Does Elon Musk want Marsists rather than Marxists:  A million folks on Mars could be the Earth’s Plan B, will they only be the 1%

and will they have the Ursula K. Le Guin’s ansible (a fictional machine capable of instantaneous or superluminal communication. 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.

Before we get into guidelines, however, we cannot emphasize enough how much we do not recommend communicating with Earth. Capitalism has poisoned the minds of of all people, infiltrating their subjectivities; the process of unshackling ourselves will not be easy. Avoid the news. Don’t talk to your loved and hated ones. Let’s face it, if you actually wanted to interact with them or capitalist structures, you would not have moved to Mars

“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.”

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Power continues to be blind even as we see SpaceX reusable spaceships of private capital land on barges in the Pacific Ocean.

news.nationalgeographic.com/…

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.

Tesla relied on cheap foreign labor to build a hi-tech paint shop in California, paying workers as little as $5 an hour, according to a damning report that prompted CEO Elon Musk to launch an investigation.

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…

Although a planetary break from Earth is necessary to defeat capitalism, the trauma of capitalism will live on in the previously earthbound planetariat. In order to to create a new, just society on Mars, we believe that it will be essential for Marsists(sic) to come to terms with what they endured under the thumb of capitalism. Therefore, we recognize the need for reconciliation, support groups, and restorative justice mechanisms in order for Marsists to live peacefully with one another and begin a new, social order together post-migration.

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; ”

More specifically, the main criticisms Marx makes of the utopians are as follows: (1) utopian thinking tends to produce visions of the future that are unrealistically rigid and complete;

(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.