Commodity and the commons: accumulations of capital on the space frontier

Katarina Damjanov

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022, vol. 15, issue 5, 584-598

Abstract: Designated as one of the global commons, outer space steadily matures as a commodity frontier at which to propel the designs and imaginaries of capitalist economy. While plans to mine the Moon, massify space tourism and colonise Mars are still works in development, the routes of its conquest expand exponentially down here on Earth, as its spectacular proceedings are mediated into a range of images, events, artefacts, samples, and experiences that disperse across the productive and reproductive ambits of terrestrial cultures. These spin-off commodities herald the evolution of the high-tech structures of power that seek to seize control over shared natural and social resources and temper the ways in which the species assembles around the commons of space. I attend to the endeavour to incorporate space into the capitalist world-system by exploring the cultural logics that precede and underpin its expansions along its ‘final frontier’. Highlighting the role of commodity in more-than planetary accumulations of capital, I suggest that its proliferation is not merely an outcome of nascent forms of technological imperialisms as they set out to claim their cosmic share, but a vital resource from which to thrust their appetites for production, consumption, and destruction out there.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2022.2066709

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