Some of the most interesting insights occur at the edges of the Federation where its explorers encounter, and often wage war against, other civilisations that are either at a more primitive stage of development or have created technologically advanced tyrannies.
There, on the margin, alien species afford us opportunities for introspection, like the Bajorans who have just come out of the brutal occupation by the Cardassians, a supremacist species that ran Bajor like a penal colony complete with concentration camps and genocidal drives. In one episode a Bajoran freedom fighter identifies a former Cardassian concentration camp monster and works tirelessly to bring him in front of a Federation-Bajoran War Crimes tribunal. I can think of no other TV programme which, within 40 minutes, can better educate the young on the horrors of the Holocaust — a reminder that good science fiction is as much about the past as the future.
Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station where different species mingle to trade, a meeting point between the communist, post-money Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station, there is a sleazy bar run by one of the hyper-capitalist Ferengi who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until his brother, who also works for him, has had enough: he calls upon his fellow workers to form a union and strike for their basic rights. For the Ferengi, neoliberalism is more than an ideology or even a secular religion — it is also a culture, a way of being. Pitching their critique of neoliberalism at its most humourful, Star Trek’s writers portray the Ferengi as humanoids incapable of differentiating themselves from Homo Economicus. Judging from the lengths the scriptwriters went to compile all 285 of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Holy Book, they must have had enormous fun. “War is good for business,” but “Peace is good for business too.”
To balance the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny, Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet ruled by bureaucratic centralism. An abducted doctor is forced to work in a hospital where he discovers that medical care is dished out strictly in proportion to the patient’s social worthiness index — a number compiled by a centrally controlled computer.
Star Trek interrogates our humanity through encounters between the Federation and other species. In truly Hegelian style, the planting of alien officers inside Federation spaceships forces humans to reflect through the eyes of those with a sharply different philosophy and outlook. There are numerous examples, but the one face-off most pertinent to our own times is what follows when a supersmart android, known as Data, is introduced on USS Enterprise.
Data has no capacity to feel but nevertheless is driven by the urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data carefully studies our behaviour, and our art. He becomes not only a much-appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from today’s perspective, a character that serves our thinking about AI.
Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights comes to the fore. When a Federation laboratory requests that Data agrees to be disassembled for the purposes of replication, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and thus retained, Data raises a subtle objection that could have come straight from Noam Chomsky’s rejection of vulgar materialism: “There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure,” he tells the laboratory’s chief. When the latter shrugs his shoulders and suggests that Data has no choice, Captain Picard demands that the question — of Data’s agency — be taken to court.
The trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android is not sentient. Data, therefore, has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism. Instead, it acknowledges that simulating sentient beings, as Chat-GPT does already, is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion in which it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness like Data.
More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and technophobia. For example, the Federation heavily regulates genetic engineering, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities as done in eugenics. On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire, the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life — Captain Picard’s defence of Data on the trial concludes with the point that “Starfleet was founded to discover new life”— with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.
The United Federation of Planets is no utopia. The enemy within, xenophobia, is there, dormant and ready to sully the Federation’s humanism; ready even to rescind the Prime Directive. When the starship crew return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans abuses the ship’s doctor in what is a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell holds the rest of humanity at ransom until all aliens leave Earth. And it is not just populist speciesist extremists that the Federation must reckon with. Its own secret services, outfits such as Section 31, also pose a serious threat to its libertarian communism. And yet, as a defiant injection of hope, the Federation’s humanist communist values hold.
The question is: despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost 1,000 episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund Left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through a maze of threats? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s Left is that we need to avoid both a conservative technophobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ failure to appreciate the importance of property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.
In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared to dream that, by the end of the 20th Century, technological progress would have eradicated scarcity, poverty and exploitation. In The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he imagined a world where mankind’s “economic problem” had been solved:
“For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
The reason history disproved Keynes was not that humanity failed to invent the necessary technologies but, rather, because the property rights over the machines became ridiculously concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Is it any wonder that neither science nor compound interest delivered us from scarcity, poverty, exploitation and war? Is it any wonder that, instead of Keynes’ happy commonwealth, humanity has edged closer to an early Star Trek episode in which “cloud minders” live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines?
Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-optimists. Cloud capital and AI is a necessary but insufficient condition for our liberation. To make it sufficient, it will take a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons. At the same time, as Star Trek poignantly shows, our liberation depends on not falling into the other trap of authoritarian collectivism.
Today’s moribund Left could do far worse than to take its cue from Star Trek‘s bold embrace of a humanist anti-authoritarian communism.
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SubscribeThe problem with communism (and most forms of leftism in general) is that it assumes that the source of mankind’s dismay is material and external to him; alleviating humanity’s material wants will therefore result in utopia, as man’s natural goodness shines through. However, man is an intelligent being, and intelligent beings need stimulation and novelty to remain healthy. Man evolved in an environment, the savannahs of Africa, in which at least some stress is omnipresent and where death is as likely as life–he is more adapted to strife than he is to harmony. Intelligent creatures who thrive in conditions of at least moderate stress do not do well when all their needs are met as a matter of routine; it is the higher animals which suffer from zoo depression, not the insects and the bivalves.
Man craves meaning, and for centuries it has been the struggle for survival that has given man that meaning. Remove that struggle, remove the stimulation and novelty provided by meaningful risk, and man does not ascend to become the Ubermensch or the New Soviet Man or any other slogan. Instead, he succumbs to boredom. And when people become bored, they seek to alleviate it. The quickest way to do so is to cause mischief.
Look around you. The vast majority of today’s tumult and strife is ginned up by people to give themselves something to do, something to keep them busy, something to keep them active and engaged. “Drama” is the coin of the realm these days, because we as a society are profoundly bored. It’s almost impossible to starve in the West unless you really work at it. The most fundamental needs of man are met, through one charity or government agency or another. The struggle to survive has been fought and it has been won. And now we are bored.
And if we don’t have meaningful conflicts, we’ll settle for meaningless ones to keep us busy. No matter how destructive they are.
We probably disagree on aspects of evolution but this was really good dude. Well done.
Absolutely true. To use another Sci Fi analogy, this is why the first version of the Matrix was not accepted by its occupants.
Pensioners, provided they are physically fit enough to get out and about and have enough money, seem to manage to sufficiently occupy themselves without succumbing to boredom or causing mischief.
Dennis, you could be describing me there, and I think I manage to fill my days very happily. But fitness and funds are not the only things required. Personally, I also get great value from my ‘homework’ into historical events and from my friendly-competitive dinghy racing.
Travel, food and passive entertainment are not enough alone yet. Maybe when I get a bit more decrepit…. But the younger me definitely fits well into RWH’s analysis.
Good to hear you are enjoying yourself.
However, I wasn’t excluding friendly-competitive activities or ‘homework’ by saying physical fitness and enough wealth are required, just that they are generally a pre-requisite.
Really? Look at who is gluing themselves to roads or throwing paint over famous works of art. A lot of them are old fogies.
Or look at what billionaires get up to. Lots of mischief there.
Actually, pensioners are a good example of what Right-Wing Hippie is claiming: once retired, and with sufficient means to live in reasonable comfort (most, not all, I know), pensioners do have to work quite hard to find something to do. It is not all bad of course – there is a lot of satisfaction to be had from putting on two coats of gloss rather than the hastily-applied single topcoat that was all there was time to do before work and/or childcare obligations prevented further time being spent on non-essentials.
Personally, I’ve never quite understood the mentality of people that can’t occupy themselves without ‘work’. There’s a billion things to do (as long as you have enough money and physical health).
I’m old radical. Appalled at the Left in these times. I spend my time in internet research.
RWH, that was a fabulous and thought provoking reply to Yannis. I thought his essay was very good too, and was quite persuasive initially.
This is what UnHerd does so well and reminds me why I come here….
You are right. This means that once scarcity has been eliminated by thecsuper abundance caused by tbe full automation of labour and nuclear fusion then neuro modulation using brain implants or other technology will have to be made universally available to alleviate boredom.
We are a long way from neuromodulation acting at the single cell resolution that is needed for this. But everyone has the ability, if they make the effort, to focus attention to find new patterns in their thoughts by ensuring that open mindedness breaks the accumulated learnt associations that otherwise trap us in the habits of herd thinking.
I’m sorry, have you have read the entire article? Finding meaning and challenges in a post-scarcity condition are central to the premise of Star Trek and the examples that Varoufakis gives. After all, the characters of Star Trek willingly take enormous risks to satisfy humanity’s drive for exploration.
Also your argument that humans no longer thrive when their (basic) needs are met is basically an argument against the typical billionaire entrepreneur. They have their material needs (and much more) covered. Are they all doing nothing all day? And what about inheriting wealth, should that be abolished to nurture that sweet productive fear of poverty? People are not just motivated by huge sums of money, intrinsic motivation is everywhere. Take scientists, take many engineers, take writers, take athletes, take open source developers. It is precisely when the majority of the population was not concerned anymore with basic survival that innovation and ideas exploded.
He didn’t say people do nothing, he said they get bored and engage in mischief.
A lot of the philanthropic giving out there is far from uncontroversial – lots of people don’t like what the Gates Foundation does with its money, for example.
Or if you want an example from the right, look at Elon Musk. The richest man in the world is clearly bored and spoiling for a fight. He once found meaning in the struggle and pain of building hard engineering companies, with that Everest conquered he has moved on to politics.
Semantics in my opinion. I wasn’t really thinking about philanthropy. Philanthropy schemes are sometimes just methods to gain influence on the international stage and sometimes even just tax evasion schemes. In particular to keep wealth in the family. Worse still, most billionaires essentially have billions of public money in their portfolios after years of loose monetary policy and bailouts but I digress.
I just doubt the whole puritan position that comfort is bad and lack thereof is good. Most of the famous entrepreneurs did struggle but not for survival. Dig a little deeper and the public story of the once poor self-made genius is rarely actually true. Most of the ultra wealthy were at the very least already from a pretty comfortable well-connected background. So in part they were able to do what they did because they did not have to work three jobs to pay the rent.
I had an uncle that used to say ‘he was too busy working to earn any real money’. Even in the Victorian era many of the scientists and engineers that Britain produced were either from relatively wealthy backgrounds or were literally supported by someone who was.
I suspect there will not be many entrepreneurs produced from the Gen Z we have impoverished.
The point is that the satisfaction of all material needs does not resolve human conflict or manifest Utopia.
Star Trek portrays this Liberal Humanist fantasy of enlightened beings working towards the ”common good of Everyone” flying around on a Starship,
No-one (entrepreneurs, etc) trying to get ahead of anyone else/ no special accumulation of resources for unique individuals/ no Darwinian drives/ everyone united in this common brotherhood of man, resulting from ‘Post Scarcity’…
which is quite naive.
I think you’ll find there is a one to one ratio of life to death everywhere, death is a universal certainty we can all acknowledge
No one escapes life alive.
Lovely stuff. Really, really good. Take it a little bit further – we persist in seeing ourselves as observers of the Universe when we are actually evidence that the Universe is becoming aware of itself. If a human takes a view of something, that’s the Universe thinking about itself. Whether this is happening anywhere else is as yet unknown, but if it is happening here then it must be the case that it is in the nature of matter to start thinking about itself – eventually!
Engaging reflections, as usual when you are in your more sincere mode. (I also like some of your ironic posts). The available evidence indeed shows that inherited or engineered easy rides through life don’t provide enough of a sense of purpose. But I don’t think the materialism you identify is in any way a monopoly of the Left. Nor is nihilism.
We can assume that hunter gatherers had a sense of community and drive to stay alive that kept them going for their likely range of 40 to 70 years on Earth. That’s putting aside the huge numbers who died soon after birth, as well as those struck down by disease before 40, killed in violent clashes with other tribes, or exiled from the “home” tribe.
By the time we reach the earliest cities, the picture is already quite bleak for most—toil, routine hunger, and actual enslavement for a large percentage of the population. Boredom was less of a problem though. How far would we go back if we could?
The materialism or externalization of meaning you indict is more characteristic of the some on the Left, true. But purposeless, and quiet (or super loud), superficial comfort joined to emptiness, anxiety, and desperation is rampant, and not confined to one side of our social or political divides. Our materialism needs a check, in every corner of our troubled societies here in the Anglosphere.
Since intentionally returning to a life or death daily struggle to survive—with however much selected upside—seems both a political and practical nonstarter (at least for those of us not built like Bear Grylls or whomever) maybe more of us can take individual responsibility for being less oriented toward possessions and pleasures, more attuned to purpose and meaning. What do you guys say—problem solved?
As for me, I do need to pursue my life’s purpose—such as it is—with more energy, discipline, and gratitude. And get out camping in the woods again soon.
Just because you have a full belly doesn’t mean you won’t want what somebody else has.
And be willing to take it if you get a chance.
Brilliant response.
Yes. Amusing ourselves to death.
I fear that Mr. Varoufakis is redefining the concept of communism beyond reason. Also unfortunately there is no evidence to support the idea that mankind would rid itself of its demons once all material wants have been satisfied.
Because the problem is not just boredom but an existential one – what is the point? Answer that question in some objectively demonstrable form & a lot of our problems go away. A fixed & certain God was always the answer in ages past, but one that has never thus far stood up to any sort of rational scrutiny.
The search for the ineffable – that’s the real Star Trek.
This is true, on the nature of humans being intrinsically conflicted, and this conflict being inescapable.
I’d also point out that any ‘post-scarcity’ Utopia relying on a magic Infinite Energy Device — which is somehow also ‘Green’ (not extractive on the environment), and can also magically convert its infinite reserves into unlimited transmutations of matter — is likely to remain out of reach.
The idea that technology can help us escape from all material limits is extremely naive – comparable to a kind of religious superstition or literalist faith in the Rapture.
Maybe Varoufakis or the Fully Automated Luxury Communism people will invent one.
Didn’t you miss the part where there’s the opportunity for earth dwellers to go into space on a close to light speed spaceship, fly into wormholes and experience the equivalent of impossible Physics experiments, land on some pretty hot and exotic planets (Riker, stop gawking!), get to fight aliens and get shot at, get into ‘drama’ and all sorts of human affairs and triangles, including with naughty aliens.
Sounds better than pushing trolleys at TESCOs, even if I own nothing except my starship jumpsuit and badge, and maybe the heart strings of a hot alien or two…
Also they do discuss these kinds of issues, such as in episode [Star Trek] TNG S4E02, when Picard visits his brother’s vineyard home and his family. And just like humans nowadays there are the homely folk who run farms and decide that that’s what they prefer to do, which I’m sure can be structured into hard work and challenge despite not selling anything.
Also many of us don’t have zero struggles now, many of us can’t feed our children the way we want, can’t find caretakers or teachers we want, don’t get the job security we want, yet we have all the ideas and desires to thrive none the less. Ideas don’t die in economic abundance, or if there’s no economic racket pulling you along by the ear and stunting your growth.
This is the problem with some aspects of Conservatism (I am a conservative by the way), it tries to conserve what is good about society, but in it’s zealousness, also ends up conserving the bad, and for far too long. What should be conserved is what elevates the human spirit, what should be discarded is what makes it slavish and brute. Wars and cycles of violence are the tail end of this paradigm too.
Economic scarcity makes us brutish, let’s make that disappear, of course without force but with ideas and ingenuity, love and inspiration, music and joy, spaceships and voyages into the unknown.
This is of course without mentioning the current spiritual scarcity that we are facing. Why didn’t we conserve what was once an available spiritual abundance? is spiritual scarcity good for us?
I fear the real problem that confronts any attempt to create a Star Trek world is a truth about human nature as articulated by a wise Ferengi barkeeper to his junior colleague: “Let me tell you something about Humans, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holo-suites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people… will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don’t believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.”
Actually, all you have to do is take away the assurance of a plentiful supply of toilet paper (as in the early days of the pandemic), and human nature will rear its head.
I’ve often read that we are three hot meals away from anarchy. Me? I live near a well-stocked Tesco supermarket so…
Whatever you do, DO NOT investigate further HOW that Supermarket keeps its shelves well stocked. IF you did, then you’d be horrified/terrified at how Net Zero inanity puts it ALL at risk, AND how Tesco and its well stocked shelves are about 48 hours IF that, from being empty.
I find the ‘human nature’ argument intellectually lazy. The truth is, the science behind it is fuzzy since there are so many chaotic factors. Moreover, we have to study it from the inside and so it remains hard to distinguish the impact of culture and other external factors. Every generation our understanding changes again, as far as static unified characteristics can be discovered at all. The danger of pretending it is a hard science is obvious too: take social Darwinism.
Of course that does not stop a status quo from arguing that slave societies are natural, that feudal societies are natural or that capitalist societies are natural.
All three are natural, just like shedding your baby teeth and sadly, your hair, is natural.
I think a comparison to the naturalness of warfare, disease, and brutality is more apt here. As with murderous rage, the fact that they are natural doesn’t, of course, mean we ought to just lie there and take it.
Capitalism, by which I mean a free market system, is necessary to liberal democracy. Liberal Democracy – meaning self rule tempered by guaranteed liberties – is currently the most optimal political arrangement of which we can conceive.
The alternatives are either dictatorship or collectivism, even if they’re run by completely dispassionate intellectuals (who at any rate, probably don’t exist).
No political economy can be deemed perfectly natural, other than perhaps the law of the jungle, red in tooth and claw.
But the free market run amok creates a grave threat to any robust version of democracy, and heightened material inequality in the name of liberty. The market is not the purely self-regulating force some hold it to be. Capital should not be able to purchase political access and sway on the scale it currently does in the States.
In the US, where I live, teacher’s unions – labor – have far more power than capital. Our destructive COVID shutdowns were largely driven by teacher’s unions, along with excessive police interventions in our political processes. All public worker unions are enormously powerful and wealthy, and often decide our elections. They are almost entirely ignorant of financial systems and capital markets.
The private sector does need to have some basic rules, so that contracts can be honored and the public can be protected from bad faith actors. Things like fraud or similar abusive practices need to be punished.
However, our public sector often fails to protect the public from things like dangerous pharmaceuticals or bad consumer products. Our public sector, with depressing regularity, often fails to even keep dangerous criminal offenders from re-offending, while at the same time stomping on other individuals for minor offenses.
Either way, democracy and freedom require a prosperous middle class, and a prosperous middle class can only come from free market capitalism. Our current economic and political pathologies are in fact a result of free markets being hampered or often enough crippled by excessive government regulations.
In the US, we can see this fairly clearly with eye wateringly high university tuitions, and extremely expensive real estate. Both goods are excessively overpriced largely as a result of state interventions. The costs of the former are hugely inflated by tax payer backed student loans, and the latter by antiquated, rent-seeking (meaning cronyism or corporatist) regulations.
Corporatist, cronyist, heavily regulated governance is the exact opposite of free markets, and is the result of political lobbying and self dealing, or “rent seeking.”
If those are removed, the market will to a large extent regulate itself.
Otherwise, you’ll have very large groups of politicized, corrupt government agencies, which offer correspondingly large opportunities for wealthy or well connected individuals and groups to control our lives.
Spare me from lectures from a Ferengi.
Fun article. Some questions:
• What role will the State have in this society? Since it will be libertarian, has the State already withered away?
• Are individuals allowed to opt out of the Common Property Alliance or must all be required to join?
• If required, are individuals still allowed to accumulate any “unnecessary” things or will a Property Police be needed to monitor accumulation of such things?
• Will there be accumulation limits for necessary individual things and what things need to limited by law to prevent scarcity?
• Who will be tasked with confiscating excess things needed for the common good and will individuals have a legal right to contest the finding of excessive possessions?
• Should collective rationing of things be necessary, who shall decide the duration of rationing?
Just some questions/thoughts for people that have thought about this more than myself.
Do you have to build the work camps you will have to live in or will the last slaves builld them for you.
The capitalists will sell us the prison camps in which we will incarcerate them, comrade.
Very good!
Better be cheap. Can’t afford any options.
You’re assuming there will be free riders and noncompliance in this society. But in reality, all will accept total equality aka Equity- Each According to His Ability to Each According to His Need.
Yeah, right! Pure science fiction!
In Star Trek people are not equal though. Star Fleet is a highly hierarchical organisation and we can only assume that other parts of society also still have hierarchies. However, it is just not based on material wealth and also repression seems to be pretty low. So perhaps it is much closer to a true meritocracy. Since materials things exist in abundance and things are automated, there are no ‘free riders’ either because that assumes that some people are toiling for others. People only work voluntarily because of all sorts of intrinsic motivations from altruism to competitiveness and pride. Will some people just indulge and do nothing? Probably, but how does that hurt you?
It’s more likely to anger or seem to hurt you if you are working your life away for something that doesn’t matter much, or harms people. Those who find right livelihood or purpose in service to others, including their own families, are quite blessed.
It’s been a long time since I watched Star Trek and I can’t really recall how it was organized. My questions could probably refer to any stateless, classless society where automation produces abundance.
Don’t you think any system run by humans would eventually result in some kind of unequal accumulation and ultimately a Hierarchy based on that accumulation? If not physical property, one would think it would be an accumulation “tokens” or some type of reward based currency that grants privileges based on “good deeds” or intellectual/athletic performance.
Part of the privilege might be access to opportunities. Maybe cutting in lines at amusement parks or grocery stores. It also seems that even if materials are abundant, quality would still be disparate so groups could hoard quality materials and would probably attempt to secure/wall off their “earned” or collective materials to exclude the general public. So the desire to privatize seems fairly natural.
Star Trek claims that the Federation is a sort of vaguely UN-inspired democracy. But we hardly see it.
What we see a lot of is Starfleet, which is a military pretending to not be a military. Strictly hierarchical, owners of many ships with advanced weaponry, willing to sacrifice people’s lives nearly on a whim merely to get scientific data, and plotting to overthrow the ‘elected’ head of the Federation surprisingly often, Starfleet is in many ways a pretty nightmarish organization. Yet anyone who is anyone in the Star Trek universe is desperate to be a part of it (implication: maybe there’s not much else to do, or no other ways to get status).
Yes but that is something you do see in the Star Trek universe. For example, not everyone can be captain of the flagship Enterprise. Being in Star Fleet at all is presented is very prestigious. Similarly scientists and engineers are held in high regard and I assume athletes and writers are too. The tendency to capture this merit into the accumulation of some kind of token which has to be translated into something material is just our capitalist consciousness I think. Even today that is not the reality. Having worked in the hard sciences I have never met someone who was there for the money. Although things like publications in high impact journals do count. About groups protecting quality, I think that is a fundamental point of what Marxism is trying to deal with. If replicators existed it makes some sense that elites would try to control them. So when production in abundance is possible, groups might be interested in preventing the “to each according to his needs” part. In some ways we see this already. And that is why Marx argued that the means of production, replicators in this case, should be captured by the public. And of course it should actually be the public, not some authoritarian state substitute. Although we could also imagine that if enough people know how to produce the technology that it cannot really be contained anymore. Something we also see today.
A Chemistry Prof who was to be my supervisor, in the 1970’s was prosecuted for Fraud, and I met many an arrogant academic who had the characteristic of NOT suffering fools gladly, combined with an inability to identify a fool. Perhaps you were lucky, OR you are too trusting? . 😉
PS Watch Morse for a probably more realistic assessment of Academe OR go and find the Transcripts of Prof Michael Mann, V Mark Steyn Et al, for a perfect example of how NOT to serve justice and the base character of at least ONE Professor. .
I think there’s a risk in over-generalizing human motivation. I don’t love the word “Capitalist” but I understand the construct we’re discussing when positioned against an Anti-Capitalist mindset. Ultimately its really just discussing competition beyond survival.
So as I understand the Anti-Capitalist mentality; accumulation presents two major problems. 1) It creates an uneven playing field. Those who have accumulated things in demand have the equivalent of assets containing value (wealth). Wealth creates opportunities to acquire more assets and gain extra opportunities in society. 2) Accumulation of stuff deemed “unnecessary” promotes the production of more unnecessary stuff creating an economy of excess instead of necessity. This creates inequality where some people have all the necessities plus a bunch of waste while others are struggling to meet basic necessities.
The question is why do some talented people seek accumulation while others don’t care that much? As you seem to be pointing out, some just want “enough” to meet their needs. I think you’re pointing out that knowledge and field achievement are satisfying forms of “intrinsic wealth” in themselves and that’s really all anybody needs.
While I personally agree with you about the value of knowledge, for many people gaining knowledge or achieving field success doesn’t serve as sufficient motivation. People look to set themselves apart from others and many believe the rewards incentive structure of wealth/accumulation creates more motivation to keep pursuing improvement.
There’s also the issue of security. Acquiring more wealth allows one to acquire more security and hedge against risk which in turn makes them a more desirable mate with a better ability to support their kin. I think this is the primary reason why Anti-Capitalism is not feasible despite some noble objectives. Because wealth provides the security to give one an edge in the dating pool, its unlikely that a person is going to relinquish the right to an edge that they feel they’ve earned through competition.
The problem comes because there are goods that are not fungible. Taylor Swift’s songs can be replicated, but Taylor Swift singing at your birthday part for you is not (instead of Taylor Swift think of a daughter, a sweetheart or someone else special). Access to someone else’s time and attention is not replicable. In a family, even children know this and play for attention.
People pay to see other people at work in the flesh (music, theatre, sports, cooks), and strive to become acquainted with those people. Sometimes desiring marriage or partnership.
That means there will always be ‘goods’ that are desired but that are scarce, which means there will always be allocation problems: how do you allocate scarce, but in-demand, ‘things’ most efficiently and most effectively? And the answer might not be ‘money’, but may also involve complex balances of emotional joy and pain.
Right, demand to go to Super Bowl is significantly more than a regular season NFL game. Just like the average NFL game is more in demand than the average college game and so on. Some seats are also much better than others. Theoretically every event with significant demand could set a fixed amount to for entry into a lottery/random selection and you just get what you get…and that fixed amount would have to be pretty low to assure equal opportunity.
Then again, I’m not real fond of a centralized planning board fixing prices for everything. It seems that would turn pretty arbitrary and subject to the political whims of the planners.
Random allocation is often proposed as a possible approach to the allocation problem. However, a common after-effect is post-allocation trading (think Wimbledon tickets and touts). Under low-prices, with a functioning secondary market, the touts have a large profit incentive arbitraging the price paid against the willing-to-pay prices. You then have to compel, regulate and police to prevent resales.
And actual selling might be the least problem. Tickets could be traded for other forms of influence, such as political ingratiation and favours.
I don’t remember seeing the Communist Utopia that was Earth feature very much at all. Perhaps it was beyond the imagination of the writers to reconcile ALL the obvious contradictions, whereas a Military Hierarchy on a tightly disciplined virtually self-contained warship was easy. We already have examples aplenty to copy. To push the agenda, simply required one to imagine it was a Soviet Warship, not a NATO one? Shades of Red October? Mind you the current NATO driven proto WW3 in Eastern Europe & the proxy wars elsewhere suggests that maybe neither the Soviet nor NATO philosophies should be embraced?
Everyone is equal but some are more equal than others.
The reason the world is as it is, is because some needs can’t be satisfied by Equality. SO what are you going to do when those whose needs demand inequality and those demanding equality come together?
Money for old Rope there Mr Varoufakis. Assuming unherd paid you, who did you share the proceeds with?
I will give it a go.
What role will the State have in this society?
Starfleet – the state will be in charge of defense, diplomatic relations and also engage in scientific exploration/research.
Since it will be libertarian, has the State already withered away?
Since all your material needs are met by technology, there is no welfare state, since none is needed. So, it is a minarchist state, which handles defense and uses that defense force to conduct science exploration/research in absence of war (see Starfleet). Of course, Starfleet likes to pretend it is not a military, but that just show spin will exist in the future too.
• Are individuals allowed to opt out of the Common Property Alliance or must all be required to join?
No, you can own stuff, but since technology means you can get everything you want as an individual there are no monopolies. Also there are humans who are not with the program (see Harvey Mudd). So if you still have some capitalist instincts you can go and try it, most other humans will regard you as a degenerate though, but you may be OK with that (again see Harvey Mudd).
• If required, are individuals still allowed to accumulate any “unnecessary” things or will a Property Police be needed to monitor accumulation of such things?
Everything is unnecessary. There is no shortage of stuff. So, if you want to collect things because that is your thing, sure, knock yourself out. The issue may be getting other to co-operate with you because nobody has any reason to be your employee (they don’t need the job or wages), so you will need to provide motivations for people other than monetary ones.
• Will there be accumulation limits for necessary individual things and what things need to limited by law to prevent scarcity?
There is no scarcity. Definitionally the tech can give you what you want. So, the only accumulation limit might be storage space, but you do have access to warp drive and it is a big universe, so that should not be a problem.
• Who will be tasked with confiscating excess things needed for the common good and will individuals have a legal right to contest the finding of excessive possessions?
There are no excessive possessions because there is no scarcity of possessions. Rich is a meaningless concept under the circumstances.
• Should collective rationing of things be necessary, who shall decide the duration of rationing?
Ah, well, this would be the Ferengi’s Question – if you put humans in a situation where all of a sudden scarcity is an issue, they are apt to revert to previous form. In fact, this is shown in Star Trek:Voyager when they run into another Starfleet crew that has handled being stranded in the Delta Quadrant a bit less elegantly than the Voyager crew. So, in the scenario you suggest the answer would be Starffeet because they are the ones with the phasers and the warp torpedoes.
Good answers – in the Star Trek universe (which is of course not reality and likely never will be), the questions asked just don’t need to be asked.
What happens to your cult leaders when their feet of clay are exposed?
Those are good questions. I would like to put myself forward as the person who determines the answers to them in this new society. Of course, you shouldn’t think that this role would give me any “power”. I promise I will be a “First among Equals”.
Indeed. John’s answers, although clever, skate over how the State would be constituted, who would run it and how the rest of the population would exercise their political rights.
Is everything voted upon? How can a government be changed? How are minorities treated in a hyper-Democracy? Etc.
And will they all die rather than fight the inevitable enemies who will see the myth for what it is? This strikes me as basically the Christian belief of prfect, eternal life, but without the Trinity/God AND before death. Perhaps the Bible AND the story of the Garden of Eden is something the author might like to read. Or perhaps the fall of Lucifer?
Is not the premise that there are no constraints on making material goods so there is no competion for them and no value in them?
Star Trek envisions a utopia where humanity, freed from material scarcity, turns to self-enrichment. But I’ve always felt that this ideal ignores the human drive for status, deeply rooted in our nature and not limited to solely to the measure of wealth.
Danilov in Enemy at the Gates captures this truth:
“Man will always be man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that was equal, where there’d be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there’s always something to envy. A smile, a friendship, something you don’t have and want to appropriate. In this world, even a Soviet one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.”
Even without material inequality, humans will compete – over intellect, creativity, and virtue. Communism(in whatever form), with its promise of perfect equality, has and always will be, doomed to fail because it is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. We are driven by a need for differentiation, for status, and for aspiration.
True progress must embrace this reality, not deny it.
Whilst “Rich in gifts, poor in gifts. Rich in love, poor in love.” is always going to exist, the desire to compete can be addressed by competing over trivialities. Who can run fastest, take the best photo, dance really well, that have no material impact on anyone’s lives.
Judging by the giant meltdown over men in women’s sports, competing over trivialities can apparently get pretty vicious.
You have picked a poor example. Professional athletes are competing for a living, often to the extent that they have dedicated their lives to it, so it is not trivial to them. If they were doing it just for fun, there would be no meltdowns.
You clearly haven’t read enough about junior sports where girls/women play for the fun and competition. A fascinating example is the Canadian Prof , Nicholas J. Cepeda, 50, also known as “Melody Wiseheart,” A professor at York University in Toronto. Look up his behaviour, the only good news is, he usually finishes last AND it isn’t a contact, other than in the changing rooms, sport.
Humanity has not turned to self-enrichment in Star Trek. Almost the opposite, humans don’t care anymore about accumulation of things.
Also Star Trek does not deny that human drive for status. Not everyone is an eloquent, moral and competent leader. And that is why not everyone can be Picard. Or any other of the ranks in Star Fleet that apparently carry great prestige in the Star Trek universe.
Let humans compete, that’s not the problem. But competition needs to be embedded in an outer layer of cooperation, the way athletes and sports teams participate in a larger structure. And let’s acknowledge that all participants contribute to the overall outcome.
Otherwise you end up with competition turning into war.
Or partners 😉
Thank you for the truest observation in these comments, which are otherwise filled with a shocking amount of neo-marxist drivel and fantasizing.
Kind of misses the point that the Captain always has a luxury suite and fine wine to drink. The crew eat in a cafeteria.
Now that’s Communism! 😉
The reason that a “communist society” can work in the “Start Trek Universe” is the same as the reason teleporters can work there – it is Science Fiction. Will we ever invent teleporters? I don’t know, but I’d say the chances are approximately similar to those of us adopting communism successfully.
Assuming a teleporter requires the mass of a human to be converted to energy, a 70 kg human will become about 6,300,000,000,000,000 kJ, which is vastly more energy than was released in the Hiroshima bomb. So I’d bet they will never be invented.
In that case we have to wonder about the efficiency and conversion method of the machine. The conservation of energy of all the matter according to E=MC2 is enormous but perhaps it is not the energy that it transmits but just the information. In that case it ‘simply’ needs matter the equivalent of 70kg on the other side it can convert. Also we have to wonder if the machine doesn’t just kill you and then constructs an entity that thinks it is you. This raises question about the hard problem of consciousness, the self, and whether hard materialism is true, also in relation to quantum mechanics. The series do play around with these questions a bit.
Surely teleporters are one of the more far out technologies they have. I remember reading the reason for introducing teleporters was because in the early days the CGI of the crew traveling to planets all the time was simply too expensive. However, I could see that one day we do produce something like atomic 3D printers, which gets close to replicators.
Maybe, but I find the idea of creating something with the complexity of a human, with memory etc intact, from a lump of matter almost as impossible as the mass to energy to mass conversion. Replicators would be ‘easie’ for sure.
Many years ago I saw a cartoon that dealt with the ethics of transportation using a device that copied and then killed the original. It was thought provoking – the operator got guilty about all the people he had killed, but then he just put himself through the machine and came out as a new, guilt-free person!
That was most enjoyable!
Live long and prosper!
What makes Star Trek unique, in my opinion, is its optimism. Not just for left wingers, for anyone really. Of course there are many Utopian SF books, but a TV series that presents such a premise, and is both accessibele and still pretty sophisticated, is an interesting cultural phenomenon. Although that is mostly the case for the shows that ran around the 60s and the 90s. Perhaps that is not a coincidence. Both of those eras were optimistic as well.
Perhaps that is also the big difference with today: people are afraid of dreaming, while nihilism and defeatism are everywhere. This is also reflected in contemporary TV shows and movies, even new iteration of Star Trek itself. They are simplistic and dark.
Still, I think it always starts with the dreamers. From classical antiquity, to the renaissance and the enlightenment. And we should not forget that many dreams were actually realized. I am sure that if we unfreeze someone from 1500 living in a Feudal society this person would be unable to even comprehend our society and achievements. So it is not necessarily unbelievable that in 350 years there is a society considered even theoretically impossible today.
We should also not forget that a status quo will always protect itself. So everyone believing that anything else but a slave or feudal society was possible was faced with ridicule (or worse) by that status quo and those who adopt a status quo consciousness. Today is probably no exception.
TV and other culture definitely reflects the times – the success of dystopian movies since about 2010, just after the GFC, clearly seems begin when it became apparent to people that the future (in the West) was going to be more difficult than it had been.
Indeed. But we also saw this in the 80s, a bit of a dark period as well. Cyberpunk movies like Blade Runner are basically the 80s on steroids. Or a vision of what 50 years of unchecked neoliberalism might lead to.
I’m not convinced by the argument that because Star Trek depicts a society that is not capitalist, it is therefore communist. Presumably you can have whatever it is that you want without having to pay/work for it – there is therefore no need for either personal acquisition or collectivisation. It is neither capitalist nor communist.
As it is sci-fi it doesn’t have to deal with whether this can be achieved in reality (not everyone can have a big house for example). However, as Yanis gets round to at the end, we are going to have to think about the implications of AI and further technical progress if they make a majority of the population ‘valueless’, from a capitalist point of view.
It is not explicitly communist but does approximate the society some communist and Utopian socialists writers envisioned. Perhaps a more interesting question is, did capitalism get them there? Marx himself argued that advanced capitalism was necessary to produce the material conditions for a socialist society. And that is where it gets interesting. Because from a perspective of capitalists full automation and post-scarcity is essentially an existential problem.
I assume, given Starfleet is clearly American in origin, that the Star Trek culture did derive from capitalism.
I suspect it will always be in the interest of some people to drive the economy in whatever direction is profitable in the short-term, even if it ultimately destructive to capitalism as a whole. Look at how business has off-shored to boost short-term profits, to their own (and our) long-term cost.
Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity economy, not a communist one.
The Federation is a democratic confederation of liberal states. The means of production are not controlled by the state, but by individuals.
Yes. A lot of people confuse post-scarcity with collectivism. Free market capitalism is excellent at reducing the cost of goods and services. (See the book Superabundance for ample data.) With sufficient supply, things can become free. They are given away with other goods. Some things will remain more scarce for longer. But the inherent logic of competitive capitalism (free market capitalism, not interventionist, crony capitalism) is to reduce costs of goods and services. If you look at the areas that are expensive, such as education, medicine, housing, you find a tremendous amount of regulation.
I’ve not watched Star Trek since James T Kirk. My impression was of a very hierarchical society dominated by ‘work’ without any particular discussion of who sets the work. A super top-down society where ‘the team’ is always unified. I presume the ship is cleaned by robots, as is laundry and sewage, but who does the dirty maintenance of those machines – because there are always dirty and unpleasant jobs that no-one wants to do, but someone has to.
This is the challenge of communism – not the fancy writers self-articulating and playing a being fishermen in the morning and critics in the evening, a la Maria Antoinette, but who does the dirty, messy nasty jobs? Who handles jealousy and envy and keeps rivals apart? How do you keep the sloth work-rate comparable to his or her peers, when all they want to do is read a book or watch a film? How do you manage differences of opinion that lead to bickering and aggression often over personal debts and slights? How do you satisfy lust and desire and falling out of love? How do you deal with the disputes that human emotions, and an ever uncertain future, create, simply because we are human?
Excuse me? The most important machine of the 20th century and, so far, of the 21st, is the computer. Under my desk is more computing power than existed in the world in 1950, more than powered the Space Shuttle, more than was available to industry in a single package till the late 1980s — and this one’s obsolete. That capability has overthrown the news industry, frightened governments, and moved knowledge out of universities and libraries and into my back bedroom. And I own this machine. Against that, the worries over the “concentration of property rights in the machines” sound ridiculously overwrought.
You may own the machine, but without access to the systems necessary to make it useful, it becomes a paperweight. And we don’t own or control those systems, others do. They can be denied us at any time.
I always enjoy YV’s too infrequent articles in Unherd. They are invariably thought-provoking, but he glosses over some very important themes in Star Trek, ones explored particularly in the original series. Nearly every other episode in the 1960s series dealt with the dangers of over-reliance on computer technology, or what can happen when we build machines too well; machines that approach sentience, that deliberately blur the distinction between machine and living being. The Next-Gen episode involving Data seems to me to make light of these legitimate concerns.
More generally though, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to believe that a character like Cptn. Kirk, or even Picard, or that other maverick ship’s captain Mal Reynolds of Firefly, would even be possible after centuries of the near-total reliance on computer tech necessary for inter-stellar space travel. Just look what a generation of smart-phone use has already done to so many. Now imagine that extended over several centuries.
Great article. As a not-Treky, I have lived my life without Star Trek. I will now engage in the original episodes.
Genuine thanks from USA.
Fun article. Thanks!
Contrast it with luxury belief theory, and it could be argued that humans no matter how materially fulfilled are hard wired to appear to belong to the cast above them. To the point of behaving like a bunch of primates permanently bearing their teeth and screaming in anguish.
I just think some humans are cleverer than others, some have sex appeal, others, not so much, some have charisma, others, yes TTK, looking at you, sadly devoid. Most unfair. Life hurts. Therefore equality in means is a dead end, equality in rights the only objective.
Some are fine with this. Others never reach inner peace and wage war. Permanently.
A very enjoyable article. Many thanks.
What happened to “Make love not war” to relieve boredom? Works for me.
Troy and Helen spring to mind 😉
Much that I enjoyed the series and found many episodes moving and often profound, ibwas never convinced of its communist utopia.
Yes, surely one day we may have such plenty that we will not have to compete for goods but, even there, there are limits.
Picard’s brother runs a vineyard and, on a visit, he and Picard get drunk on his wine. The brother explains that the wine is unlike what technology produced. It is therefore limited in supply. Moreover, Picard occasionally finds archaeological treasures. These are limited in supply.
When there are limits to supply, goods must be rationed and money has proven the best way of rationing scarce goods.
I’m also a little dubious about people ever having enough, after compared to our ancestors and compared to other on the planet, people in the West have enormous wealth, even the poorest have better access to necessities than nearly everyone who ever lived.
Still, interesting piece from an interesting man.
The more I read of Mr Varoufakis, the more I think he’s desperate to show that he didn’t miss the tide in his affairs when he actually had the chance to face down the EU, BUT didn’t. He was no Alexander, and a very poor Communist revolutionary, UNLESS, the EU is Communist and he was a 5th Columnist?
“And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.”
Under the “Prime Directive”, starship captains in the fictional United Federation of Planets are banned from using technology to interfere with any community, even if non-interference might cost them their own lives.
Well, that’s the theory anyway. A careful study of the Original Series will show that Captain Kirk spent most episodes violating the Prime Directive. Usually with the excuse that it was for the locals’ benefit. By the way: The PD forbids any interference in the Natural Development of the society, no matter how destructive that society was.
Ah, but Yanis, once we take off the rose-tinted glasses, we see that the Left represents the philosophy of the Klingons in Star Trek.
They value absolute power and domination above all else. They relish prideful brutality against The Other, and they enjoy exerting absolute ruthlessness by establishing vigilante / extrajudicial Cancel Culture and outright violence against innocent Americans. All in an effort to cull ‘undesirables’ from Klingon civilization.
The root of the word xenophobia (xeno) means “strange, foreign; stranger, foreigner”. Thus, the term isn’t limited in applicability only to those from a different country. It can refer to those who live in a different State. Or those who live in a different County. Or those who even live in a different ZIP Code. Fear of the “strange, foreign; stranger, foreigner” comes in many different shapes and sizes.
Indeed, the Left have been forceful proponents of their xenophobic views within America over the past decade-plus.
For example, rather than being reprimanded, denounced and de-platformed, Hillary Clinton was widely cheered and celebrated by the Left for calling half of all Americans “Deplorables.”
Hillary’s dehumanization of The Other remains with us eight years later: Financial institutions happily de-bank innocent people. And innocent people have lost and are losing their jobs. Not because they broke any laws or did anything wrong. But because of the Left’s xenophobia against anyone who isn’t a card-carrying “progressive” in America.
Things are no different today. It was only a few months ago when Biden – the current President of the United States of America who is supposed to represent all Americans – went full ‘Klingon’ by declaring that 77 million Americans – representing 49.9 percent of total voters – were “garbage.” Merely because they believed in upholding their civic duty and supported enough of Trump’s policies to vote for him over Kamala.
The brutal and ruthless Klingon Oppressor / Oppressed ideology of the Left has sucked all the creative air out of the country. To the point that progressives now fear their own fellow progressives who, with vindictive glee, ‘eat their own’ based on tallied points from some intersectionality bingo cards. Power – and the accumulation of power – is everything in the Klingon world of the Left.
It’s no wonder that many comedians and creative types have quietly shifted their support and votes to Trump in order to recapture their first amendment creative freedom in America and have a more open – non-Klingon – society.
The Left torching and killing for a whole summer in the US was NOT an insurrection remember, but the US equivalent of the UK Monster Raving Looney Party fancy dress day out in the Capitol was – because they aren’t the Left!
It’s not worth over-analyzing Star Trek’s economy or society. Roddenberry’s ideas weren’t well thought out and he was openly communist by the time TNG came around, so the writers tried to stay away from exploring his ideas and once Roddenberry had departed they strayed ever further from the original vision. For instance the writers stayed away from exploring the Federation government or economy, much preferring to leave it ambiguous. The show goes into far more detail about the arrangement of alien societies than the Federation.
It’s not even clearly a democracy; I don’t recall any episodes that show things like elections, politicians, Federation art, or really any kind of civil society whatsoever outside of Starfleet. It claims to be a democracy, but all communist regimes do.
Nor does it even show a post abundance society, as is sometimes claimed. This is largely because the top voted comment in this thread nails it: a post abundance society is really boring. The writers struggled with the replicators because they kill many plotlines that would work in any other show. Nothing can really be valuable to the characters because if it were to be lost or damaged they could just replicate a new one. This is why the replicators have so many weird limitations: for instance, you can’t replicate starships (because otherwise seeing one get blown up would be meaningless). You can’t replicate Cmdr Data (because otherwise he can never be in danger). In fact you can’t replicate any body because that then characters couldn’t really die. And so on.
The most glaring plot hole was Roddenberry’s insistence that the future doesn’t have money. How is time in the holodeck rationed out? We never see – it’s just always empty whenever the senior officers happen to need it. What motivates the red shirts to sign up for incredibly dangerous jobs that takes them away from their family for years at a time? “Self improvement”. What do their wives think about this? Oh, sorry, in the future we don’t have wives or husbands. Everyone is kind of ambiguously single whilst also ambiguously hooking up with each other.
In the end, capitalism is the only system that works because it’s capable of allocating scarce resources beyond just physical resources. People’s time is one of the most valuable resources and it can’t be replicated. Capitalism has an answer for that. Communism, whether of the mythical libertarian variety of the real thing, does not.
If capitalism is “the only system that works”, what existed before capitalism?
There are plenty of cases where a scarce resource isn’t sold on a free market.
Before capitalism, we were hunter-gatherers, living in small tribes.
and doubtless trading with other tribes items such as flints, animal hides, and wives, which was capitalism of a kind.
There was lots of trading (far more than most people realise) but that doesn’t make something capitalist as trading is not unique to capitalism, as you have noted.
There were plenty of different socio-economic systems between hunter-gatherering and capitalism.
Like?
I used to believe the fantasy world of Star Trek was possible, but then I grew up. Mr. Varoufakis clearly has not. The problem with communist utopians is they believe that humans are perfectible, and so far, they’ve been willing to kill millions trying to prove they are right. Star Trek isn’t our future, another Stalin or Mao is far more likely or another Hitler or Pinochet.
Very true.
The lofty plan to achieve socialist/communist utopia always seems to follow the same pattern, like a broken record:
Step 1: Self-righteously pontificate upon humanity’s imperfections and current error-prone societies
Step 2: Add … ?
Step 3: Remove … ?
Step 4: Uh …?
Step 5: Time’s running out … force square peg into round hole by totalitarian diktat … society’s less-equal people will understand while lying in their graves that their sacrifice was for the greater good of society’s more-equal people. Gotta break some lesser eggs to make an omelet.
Step 6: Omelet turned out to be a messy failure, but utopia has been miraculously achieved and everyone declares each and every day that they are happily living their best life, thanks to the benevolent nature of their Supreme Leader and Omelet-Maker! (Or they are immediately put to death.)
I only need to remind myself that Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets was modeled after the United Nations almost 60 years ago. And we all see how the United Nations has fared since then ….
You might as well say that about the enlightenment thinkers too. And in feudal times, reactionaries trying to protect the status quo, did. Revolutionary action in the name of liberty was also very violent and not always immediately successful. And yet, today many of the enlightenment dreams have been realized and we often celebrate the achievements of the radicals of the past. I understand it feels safe to keep everything the same, but it is not the human way. In the end, the dreamers – who perhaps never grew up – have the future.
On the other hand, socialist and communist dreamers who pursued the eradication of such things as the ‘Four Olds’ – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits (in Mao Zedong’s words) – bequeathed us with the greatest genocides of world history.
Coming in at No.1: Lapsed-Buddhist-turned-ardent-atheist Mao Zedong, who committed the largest genocidal mass extinction event of innocent people in world history – with up to 55 million deaths (six to eight percent of these deaths caused by torture) during the ‘Great Leap Forward.’
Coming in at No. 2: The anti-semite socialist, rationalist and evolutionist, Adolf Hitler, who killed seven million innocent people … 2/3rds of the Jewish population in Europe. Not to mention the tens-of-millions of military and civilian deaths caused by his ‘dreams’ of military expansion and conquest.
Next up on the list of genocidal ‘Greatest Hits’ (No. 3) is atheist-socialist Joseph Stalin’s Holodomor, that killed an estimated five million (10 percent) of Ukraine’s population with a man-made famine. Not to mention Stalin’s other self-excused mass extinction events in Russia.
And let’s not forget the fourth-worst genocide in world history, committed by the EFREI-educated atheist-socialist Pol Pot, who conducted a systemic genocide with cold mathematical precision, killing approximately 25 percent of Cambodians (1.8 to 2 million deaths) to initiate Year Zero of Cambodian history. He assumed that dreamers, such has himself, “had the future” … by eliminating the truths of the past.
Just as the emergence of innovation doesn’t have a Left- or Right-side bias, the personality leanings of tyrannical psychopaths also don’t have a Left- or Right-side bias at the lower evolutionary / psychological level of the Big Five Personality Traits that also happen to influence conservative or progressive leanings.
In short, we should have learned the 20th century lesson by now that we – as a civilization – mustn’t ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’ just because dreamers shows up with grand plans. Denying history and erasing hard-earned truths doesn’t make either history or those truths go away.
The machines have tended to be owned by a very few under socialism in practice it seems.
The big question that must be answered is this – what do the founders of the Utopia they have created do when it doesn’t work for some reason? When some people steadfastly refuse to co-operate in the new paradigm? It that where the guns (or phasers) and re-education camps come out?
Because the history of human existence tells us that Utopias don’t work, and when they go wrong they normally end in violence, often on a genocidal level.
But why would it not work? Everything gets done by tech so if people want to do nothing they are free to do so as long as they do not bother anyone or otherwise break any laws. This basically is already a relevant question with people wealthy enough not having to work.
Because the Starships were equipped with, shields, phasers and photon torpedoes ? 😉
‘On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields,’ Haiphong was off limits to USAF and USN bombing until 1968, as were NV airfields, whose aircraft could only be engaged once airborne. But I suppose that would not have fitted the ‘narrative’.
Unfortunately, humanity is fast approaching a level of skill where things to accumulate are not just inanimate objects such as gold or Ferraris, but bodily and mental characteristics of people themselves.
Today it is plastic surgery, weight loss, and pills to correct mental health issues such as depression. But what will happen when technology allows the appearance and IQ of offspring to be increased by genetic tinkering? What would the world be like if everyone was physically beautiful and had an IQ of 140 or more?
Some might think it would solve many problems, and even advocate for it to be made routine for every birth. But I suspect it would become hell on Earth and vastly increase the amount of inter-personal and international discord.
One only has to consider how competitive and quarrelsome highly intelligent people often are. I gather Mensa, for example, is a hot bed of disputes among members. So everyone would (rightly, I suppose) feel entitled to have their views widely known and adopted, whereas most people of average intelligence, or frankly below it, are more or less content with the status quo, provided society treats them reasonably and they can get by.
Sadly, today’s left is embracing anti-humanist authoritarianism, driven by postmodern ideologies. Where we had discussion we now have cancellation. Democracy has been replaced with institutional capture, argument with thoughtcrime, equality of opportunity with equity of outcome, anti-racism with critical race theory, feminism and gay rights with gender theory.
If we are thinking of science fiction, Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to the supplanting of humanist socialism with Stalin’s policing of language, subversion of science, and revision of history. Star Trek is a cosy vision from our childhoods, and a very American one at that. Unfortunately right now Orwell is the one to revisit. He did warn us.
Yanis, are you kidding me? Have you looked at the sort of people in Star Trek fan forums on social media? The ones who are capable of making sense at all are overwhelmingly on the political Left, and the ones who aren’t, are only that way because they’re spitting Marxist nails at the keyboard.
I get the impression you’re only saying this now because the world’s richest man – and notorious tech-bro – has turned out to be a libertarian, which is ideologically inconvenient to loads of leftwingers because one of their sillier conceits is that technological creativity and leftwing politics are inextricably intertwined. And that might even have been true once, back when governments on the whole had the sense to stay out of the boardroom. But that’s no longer the case, and this is a bed that the Left made, and now must now lie in.
I kept waiting for the punch line. Alas, there was none. The writer and UnHerd were apparently either serious about this fictional series based on fictional understandings of human nature and civil economics or were doing a deadpan Andy Kaufmann.
Star Trek is very much divided into two eras: before and after the death of Gene Rodenberry. His original vision was well meaning but naively utopian and sometimes naively technophilic. Unlike say Tolkein, he had no interest in creating a fully realized world. The Federation of TOS does not feature an idealized economic model or body politic: it simply lacks these essential features of a functioning society entirely. Economics and politics bored Rodenberry, so he just left them out! In a world devoid of political leadership, orders come down from the admirals of Star Fleet Command on high: TOS Federation is in practice a military dictatorship.
After Rodenberry’s death the writers were free to introduce darker themes, such as The Borg representing the harmful aspects of technology. But it is only with DS9 that we finally discover that the Federation is – a democracy! Even then some contradictions are never resolved. The Federation may not use money, but the Ferengi certainly do. If Sisko doesn’t get paid, how does he pay his bar bills in Quark’s?
I write as someone who loves Star Trek and hates communism.
http://georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1998/04/economic-justice-by-stephen-na/print/
Well spotted. A bit of ‘Let em freeze, Reeves’ plagiarism?
I liked the Star Trek series up to and including enterprise. I was always a bit suspicious of the utopianism though, so I liked DS9 the most because it showed a lot of the utopianism unravelling because of the total war the Federation ends up waging with the Dominion. The former resort to biowarfare, genocide, terrorism and false-flag operations to be able to defeat the utterly ruthless latter.
I also liked that DS9 treated the Ferengi less one-dimensionally. Yes Quark was avaricious and exploitative. But he was a useful go-between for the Federation, impressed the Klingon emperor with his bravery and was able to use Ferengi business philosophy to out-logic a Vulcan about the wisdom of waging war at all costs. I also liked that when Captain Sisko resorted to bribing him, he was essentially mostly delighted that a human had resorted to Ferengi tactics.
Superb, simply superb.
This article reminds me of a little known, or remembered, novel “A is for Anything” by author Damon Knight. It tells the tale of an invention that is quite simple, uses no power supply, but is nevertheless capable of replicating anything.
Including duplicating human beings.
The society that evolves from this invention is hardly Utopian. When you can create anything from nothing, Knight suggests, the only status symbol is your power over other men. And those who understood this fact were those who quickly forcibly dominated others, enslaving them, and securing their station thereby. The resulting static, stratified society would be anathema to most of us.
At least I think most of us would find it anathema.
These days. watching events in the Western so-called democracies and their dictator-led competitors, I’m not so sure.
“[Our liberation needs] a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons.”
In which case the ‘snazzy machine networks’ would not be invented and developed in the first place, and ‘the commons’ of YV’s Leftist paradise would be empty.
Except that the succes of open source makes the “nothing gets developed without financial incentives” paradigm a pretty weak one.
Open source is largely played out. I speak as someone who has been writing open source software on and off for over 25 years. The Year Of the Linux Desktop became a sad joke because it never arrived – literally, we gave away our work for free and still nobody wanted it. Today open source is mostly restricted to libraries shared between developers for their own use, or a handful of apps/platforms that are open sourced for strategic reasons by big tech firms but otherwise developed just like a commercial product.
The reason it failed is exactly because open source is an attempt to build a collectivist commons, and it suffers all the same issues the USSR did. In particular, extreme difficulty in innovating. It’s not a surprise that the most successful bazaar projects (like Linux) are straight clones of commercial designs.
With all due respect, I cannot even begin to understand your point, Linux is literally the most used operating system by far. The kernel and its derivatives run on almost every server and many, many smart, IoT, devices (e.g. Android). Not strange, according to many objective figures such as stability, it is also superior to commercial products. It is an understatement to say it has been central to the digital revolution and it has only become more important, not less. Desktops kept running on Windows because of compatibility and familiarly mostly. It is the same reason Apple also failed for a long time. However, we finally see it changing with non-Windows and ARM devices slowly overtaking traditional PCs and also the gaming market.
Commercial companies like Google and even Microsoft continuously use hybrid open source projects to harness to power of crowds. Not just a few libraries as you suggest, many of the Google projects are simply completely open source. Google engineers also allegedly released a memo expressing concern that they had a hard time keeping up with open source developments in the AI world because they essentially had no “magic sauce” that was not already public. And this is true, open source projects may not have the infrastructure, user friendliness and GPU power of big companies, yet LLMs and image generators like Stable Diffusion have no trouble keeping up as far as the tech goes.
Or take something like the Unreal engine, really there are too many examples to mention. Open source, the anarchist libertarian mindset and the digital revolution are completely intertwined and constantly at odds with our traditional industrial capitalist way of thinking.
Perhaps part of the problem with open source is that its licences for use typically prohibit any use of the code as the basis for elaborated “bells and whistles” commercial versions, or even for inclusion as libraries in non-open-source commercial applications.
It’s understandable that open-source authors are loathe to allow their hard work and skill to be used or “exploited” by other developers for commercial gain. But in being excluded from any participation in the commercial software industry, open-source is thereby self-limiting.
One niche where it can be used commercially is by multiple open source projects being packaged and managed as a whole open source “ecosystem”, such that the service being sold is support and testing for reliable operation and updates etc of the collective caboodle, rather than any of the code itself.
Anyway, I think you are slightly selling open source short, because aren’t many mainstays of modern commercial IT open source? Examples include several databases, such as MySQL, PostGreSQL, NoSQL, etc, and the two principal software containerisation and orchestration systems, Docker and Kubernetes, not to mention languages such as Java and python.
The first does not mean that the second isn’t still true. Open Source – and importantly the GNU licencing it usually comes with – is the best the SME software industry could come up with in a world where software can be copied and distributed at zero incremental cost and almost undetectably. This is a world in which you could exhaust your financial reserves almost overnight trying to enforce your licencing rights and still get nothing in return.
Open source software therefore usually comes with licensing obligations that permit you to use the software however you like except that once you include it within a commercial product or service, you then pay a fee. This restores at least a chance of enforcing rights because legally accountable corporations must avoid getting sued.
Even without this, it is very often the case that free tier access exists only as a lead to commercial access. Either way though, software development remains a time and skill intensive process that has to be either paid for somehow, or swallowed as a cost. The open source paradigm does not solve this problem and never attempted to solve it.
You have it a bit backwards in my opinion. A large part of the digital revolution came out of the (semi) public sphere at the evening of the Cold War. DARPA funded military and university projects laid the groundwork such as the ARPANET itself. Semi-public labs like Bell Labs played a major role in producing Unix and B, which became C/C++. Much of this was always relatively open and public and so there was a natural transition to the early open source and hacking scene. First in the US but soon also Western European universities and research institutes joined, but the open, sort of, hobbyist attitude remained. See, for example, the origin of now popular language Python. From this point the internet really started to become the internet and It was only later that things became commercialized and so licencing like GNU and exotic ways to produce revenue had to be invented. But the bottom line is that people and communities produce great things without direct financial incentives and open source, as well as freeware and hybrid stuff have played a major role and are definitely alive. Even if big money has its impact.
What you’re saying here isn’t untrue, but it doesn’t alter my point above that someone, somewhere, always pays the cost for development time. Even if that’s the developer simply doing it for free, that’s still a cost that is paid.
Developers are unusually prone to doing this incidentally: they (or I should say we, since I’m one myself) do a lot of collaborative work outside the commercial sphere, contributing free advice in fora such as StackOverflow etc, and mentoring less experienced devs.
Entertaining, if a little naive. And depressing to read Keynes prediction which, one feels, really should have come true.
On the bright side, we do have only fans, Instagram, fast fashion and so called luxury goods to tempt those stupid enough to buy them while not being rich enough to really afford to. Oh and the coffee is better.
There are so many glaring flaws in this article that I hardly know where to begin. The author, like most communists, fails to realize that humans have stark differences in abilities, so assuming the highly intelligent could even produce material overabundance, would they wish to be enslaved by us average types, so that we’ll want for nothing?
There is, at any one time, a limited supply of the most desirable things. Someone has to work very hard to produce them, and have the ability to do so. Will they do that for people whom they don’t know, and expect little in return?
Communism has been tried repeatedly, as has slightly less totalitarian versions of forced sharing. (Forced by the state, and ultimately backed by armed men.) It’s universally failed to provide good living standards, for all but a tiny few whose goals aren’t much more than wealth and power accretion for themselves, resulting in little left over for the masses. Socialistic or Social Democratic versions – basically market economies handicapped by high taxes and endless rules – result in the dangerous banlieu districts outside of French cities, or the squalid slums outside of Scandinavian or other European cities.
There, the poor swamp a vanishing middle class, and upper crust technocrats live in tiny, glittering islands of wealth. Hardly paradisical.
A communist techno-utopia isn’t possible in the foreseeable future, and is anyway incompatible with human nature. An attempt to institute it now would result in something that much more resembles the Borg Collective – the USSR of the 20th Century, or the squalid residential areas of the PRC’s Shenzhen province come to mind – than the bright, clean, optimistic utopia of the Federation.
We humans much more resemble the grasping, vulgar Forenghi than we do the noble, dispassionate Vulcans. On occasion, we will often resemble the prickly and warlike Klingons, as well.
Those should be the real lessons of Star Trek. Economics is a science just as valid as astrophysics, and must incorporate the concept of human nature.
In Star Trek, this is reflected in the wildly varying abilities, desires, and actions of alien species. The resulting space wars that constantly rage in Star Trek deny the notion of technology as an economic panacea for all of the universe, and is, here on Earth, a recipe for disaster, and dangerous naivete.
There is an interesting history to the maxim
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
which can be dated to the New Testament and the Acts of the Apostles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs
This captcha thingy intrigues me, wouldn’t it be simple to train a machine to fake a mouse movement and click when challenged to do so?
Star Trek is certainly an interesting study/critique of human life and society. I’m wondering, however, if possessions are separated from work (each receives his need, which I assume is one apartment, etc.), then what impels each individual to get up and go to work in the morning? Whether he works or does not work, he will receive his needs, won’t he?
The doctor, the dentist, the lawyer, the plumber, the starship captain – what gives each of these the impetus to do his work the very best he can?
Someone might conceivably choose to work as a head chef unpaid purely for their love of cooking. But who would wash dishes unpaid for the love of washing dishes? This utopian fantasy is posited on the assumption that everything people wouldn’t want to do could simply be delegated to technology.
I’m no Clingon speaking true trekkie, but really like the first series, and saw much of the others through the 90s.
With this as resume’ , alway thought prime directive kicked in when they traveled to places with no previous Federation exposure, or time traveled back to earlier earth times. They could not do anything to alter the course of of that places development. Federation tech was used all over the place, except in those instances.
I loved Star Trek as a kid. The acting was great and there were cool looking spaceships and laser fights and what not. I was not aware of the social agenda until I got older. That’s when I saw the problems. I learned that Roddenberry was basically a communist and wanted to show it in a positive light. He did so by setting his tales hundreds of years into the future where all those problems that caused the Soviets and the Chinese and others to fail have been solved by technology.
The problem is that this is basically a literary handwave. How the technology works and where the energy comes from is never addressed. How the world got from its current state to a techno utopia is not well established either. In literary terms, it’s the equivalent of a wizard waving his wand, which puts Star Trek into the realm of fantasy, which it is.
The devil is in the details. Some of Star Trek’s technology violates known laws of physics. The stuff that doesn’t would require unbelievable amounts of energy. Replicators can’t conjure something from nothing so they presumably have some type of material input that is used to make your cup of coffee and that whatever presumably has to be replenished after however many cups of coffee, never mind the titanic amount of energy that would be required to disassemble materials on an atomic level and rebuild them. The warp drive runs on dilithium crystals that are some kind of exotic material that only exists on certain planets for reasons that are never explained. It may as well run happy thoughts and pixie dust, maybe the same pixie dust that the replicator turns into a cup of coffee.
There’s a reason sci-fi is grouped with fantasy in book stores. Authors tend to handwave some of the known scientific problems in order to write interesting stories and have people bounce from planet to planet as easily as we hop continents. The stuff that follows the known science tends to be less popular, because people want cool space ships, exotic planets, and laser battles. So, no, we shouldn’t be taking our political philosophy from Star Trek any more than we should look to dungeons and dragons for it. Actually the latter is probably better, what with all the randomness and dice rolling.
Nothing was ever quite so thought out. You may recall the first, or second episode with Kirk and Spock? Kirk mentions to Spock how Spock’s people were conquered before they entered the Federation!
Lots of loose ends, unpursued plot lines, etc., as the series developed. Recall that his pitch to studios was “Wagon Train to the Stars”, evoking the theme of a popular TV series wherein the main cast acted as the backdrop for guests of the week to work out their issues.
Yes, obviously. Ultimately its a TV show and shouldn’tbe taken all that seriously. Still, some people do, including this author. If he’s going to seriously argue we should take our cues about an ideal future from a television program, then I feel compelled to just as seriously point out how ridiculous that actually is.
You are clearly right that science fiction is, in a broad sense, fantasy fiction. But that doesn’t necessarily make it trivial. 1984 is “hard” SF, in that the technology Orwell describes already existed in embryonic form at the time of writing. So what? Dante’s Inferno is a fantastical depiction of something most of us today would take to be fictional in the first place. And Animal Farm isn’t a children’s book because it features talking animals.
1984 doesn’t belong in the same sentence with Star Trek, nor do any of those others. Yes of course it is possible to illuminate greater truth through fiction, but that isn’t what Star Trek was doing. Its main purpose was to get people to watch TV and get good ratings to make money for the network, and it mostly succeeded. There was also a secondary goal of providing an optimistic view of a post-liberal future without money or possessions that only works because of the elimination of scarcity theough the application of technology, with said technology ranging from the scientifically dubious to the obviously impossible, thus, in my judgment, it fails to make a convincing and believable case that there is some prospect of humanity achieving any suvh thing. The author of this article takes a TV show far too seriously and so I am making a serious critical review of what’s wrong with using Star Trek as any kind of political guidance or a rubric for utopia.
Yanis truly is thick. bless.
For most of my lifetime (leading-edge Boomer) the technophobes have dominated the left, not the right. Over this time is is the technophobes left which has locked humanity into artificial scarcity. The right-wing technophobes we are seeing now are self-limiting; those who won’t vaccinate will be first to die off in any new wash of disease, thereby selecting themselves out of the population.
I look forward to Musk’s inauguration this month with renewed hope that now the technophobic left will be out of power for long enough for us to colonize space, build the carbon-free nuclear plants, get the advanced medicine rolling, and build the China-challenging infrastructure that the left has so long denied us.
Star Trek isn’t science fiction. Star Trek is cowboys in space drama hour.
I can’t really remember one idea of the future that Star Trek developed.
Mobile phones? Wearable tracking gear?
And it really isn’t cowboys in space. Firefly did that (and was much better than Star Trek as a consequence).
Star Trek is Liberals in Space.
What is the significance of mobile devices?
That question is science fiction.
For instance Philip k d**k imagined flys being produced which conveyed advertising.
Imagine a fly being genetically muted for such a thing.
What are the consequences of that?
Star Trek is pap.