In case you don’t know, they explicitly use the term socialist to describe the Federation economy in SNW. I was wondering if ppl liked or hated it? I like it personally since it’s not a dodge like “new world economy”
As I am not American I grew up with socialism being a positive connotation in day to day culture, so much so it’s wild to me that this needed to be veiled in Trek’s past. Star Trek should be as explicit as possible with this. “Hey, you want Utopia? This is how you earn it!”
Where are you if I may ask? And I think it may have been a dictate of Gene Roddenberry to not name which economic system won out, which is kind of a copout. But yeah it’s refreshing to see it called what it is finally
British. Specifically Scottish.
Ah yeah socialism I guess is a less dirty word in those parts.
Gene Roddenberry was a Maoist. Pretty sure this was a studio thing, not a Gene thing.
He was a Maoist?
According to his wife Majel, yes.
Where did you read this?
I admit I’m having trouble finding any transcript of the primary source. It’s supposedly an answer she gave during a local convention and it’s been repeated by enough websites citing each other that I don’t know which one was the original.
I’ll keep trying to find it, though.
Yeah I doubt it personally, it doesn’t seem to match anything ever reflected in Star Trek. But if you find it, do tell me!
I think so, the federation is often seen and portrayed as close as you can get to a utopia (Since it’s practically impossible to achieve a “true” utopia). They still have issues, make mistakes and wrong calls, and even some (albeit greatly reduced) crime.
So having more positive association/references for the term socialist, a term that most general people can have a connection with, cant hurt.
And it just seems accurate, at least with definitions of socialism I’ve read and studied
Rom was in way before SNW:
Based
Saw this episode for the first time two days ago and loved everything about it. Especially the inqusition of anti-union Ferengi, that is the FCA, captured the violence of capitalist oppression, both direct and threat thereof, beautifully.
I also liked the subtle points being made, like Odo being against the strike on basis of upholding law and order, even though this should contradict his moral compass in my opinion.
It was always socialist. That was blindingly obvious even from the days of TOS. Remember, Star wars universe everyone had just come out of the third world war, practically everything had been destroyed and there was virtually no infrastructure left, people were willing to take pretty much any kind of government going.
Then replicators were invented and once you’ve got that it’s pretty difficult to have anything other than a socialist government or a dictatorship.
Star Wars?
It’s a trap!
You know the irony of this interpretation? By canon, replicators are energy to matter conversion devices. Basically a 3D printer using relativity to poof atoms into existence from an energy source.
Replicators are straight-up the most expensive way to make anything. Using that technology to make you a cup of tea is the most inefficient use of any resource put on screen in media history. It’s absurd. The notion that instead of heating up water you would go ahead and make the atoms out of energy is so much worse than just filling in a space station’s worth of water and carrying it with you into space just to keep Picard’s Earl Grey habit going.
It’s not the replicator at all that drives the post-scarcity, it’s whatever nonsense antimatter generator stuff dilithium is enabling where they get infinite energy forever. Although we know dilithium is a limited resource, since they don’t seem to just replicate some when they need it, so… somebody should do the math there and figure out how expensive all those Janeway coffees actually are.
It’s good because most of the American audience is too politically miseducated to recognize it otherwise.
they explicitly use the term socialist to describe the Federation economy in SNW.
I’m going to need a source and context for this, apparently it flew by me in between all the parallel timeline nonsense required to shoehorn James Kirk into the series. Also, the “Gorn, but Xenomorphs” retcon.
Generally speaking, I was fine with Socialism being a quiet part of Trek economics for 50+ years. I don’t do a lot of mental gymnastics aligning the minutiae of a fictional future with contemporary concepts. Science fiction is a reflection of our real world, sure, but I have as little use for connecting the dots between 21st and 23rd economical concepts as I have for schematics for the replicators on Enterprise. A lot can happen in 2-300 years, especially when Trek concepts are metaphors and narrative shortcuts for telling stories about a future that recontextualise our own times.
But I get what you mean, it was always Socialism, wasn’t it? Our real world has taken a weird polarised turn that makes Trek’s space utopia seem more far fetched than it has for a long time. Even if “the culture wars” sounds like something the franchise might have introduced as a philosophically apt concept back in the '90s…
In that regard I too appreciate that the show’s producers put their company scrip where Trek’s mouth has been all those years. It seems that some very loud “culture warriors” never grokked that this was a deeply left (or at the very least humanist) leaning show. It’s a little late in the day to spell it out for them that, yes — “Trekonomics” are frigging Socialist, but apparently that’s the level of media illiteracy we’re dealing with here.
So good on SNW for letting its red flag fly. It will probably piss off some people who still can’t separate Socialism from whatever garbled idea of “Red scare” indoctrination has been passed down through generations. Whatever, they’re pissed off no matter what.
It is ironic to me that this “Socialist” discourse is coming from a franchise(!) so ensconced in capitalist production and economic structures that it is gauged for marketability and profit. That’s the big elephant in the room throughout all the “Trek so woke” outrage cycles: We’ll never get to a post-scarcity future resembling Star trek by sitting around watching Star trek.
Got it. TBF, most of what comes out of Pella’s mouth I interpret as sarcastic quips. She’s the SNW version of Jett Reno, after all.
Not that she’s wrong, it’s just not exactly a franchise-wide decree of mission statement passed down from Alex Kurtzman or the Roddenberry estate…
The same episode says private ownership of things like cars no longer exists in the future, so it’s clearly a description of the economy. I agree its almost a dismissal though, which is why I prefer The Orville’s treatment of the no money post scarcity economy more.
Yeah, but claiming that money is a thing of the show’s past is as old as
the show itself.The voyage home:
Almost 30 years ago we got this great bit between Picard and Lily in First contact:
— The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.
— No money? You mean you don’t get paid?
— The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
This, of course, from a man with inherited real estate in La Barre… But there are several anticapitalist barbs in TNG and DS9, too.
[Edited first to add GIF, second because I got my wires crossed re private property and money]
None of those quotes say private ownership of cars is gone. Cars aren’t the means of production btw, so I don’t even agree with SNW here.
You’re right, I wrote one thing but my head was still at the general economy matter! Will edit.
There is definitely still private ownership in Star Trek. Replicator programs and other software are regularly seen as being treated like intellectual property. Schematics as well. You think anyone can just go down to their local print shop and replicate the parts for an Enterprise class ship themselves?
I’m a bit shocked that nobody has pointed out the obvious:
The economics of Star Trek are super inconsistent and make no sense because multiple writers had a crack and they each liked and believed different things.
Sometimes it’s a post-scarcity socialist utopia where money is obsolete. Other times, Picard invites someone out on a date and she answers “you buying?”.
This is obvious enough that multiple people have tried to fix it, which as always in franchise worldbuilding only makes things less consistent and more complicated. So now some things just can’t be properly replicated. Sometimes it’s because of regulations and laws, other times it’s because of technology limitations. Sometimes the Federation doesn’t use money but they still have it for trade, other times they use money, just for random commodities.
The middle of the road for Trek seems to be some form of socialdemocracy where you’re provided with anything you need and labor is largely vocational, but out in space there is enough variation over time and different areas that there is still a bit of a pseudo-capitalist economy even in regions where Federation-level post-scarcity tech is still available. Go into any more detail and the whole thing breaks down.
This goes for other political elements of the series, too. Picard gets super mad at the notion of endorsing religious beliefs in a prewarp society because he finds it barbaric. Meanwhile, Sisko is out there becoming Bajoran Space Jesus and everybody is just cool with that.
It’s almost like Rick Berman’s, Ronald D. Moore’s and Gene Roddenberry’s political beliefs were different from each other’s, huh?
That and post-scarcity doesn’t mean “zero scarcity”. Like if someone wanted to create a picard funkpop the size of a planet, I don’t think they’d be allowed the resource budget.
It’s like how it doesn’t matter where you live, if you want to buy on the silk road, you need bitcoin. Presumably even the federation can’t just make latinum whenever they please, or we wouldn’t see them haggle with it. Although, it would be fun to see that they could and just take the responsibility of not crashing non-federation cultures entire economies very seriously, either out of respect or treaty.
Damnit, I want a LD episode where the crew is frustrated and desperately wants to just “buy” their problem away but can’t because an economist at command says it’ll mean they have to rescue all these non-federation colonies that are currently self sufficient. Come to think of it it’s right there with the “you break it you own it” concept of the prime directive.
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Yes, although I do find that the penal labor in the Federation prisons are a bit concerning for a utopia
Ironically The Orville did that better by saying there are no prisons anymore in the Planetary Union.
I’ve noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a “dirty word,” though she qualifies the statement by first saying “I’m not a communist.”
Yeah, I find it odd because its Hollywood doing these references which isn’t exactly a left wing institution.
The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene,
I love that scene. It’s so authentic: hearing a white American describe his successful living arrangement as literal communism but saying it’s not communism, and a black American correcting him. 100 years of Red Scare and minority struggle captured in a few lines of dialogue.
I don’t like the implication that full communism is only possible after a zombie apocalypse though lol
More like the dissolvement of US hegemony.
I don’t think that’s what they were going with.
Caveat that I have not played the games, but taking the series at face value they are highly US-centric like most Hollywood productions. It makes no sense arguing on the basis of the series alone what they are going with in this regard, since all the action takes place in the US it is pretty much the scope of the universe, just like in many Americans minds. I tried to make a disjoint point, that was based on how I would interpret it with complete disregard to whatever is canon to the story as a whole, taking what is presented in the first season of the series at face value.
To put this into context with Star Trek, I also find it really boring and non-immersive whenever they hold 21st century America in special consideration. It is just such an obvious way to make a comparison to current state of affairs in one particular country, placating preferences of current pop culture, which is redundant anyway since all science fiction is a universal critique of the current state of affairs anywhere simply by showing a future alternative. A hypothetical sudden end to US hegemony is actually a valid way to make the current US affairs leading up to it special with respect to the future development of mankind, and not just a boring move for views.
Well I’m not for ending US hegemony so that doesn’t sound appealing to me.
That is understandable if you think only within the paradigm of some select countries dominating the rest, but that is perhaps the biggest obstacle to our gay space communist Star Trek future.
It’s not really socialist. Socialism is an economic model that involves taxing the rich and redistribution of wealth to the working class through welfare programs.
But in ST, there is no economy, no taxes, no rich people, no wealth, no working class. The only thing from that definition that they do have is welfare, but it’s a completely different form of it.
ST is a magical post-scarcity utopia. Any economist would tell you that economics is first and foremost the study of how to allocate scarce resources. In a post-scarcity society, the whole concept of economics breaks down. Replicators break everything we know about economics. Everyone can get everything they need and it costs them nothing but electricity (which they conveniently can generate for basically no cost).
I thought socialism was social ownership, not welfare programs that exist under capitalism.
You’re right.
There’s a bad habit of calling socialists the countries that should be called something like"capitalist but a bit to the left"
Also countries that probably started out socialist but took a sharp turn into authoritarianism and under-the-hood oligarchy… You know who you are.
Socialism isn’t a binary yes/no thing. It’s an economic ideology that can be realized in many different ways
Social ownership of what? Resources? Means of production? Neither of those means anything when replicators are a thing.
There are a million different definitions of socialism depending on who you ask. I gave one above but I’m not claiming it’s the only one. However it is ultimately an economic model, and it doesn’t make sense to apply it in a world where economics is meaningless because the laws of thermodynamics have been broken.
Resources and means of production are both things in the Federation. We see mining operations and manufacturing facilities well into the 24th century.
And with only one unfortunate exception that I can think of, matter replication is treated as a net energy loss - it isn’t free.
And with only one unfortunate exception that I can think of, matter replication is treated as a net energy loss - it isn’t free.
Well sure, it’s energy negative, but they also have basically free energy. We see in Voyager that as soon as they are cut off from that free energy, they regress to a market-based economy by like the third episode of the show. Doesn’t seem very socialist to me.
as they are cut off from that free energy
They were “cut off” because they no longer had access to the supply lines that provided them with fuel. That’s not “free energy” at all.
Yeah that’s my point. As soon as they no longer had access to the magical impossible logistics network of virtually free energy, they immediately regressed to capitalism with a side order of martial law.
I don’t think what they were doing in the Delta Quadrant would meet many (good) definitions of “capitalism.”
And it’s difficult to say how “martial law” could be imposed on a command structure that was already militaristic.
Then explain what the Orion syndicate does for a living. Or how can ferengi pursue profit. Or how captains owned private transport ships and need to take things from one place to the other.
There’s always people who want more than they have, and know who’s going to provide them that.
Neither the Orion Syndicate nor the Ferengi Alliance are members of the Federation.
Because the writers recognized that too many story tropes would be entirely unreasonable in a post scarcity world and so wrote in a bunch of stuff that really makes no sense if you think about it too hard. Like why would someone pay for a drink at Quark’s when every residence on DS9 has a replicator? Because the writers wanted DS9 to be a frontier town and a frontier town needs a saloon.
Also to be clear, everything I was saying in my above comments was primarily in relation to the Federation. I recognize there are parts of the galaxy where replicators are not common.
Like why would someone pay for a drink at Quark’s when every residence on DS9 has a replicator?
Because the scarce resource at Quark’s isn’t the food or drinks, it’s the atmosphere and the experience, i.e things the replicator cannot provide. Quark controls the holodecks too, but even if he didn’t the scarce resource would be authentic (not replicated) food and experiences. It’s been shown pretty regularly on the shows that some people prefer non-replicated food, non-synthohol drinks, and real people. It doesn’t really matter in that context if those are technically indistinguishable from the real thing (but even in canon there is a measureable difference between them and some things the replicators can’t do).
I don’t really believe there could ever be a post-scarcity world in which we don’t create new scarcities to demand.
Hot take: The Expanse (mostly referring to the books here) handled a post-scarcity technocracy much more believably.
Again, the Ferengi are a bad example since they aren’t part of the federation. But my point was simply that this stuff wasn’t thought through. Why do the Ferengi exist? Because the writers wanted some capitalists to use as a contrast to the Federation.
I firmly believe that ST’s worldbuilding mostly handwaves the questions of economics and scarcity, at least within the Federation. The writers didn’t want to come up with good reasons for these things that actually make sense when you think about them.
It’s a great franchise, but we shouldn’t try to apply real-world economic ideas to it when that was so clearly not at the front of the writers minds when they created it.
What you described is just welfare, not socialism. Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, meaning there would be no need to re-distribute wealth as it would be fairly distributed from the start.
What you’re thinking of is more along the lines of what Scandinavian countries have, which is just capitalism with social democracy and extensive welfare programs.
Socialism isn’t a binary thing. It is an ideology that can be worked toward with various different degrees and measures.
But also I clarified further down this thread that my intent is not to give a definition of socialism, but rather to say that no definition of socialism makes sense in the context of ST’s federation and the magical impossible technology they possess.
You’re all true until allocating scarce resources. These days economy is how to make scarce something that isn’t in order to profit from it. See copyrights and patents. In our society a replicator would be the property of a company and you would need to pay it to be allowed to use it.
Yeah that’s the cynical and IMO more realistic take. I’m mostly just taking the world presented in the show at face value. It’s not realistic at all.
But even then, it wouldn’t be the replicators that are scarce, it would be the software. Because in theory if someone is charging you to use their replicator, you could just pay to print out the parts for your own replicator, and then replicate yourself ten more replicators. What would prevent this? Proprietary software.
