The proletariat labours for society as a whole not for himself, since there is no such thing as money, everyone receives free health care, everyone receives equal education opportunities, plus many other similar differences.
But not all races are communists, for example the Ferengi are clearly capitalists since they believe everyone should work for himself.
Please don't flame me.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Well, the Federation's utopian post-materialist uberegalitarian and ubersecular society certainly borrows more than a few pages from Marx, yes. Of course, it apparently arose not through a revolutionary displacement of the bourgeousie by the proletariat brought on by technology cheapening labour and rendering the proletariat irrelevant (as Marx predicted) but by technology eliminating disparity and a Roddenberrian enlightenment descending on all humankind to make love not war and to share their lunch money.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
To disagree with my good friend Tom, no, of course they aren't. Earth, and the Federation in general, represents a post-scarcity economy.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Oh, you know damn well that's what I said
Similar to Marx in may respects, yes. But communist in the traditional sense, no.
In fact, on the macroeconomic scale, the Federation is not a post-scarcity economy, seeing as starships can't be magically replicated and the power for transporters doesn't just come out of the wall. But I think the implication has been strongly given (though not said outright) that the state acts on the macroeconomic scale essentially alone and conducts trade with other powers, acquiring resources and then investing them exclusively in public institutions like Starfleet and Earth's planetary power grid and such. In that sense, the Federation may well roughly translate to a socialist state.
[ February 03, 2002, 13:14: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
quote:Originally posted by The_Tom: the power for transporters doesn't just come out of the wall.
Of course not, everyone knows that the transporter's power comes from the floor.
Seriously, Communism according to Marx states that there is no government, people just govern themselves based on agreement (take that Hobbes). As long as the Federation have things like the Federation Council and the President, it's a Socialist state. And as far as we can tell, 300 years into the future, the Federation remains a Socialist state.
A damn fine one, though. Posted by Quiggie (Member # 771) on :
Yes I will have to agree. Those are some interesting analyses. And unlike a communism, in the Federation there are benefits to labouring hard, for example an Admiral with many years of education would have a huge house and his own shuttle and whatnot, whereas someone who refuses to do any work will probably not have much.
So let's say someone refused to do any work at all. What would the society do with him? I doubt they'd let him die. They'd have to give him a place to live.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
It's probably unwise to question utopias too closely. They were named as they were for a reason, after all.
But, to address your question, some level of food is probably assured. (I don't want to get into the issue of energy "too cheap to meter," but considering the general state of affairs on Earth, it seems likely they're capable of pulling more power, probably from the sun, than they tend to use.) Housing is a little trickier. Even if energy becomes unlimited, space is not. I suspect a nice two story villa by the coast is not part of the Federation Constitution. But I'm sure there are shelters just as there are today.
Posted by thoughtcriminal84 (Member # 480) on :
I don't know if they're commies, but I know there sure are alot of Red uniforms in Trek. Posted by Vogon Poet (Member # 393) on :
These discussions usually end up the same way - "Trek isn't communist because Communism is EVIL and the Federation aren't, so there."
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Not that I aprove of the dumbing down of today's society, but good grief Tom. Had someone delivered a load of spare letters to you that you had to use today or you'd be forced to pay tax on them?
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
My keyboard was feeling frisky. I couldn't say no to it.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I feel that it was an-anti 733t reaction on your part. Join Tom's Campaign for Real Words. Use uneccesarily complicated phrases in everyday life. Only get off with ugly women. Rub it in Liam's face that he is awful at finding synonyms. Go on.
Bastards.
Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
Then again, what do we really know for sure about the Earth government in the 24th Century? We've seen precious little about how the average, non-Starfleet citizen lives on Earth, and as far as I can remember, the only government agencies we've seen on the planet are Federation, not local. Picard's little speech to the thawed corpsicles in "The Neutral Zone" seems to imply a world where you don't have to do anything at all if you don't want to. Certainly replicator technology has made a major impact on day to day life; Keiko seemed surprised that Miles' mother still cooked her own food. It would be interesting to find out what the population of the world is at that time. I doubt it would be anywhere near what it is now.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
The Federation, in ITSELF, may be somewhat socialist, but it's an alliance of over a hundred local governments, who can probably do anything they darn well please (minus things like caste systems once mentioned and violations of basic rights). It's interesting that the central government is NOT all-powerful, nor does it seem inclined to be. That's just weird. It's as if human nature suddenly made some absurdly massive change around 2100. What, did we kill all the greedy, power-seeking people? It'd go along with there being lower population. Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
quote: What, did we kill all the greedy, power-seeking people?
Yeah. Don't you remember Picard's line, "then we did what Shakespeare suggested - kill all the lawyers..."
(I'm paraphrasing of course)
Posted by Lost (Member # 417) on :
Yes, yes, I say we kill them tonight.......
Still, the amount of 'volunteer' time spent building a starship bigger than a raft must be forbidding.....
or is it all done on a community service basis????
I think that was a bad canonical line that should be ripped from the pages from which Stewart read them.......
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Uh, ok, we'll get right on it.
Posted by thoughtcriminal84 (Member # 480) on :
Sorry, this is going to be a rambling post...
World War 3 (Eugenics War?) must've been a real bitch. Maybe it was devestating enough to actually burn alot of the hate out of the world.
I know, I know, that's ridiculous. But it would explain why there aren't so many arabs, mexicans, indians, etc. etc. in the future. (Aside from the Wasp demographics that watch the show, of course.)
Only problem with that is that they gave the number of 600 million dead somewhere in regards to that war...which, while being a fantastically large number, is not going to make much of a dent in the world's population.
We also don't know that much about what the major philosophers of the future have had to say. Considering that one or two of them might have been genetically enhanced, they might have developed a philosophy that was both powerful and accessible to the common man (which David Hume basically said was only rarely possible, and I think only Marx ever truly achieved)
Random Thoughts:
How much are the Fed children indoctrinated from birth? Must be pretty intensive, I'd say, if virtually the entire world is of one homogenous mindset...
Where ARE all the dissetent groups? We've seen some of them that have problems with Cardassia, but Jesus, how many people in the Federation really give a shit about that particular region (before the War, of course) of space?
How much did Vulcan Logic influence Earth culture? What, it had NO effect? Where are the imitation Logic Academies on Earth?
when did the first replicator come online? Who built it? I'll bet hard Federation cash that THAT had as much impact on human life as First Contact did, if not more.
Several intermediate technologies apparently didn't exist...for example, nanoprobes from the Borg should have some sort of Federation analog, right? What, they went right from actually growing and cultivating their food to zapping it into existence in the replicators without ever using nanotechnology? Huh? How did they figure out how to do that without gradiant steps in matter manipulation?
Question: I remember that Khan was around during the late nineties or so...but don't I also recall an epi of Voyager where Janeway went back to San Francisco in 1999? There was social chaos in that episode, but nothing compared to the way things were described by elsewhere. Or are my dates wrong?
Anyway.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"Future's End" took VOY back to '96, not '99. '96 is also the same year Khan took off in the Botany Bay. One theory is that the Eugenics Wars didn't take place in the '90s, but I don't buy that. Another theory is that Los Angeles simply wasn't affected. But since there was no indication whatsoever that there was a major world-wide war going on, that seems unreasonable, too. Personally, I think that Braxton's changing of the timeline (crashing and letting Hnery Starling take his 29th-century tech) simply caused the Eugenics Wars to not happen. Of course, after the timeline was corrected, the Eugenics Wars come back and Henry Starling goes back to just being a hippie.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Or, as my theory goes, Star Trek's history of the period from 1966 to 15 years after an episode's airdate is subject to the same fucked-up laws of physics that allow black holes to have cracks in their event horizons and Saavik to mysteriously change her appearance over the course of a few weeks and warp factor conversions to come out differently depending on the circumstances and stardates to not convert perfectly to Gregorian dates. Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
Bunnies are soft.
Posted by First of Two (Member # 16) on :
Maybe the Eugenics Wars were quiet, covert wars rather than out-and-out fighting?
Posted by Lost (Member # 417) on :
Seems like an awful lot of sneaky pete killing, 600 million is a tad high for that....
A limited nuclear exchange, targetting places with huge populations, Chinese cities, New York, LA, and the such would achieve this without too much trouble. LA not being hit could be chalked up to a prototype ABM system being installed there.....
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
"How much are the Fed children indoctrinated from birth? Must be pretty intensive, I'd say, if virtually the entire world is of one homogenous mindset..."
I've always found a line from "In the Cards" fascinating in this respect. Jake repeats pretty much word for word Picard's bit about "improving yourself" from "The Neutral Zone", except that instead of Picard's passion and belief, Jake says it as if it's been taught to him by rote.
Certainly Sisko's joy over the baseball card seems to jibe with Picard's "Mankind no longer cares about possessions". But in many ways we're less perfect than we were in 2364. And in others, a lot more. Especially Crusher.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Earth, and the Federation in general, represents a post-scarcity economy.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)