Editor's comment: In 1969, I was a young Christian minister, guiding others before the spiritual organs of my own true self had matured. But my disillusionment was already underway. When the Apollo landed on the moon, I remember feeling something sad inside when the world around me seemed to be celebrating. At the time, I didn't own or understand my own feelings. I also remember the confusion that accompanied this conflict. In the years that followed, I was able to put it together. As time passed, I came to realise that as human beings, we lost far more than we gained. The blessings from that haunting orb were lost along with its mystery and unchanging path that inspired awe, spiritual insight, calendars, romance, music, poetry and worship for people on every continent. Forty years ago, the people at Workers World and the people about whom they wrote were far more prescient than I. Their essay below helps me understand that I wasn't alone in my sadness when the Apollo landed in 1969.

- Les Blough, Editor

It has been there in the sky since long before our species walked the earth. As our ability to wonder and imagine grew, so did our curiosity about this great luminous ball that waxed and waned above us. No matter what continent we lived on, we worshiped it, wrote poetry to it, made love under its soft beams.

Not strange, then, that when the U.S. scientific-military establishment, through NASA, put a person on the moon, it was a very big deal. It generated such excitement and optimism; somehow this technological breakthrough would usher in a better, more enlightened period in human history.

Well, that was four decades ago, when the United States military was involved in another horrible war that brought nothing but suffering and misery to the peoples of Southeast Asia and the U.S. In fact, the Apollo moonwalk may have prolonged that catastrophe, because it bolstered the sagging prestige of the U.S. at a time when rejection of imperialist war and plunder was growing around the world.

Today the efforts of the corporate media to revive the flag-waving euphoria of 1969 are falling flat. This is 2009, the scientific-technological revolution has transformed the world on a huge scale, and workers are worse off than ever. Yes, we see the wondrous new devices everywhere, but they don’t bring us much joy.

Official unemployment in the U.S. has hit double digits as jobs evaporate. Truck drivers hate the GPS spy in the sky that knows if they take an unauthorized break. Villagers in Pakistan and Afghanistan hate the pilotless drones that bring death-dealing missile strikes. All workers feel insecure when their bosses roam the world in search of ever-cheaper labor.

Case in point: A few years ago, Ireland was the country of choice for many transnational electronics corporations. It had a labor shortage and workers immigrated from all over Europe. Now Irish workers are in a deep crisis as their jobs have been shifted further east. It was easy for the companies to pick up and leave; the plants and equipment were totally modular and could be moved in a week. Of course, they planned it that way.

At the time of the Apollo landing in 1969, Workers World wrote an article pointing out that in Harlem, where 50,000 people were attending a cultural festival, there were boos when the announcement was made. Our article said that “contempt and hostility for the celebrations of imperialist overlords who planted their hated flag of slavery on the moon was undoubtedly the reaction of the millions of oppressed people in Asia, Africa and Latin America who live under the heel of Washington and who defiantly refuse to applaud a victory for their oppressor.”

The Black struggle by then had swept away segregation laws but poverty, super-exploitation and daily abuse remained. A healthy skepticism about what the government was doing was high in the Black community.

Now that much of the world has been plunged into a new economic crisis, brought on by capitalism’s incurable disease of accumulating incredible wealth in the hands of a few while pauperizing the workers, the ground is being prepared for a broader struggle of the working class as a whole against the exploiters.

To quote again from our 1969 article: “At this moment, the greatest burden on humanity is not ignorance of outer space but how to overthrow the parasitic imperialist bourgeoisie right here on earth. This decadent class utilizes all knowledge for its predatory ends of intensifying the exploitation of the toiling classes and of improving the means to keep the workers and the oppressed from breaking their chains. Technology in the hands of the capitalist class is distorted until it is almost unrecognizable as a means of serving human ends. All leaps forward in science and technology by the imperialists must necessarily increase the burden on humanity, not lighten it.”

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