Hi there, I’m not trying to start a political argument or anything, I’m just curious what people here think about this often repeated claim that the Federation is a socialist or even communist utopia? I know Strange New Worlds did say in dialogue it is socialist but I was wondering if people here think that’s accurate? I’m not a communist or a marxist or anything like that, but I’ve had people who identify as such tell me the Federation basically is communist. So anyway, what’s your thoughts?
I’d say they’re post-scarcity anarchist. There’s no central/communal resource dispersal as needed for socialism, nor the central/communal resource allocation/planning needed for communism.
There’s seemingly no authority outside starfleet exerting any power, nor does anyone ever claim a motivation beyond exploration or study (to do something meaningful). The lack of money and unlimited access to replicated resources pending available dilithium also points to a society without exploitative discrepancies.
The humans also never are reported to have any resource hogging, the only tensions/stratification seem to be militarily (and against external parties also diplomatically), meritocratic, and even then the bottleneck seems mostly to be to not fall behind other races.
I don’t see neither capitalism, socialism, communism, despotism, theocracy, nor fascism, but many aspects of anarchism. If you’ve read anything about The Culture, they openly speak about being anarchist, and it’s very similar to Star Trek.
I agree, this is also a perfectly valid read. Unfortunately Star Trek spends a lot of time with Starfleet and The Federation and almost not at all with Earth to understand the nuances of governance of productivity. But they are still supposed to be several billions of people, it’s hard to imagine there’s only ad-hoc organization going on to keep something as massive as Starfleet and The Federation going. Even the Vulcans had the High Command. Earth must have something akin to a government structure going on to produce a representative diplomatic corpus. The Federation is supposed to be a Republic after all, and that’s not anarchy. Perhaps a system of direct democratic municipalism, but we don’t know for sure.
Anarchist doesn’t need to mean without government, simply that no one is above another, which is echoed in how the Federation is structured towards the other races.
It’s a federation, which means it’s a group of government who decided to get some of their rules and organzations in common. Each government in the federation can be different, although there are some implications for the federation to work: they must recognize the borders and laws of the federation, and they must participate in its function.
Which is inherently anarchist :P
As it seems a common confusion in this thread, I repeat, anarchism doesn’t have to be without government or rules, several forms of anarchism are focused on not limiting individuals freedoms and/or not allowing power over eachother (while accepting government and rules not contrary to that). Both of which I believe describe how the Federation works.
I certainly don’t know much about anarchism, but different planets in the federation can and do have different kinds societies.
If we consider the vulcan in brace new world for example, their society seems very much aristocratic for example, where influence gives authority and power. I doubt the klingon are anarchists either. And in lower deck, the orions have a monarchy.
The federation is the government of the collection of planets, but each planet still has its own government and culture.
