Never Try to Predict the Future

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

By the early 1960s, both the space race with the Soviet Union and the New Left had become major news in the United States.

America’s Cold War rival astonished the world on Oct. 4, 1957 by launching Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the earth. I can remember as a boy seeing the story -- it took up the entire front page – in the Montreal Herald (which, as it happened, ceased publication two weeks later).

On April 12, 1961, the USSR launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth on Vostok 1.

In response, President John F. Kennedy vowed to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, on Feb. 20, 1962. His mission completed three orbits in the Friendship 7 spacecraft.

The early Project Mercury and Project Gemini programs would give way to Project Apollo. The Apollo 11 mission culminated with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

Meanwhile, the American New Left, concentrated on college and university campuses, was rapidly changing the country’s political culture. It was motivated by social injustices, the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movement in the segregationist South.

Starting with the April 1960 founding of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which supported the new Cuban revolution against attacks by the U.S. government, by the end of the decade the movement, much of it Marxist, was a major force in American life.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was also created in 1960. Two years later its members met in Port Huron, Michigan and drafted the Port Huron Statement.

In it, SDS criticized American society and described how universities should be at the centre of activities to establish a “participatory democracy.” With the escalation of the Vietnam War, SDS grew rapidly and organized massive marches and “teach-ins” across the country.

There was also a much wider “counter-cultural” movement. On Aug. 15-18, 1969 about 400,000 people gathered in upstate New York for the Woodstock concert. Bob Dylan didn’t participate, but the lyrics to his 1964 song “The Times They Are a-Changing” summed up the spirit of the event.  It indeed seemed that the “winds of change” were unstoppable.

No doubt, had people that year been asked what the world would look like 45 years later, many would have assumed, given the momentum unleashed in the decade, that by 2014 there would be human colonies on Mars (and maybe even farther in space), and that America would be governed by progressives who had introduced some form of socialist egalitarianism.

In fact the reverse happened.

Apollo 17 and was the sixth and last landing of humans on the Moon, in December 1972. There have been no humans there for 42 years now, let alone elsewhere in the solar system.

Even NASA’s space shuttle program ended in 2011, and so – irony of ironies – because America lost its own capacity to send people into space, the only way for its astronauts to get to and from the International Space Station is by way of the Russian Soyuz capsule and Russian rockets.

Meanwhile, the gap between the rich “one per cent” and everyone else is now at its widest in many decades. The wealthiest 10 per cent of Americans control more than three-quarters of all U.S. wealth and 80 per cent of all financial assets.

At the same time, median household income in 2013 was US$51,939, a full $4,497 less than before the recession.

The financial crisis led to millions of people being unable to pay their mortgages. There have now been approximately 5.2 million completed foreclosures by lending institutions across the U.S.

Not only is America not socialist, it has become a plutocracy, where money is now the mother’s milk of electoral politics.

The Center for Responsive Politics projected that $3.76 billion will have been spent on this year’s just-concluded midterm elections. Who provides these vast sums? Mostly, the very rich – and lawmakers are then beholden to them. Not exactly “participatory democracy!”

Communists used to brag that they were “on the right side of history.” Barack Obama has lately begun using the same phrase, when speaking about U.S. attempts to implement democracy in places like the Middle East.

But in fact, no one is either on the “right” or “wrong” side of “history,” as the Communists, who now barely exist, discovered. All we can be sure of is that “history” has its own trajectory, and we can’t predict its direction.