[kemotep]

The author makes no sense when they dismiss a Marxist approach to economics but then describes that capital will be diffused amongst everyone (so everyone owns a piece of the means of production aka Marxism).

Banking is going to be the least of the Martian colonist’s worries for the first several decades if not the first century. Mars could be a sovereign nation or set if sovereign nations but why the insistence on absolute separation from the people on Earth? Even just trading scientific research for water would be massively beneficial for the people on Mars.

[thiagoharry]

The author is not an economist nor formally studies history of economics. I do not think that he understand very well Marx contribution to economy and how his framework works, as he equates it just to "centralized government" which is more the shallow common sense about Marxism.

Marx probably would think on this as a kind of utopian socialism, and his criticism would be that you cannot understand the Mars society and its economy without thinking firsthand how exactly people will organize production to ensure their survival: the superstructure comes after the infrastructure. He would say that if people ends organizing production in a capitalistic way, like in Earth, then this would concentrate wealth, and therefore, power, in few hands; undermining democracy despite how much the society appear democratic on the surface. But probably would agree that if they manage to ensure a more egalitarian society from the ground up, diffusing capital ownership as is proposed in the paper, then a revolution would not be necessary, as there will not exist a previous entrenched ruling class in Mars trying to undermine this. However, Marx would point that the real end result would probably confuse the author who is too accustomed with capitalist economy to the point of not envisioning in the paper nothing fundamentally different than what he sees in a capitalist economy. Would then point that what the author propose about distributing capital is not different than what he defines as communism and that perhaps it may be possible to create it more directly in the outer space than in Earth, but it would depend on the challenges that humanity would face during this era, and on how much technology (aka development of means of production) we would have to deal with such different environment: if Mars economy is too much dependent on Earth, it will not create something that contradicts capitalist development on Earth.