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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi.
That’s called “socialdemocracy” and it’s been around for centuries. It’s actually older than the marxist concept of socialism, if you’re gonna get pedantic about it.
I get that Americans have completely sandblasted off any remaining meaning in the word “socialism”, first by having conservatives use it as an insult and then by having weird US lefties get all purity test about it, but most of the world has a pretty clear picture of socialdemocracy, it’s not that ambiguous. Most socialdemocrat parties across the planet are called some version of “Socialist Party”, “Labour Party” or “Worker’s Party”. It’s a thing.
So no, it’s not a bad habit. It’s just… what that’s called. It does get easy to mix up with the Marxist concept of socialism, which is likely why most marxist parties advocating for a socialist society are called “Communist Party” instead. The bad habit is to not challenge the fundamentally conservative, deliberate confusion between the two that any range of neoliberals and protofascists continue to use to pretend milquetoast socialdemocratic policy is some form of revolutionary action.
Man, US politics are so weird.
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.
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.
It bugs me that you’re being downvoted because you’re correct that modern descriptors don’t apply.
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?
