The problem I see is, even in a so-called "post-scarcity" society like the Federation, I can only see it being possible with a massive government bureaucracy - and with that, a resulting loss of freedom.
I mean, at the end of the day,
any complex economic system requires a large government bureaucracy and restrictions on personal autonomy. There is a reason for the old anarchist catchphrase "Property is Theft." The distribution of scarce goods and services inevitably results in restrictions on personal autonomy. Whether we view these restrictions as protecting someone's rights or as resulting in loss of freedom ultimately has as much to do with one's premises and a priori assumptions about how wealth ought to be distributed as anything else. "Freedom" often means very different things to different people.
Prime example: Most Americans viewed citizens of the Soviet Union as living under the oppression of a tyrannical Soviet government, because it was a dictatorship that violently repressed basic political rights. Many Soviet citizens, on the other hand, viewed Americans as living under the oppression of a racist government controlled by large corporations who kept millions of Americans in poverty, and prevented them from having access to guaranteed health care, employment, and housing.
Who was right? Well, I'd argue that they were both right, but that the Soviet Union was worse. That's my bias -- I view people as being entitled both to political rights (right to vote in competitive elections, right to form political parties, right to free speech, etc.) and to economic rights (right to a job, right to health care, right to housing, etc.), and I view the former as coming first in the hierarchy of needs. But ultimately, the exact same pieces of information could lead people from either country to view their counterparts as oppressed while they themselves had something called freedom.
Some of my learned colleagues...they know who they are
... believe in a sort of "democratic socialism," and furthermore believe that the Federation is an example of that. That is their right, of course. I won't insult them for believing that.
Yeah, and I do want to make one thing clear: This is my interpretation of the canon, but it's certainly not the only one you can support with canonical data. The canon is full of contradictory date. Furthermore, because the Federation is supposed to represent, if not the ideal society, then one that represents meaningful human progress that everyone in the
Star Trek audience can believe in, we all are naturally going to want to see in the Federation those traits we wish to see in our own conceptions of an idealized society. So our own biases will naturally come into play -- we're all looking for utopia, after all.
I interpret the Federation as having a form of market-based democratic socialism because I think this is a good way to reconcile contradictory canonical data about the presence of money on Earth and in the UFP with both real-life human economic experiences and with
Star Trek's recurring theme of anti-capitalism. Your mileage may vary.
My response is simply this: I don't believe in democratic socialism. Socialism, IMHO, is anathema to the concept of freedom and democracy. It requires government control and ownership of everything...and how can you have freedom with that?
As others have pointed out, socialism does not automatically mean the government must own and control everything -- though of course, that is how the Soviet Union justified its state monopoly on wealth and power.
The thing about socialism is that it is not really one system. Rather, like capitalism, it would be more accurate to describe it as a
family of economic systems -- this one characterized by communal ownership and control of the means of production. This may be manifested in different ways.
Now, sure, hypothetically, you could have the state owning and controlling the means of productions on behalf of the people, and hypothetically this could be liberated society. In reality, of course, experience has taught us that an institution's monopoly on wealth and power tends to corrupt rather than to enlighten.
That's why I and many other democratic socialists favor a market-based form of socialism -- one in which workers get an equitable portion of the wealth their labor creates, in which firms are organized as worker-owned cooperatives rather than pieces of private property, in which market-based competition exists within a framework of regulation designed to severely curb levels of economic inequality while still giving people the chance to advance in life.
Again, if I've offended anyone by saying what I just said, I do apologize, it's not my intention to troll or to piss anyone off. But other people in this thread have spoken their minds, I'm just taking my turn.
I certainly don't take any offense at what you say. As a democratic socialist, I understand that my views are at the further left of the American political spectrum, and that most people in pseudo-democratic capitalist nations will tend to disagree with me.
I would, however, like to suggest that you read an article entitled
"Towards Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice" by Joseph Schwartz and Jason Schulman of
Democratic Socialists of America. It will give you a better understanding of both why many view capitalism as inherently oppressive, and of what those who advocate for democratic socialism mean (and how their vision differs from the tyranny of Stalinism in the Soviet Union).
As for a post-scarcity scenario, if production were to become so efficient (and require little to no "human" labor) and so inexpensive, and its output exceeded the rate of consumption, much of that overflow would be directed into a free commons which the citizens could draw upon at will and manage collaboratively. Private monopolies would be impractical without scarcity, a huge bureaucratic apparatus would be unnecessary as the free commons would be accessible to all and purchases would be pointless. It would be like paying someone in the arctic to make snowballs.
This. Though there will always be some levels of scarcity, it seems highly probable that in a world characterized by the miraculous levels of technology present in
Star Trek, the amount of wealth needed to sustain what we would today consider a middle-class standard of human(oid) life should have become so small as to render "the cost of living" to be virtually free.
The Bajorans were not in a position to buy replicators from any third party since they had nothing to trade with perhaps the exception of sex or religious mumble jumbo.
The Federation would not have given advanced technology to a non-member world as it would have been illegal.
Since Terok Nor is/was Bajoran property we can only assume the Cardassian level technology was not capable of creating self-replicating replacators at the time of its abandonment and that it is unlikely that Cardassian military grade equipment was below that of civilian equivalents on the open market.
What else explains their backwards love of farming? They can't ALL be traditionalists.
In one TNG episode, Picard gave a needy couple (who didn't want to leave their colony) a small replicator that he said would take care of all their needs. Food, water and clothing. And it was pretty small and self contained.
Now, we know a single replicator won't solve the hunger issue, but does any Bajoran
need to starve on Bajor, when a small replicator can probably provide for 20 people for who knows--a decade or so?
Those issues with droughts and hunger implied that those Bajorans exclusively relied on farming for food, even though they know what replicators are and what they can do.
I think we would have to look at each individual episode's dialogue to try to infer the exact situation in post-Occupation Bajor. But my suspicion would be that the Federation would have stepped in to provide enough "sentientarian" aid so as to prevent wide-spread death and malnourishment, even if it could not provide enough technology to solve all their problems.
I wouldn't be surprised if Bajor was full of refugee camps that received regular shipments of Federation food and medicine for the first two or three years post-Occupation, while one hopes the UFP would have provided the Bajoran government with the funding and expertise necessary to repair their infrastructure to a pre-Occupation level.
22nd century humans were able to solve their scarcity problems to the point of getting rid of money.
Well, maybe? The canon is contradictory here. In "Dark Frontier" (VOY), Tom Paris makes mention of the "New World Economy" that caused money to "go the way of the dinosaur" in the 22nd Century. However, in "These Are the Voyages..." (ENT), Holo!Trip, while talking to Riker, is talking about different kinds of trust, and references trusting someone so much that you'd trust them with your money. And then there are references in TOS to Starfleet officers being paid and to Starfleet having invested specific sums of money in their officers' training.
I suppose one way to reconcile this might be to suppose that the "New World Economy" began to take place in the 22nd Century, perhaps after the Founding of the Federation, and that the transition was incomplete as of the 2260s?
(Personally, I prefer my reconciliation -- that money is a luxury, not a necessity; that firms are organized along worker cooperative lines according to democratic socialist principles; and that cash is relatively rare compared to electronic currency. But that's me.)
They could have employed the method of modern day Panama (with their canal) and charged a fee to travel through the wormhole.
I always assumed the Bajorans were charging ships a fee that stop there.
For all we know, maybe they do. Or, at least, maybe they charge a fare to enter the Bajoran terminus of the Wormhole.
I hope that they were. It would be really strange that they let ships dock there and repair them free of charge, and then just send them on their way.
Well, the issue is complicated by the fact that Deep Space 9 is legally Bajoran territory but is administered as a Federation starbase. Maybe civilian ships pay a fee to the Republic of Bajor to use the station's repair, shipping, and docking services, while Starfleet and Bajoran Militia ships do not?
I don't expect ST to be coherent, not entirely at any rate, it's got to have plot holes and contradictions all over, especially if you start quibbling over the smaller details. I think we should seek large scale, big picture coherence. And that, most of the time, we do have. One thing is certain, Earth's economy is not in any way capitalistic, so for those of you who need to think otherwise, well you'll just have to get used to it or live in a parallel universe.
Yep. There's no avoiding the recurring anti-capitalist message in
Star Trek.
what large populations are in a post-scarcity existence today
I didn't say "post scarcity."
In the Western world and increasingly in other parts of the world too, large numbers people do live without scarcity
Nope. You are confusing "living in wealth" with "living without scarcity." Possessing wealth today is only possible at the cost of someone else being impoverished.
Nightdiamond said:
When we think about solving poverty problems, we want to come up with a way to provide plenty for all.
If a machine like the replicator can literally do that, wouldn't getting rid of money and developing a program to distribute them to all civilians be the natural result?
How else can it happen?
Something like that appears to have happen in Trek history.
No more hunger, poverty, yearnings for basic needs--people are free to pursue interests without worrying about supporting themselves.
On the other hand, you are at the mercy of the government for the very food you eat-the rug could be pulled out at any time--so the idea goes, anyway.
Depends on how the system is organized. If you have a situation where you've put physical control of the means of production into lots and lots of autonomous hands, then that won't happen.
Ralph Offenhouse might have freaked if he saw that example.
That's what Offenhouse wanted--control- to be able totake care of himself-- which makes sense when you think of that scene from "In the Cards".
Which is quite silly, though, because you don't actually "take care of" yourself under capitalism, either. You're wholly dependent upon other people for your wealth -- either upon an employer to translate a small portion of the wealth your labor creates into the capital you need to survive, or upon your employees to create wealth that you are then given "ownership" of. And of course, you're wholly dependent upon other people in other industries to produce the resources you need to survive, and upon the capital you have either received from your employers or from your customers in order to compensate for those resources.
There is no such thing as self-sufficiency in a complex society. The only people who are self-sufficient are the people who "produce for use"--that is to say, who live off of the land directly. And even then, they rely upon the services of government to enforce their claim to land ownership.
No, capitalism does not produce self-sufficiency. You don't take care of yourself under capitalism. Capitalism is about
power--about creating conditions of inequality whereby some people can survive only by selling their labor (and receiving a small portion of the wealth their labor creates back in the form of "wages") in order to advance the dominance of a small class of people by redistributing wealth to them.
So while I can't imagine how it would work is largely irrelevant.. Roddenberry was making a grand statement about humanity
Shouldn't be too hard to imagine. Humanity has done without money for much of its existence using gift economies, credit systems and so forth.
I'm anti-capitalist, but let's not idealize the past, either. Feudalism and its antecedents were hardly paragons of liberty, either; capitalism, for all its oppressiveness, represents real and significant progress over what came before it. The fact that humanity survived without money in the past is virtually meaningless, because their societies did not have the sophistication or resources necessary to support the kinds of populations and lifestyles we have today.
That's why real progress in the economic sphere requires an economic system that preserves the advances capitalism has given us while also recognizing and avoiding the oppressions those advancements have been built upon.
It's just that under the current system people are obliged to work hard for long hours to earn wages that reflect only a fraction of the actual value they produced, just to make ends meet, while using some of their "free" time supporting that same system by buying things that are priced higher than they cost to make.
Very true.
Bare minimum apartments are probably free.
The problem with that is, what happens when the population outpaces the available space?
There is significant evidence that when education levels increase, population growth plateaus and reaches a point where most families choose only to have one or two children -- population growth ends up reaching replacement level or lower. In the highly-educated Federation, there's probably a point at which population growth just stops. Since 23rd Century Vulcan had a population of roughly 6 billion in ST09, I would infer that most Federation Member homeworlds are at somewhere near that level or lower.
There is a scene in one of the novels - think it might be
Enterprise: The First Adventure - which shows Kirk staying in a kind of massive, hive-like, 'cubicle hotel' kind of place. Something like
this. (And the last thing he does before leaving for his duty posting is tell the complex's computer to "close out [his] account here."
)
Perhaps this is the minimum standard housing in a society like the Federation?
Well, I for one would hope that it the minimum standard housing for the Federation would at least be a modest apartment in urban areas or a small house in suburban or rural areas.
* * *
A few years ago,
Jacobin magazine published an article entitled
"Four Futures." The article goes through different futurist scenarios, and the editors have described it as "Socialism for
Star Trek fans." It's worth a read if you want more insight into
Trek's idea of a future with "no money."
