https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/14/per1-m14.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
EXCERPT:
Such vast scientific undertakings are becoming increasingly routine. The Large Hadron Collider, the detection of gravitational waves, the IceCube experiment to detect neutrinos, as well as virtually every space mission, require an international effort to succeed. As an example in the negative, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission, which was scheduled to launch this year, will now not launch until at least 2028 after Russia withdrew its participation in the mission as a result of sanctions imposed on the country after it was provoked by the US and NATO into war with Ukraine.
The necessity of international collaboration was remarked on by Xavier Barcons, the director general of the European Southern Observatory, who said in a press conference to announce the findings that “This extraordinary result would not have been possible to achieve by one single facility or even the national astronomical community of a single country. It took eight radio observatories around the world, and that network has already expanded to 11 today, many built, funded, operated and supported through international organizations across many countries around the world.”
Barcons then felt compelled to note that the discovery “shows what we can achieve when we cooperate, when we work together. This is very important to remember in the times that we are living in, where the world is not running in that direction unfortunately.”
Indeed not. One can assume that Barcons was referring to the spiraling conflict between NATO and Russia, which threatens humanity with nuclear annihilation. Or perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed an estimated 20 million people worldwide and where wealthy countries have hoarded vaccines and other therapeutics.
Barcons could have also been referencing the ongoing and accelerating climate catastrophe, which world governments have done nothing to abate and which threatens to drown the world’s coasts by the end of the century. And despite warnings for more than half a century of the looming disaster, nations have consistently refused to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the name of their national capitalist interests.
This state of affairs is a product of definite social and political relations and objective economic processes. It is the division of the world into rival nation-states competing in a global capitalist market that produces such horrors, not to mention the crushing inequality and poverty faced by billions every day.
Serious scientific collaboration involves a certain conscious effort by those involved to reject the chauvinist and nationalist mantras spewed by every government, governments that would much rather see these scientists producing ever-more terrible weapons of mass destruction than working together toward understanding nature and our place within it.
Those same governments have overseen an astronomical redistribution of wealth during the pandemic, handing over trillions of dollars to Wall Street and other financial markets, while forcing workers back on the job amid a pandemic to pay for the bailouts. The war in Ukraine has produced shortages of basic necessities, food and baby formula, while inflation has skyrocketed, forcing more and more of the world’s population into destitution.
But towering scientific achievements like the imaging of Sagittarius A* give a glimpse of another basis of social organization. If the principles of scientific planning and international collaboration that brought about this triumph were applied to contemporary society, it would be possible to end war, poverty, preventable disease and all other forms of social misery.
The capitalist class has proven that it is resolved only for the continued accumulation of private profit, no matter the consequences to Earth’s ecology or the cost in human lives. It is thus left to the working class, the objectively revolutionary and international social force in society, to overthrow capitalism as a whole, paving the way for a new and higher social order, socialism.
(Emphasis added)
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