences, if not the resultant crushing misery, of the trend toward private colonization of the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

So what would be an anticapitalist vision of the moon? Inspiration could be drawn from the backstory of The Expanse series by James Corey, specifically the asteroid belters’ union (OPA), which began as workers seizing control of asteroid mining operations—vital for building anything in outer space, because large planets’ gravity wells are obstacles to getting resources at scale to off-earth industries.

Exerting organized leverage is how labor emerges victorious against capital. What greater leverage over the earth than to unionize the first-ever mining colony on the moon?

Science fiction could also follow the example of Star Trek and others in imagining an outer space frontier with the moon as its gateway, whose habitation resists the advance of anything but a fully united, communized humanity. Or, like Anarres in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the moon could become a Leftist utopia following separation from the capitalist homeworld.

While present-day technology puts the lunar surface in tangible view, and while that technology is controlled by anti-labor tycoons and state capitalist superpowers, the path there isn’t inevitable. As writers we have to dream bigger than the present day. Part of the thrill of outer space fiction is that it can represent a fresh start for humanity.

Cynicism, grit and working-class exploitation may be the start of the new lunar aesthetic, but they don’t have to be the end.

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