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Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist? (startrek.website)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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"

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (8 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I thought socialism was social ownership, not welfare programs that exist under capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Also countries that probably started out socialist but took a sharp turn into authoritarianism and under-the-hood oligarchy... You know who you are.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

Socialism isn't a binary yes/no thing. It's an economic ideology that can be realized in many different ways

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

They use replicator rations as currency and exchange them for goods and services. In a world that frequently says that society has progressed beyond the need for money. As soon as things become scarce they start using a market again. Thus, the lack of scarcity in the Federation precludes the concept of an economy at all.

And yeah Starfleet ships are always militaristic, but people can choose to leave if that's still an option. I believe this was why RDM left the writing team, but it never seemed right that Janeway just appointed herself dictator when this ship was potentially in for a multi-generation journey. BSG handled that sort of thing much better.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Neither the Orion Syndicate nor the Ferengi Alliance are members of the Federation.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Star Wars?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

It's a trap!

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (8 children)

Rom was in way before SNW:

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Based

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

It's good because most of the American audience is too politically miseducated to recognize it otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Socialism

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

You're right, I wrote one thing but my head was still at the general economy matter! Will edit.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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!”

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (8 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

And it just seems accurate, at least with definitions of socialism I've read and studied

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