But, seriously, geeks have apparently hammered out how the economy (the federation economy) works. I’ve been meaning to read this, but haven’t gotten around to it yet…
Plus, the federation is ONE economy within a quadrant of the galaxy. The Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and Ferengi (among others) have their own economic structures, not to mention the Orion Syndicate, etc… and the Gamma quadrant led by the Dominon.
Over and above the handwaving of the economy, there is a lot of handwaving around other issues that plague us as well. How did we get from the Eugenics wars to the Original Series, for example? Part of the fun, is that it allows fans to explore these aspects that are left at the edges, and there is more structure filled in if see all the series, read the books and comics, and even some of the fanfic.
I fail to see how this is “fully automated luxury communism”. You could put “We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.” Bill Gates
and make it indistinquishable. Those with half a brain can see that we need aid for those that are at great risk of losing their jobs to automation that occurs ever so often throughout human history and be lost to the mechanization of capitalism being a cog in the machine. Automation is Kafkaesque. Raw capitalism is cruel and immoral. We cannot let our humanity die to greed or gluttony.
Given that they only had a couple of episodes where they were at his restaurant, for a short time, no. But it’s entirely possible that they do pay to eat there, even if it’s a system where they don’t pay in physical cash. As others pointed out, there is a credit system in the federation itself. And you regularly see federation citizens doing business with people who are outside of the federation…
Reading this, thinking “Holy fucking crap, in a generation the Republicans will be dead as the Whigs.”
And it reminds me of . . . OK, give me a minute, I think I have this transcribed.
Yeah, THIS:
“All that we had previously achieved mechanically by great exertion and coordination can now be done electronically without effort. Hence the specter of joblessness and propertylessness in the electronic age. Wealth and work become information factors, and totally new structures are needed to run a business or relate it to social needs and markets. With the electronic technology, the new kinds of instant interdependence and interprocess that take over production also enter the market and social organization. For this reason, markets and education designed to cope with the products of servile toil and mechanical organization are no longer adequate. Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and piece-meal character of mechanization. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth and interrelation that are indispensable to the all-at-once world of electric organization.”
“Paradoxically, automation make liberal education mandatory. The electric age of servomechanisms suddenly releases men from the mechanical and specialist servitude of the preceding machine age. As the machine and the motorcar release the horse and projected it onto the plane of entertainment, so does automation with men. We are suddenly threatened with liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seem to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society. It has the effect of making most people realize how much they had come to depend on the sentimentalized and repetitive routines of the mechanical era. Thousands of years ago man, the nomadic food-gatherer, had taken up positional, or relatively sedentary, tasks. He began to specialize. The development of writing and printing were major states of that process. They were supremely specialist in separating the roles of knowledge from the roles of action, even though at times it could appear that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ But with electricity and automation, the technology of fragmented processes suddenly fused with the human dialogue and the need for over-all consideration of human unity. Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before – but also involved in the total social process as never before, since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.”
“…the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy. Panic about automation as a threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.”
“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” she said. “Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”
A trim tab is a very tiny part of the ship, and as Buckminster Fuller said:
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”
To an owner, a job is a dangerous toxin that needs to be managed like any other hazardous waste. Better not to create the job at all, but if the job is an essential part of making a profit then the job will be created with the rest of the pollutants, as far away from the owners and their progeny as possible – like in China.
I agree with your description of this process: reactionaries are always trying to equate liberatory symbols with oppression, and vice-versa, and we shouldn’t play along.
But I don’t think the hammer-and-sickle is really an example of this process. The hammer-and-sickle is pretty much the symbol of the Soviet Union. Maybe we want it to mean something other than that, but it’s actually very understandable and correct that people associate the hammer-and-sickle with the USSR.
The reason we should distance ourselves from the symbol is not that it’s being undermined by our enemies, it’s that it actually stands for a thing that’s different than what we’re fighting for. To be honest, I’m actually fighting against the politics of the USSR. Aren’t you?
If people want something objectively irrational, shall we educate the people? or shall we make society deliberately stratified and cruel because somebody thinks that’s what they want?
By all means, if people want “jobs,” offer them “jobs.” But if what they really want is to be better than their neighbors, there is a fundamental problem that has to be rectified.
I agree with everything you’ve said about how the Republicans and others have blatantly used racism to advance their agenda for decades. My only point is that most of them, while cynically using racism for manipulation, also believe that races exist as biological distinctions and that race is a valid and accurate way to categorize people. And when you listen to the comments they don’t think are racist, it’s clear that they believe a lot of racist suppositions are real facts. Being racist and being a cynical manipulator are not mutually exclusive.
The only thing we disagree on, I think, is how much of what they say they also believe. I think they believe most or all of it. And that’s why I say that racism has a life of it’s own, and no one really controls it now - they may use it, but they don’t control it. It’s so deeply embedded that when they are looking for a manipulation tool, their own beliefs lead them to pull racism down from the shelf instead of some other tool. That in no way excuses their behavior - but understanding it should give us a boost in figuring out how to fight them, and help us be more effective.
I think AOC realizes this, too - New York is a racist city, but also a liberal city. She’s had to deal with these complexities all her life. She doesn’t use the easy racial memes that some others on the left use, she criticizes behavior and policies, not personal identities.
