that's a stupid way of "poking fun."
I think it's an awesome way of poking fun.
Then you are not responding to actual socialist arguments, but are instead attributing false claims to the socialist argument for you to dismantle. The term for this is "strawman."
Even hard-core socialists respect personal property that's actively being used for something and by someone.
You just keep telling yourself that.
I am a socialist (a member of Democratic Socialists of America, to be precise), and I spend a lot of time reading socialist and socialist-leaning opinion sites. I have never encountered a socialist who thinks that personal property should be subject to arbitrary confiscation.
That's like saying "in a socialist society I could just take your car from you while you're asleep!"
So if I
owned let's say a newspaper business, you (hypothetically) the socialist government could not simply
nationalize that newspaper, and use it to spread the governments version of the "truth?"
There are two separate issues at play here:
1. The right of the government to confiscate property and what circumstances should govern such confiscation.
2. The use of media by elites to spread propaganda.
With regards to #2, let's make one thing very clear: Media is used under capitalist systems to spread propaganda just as clearly as it was under Stalinist or Maoist systems. The only variable is which piece of rhetoric the particular set of elites in question used to justify their undemocratic domination of society.
With regards to #1, let's not pretend that capitalist systems actually view the right of personal property as sacrosanct. Eminent domain was placed into the Constitution itself exist for a reason -- even the 18th century oligarchs who wrote the United States Constitution recognized that sometimes the right of the people to receive a public good outweighed the right of an individual to a piece of property. So if you think the government should never, ever be able to confiscate a piece of property, then let's be fair in our condemnations; this is a "sin" all societies share equally.
Meanwhile, goodness knows that capitalist police forces feel free to confiscate personal property from citizens for
completely arbitrary reasons, with no real due process, if those persons are poor and the police claim to be conducting a drug-related investigation. Just read
this account of police confiscating the personal property of a woman whose estranged husband was a suspect in a drug investigation -- including things like a PlayStation -- to see how little the capitalist system actually cares for the personal property rights of those without wealth and power.
So, the questions are:
Are there any circumstances under which it is appropriate for the state to confiscate property, and, if so, under what circumstances can such confiscation be appropriate?
As a democratic socialist, I do not think your scenario -- the government nationalizing a newspaper in order to spread propaganda and suppress dissent -- is appropriate at all. However, I
also do not recognize the so-called "right" of a person to "own" a firm whose wealth is actually created by the labor of its employees. In my view, such an "ownership" system -- the private ownership of social wealth -- is a work of legal fiction.
I would view it as appropriate for the government to make the firm publishing this newspaper into an employee-owned cooperative subject to democratic management, with a board of directors and upper management elected by all employees in a one-person-one-vote system.
All other things being equal, if one particular person wishes to have a media platform that reflects his views and his views alone, then I think he has an obligation to run and maintain such a platform himself -- a possibility that has become exceedingly plausible in the modern world, where we can all obtain and maintain media platforms with no real barriers to large audiences for free or at minimal costs. But if he requires the labor of others to maintain his media platform, then he should carry a legal obligation to run that platform democratically and reflect their policy agenda in the product, too.
I am open to the idea that maybe someone who founds a firm by taking the risk of investing her own capital ought to receive a greater share of the profits and have the firm reflect her individual vision -- at least for a time. But I think that as a firm grows larger and larger, there comes a point where the labor of the employees is more important than the initial risk undertaken by the firm's initiator; at that point, the firm should be switched into a democratically-managed cooperative. I'm open to different ideas about when that point is reached, however.
I will, because it's the truth, and something that one could find out by researching the subject for about five minutes.
Graduated with a poli sci major, thank you very much.
I hold a Bachelor of the Arts in Political Science with a Concentration in International Relations, thank you very much. And
sonak is right -- your scenario is specious and can be debunked by a very small amount of research into actual socialist proposals.
Phoenix class is correct in that there are different manifestations of socialism. I would call it different degrees of socialism-- different points along the same spectrum.
Differences in points along the spectrum
matter. Otherwise, you'd be forced to conflate Augusto Pinochet with Winston Churchill just because they both happen to have been capitalists. Democratic capitalism is very different from authoritarian capitalism -- just as democratic socialism is very different from authoritarian socialism.
And, no, not all socialist visions involve state ownership of firms. The communal ownership of the means of production can be accomplished through employee-owned cooperatives, for instance.
I think American pop culture, including Trek, is so quick and eager to praise socialistic societies, yet leaves the darker sides of that economic system completely unexplored.
Oh, please. "Socialism" has been a dirty word in American popular culture for
decades. One of the most reliable rhetorical devices used to suppress those who dissent from laissez-faire capitalist arguments has been to engage in red-baiting. Socialism is constantly demonized and conflated with authoritarian communism or with fascism. The only relevant center-left party in the United States isn't even a member of the Socialist International, and has spent thirty years moving steadily further and further to the political right (to the point where its signature health-care law was actually invented by a
right-wing think tank and first implemented on the state level by an avowed capitalist).
What you're reacting to is a trend in the more liberal -- not socialist, but liberal; liberals believe in capitalism with some socialistic modifications to curb its worst excesses, but still believe in the private ownership of the means of production -- content creators in U.S. popular culture to use their platforms to criticize the worst aspects of
laissez-faire capitalism. But most influential people in American popular culture are opponents of laissez-faire capitalism, not capitalism period. (Once again -- differences in points along a spectrum
matter.)
You want to brag about your tech socialism? Fine, but give me an episode or two where we delve into its darker sides too. Sci Fi should have no sacred cows.
I think this is fair. No economic system will ever be perfect; all systems have their costs and benefits. Showing these costs and benefits would make for compelling drama.
I don't know how I ultimately feel about there not being any money in the Federation. What irks me most about today's society is the inequity of it more than the inequality. The meritocracy is a falsehood to maintain order. We don't all have the same opportunities. We don't all have the sane safeguards.
Exactly. The system is rigged and always has been, and it merely uses the rhetoric of equal opportunity to justify economic exploitation.
I would in fact go one step further: I would argue that it is inherent to any meritocratic system that those who benefit from the meritocracy will eventually find ways to subvert the rules of fair competition in order to benefit themselves and their allies. Meritocracy cannot function in the long term, because it will always be subverted and produce an oligarchical class. As Christopher Hayes argues in his book
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, "He who says meritocracy says oligarchy."
Dunno. I love Ron Moore but he's a twat to ridicule something he doesn't understand. Oh Gene couldn't explain how the moneyless economy worked? Oh. Could he explain explain the FTL?
I don't think Moore was being a twat; I think it's legitimate to make fun of poorly thought-out pieces of worldbuilding. I wonder if Moore might have worked to develop a more science-fictional economic system that reconciled the various seemingly contradictory clues throughout
Star Trek if he had been the showrunner on TNG or DSN.
Jake sells his stories to the Fed News Service--but they pay him nothing because Earth has no currency system. He uses the words, describes the process, but he was not paid anything.
Apparently Jake's a masochist, then, because I'd wager that journalism is hard work. You wouldn't do something like that without a kind of compensation.
The local news stations here in Seattle accept stories submitted by their viewers.
Which I rather object to -- it's an act of exploitation to accept a story produced by someone's labor without compensating him or her for that labor. The fact that this person is blinded by the media attention does not make it any less exploitative.
T'Girl said:
The notion of fairness is tied to the fact that we're all equal in dignity
I don't see that particular tie.
And thus
T'Girl once again reveals her hierarchical political agenda that seeks to find rhetorical justification for policies that are blatantly designed to enrich some at the expense of many -- her constant agenda to justify oppression and injustice. "Some people are just better than others, they should benefit from other people suffering."
* * *
I'm going to end by quoting
a previous post of mine wherein I speculate about how the Federation economy works, attempting to reconcile various contradictory pieces of evidence, and to reconcile them with Gene Roddenberry's anti-capitalist inclinations:
Star Trek is full of contradictory information about whether or not the Federation uses money or engages in economic exchanges using currency. You have Picard declaring that humanity does not use money in "The Neutral Zone;" you have Crusher charging a purchase to her account in "Encounter at Farpoint;" you have Scotty buying a boat in
Star Trek VI and Kirk selling a house in GEN; you have Tom Paris talking about money going the way of the dinosaur in "Dark Frontier," and the Federation offering to pay for access to the Barzan Wormhole in TNG. It's all over the place.
To me, the simplest way to reconcile this is to assume that the Federation uses electronic currency (called "credits") rather than physical currency, and to assume that the Federation's welfare system is so extensive and can so easily provide so much that Federates can live in conditions we would today consider to be middle-class comfort without having to work for a living.
The Federation being therefore able to guarantee such a high standard of living to everyone on its core planets, the "playing field" is therefore finally truly level -- unlike the so-called "meritocratic" capitalism that exists today, in which the game is clearly rigged to redistribute wealth to the top. (Just ask the residents of Camden, New Jersey, or rural West Virginia, how much of an "equal opportunity" they ever had.)
So starting from that level playing field, Federates do seem to engage in some competitive economic activities, as demonstrated by things like Joseph's restaurant in New Orleans, or Quark needing to purchase passage back to DS9 from Earth, Scotty's buying a boat, etc. I imagine that for luxuries that cannot be easily replicated or otherwise provided for in the welfare system -- a beachfront mansion, for instance -- citizens do compete to gain such wealth. This would provide incentives for innovation, the biggest advantage of capitalism. Presuming an extensive welfare state, however, accounts for canonical references to money no longer being the driving force in society, to people working to improve themselves and humanity rather than for mere economic gain, and accounts for the idea of money as people of the 20th and mid-21st Centuries understand it, no longer existing.
(Ironically, only by starting from a perspective of wealth redistribution to create some equality can a truly competitive system of economic exchange emerge. Of course, as David Brin argues, this might not have surprised Adam Smith -- who favored an economy of mostly-equal economic actors competing with one-another, but investing their profits into the commons and preventing too much wealth accumulation. Adam Smith and Karl Marx may have had more in common than people imagine.)
The following is my speculation on how the Federation would seek to preserve the advantages of limited economic inequality and competition while preserving its broadly egalitarian welfare economy:
I imagine that the Federation likely has several systems in place to prevent the rise of an aristocracy -- limits on wealth inheritance; taxation to redistribute some wealth back to the lower income brackets; a limit to how much wealth a person may accumulate, etc.
And I imagine the Federation also structures business entities very differently than they do today. Modern private businesses are usually bottom-up redistribution machines -- they take the wealth employees generate each day in the form of their labor, compensate employees with a value that is less than the wealth they generate, and then redistribute the rest to the owners of the business in the form of "profits." A Federation dedicated to economic justice, I argue, would require business entities to compensate employees with value equal to that which they create: an equitable distribution of profits to all employees, with ownership of the business being shared equally by all employees.
After all, the justification for a business being "owned" by someone at the top (in spite of his business being utterly dependent upon the labor of many other people called "employees") is that he took a financial risk by investing capital into the business -- but in a society in which wealth is much more broadly equal than it is today, it seems unlikely that society would need a class who own greater capital to invest such capital in order to create businesses. Worker-owned cooperatives seem like they'd be much more common, once society is freed from the existing systems of inequality that require a capitalist class to initiate an enterprise.
Broadly-speaking, therefore, I am presuming that the Federation can be described as a socialist society. Not in the sense of there being state ownership of all enterprises, but in the sense of the private ownership of the means of production being broadly ended, and social ownership of the means of production (in the form of democratically-controlled worker-owned cooperatives) being the new norm.
So what does that mean for
Star Trek? Well, I am presuming, for instance, that there is a strong possibility that Sisko's Creole Kitchen in New Orleans is not actually owned by Joseph Sisko, but that it is in fact a worker-owned cooperative of which Joseph is the founder and head -- sharing ownership of the restaurant with the waiters and kitchen staff, democratically elected to lead it, but not owning it per se, and sharing all profits equitably with his staff. Same, perhaps, with Broht & Forrester, the holonovel-publishing company in "Author, Author." Same, perhaps, with the mining company on Janus IV in "The Devil in the Dark." Etc. To be honest, I can't recall any character in ST being described as "owning" a business himself -- nor can I recall any reference to "shareholders."
Of course, as anyone who recognizes the logo I'm currently using as my avatar might surmise, I myself am a socialist, so of course I'd be inclined to view the Federation as a socialist democracy.
Still, I think this can all be summed up best by this image, taken from
Young Democratic Socialists's Facebook page:
