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?

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    I'm not claiming anything I said is facts, just the way I understand it to be/how it had been explained to me quite a while ago. I could absolutely be wrong, if that's the case I'll gladly retract my comment based on new (to me) information. I'm far from qualified to give an authoritative answer on this topic.

    I apologize for being coarse, it's a bad habit of mine.

    The way I understand it is "the government decides to build a factory because the country needs a factory" vs "the people of a region get together and build a factory because they want one". Well, in either case nobody really owns the factory (compared to capitalism), but rather who's in charge of it, who decides who works on what and how it comes to be.

    If the government is democratic, there's very little substantive difference here as-described, because "the government decides X" is an entity with the popular mandate doing it, and if that decision loses it the popular mandate, the people can oppose it. Likewise, if "the people" of a locality decided to build a factory in this hypothetical and a minority opposed it, if the minority cannot sway the majority, they are simply ignored.

    The problem comes in when you realize that the goods produced by factories mostly aren't for the use of the local community, they are for a much more expansive group of people. There need to be systems to coordinate production at the full scale of society so that people have some idea of who needs what. It's compounded by the fact that the machines in the factory will themselves probably need to be imported from elsewhere.

    Unfortunately the only examples of communism we've seen are authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, and currently North Korea and China (sort of). I don't think we have a true socialist community that's not some form of capitalist hybrid, let alone post-scarcity communism or socialism without massive corruption tainting it.

    Depending on your definitions, you left out Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. In any case, I don't think most people are able to maintain the "real communism has never been tried" stance. Eventually, you either come down on the side that "No, they were real communism and communism is therefore evil" or "I was lied to about at least some of these countries and should give them credit". For an anglophone, societal gravity is very much on the side of the first option, but it's possible to reach the second conclusion if you have a strong enough motivation to dig through information. Cuba is probably the route of least resistance.