The end of capitalism in the ST universe...?

[Deks]

Ds9 incorporated way too many aspects of human behavior from contemporary times which were in clash with what TNG established.
The gray area would have to be more along the lines of that stereotyping species and responses in situations is not a good idea.
The way Ds9 was made, it was almost as if I was waiting for people to start saying regular vulgarities so it would be turned into just another show that went against it's premise with humans that behaved anything but the future ones.
Ds9 also in my humble opinion dumbed many things down ... and for me, it wasn't that great.
Also, incorporating religion was just another sour grape.
But that's just me.
I don't mind the darker tone of the show, but I do mind that many things were completely forgotten and dumbed down to suit the drama (which for some reason happens all the time).
Are the writers THAT inept to keep things as they are and make a situation that would have the same dramatic effect ?

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

Fortunately things like capitalism and communism will be gone and looked upon as barbaric, narrow-minded systems from the Dark Ages.

Giving away the means of production to just about every Federation citizen makes a mockery of any form of government we have today.

If I can make myself every item of food, clothing, habitation, tools (if I actually need them!), Ferrari hover cars I need, who cares about money and who cares who's running the country or indeed the planet?

 

[Turtletrekker]

I don't think that people need money in Federation society, if they depend on completely replicated food and materials. If you want real food, you either grow it, or buy it. If you want that rare collectible or artwork, you buy it. Hand-make your own clothes, buy the material (Beverly bought a bolt of cloth in Enconter at Farpoint.) That Risa vaction? Buy it. Luxury items (Scotty's boat)? Buy it.

Things you need, you can get by replicator. Things you want will require some form of currency, and that is where the incentive to work comes in..

 

[Guy Gardener]

Kirk said there is no money in the future. Nog said Humans don't use money. Jake replied don't mock our philosophy. Externally there is money and the federation will just hand over money to it's citizens to use places like Quarks, but Quark didn't pay rent. He called Sisko a very generous land lord.

There are trillions of humans raised to believe in a religion called their "philosophy" which would be most likely in a nut shell what picard explained to lilly. They're all religious zealots. Y'know how priests and nuns don't get paid. They just follow a calling of their heart. Even an Incompetent like bashris daddy who has had multiple occupations.

 

[Sean Aaron]

Perhaps some posters here should look up the term ethnocentrism, there are many cultures whos entire basis is cooperation not compitition, just because many critical aspects of the dominant western culture currently rely on greed and professional gambling (or as we call it investing) does not mean this is the way it has to me forever.

Thank you. I was reading this thinking that some people in this thread must think every human culture on earth is like North America and Europa -- guess what, it isn't. You want to know how diverse human culture can be read up on the peoples of Papua New Guinea. Some of the tribes there have mores and customs more alien than anything depicted in popular science fiction.

 

[Triskelion]

Sounds interesting. Of course I've also seen where the collectivism has the opposite intended effect: total mistrust of others, especially of other countries, and no desire, whatsoever, to live in a world where you would give another person the benefit of the doubt. So yeah, I'd agree that there's all kinds of cultures with all kinds of longterm effects.


But what I really like about Trek is that it says people have found a way to live together, which apparently both preserves individual cultures, but also has created a peaceful global culture. The idea of a standard culture might have different implications with the hindsight of even the past five years; but there's no denying the emergence of a more global culture even today. Influenced perhaps by the homogenization of markets, manufacturing, information and media, and of course encouraged by the generally-accepted lingua franca, ironically not French, but English.

The physicist Michio Kaku posits that in the future each individual will have two cultures: their unique heritage, and the common global. Now, this is a proposal which would seem to have a bit of the weight of truth to it. If this were the case? I wouldn't fault the members of the global culture whose own heritage(s) served as a model for the global, with being culturally arrested or insensitive. Especially if they embrace IDIC.

We tend to embrace the things we need to improve our lives, and superfluous things only with leisure resources. This includes cultures.

 

[Sean Aaron]

That's why you have to socialize children into sharing their toys and into not over-eating -- because we're a species that evolved in habitats were resources were scarce and if you weren't greedy enough, you'd die.

This is an exceedingly poor example. Children are socialised to want things, not the other way around; you have to teach children to share because they're given contradictory information about possessions right from the start:

"Don't touch that doll, it's not yours!"
"Happy birthday, here's your own doll!"
"It's good to share your toys with others, let that other child play with your doll!"

They are naturally curious however and will play with anything they can get their hands on -- that is innate to our species.

Kids also don't need to be taught not to over-eat, that's another function of how they're socialised: you force children to eat everything that's on their plate or feed them junk food like McDonald's all the time, yeah, you'll get kids that overeat. You don't make a huge issue about food, and then whether or not you get this behaviour is more down to the individual; it's certainly not going to apply to all human children as an innate attitude towards food. There's been plenty in the USA since the 1950s; the "obesity crisis" is a phenomenon of the last 15-20 years.

 

[Kaijima]

Personally, I had always imagined that "credit pay" in Starfleet was actually a form of compensation for people devoting themselves to an /unusually structured/ occupation by Federation standards. That is, most people in the Federation do not actually /need/ to carry around or accumulate trade credits because they live in private civilian homes, have their utilities and resources provided by the post-scarcity world that the Federation has brought about. Especially with replicators and cheap, clean energy galore, people generally do not ever need to "buy" anything that they usually need over the course of their daily lives.

However, Starfleet personnel, and people also serving the Federation and maybe some institutions in highly specialized, disciplined roles, forgo many of these comforts and "rights" that regular people have. In order to keep the system from becoming imbalanced, they must be "paid" credits that are essentially stand-ins for whatever resource and energy budget they'd use up if they were living in a home, off official Federation property, and just doing regular civilian "stuff".

As a result, SF members can technically grow a stockpile of wealth, but in the long run, it won't actually "buy" them anything more than anyone else can have over the course of their lives. I would imagine that Fed Credits can't accumulate interest, for example, and there isn't like, a stockmarket for investing them and turning one amount of credits into a greater amount. You get what you get, and what you get is always worth the same amount, and everybody else has the same amount, just distributed along a different time scale.

Generally, I imagine that at a broad glance Federation, or at least Federation Earth, life doesn't look all that different from the present day, it's just that the details reveal things are operating on fundamentally different principles. For instance, Picard's family winery was in the business of making wine not for profit, but as trite as it may sound to 21st century humans, a hobby and a family pastime. Their wine products would technically have a special value because they were unique, non-replicated, and in limited supply, but there would have to be trade channels established to handle the distribution of such hand-crafted items. For example, perhaps there is a waiting list other people can sign into, requesting Picard wine when a certain vintage is available.

 

[FordSVT]

Picard's vineyard = Sisko's restaurant. They do it for love, not money.

 

[AlanC9]

We've got people doing productive work for no financial gain right now. For instance, computer game modding -- there are hundreds of people investing many, many hours to develop programs that cannot be sold, and must be given away if they are to have any value to anyone.

 

[Sean Aaron]

Picard's vineyard = Sisko's restaurant. They do it for love, not money.

Exactly; in the case of Picard's brother it's a matter of continuing a family tradition. Not like family farms are generally profitable enterprises, is it? Ultimately if there's no money in it then people will do it for love of the craft. I would imagine in addition to restaurants there's replimats where people socialise and I could see people applying for things like retail and living space in areas where it's in short supply and having a waiting list influenced by a business plan or application interview. Basically a big University campus setting.

 

[FordSVT]

Picard's vineyard = Sisko's restaurant. They do it for love, not money.

Exactly; in the case of Picard's brother it's a matter of continuing a family tradition. Not like family farms are generally profitable enterprises, is it? Ultimately if there's no money in it then people will do it for love of the craft. I would imagine in addition to restaurants there's replimats where people socialise and I could see people applying for things like retail and living space in areas where it's in short supply and having a waiting list influenced by a business plan or application interview. Basically a big University campus setting.

Farming is a good example. With replicators, the vast bulk of food eaten by the population, the day to day meals, is going to be via replicators. This eliminates the need for mass produced "real" food and allows smaller farms and allows family farms to operate and produce the most highly desired natural foods for fine restaurants, personal splurging, etc. They do so because of the prestige involved in doing so, the feeling of accomplishment that comes from running an operation and providing people with a high quality product they enjoy. A nice home in the countryside perhaps. And I doubt that many jobs are full of back-breaking work that grinds the soul today, technology would take care of the heavy lifting and menial labour beyond our methods.

Things like that, combined with everyone having their own family replicator and in some cases even power plants (TNG, "The Survivors") goes to show that in many ways life in the Federation is the opposite of what some critics say (socialism), it in fact gives the means of production directly to the individual.

 

[stj]

Since capitalism as we know did not always exist, it is pretty much common sense to posit that it might not always exist. The notion that somehow it will last forever because it is an inevitable expression of human nature is silly. Conservative people with limited knowledge and little imagination are often convinced that they are being realistic or toughminded when they repeat these platitudes! Berman Trek tended to get a little silly on this point, especially in his less experienced days when DS9 was running. That episode where Bashir's ne'er-do-well father somehow could wangle an illegal procedure required ignoring blatant stupidity, for instance.

 

[Triskelion]

Picard once referred to "economic systems" as a strange thing from the past - perhaps in the episode when they unfroze those 20th century people.

In Emissary, the first episode of DS9, Bashir said he didn't want a cushy job or a research grant, but preferred "frontier medicine". I wonder what a research grant would have provided for. Possibly the ability to manipulate credits in order to pay a staff, or acquire offworld resources? Point is, how can a world without an "economic system" (huh?) utilizes grants or other government funding? Answer? It's TV, and it's full of fudging.

How can a world not have an economic system? That's like saying there are no resources to shift around. I think the premise is interesting, but frankly unrealistic and irresponsible, after all, we don't have to show how these solutions and problems are addressed on TV.

But I do believe it's not communism, at least in the practical sense. Practical communism is centralized, but I don't see that Fed citizens are required to surrender their resources to the state, thus creating basically a world-class clusterfrak.

 

[FordSVT]

Picard once referred to "economic systems" as a strange thing from the past - perhaps in the episode when they unfroze those 20th century people.

I don't remember him ever saying that. He's said that the old banking institutions have disappeared, and he told Lily that the economic system was significantly different (and I choose to believe his "no money" comment was an over-simplification for brevity due to its relative unimportance in an extreme situation).

But he's never said that they had "no economic system", that doesn't even make sense by definition. All societies have economic systems.

 

[PhoenixIreland]

Picard once referred to "economic systems" as a strange thing from the past - perhaps in the episode when they unfroze those 20th century people.

I don't remember him ever saying that. He's said that the old banking institutions have disappeared, and he told Lily that the economic system was significantly different (and I choose to believe his "no money" comment was an over-simplification for brevity due to its relative unimportance in an extreme situation).

But he's never said that they had "no economic system", that doesn't even make sense by definition. All societies have economic systems.

I think that quote wasn't about earth, it was in the early seasons when they were mediating some alien dispute and he commented that he found it odd that someone would argue over economic models, this was a mocking refrence to the then cold war

 

[Damask]

Picard's vineyard = Sisko's restaurant. They do it for love, not money.

Well Quark does it for the money. I imagine the replomat was free but if you wanted something different or "real food" then you had to pay.

 

[Deks]

When dealing with the Ferengi and species outside the Federation, yes you need currency (gold pressed latinum for the most part) ... unless you used direct method of trading with him and other races (which also worked) on several occasions.

 

[FordSVT]

Picard's vineyard = Sisko's restaurant. They do it for love, not money.

Well Quark does it for the money. I imagine the replomat was free but if you wanted something different or "real food" then you had to pay.

Both Ferenginar and DS9 are outside of the Federation, the latter until the end of DS9 when Bajor joined (and Quark had to either close his for profit business or operate it under Federation rules: for free).

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I don't think Quark would be required to give it for free, he'd just have to deal with people who never have money and expect things for free who would think he's strange for charging money and go some place else instead (this is assuming a currency free Federation as opposed to the idea of one where they do have money, it's just that the pursuit of wealth isn't desired).