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”
Rom was in way before: Image
Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?
Submitted 4 months ago by jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website to startrek@startrek.website
Comments
halm@leminal.space 4 months ago
Urist@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
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.
halm@leminal.space 4 months ago
I dunno, Odo’s morals are very much tied to his need to maintain control and appearances. Yes, that aligns perfectly with his shapeshifting ability 🙂
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
Based
Munrock@lemmygrad.ml 4 months ago
The kicker is that Rom eventually becomes Grand Nagus and starts transforming Ferengi society.
halm@leminal.space 4 months ago
I know! Who would’ve guessed watching him in DS9 S1 (Quark’s doofus whipping boy passing down the abuse to Nog) that he would have one of the most low-key amazing character arcs of the series?
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
Though apparently remains a capitalist according to Lower Decks.
cm0002@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
And it just seems accurate, at least with definitions of socialism I’ve read and studied
echodot@feddit.uk 4 months ago
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.
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
Star Wars?
chahk@beehaw.org 4 months ago
It’s a trap!
MudMan@fedia.io 4 months ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 months ago
Right but they get all that energy from atom to energy conversion. The starships get that from antimatter reactors but I’m pretty certain that planet-based installations probably just put a bunch of trees and gravel in as base material, convert that to energy and then convert that back into useful atoms.
If you can do matter conversion, then power generation is almost certainly trivially easy.
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
My headcanon is that they have feedstocks and are just teleporting atoms around and gluing them together, maybe adding and electron here and there. If anything it’s the most consistent use of their transporters.
EarMaster@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Maybe it’s a combination of both the abundance of energy combined with the ability to create almost everything out of it…
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
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).
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
I thought socialism was social ownership, not welfare programs that exist under capitalism.
trolololol@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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"
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
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.
Schmoo@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
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.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Socialism isn’t a binary thing. It is an ideology that can be worked toward with various different degrees and measures. But also I clarify further down 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.
Corgana@startrek.website 4 months ago
It bugs me that you’re being downvoted because you’re correct that modern descriptors don’t apply.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Yeah I’m not out here saying socialism is bad. I consider myself quite left of center. But it’s like… they have literal magic. The words we use to describe different ways of allocating resources do not apply to them. They don’t have an economy. An economy is a system of logistics and trade for moving scarce things to the people who want those things. Everyone and their dog has a transporter and a replicator. Logistics and resource allocation are irrelevant. Why would anyone trade anything for anything else if they have infinite everything?
bouh@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
Schmoo@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
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.”
Munrock@lemmygrad.ml 4 months ago
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.
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
I don’t like the implication that full communism is only possible after a zombie apocalypse though lol
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
Yeah, I find it odd because its Hollywood doing these references which isn’t exactly a left wing institution.
Barx@hexbear.net 4 months ago
It’s good because most of the American audience is too politically miseducated to recognize it otherwise.
halm@leminal.space 4 months ago
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” whiplash.
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.
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
halm@leminal.space 4 months ago
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…
Keeponstalin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes, although I do find that the penal labor in the Federation prisons are a bit concerning for a utopia
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
Ironically The Orville did that better by saying there are no prisons anymore in the Planetary Union.
Jaccident@startrek.website 4 months ago
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!”
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 4 months ago
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
AdlachGyfiawn@lemmygrad.ml 4 months ago
Gene Roddenberry was a Maoist. Pretty sure this was a studio thing, not a Gene thing.
Jaccident@startrek.website 4 months ago
British. Specifically Scottish.