There is a strong streak of techno-utopianism in the Silicon Valley variety of libertarian, so I can see that tendency allowing them to ignore the implicit and sometimes explicit statements about economics made by Roddenberry, his heirs, and their proxies:
For the other kinds of Libertarians and conservatives, though – especially the anti-intellectual/anti-artist types – the above must be jarring. They’d probably be more comfortable rooting for the Empire in Star Wars.
Even so, she is moving the Overton window.
My question for the Star Trek universe: If there’s no money or worry about possessions, how do I get a shiny starship?
Yeah, she sure is uppity. Doesn’t she know that she’s supposed to serve for a decade or two before speaking out? Because by then she’ll have been co-opted.
You replicate a small one out of generic parts. Sure, it’ll take a while and it won’t be the Enterprise, but eventually…
Also, there’s plenty of room in the ST universe for greedy guts like Harry Mudd or Quark, but they’re not going to find much satisfaction living in the Federation.
Unions, labor laws, minimum wages, those are what will SAVE capitalism from itself, not steps towards its destruction.
And let’s not forget - dialectically - also instrumental in finally overcoming capitalism. Yay to that.
I mostly like the phrase fully automated luxury communism - my only objection is that is perpetuates an idea of consumerism.
I laugh every time I realize how much attention AOC is getting and how the right apparently is losing their minds over her, devoting hours of million dollars of airtime every week against her.
Just keep on vapor-locking onto her, that’s great, meanwhile everyone else can get stuff done like the surprising gun regulation legislation that somehow passed for the first time in decades?
She’s a freshman and utterly powerless, represents a very small district. I welcome what she says and does as a very important young enthusiastic voice in congress but she is a very very tiny part of a lumbering giant and meaningless in the end.
They can because Star Trek itself has never had a complete or consistent economic model. The replicator is a hand-wave over the concept of scarcity the same way as the universal translator is just plot spackle over why everybody in the galaxy speaks English. As a recent Discovery episode demonstrated, when you dig too deeply into how it’s supposed to work you end up with something silly and implausible everybody was previously willing to just ignore.
That’s not a dig against fully-automated luxury space communism (don’t we all want to live in TNGverse?), just an observation that the Trek writers frequently didn’t get what that would look like and their interpretations were all over the map. Sometimes there are “Federation Credits.” In the first TNG episode Crusher buys a bolt of fabric in an alien bazaar and says “have it sent to our ship, charge to Dr. Crusher.” But she’s paying in what? Replicated local currency would just be counterfeiting, and would make the Federation an economic nightmare for the scarcity-driven economies they interact with. It’d be better for everyone involved if she’d just scanned the bolt of fabric and replicated the fabric herself. The shopkeeper loses a sale, but still has the opportunity to sell to someone else. There ends up being a lot of weird space-bartering for fifty liters of techno-goop here and there. And then we have a whole libertarian-caricature species that has replicator technology but is still obsessed with currency, so the writers had to invent “latinum,” a substance that cannot be replicated, to be scarce and valuable so they can still have something to unhealthily fixate on for some hard-to-fathom reason.
It’s always bugged me how Star Trek can’t figure out what its own economy is supposed to look like, when hubristic pronouncements over how we’ve fixed all human problems are such a central feature of the franchise.
Why is that? We must have bread, but we must have roses, too.
That said, I have issues with the title that this handy diagram should explain
I agree. It’s sort of evolved over the decades and still has a lot of holes and hand-waving and a deus ex machina. None-the-less, from the beginning the underlying message is one of an ideal society being defined by a lack of scorekeeping using money and possessions.
Early on in STNG, the Ferengi were supposed to be the series’ primary antagonists. It quickly became apparent that they’d work better as a society to be mocked for its eccentricities (in the context of and in contrast to the Federation). By DS9 they exist mostly for comic relief. If only that were the case with Libertarians in our current society.
[That might have been an interesting plot arc: the Ferengi as a clever bunch of sneaks who are part of the Federation and who constantly try to subvert its core values with their vast resources and ability to prey on weakness. Quark and Rom as interstellar Koch brothers.]
It could be the Enterprise NX. By the 24th century, historical cosplay is srs bz!
eta:
“We have engaged the human forces!”
“The Federation?”
“No sir. The ‘22nd Century LARPers’ and the ‘501st Imperial Legion’.”
I always thought “fully automated luxury communism” was the respectable and serious position. “Fully automated luxury gay space communism” is the slightly jokey version (in a ha-ha-only-serious kind of way)
Indeed.
Peter Kropotkin kind of covers this in chapter 9 of the Conquest of Bread
But she’s not the only one.
Andrew Yang is running for President on the specter of automation and the need for a universal basic income. One thing that he apparently does not take into consideration is that a just transition to renewables in a Green New Deal would requite a lot of new jobs in the energy and building renovation sectors to meet net zero energy requirements. These jobs are local and not likely to be automated soon.
I haven’t seen many people thinking about what happens to the economy when the cost of fuel goes away.
Does fully automated lux communism just push off an inevitable future collapse of the system?
“The tendency is for the system to collapse, and for recessions to destroy shoe factories whose customers are too poor, or not numerous enough, to buy all the shoes, Marx believed. This collapse can be staved off, he argued, if the shoe factory goes to great lengths, for instance by investing in new technology allowing that shoe worker to double her productivity and make 10 pairs of shoes per day (or maybe the same number of shoes at a lower price).”
“But the collapse is only pushed into the future. New technology will be also be acquired by all the competing shoe factories, squeezing profits — and squeezing some factories out of business. And if the factory buys shoemaking machines instead of hiring new workers, then it still faces the problem of producing more shoes than can be bought by the workers making them.” -BusinessInsider
