M J Banias and A M Gittlitz carry on a wide-ranging and often quite acute conversation orbiting capitalism, Marxism, and things ufological on Banias’s weekly webcast, Café Obscura.

More rewarding than reading my offhand responses below, go, watch it, now.

Three important takeaways for me are:

First, how difficult it is to extract such discussions from anthropocentric reflexes. On one hand is the unwarranted assumption that any visiting extraterrestrial Other would immediately perceive homo sapiens as their complementary Other:  as I pointed out criticizing Schetsche’s and Anton’s recent book on exosociology, that assumption was overturned in even such a low-grade science fiction as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where the extraterrestrial Other completely ignores the human civilization sprawled over the surface of the earth. On another hand is the more urgent and radical relation Herbert Marcuse remarked between the exploitation of other human beings and that of nonhuman nature, the two being essentially identical, such that the liberation of the one entails the liberation of the other.

Second, the very refreshing allusion to Charles Medede’s article How Capitalism Can Explain Why an Encounter with Aliens Is Highly Unlikely that outlines how capitalism is both the result of a very local and highly contingent historical development and the very condition of the kind of technological civilization we inhabit and imagine extraterrestrials to possess, too. The persistently unconscious projection of an accidental time and place in human history onto all intelligent life in the universe needs to be vigilantly called out in every instance.

Finally, A M Gittlitz’s constant reiteration of the truth that arguably drove the researches of the Frankfurt School, that, since material scarcity is economically unwarranted, its persistence must be due to other factors (for the Marxist, social ones). Gittlitz is especially insightful when he puts his finger on the fact that any suppressed free energy technology would be immediately monopolized upon its being disclosed, regardless of its human or extraterrestrial origins. That such utopian technologies would emerge spontaneously governed by the capitalist order in this way seems lost on proponents of disclosure such as James Gilliland and Foster Gamble. What’s very compelling is how the belief in and drive to reveal suppressed technologies implies a cognitive dissonance in the believers in disclosure. Gilliland, Gamble, et al. tend to be politically reactionary, in Gamble’s case, vaguely libertarian. However, the general distribution of the technologies they believe suppressed would undermine the economic base that supports capitalist social relations. In this way, those pressing for disclosure are bourgeois reactionaries dreaming of a socialist utopia!