Is there a Klingon Hayek and Keynes?

[T'Girl]

Certainly there is no effort to explain how this moneyless society rewards risky innovations.

There are efforts made to explain other aspects of the future, admittedly occasionally with techno-babble, but not always. But the economy of the 24th century was for some reason held separate from explanation.

Whether you use the term class or caste, the Klingons have a stratified society. There no indicate that all the "great houses" in the empire are warrior lead. Worf came from a named house and his father didn't seem to have been strictly speaking a warrior.

Dedicating yourself to the "way of the warrior" may be only a option for high born Klingons. Durass (sp?) was on the Klingon Council more it would seem because of the power of his house and as a political manipulator.

 

[FormerLurker]

I wouldn't want to go all Christopher on you, but really, equating class society with caste society is akin to equating communism with fascism. It might be of slightly more than academic interest to know which kind the Klingons prefer.

Timo Saloniemi

I hate to just jump in like this, but empirical evidence suggests that in practice, communism is fascism. That is, every communist in name society of the last hundred years or so was fascistic in its execution.

 

[Timo]

Well, communism is an economic system. Fascism is an economic system. Many nations have had the communist economic system or then a system with a high degree of communist elements to it, and all have been totalitarian. Italy had a fascist system once, and was totalitarian. Germany had a fairly similar system as well (although they never considered it fascist - that's just a perversion introduced by Germany's then enemies), and was totalitarian.

It doesn't follow that fascism would be communism. It just follows that totalitarianism is popular in all sorts of economic systems, ranging from fascism to communism to all sorts of free-market capitalism. And even that doesn't tell us much, because totalitarianism is popular on its own account. Only mercantilism would actually require pairing with totalitarianism in order to be an effective economic system. And conversely, totalitarianism is one of those forms of government that has good odds of working in company with an inefficient economic system (both in the sense that it can uniquely cope with the handicap, often through conquest and coercion, and in the sense that it can thrive on the economic suffering).

Whether Klingons have a class society or a caste society would depend on who is speaking. Nazis never had much of a say in whether their system was fascist or not, as the inaccurate expression (descriptive enough, but Germany would have insisted on a native name rather than an Italian one!) chosen by others has stuck; the US was and remains imperialistic to its enemies (and many allies).

So, we might choose whether to believe Antaak or Kolos on this. Kolos has antipathies towards the existence of the warrior class, so "calling it names" would make sense. Perhaps they really are a caste, near-divinely established, but Kolos feels they should be a mere class, breachable by mortal means? Antaak in turn speaks as the (past and wannabe) member of a caste, so "calling it names" doesn't make similar sense. Put together, the formally correct way to describe the Klingon society in the 22nd century thus might be as a caste system. But DS9 portrays definite class movement which clearly contradicts the idea of a caste system.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[horatio83]

To me Klingon seems to be a aristocratic society so its economy is most likely feudal.

 

[sonak]

I wouldn't want to go all Christopher on you, but really, equating class society with caste society is akin to equating communism with fascism. It might be of slightly more than academic interest to know which kind the Klingons prefer.

Timo Saloniemi

I hate to just jump in like this, but empirical evidence suggests that in practice, communism is fascism. That is, every communist in name society of the last hundred years or so was fascistic in its execution.

No. Totalitarianism is not the same as fascism. Fascism is a form of totalitarianism, as is Communism. That is, yes both Communism and Fascism are totalitarian in practice, but there are still major differences between the two systems.

 

[horatio83]

Well, except for the usual right-winger game of equating communism and fascism (one pseudo-argument that you often encounter is that national-socialism is socialism for semantic reasons) back in the days there was the notion on the left that Stalin has basically become a fascist. I do not like it as it seems to be a bit of a cheapo, implying that there is a pure communism yet Stalin corrupted it. Seems to be more honest to admit that Stalin was a consequence of Lenin, i.e. structurally inevitable.

Of course economically the key difference between communism and fascism is that fascism is not really an economic system, that nothing really changes when fascists grab power. Sure, there was a change as the nazis ended the Brüningian austerity nonsense and the public economy naturally became naturally more important during war preparations but the nazis did not really socialize anything but cooperated with big business.

Ideologically fascism is basically a distorted form of communism. When you hear a fascist and a communist speak they might initially sound very similar, bad bankers, ordinary workers are exploited and so on. Yet communists realize who the real enemy is whereas fascist project it upon an outsider. That's why there were no real change in the economic sphere.
As Benjamin put it succinctly, every fascism is an index of a failed revolution.

So I would claim that the key ideological error (that violence is bad should be obvious) of communism is the dream that society will be whole after you destroy the current oppressive forces which ignores that you create new forms of oppression in the process. In the case of fascism the error is the idea that society has been whole once (this reactionary notion makes it a right-wing ideology) and all that has to be done is to undo the forces which allegedly recently messed it up, be it Jews in the case of the nazis, Muslims in the case of contemporary European neofascists like Breivik or immigrants in the case of Greek fascists (proving again how important demand management is; not just for the sake of the unemployed or for the sake of one's own social democratic convictions but for the sake of simply preventing communism or fascism from ever appearing on the menu again).