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