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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.