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Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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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.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Socialism
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:
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.