Swords into Spaceships
by Patric O'Brien, East London AAA

The East London AAA is constituted as a local chapter of the World Committee for the Pursuit of Human Exploration, which proposes to create a new cultural Renaissance, a new practical liberty. In our programme, our first demand is the transference of all the armed forces of the world to our control. Of course, our first task would be to ban conscription and mete out retribution to those officers who are guilty of anti-working class activity. Once purification and demilitarisation have been accomplished, we shall co-ordinate the development of inter-planetary space exploration upon the basis of human solidarity.

All surveillance systems, currently used to subject a terrified population to ever increasing levels of invasive scrutiny, shall henceforth be dedicated to the detection of messages from extra-terrestrials communicating from outer space. The cloak of secrecy will be removed from these facilities as they are converted into community resource centres, available to be freely used by anyone. All nuclear warheads will firstly be collected in orbiting satellites before being safely disposed of by plunging them into the sun itself.

Only the unification of all the military traditions of the world into a single space exploration programme can guarantee world peace. There is no choice between war and peace, only between the continuation of imperialist competition for mass human destruction and the flowering of a new human Renaissance reaching out across space. Instead of being nowhere here, we shall be somewhere there.

But the new frontier of mankind is not only in Outer Space: it is also in the radical transformation of life upon Mother Earth. By superseding national rivalries through space exploration, humanity can transcend the false dichotomy between peace and war. We are not unconditional partisans of peace: the profound error of pacifist intellectuals is their unimaginative defence of peace within the context of existing social relations. In actual fact no-one wants such an anodyne peace, which not only nurtures the menace of war, but also the total alienation of everyday life and the absolute boredom of a society on the road to cybernetisation. Peace, as with life itself, is in itself unimportant. What is important is human exploration: the creation of events that suit us.

We also demand the dissolution of that pseudo-scientific gang, the Royal Society. For over three hundred years this ragbag collection of Freemasons and hangers-on, have held back the open flourishing of humanity. Their staunch Anglicanism reached its absurd height with the doctrines of Isaac Newton, for whom they claim a phoney 'immortality'. Although some of their contemporary luminaries have dispensed with all theistic notions, this has in no way diminished their maintenance of upper-class domination of society. This is as true of J.D.Bernal, an atheistic Stalinist, as of Joseph Needham, a high Anglican apologist for Mao's People's Republic of China. Their showy leftist leanings never transgressed to the point in which they put their class position into question.
They remained luminaries of the British establishment who favoured military alliance with Russia rather than America. At the same time, they used the cover of the Royal Society to set up an international web of pseudo-scientific institutions to hold society across the world under their class domination. Their pseudo-scientific speculations are universally without merit, as the objectification of nature lies at the root off all their speculation. As any child knows, true science can only flourish when nature is seen as a rounded whole, not as an object for human domination but something which is simultaneously part of human nature, and that which humanity is merely a part. This is the dialectical materialist position which has definitively superseded all pseudo-science and demands to be recognised as such.