Well, Marx did say that the capitalist class has generated enormous innovation even if it created a new system of oligarchical oppression in the process.
By Eleanor Penny, In These Times
Space is our birthright. “Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery and use of resources in outer space,” President Donald Trump wrote April 6, 2020, issuing the “Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources.” In the stroke of a pen, Trump planted the U.S. flag on “the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies.”
As Trump declared these space lands and resources open for business, you could hear the cheers — mostly from “moonshot” corporations that have clamored to sweep away the patchy, unregularized Cold War-era space law in favor of new, unregulated corporate plunder of the solar system.
While the institution of private land ownership is now widely taken for granted, it was — like many so-called natural things — invented.
Before the muddied, grueling transition from feudalism to capitalism, peasants in Britain and much of Western Europe depended on their right to farm, forage and harvest on common, community lands. The land was controlled by local lords, but it belonged (in a loose, de facto sense) to the communities living on it and dependent upon it. Eventually, common lands were “enclosed” and became the private property of aristocrats.
