Devon Eriksen recently pointed out that today’s Marxists are hostile to space flight and off-world colonization. But in Cold War times, Marxists who ran countries were aggressively futuristic about space, treating it as the empire of their dreams.
What caused this turnaround?
To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.
But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.
That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.
And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?
We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.
Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.
Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.
That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.
The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.
Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.
July 3, 2025
QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization
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