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Red Century

‘Make It So’: ‘Star Trek’ and Its Debt to Revolutionary Socialism

By A.M. Gittlitz

• July 24, 2017

H. G. Wells’s foundational work of political science fiction, “The Time Machine,” predicted a future in which a small utopia of sprightly elites is kept running by a subclass that lives below the ground and is reduced to bestial violence. This prediction, carried to a horrifically logical extent, represented the intense wealth disparity of the Victorian England in which Wells wrote the novel. Judging from the major political narratives of the fictions of our era, films like “The Hunger Games,” “Elysium” and “Snowpiercer,” the certainty of a future rendered increasingly barbarous by class division remains essentially the same.

But this was not always the case. In 1920, Wells met Vladimir Lenin, a fellow world-building visionary who planned “the inauguration of an age of limitless experiment” to rebuild and industrialize his country from ruination by years of war, abolishing class society in the process. Wells was impressed by the pragmatic revolutionary and his planned “utopia of electricians.”

If Wells had been less skeptical of Communism and joined the party, he wouldn’t have been the first sci-fi or futurist thinker to do so. Alexander Bogdanov, an early political rival of Lenin’s, wrote “Red Star,” a utopian novel about a Communist colony on Mars where everything was held in common and life spans were greatly extended through the use of parabiosis, the mutual sharing of blood. Along with Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky, Bogdanov proposed a program of “God Building,” which would replace the rituals and myths of the Orthodox Church through creation of an atheistic religion.

For his part, Gorky was a fan of the Cosmism of Nikolai Fyodorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a scientific and mystical philosophy proposing space exploration and human immortality. When Lenin died four years after meeting with Wells, the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s line “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live Forever!” became not only a state slogan, but also a scientific goal. These Biocosmist-Immortalists, as they were known, believed that socialist scientists, freed from the constraints of the capitalist profit motive, would discover how to abolish death and bring back their comrades. Lenin’s corpse remains preserved for the occasion.

Bogdanov died in the course of his blood-sharing experiments, and other futurist dreams were sidelined by the industrial and militarist priorities that led up to World War II. In the postwar period, however, scientists inspired by Cosmism launched Sputnik. The satellite’s faint blinking in the night sky signaled an era of immense human potential to escape all limitations natural and political, with the equal probability of destroying everything in a matter of hours.

Feeding on this tension, science fiction and futurism entered their “golden age” by the 1950s and ’60s, both predicting the bright future that would replace the Cold War. Technological advances would automate society; the necessity of work would fade away. Industrial wealth would be distributed as a universal basic income, and an age of leisure and vitality would follow. Humans would continue to voyage into space, creating off-Earth colonies and perhaps making new, extraterrestrial friends in the process. In a rare 1966 collaboration across the Iron Curtain, the astronomer Carl Sagan co-wrote “Intelligent Life in the Universe” with Iosif Shklovosky. This work of astrobiological optimism proposed that humans attempt to contact their galactic neighbors.

Interest in alien life was not just the domain of scientists and fiction writers. U.F.O. flaps worldwide captured pop cultural attention, and many believed that flying saucers were here to warn us, or even save us, from the danger of nuclear weapons. In the midst of the worldwide worker and student uprisings in 1968, the Argentine Trotskyist leader known as J. Posadas wrote an essay proposing solidarity between the working class and the alien visitors. He argued that their technological advancement indicated they would be socialists and could deliver us the technology to free Earth from the grip of Yankee imperialism and the bureaucratic workers’ states.

Such views were less fringe and more influential than you might think. Beginning in 1966, the plot of “Star Trek” closely followed Posadas’s propositions. After a nuclear third world war (which Posadas also believed would lead to socialist revolution), Vulcan aliens visit Earth, welcoming them into a galactic federation and delivering replicator technology that would abolish scarcity. Humans soon unify as a species, formally abolishing money and all hierarchies of race, gender and class.

“A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” Captain Picard explains to a cryogenically unfrozen businessman from the 20th century in an episode of a later “Star Trek” franchise, “The Next Generation.” “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

For all its continued popularity, such optimism was unusual in the genre. The new wave of sci-fi in the late ’60s, typified by J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick in the United States and by the Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem in the East, presented narratives that undercut this theme of humans’ saving themselves through their own rationality.

The grand proposals of the ’60s futurists also faded away, as the Fordist period of postwar economic growth abruptly about-faced. Instead of automation and guaranteed income, workers got austerity and deregulation. The Marxist theorist Franco Berardi described this period as one in which an inherent optimism for the future, implied by socialism and progressivism, faded into the “no future” nihilism of neoliberalism and Thatcherite economics, which insisted that “there is no alternative.”

The fall of the Soviet Union cemented this “end of history,” in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, and signaled a return to late-capitalist dystopian narratives of the future, like that of “The Time Machine.” Two of the most popular sci-fi films of the ’90s were “Terminator 2” and “The Matrix,” which both showcased a world in which capital had triumphed and its machinery would not liberate mankind, but govern it. The recent success of “The Road,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Walking Dead” similarly predict violent futures where only small underground resistance movements struggle to keep the dying flame of humanity alight.

Released the same year as “Star Trek: First Contact” — and grossing three times as much — “Independence Day” told a story directly opposed to Posadism, in which those who gather to greet the aliens and protest military engagement with them are the first to be incinerated by the extraterrestrials’ directed-energy weapons. (In Wells’s 1897 vision of alien invasion, “The War of the Worlds,” the white flag-waving welcoming party of humans is similarly dispatched.)

The grotesque work of 1970s white supremacist speculative fiction, “The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail — recently referenced by the White House strategist Steve Bannon — has a similar story line. A fleet of refugee ships appears off the coast of France, asking for safe harbor, but it soon becomes apparent that the ship is a Trojan horse. Its admission triggers an invasion of Europe and the United States.

The recent rise of right-wing populism indicates a widening crack in the neoliberal consensus of ideological centrism. From this breach, past visions of the future are once again pouring out. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg feel empowered to propose science fiction premises, like space colonization and post-scarcity economics, as solutions to actual social problems. Absent, however, are the mass social movements of the 20th century calling for the democratization of social wealth and politics. While rapid changes in the social order that are the dream of Silicon Valley’s disruptors are acquiring an aura of inevitability, a world absent of intense poverty and bigoted hostility feels unimaginable.

Shortly after World War II, Wells became so convinced of humanity’s doom, without a world revolution, that he revised the last chapter of “A Short History of the World” to include the extinction of mankind. Today we are left with a similar fatalism, allowing the eliminiationist suggestions of the far right to argue, in effect, for a walling-off of the world along lines of class, nationality and race, even if this might condemn millions to death.

If humanity in the 21st century is to be rescued from its tailspin descent into the abyss, we must recall the choice offered by the alien visitor from the 1951 sci-fi film classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

“Join us and live in peace,” Klaatu said, “or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”

I think of it as science fiction’s useful paraphrasing of Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary ultimatum: “socialism or barbarism.”

A. M. Gittlitz is a writer from Brooklyn who specializes in counterculture and radical politics.

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion) , and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter .

Is Star Trek’s Society Really Socialist?

Some claim star trek presents a socialist utopia, but the themes of technology, individual rights, post-scarcity, and currency, might show otherwise..

There are many popular memes and YouTube videos that present the future society depicted in Star Trek as socialist, and this has led to much debate online between fans. It’s a huge franchise that is composed of, as of now, six television series that take place over a 200-year period, plus 13 feature films. There have been hundreds of writers and producers involved with the franchise, and all of them have left their own marks on what fans call “cannon.”

Most people who find socialism appealing often have their own distorted definition tailored to their personal desires.

In addition to considering the hundreds of writers and producers all leaving their individual and sometimes conflicting impact on Star Trek , we must also consider that the franchise’s point of view is told primarily through Starfleet (military) personnel and not through the average private citizen’s perspective, so there is a distorted view of life in the future.

We also must recognize that most people who find socialism appealing often have their own distorted definition tailored to their personal desires. For our objective analysis, we will go with the dictionary definition of socialism as a system that advocates for the means of production, distribution, and exchange to be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

Advances in Technology

Daily life in the 24th century is depicted as radically different than life in the 21st. There are two technological breakthroughs that are the causes of this.

The most revolutionary is Warp Drive , which allows starships to travel faster than the speed of light. The device helped humans colonize uninhabited worlds to prevent overcrowding on Earth and discover new natural resources. It also led to alien contact, which helped unite the nations of Earth into one government. The expansion of territory, discovery of new natural resources, and diffusion of alien technology created a higher standard of living for humans as many resources became less scarce.

Scarcity has been almost eliminated in the future.

Another revolutionary development was the invention of the replicator . Replicators convert energy into matter and can later convert that matter back into energy to create something else new. By the 24th century, replicators are capable of creating almost anything (some minerals are not replicable) from food to consumer goods. You can ask the replicator for a dish of food, and it will appear out of thin air. When you’re finished eating, you put the dirty dish back into the replicator, and it’s converted back into energy. Scarcity has been almost eliminated in the future.

Individual Rights

Societies that embrace socialism have poor records when it comes to human rights. When the community has ownership of everything, the individual becomes expendable. In Star Trek , Earth and the United Federation of Planets protect the rights of people and businesses. In the TNG episode “ The Drumhead ,” it is revealed that the Federation’s constitution has twelve guarantees of basic rights for its citizens. The seventh guarantee is the fundamental right against self-incrimination.

The twelfth guarantee covers intellectual property rights and establishes an artist as the person who created an original artistic work ( ST: Voyager later has those rights expanded to holograms in the episode “ Author, Author ”). The emphasis on individual rights is closer to classical liberalism than socialism. We also see glimpses that private businesses exist and thrive in the Federation like Joseph Sisko’s restaurant in New Orleans, Quark’s Bar on Deep Space 9, and holodeck program publisher Ardon Broht .

Post-Scarcity Way of Life

Private businesses and individual rights are not pillars of socialist governments. That’s because the federation and human society are not socialist. There is a higher standard of living that is the result of technological breakthroughs that eliminated hunger and poverty. Buildings can be made with replicators, and rocks can be converted into food. There are things in the Star Trek universe that are scarce because a replicator cannot reproduce them. Star Trek is what can be considered a post-scarcity society. Medical care also appears to be free (though we only see the medical world through Starfleet) thanks to advances in science.

But there are things we have seen in the Star Trek universe that are still scarce because a replicator cannot reproduce them. Latinum is an alien mineral that is the galactic equivalent of gold, and it is used as currency between different societies. Space transport is also a limited resource, as there is only a certain amount of room for passengers on a ship.

In Star Trek 3 , McCoy tries to hire a smuggler with a ship and pay him with money. We also see that genuine antiques are an item people want and cannot replicate because it won’t be the real thing, such as in the DS9 episode “ In the Cards ,” when a 1951 Willie Mays mint condition baseball card is up for auction and latinum is the only payment accepted.

Currency in the Federation

“ In the Cards ” is an interesting episode with regard to the economics of Star Trek because it features one of the most direct conversations when Jake Sisko realizes he needs money if he wants to bid at the auction:

Nog: It’s my money, Jake! If you want to bid at the auction, use your own money. Jake: I’m Human, I don’t have any money. Nog: It’s not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favor of some philosophy of self-enhancement. Jake: Hey, watch it. There’s nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity. Nog: What does that mean exactly? Jake: It means… it means we don’t need money! Nog: Well, if you don’t need  money , then you certainly don’t need  mine !

Some people interpret this scene as the end of the discussion that the Federation, or at least Earth, functions as a socialist society. But the issue of “no money” could boil down to semantics. The currency of Federation Credits exists, as we see in TNG episode “ The Price ” when the Federation negotiates exclusive use of a wormhole. Jake Sisko did not work and was a dependent of his father. His father probably had credits, but since Jake was trying to buy the baseball card as a surprise gift, he did not approach his dad. It should also be noted that the ultimate winner of the auction was a human named Elias Giger, and he paid in latinum.

Star Trek Is Not Socialist

Star Trek presents the idea of a better future for humanity. But it’s because of technological advances rather than redistributive government policies. It’s a future where most needs and wants are no longer scarce and can be easily provided for. But, most important of all, it’s a future that protects the rights of the individual rather than bulldozing them at the whim of politicians who arbitrarily decide what’s best for the community. Individual freedom is the foundation of the Federation’s values.

Daniel Kowalski is an American businessman with interests in the USA and developing markets of Africa.

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Star Trek Gave Us a Utopian Vision of an Egalitarian, Postcapitalist Future

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Unlike many classic works of sci-fi, Star Trek offered an optimistic vision of humanity’s future — one where democracy triumphs, exploitation is ended, and everyone’s material needs are met.

Still from Star Trek: The Next Generation . (Paramount Domestic Television, 1993)

It’s the year 2364 and a tatty old space shuttle containing former Wall Street capitalist Ralph Offenhouse, who was cryogenically frozen in 1994, has just been discovered floating through space by a starship called the Enterprise–D. Upon waking, Offenhouse discovers that, although science has found a cure for his previously terminal illness, his bank accounts and investments have all gone. To his horror, not even his beloved Wall Street Journal has survived the ravages of time.

“A lot has changed in the past three hundred years,” the ship’s captain Jean-Luc Picard tells him. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

It’s particularly striking that in a genre that trends toward bleak, dystopian futures, Star Trek is an outlier in science fiction for offering an optimistic vision for humanity’s future. In fact, while it may be overly simplistic to say that Star Trek depicts a socialist society, its utopianism owes much to the ideas of Marx in that it imagines a future where collectivism triumphs, money is obsolete, and every material need is met.

Beyond Capitalism

The show follows, in various incarnations, a spaceship and its crew whose enduring mission is to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” But as Captain Picard explains in First Contact (1996), “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Instead of working just to live, humans are free to spend their time exploring the cosmos, or inventing, or making art — and sometimes doing all three. This optimistic view of human nature is in stark contrast to films such as Pixar’s Wall-E , which follows the right-wing line of thinking that achieving a postscarcity society (what Keynes calls the “economic problem”) would lead to sloth and hedonism, and ultimately the demise of humanity.

In Star Trek, geopolitics is a thing of the past. Instead, there’s the United Federation of Planets, a United Nations–inspired organization founded on the principles of liberty, equality, justice, progress, and peaceful coexistence, which is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the universal enfranchisement of sentient life. It is a world in which economic conditions allow each person to contribute to society according to their ability and consume according to their needs.

It’s worth noting here that Star Trek is a product of a political era that preceded post-Fordist, neoliberal conditions, when different futures were not only imagined but contested. Star Trek: The Original Series aired between 1966 and 1969 — a fertile period for the political imagination in spite of great unrest.

Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, certainly subscribed to this optimism. He believed that humanity, rather than being doomed to self-destruct, was destined to evolve out of our political myopia. It was thanks to Roddenberry that The Original Series , though dated by today’s standards, was ahead of its time with its multinational, multiethnic, and multigender crew. Famously, the show featured the first-ever televised interracial kiss (in an episode banned by the BBC ), and Martin Luther King once said that Star Trek was “the only show I and my wife Coretta will allow our three little children to stay up and watch.”

Today, Roddenberry’s flaws and hypocrisies are well documented. According to his last wife, Majel Barrett, he identified as a communist. But we know from the many accounts of his unethical business practices that he was also obsessed with making money. He preached peace and love but was infamously difficult to get along with. And he flew the flag for feminism while being a notorious womanizer.

Rather than focus on Roddenberry the man, I find it more interesting to evaluate Roddenberry the salesman. When the show aired, there was widespread unrest; the United States was being torn apart by race riots and antiwar protests; and the then–very new and horrifying threat of nuclear Armageddon loomed large on the horizon. But rather than offer an “extrapolation or exacerbation” of these conditions, as culture is prone to do, Roddenberry saw the appeal of a brighter future.

Perhaps he recognized this appeal because he knew better than most how awful humans could be.

The Politics of Technology

When the show was rebooted in the 1980s, the political horizon was narrowing. Yet it was in this decade, just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Star Trek became most notably Marxian. This was all thanks to the introduction of the “replicator,” a futuristic 3D printer that can create anything out of recycled matter, thus solving the problem of scarcity. So far, so science fiction.

But in Star Trek, technology alone doesn’t bring about utopia. As we learn through the introduction of the Ferengi — an alien race whose culture centers around greed and profiteering — the socialization of the replicator is a political choice. The Ferengi’s replicators are privatized, whereas replicators in the Federation are publicly owned.

While concepts such as warp-speed propulsion and teleportation remain firmly in the realm of science fiction, many of Star Trek’s technological predictions have materialized or are coming to pass — including the concept of 3D printing at the molecular level and the increasingly exploitative applications of artificial intelligence. What capitalism renders unthinkable is the politics behind technology: that developments in technology might benefit us rather than usher in further alienation.

Star Trek provides an antithesis to how capitalism predisposes us to view technology, allowing us to imagine what society might look like if technology were used purely for improving our quality of life. Instead of following this path, the morsels of convenience we’ve received through technological advancements are only enough to numb us to the realization that we’ve become locked into a cycle of consumerism and surveillance capitalism.

Constructing Utopia

Another utopian aspect of Star Trek is its depiction of solidarity. Roddenberry had many “rules” that he insisted upon the show following, but his most infamous is what’s become known as “Roddenberry’s principle”: a mandate that conflict must never be between the main characters, only with external forces.

Roddenberry’s argument was that, for the utopian conditions of Star Trek to be believable, the characters must represent the best of humanity. In the episode “Remember Me,” the ship’s doctor Beverly Crusher notes that crewmembers are disappearing. But each time a person disappears, they become forgotten by everyone else; to the rest of the crew, they never existed.

In a typical drama, this would be what’s called a “Cassandra Truth” plotline: the hero discovers a conspiracy, nobody else believes them, and so the hero has no choice but to solve the mystery alone. But in Star Trek , rather than treat the doctor as though she has lost her mind, the possibility that people are being erased from existence is taken seriously and investigated by her colleagues.

Instead of the show’s drama revolving around interpersonal conflict, problems are overcome through teamwork, and very rarely as the result of one person’s heroism. It’s one of the most unique aspects of the show; as viewers, we’ve come to expect conflict between characters to be one of the most fundamental aspects of drama.

There’s comfort in knowing that no matter the scale of the problem, you can trust the characters to communicate their thoughts and feelings, weigh the situation objectively, and work together. But more than comfort, Star Trek continuously offers examples of cooperation, conflict resolution, kindness, and empathy that are in short supply in most modern dramas.

To me, this is perhaps the most radical element of Star Trek . In simply showing the possibilities of cooperation, the show offers something for us to all strive toward — and solidarity is no doubt the first building block required for constructing utopia.

Sci-Fi Optimism

When the time comes for the twentieth-century capitalist Ralph Offenhouse to return to twenty-fourth-century Earth, he’s at a loss. “What will I do? How will I live?” he asks; “ What’s the challenge? ” The problem is, Offenhouse has never allowed himself to imagine an alternative to capitalism. And to someone that has lived his whole life in a prison, there is nothing more daunting than being set free. Like the prisoner in Plato’s cave, the instinct is to return to the darkness that he’s accustomed to.

In a sense, we are all Offenhouse. We might not all suffer from his peculiar strain of capitalist Stockholm syndrome, but we all, naturally, struggle to imagine an alternative way of living. We all live under the same political system that snuffs out any threats to its existence by design, and it becomes harder to imagine an alternative each day that this system entrenches itself deeper into our lives.

Here lies the power of Star Trek . It’s easy to dismiss utopian science-fiction as escapist, as though capitalist escapism is a lower form of art than realism, but what good does the constant reminder that everything is bad do for society? Negativity is hardly inspiring. And besides, as Gene Roddenberry recognized (politicians take note), optimism sells.

The Political Philosophy of Star Trek

Individualism, not socialism.

Star Trek sometimes catches flack for portraying a Socialist space utopia. There's a vast, far-reaching central government, and Captain Picard often waxes – especially when time travel gives him the opportunity to lecture present-day people – about how humanity has evolved beyond self interest. Those interested in personal gain are portrayed in a less than flattering light . Our era with hundreds of national governments is reflected on smugly as "the age of confusion". But should Star Trek be totally thrown out for its political philosophy? I believe there's more to redeem it than to condemn it.

The economics of Star Trek, given the technology, are not so far-fetched. Replicator technology would enable the utopia of the Star Trek universe by eliminating physical scarcity of most things. Even energy scarcity isn't something one has to worry about except in extreme circumstances, thanks to antimatter-powered warp cores.

Granted, this point is (so far as I'm aware) never emphasized. But if marginal costs fall sufficiently across the board, the entire price system could plausibly become more costly than its benefits. Harold Demsetz argues near the end of his paper, " The Exchange and Enforcement of Property Rights ":

Attention is sometimes called to the fact that emerging technical developments will make the use of markets or governments more economic than they now are. There are surely many instances where this is true. However, our analysis suggests that technological developments can operate in the opposite direction. . . . Markets or their government alternatives should come into greater prominence only if technical developments lower the costs of these institutional arrangements more than they reduce the costs of producing[.]

Replicators and warp cores clearly reduce raw costs of production more than they reduce the costs of government or the market mechanism. One could imagine a story where after hundreds of years, the question of allocation by the price mechanism becomes outmoded, and the economics of scarcity fall into disuse.

Nevertheless, despite the negative portrayal of capitalists, there is a more fundamental theme: individualism. Though Starfleet might fairly be called a Socialist utopia, it is not always a perfect one. One of the most common themes in each of the series is the captain's deliberate defiance of a direct order, thereby saving the day. Successwise, captains have a vastly better track record than Starfleet, illustrating well the knowledge problem of centralized government. Naturally, though Starfleet never does back off the regulations and directives, it's apparently fine to violate them so long as things work out in the end.

Star Trek is in fact rather schizophrenic in its attitude towards its utopia. Generally it's good and enlightened, though often misinformed, having to be corrected by intrepid Enterprise captains. Occasionally though, Starfleet embodies every problem of tyrannical government, making the captains not only occasional rulebreakers with exceptionally good judgement, but outright traitor-heroes. The story of Insurrection , for example, puts Starfleet barely short of genocide, forcibly relocating an eternally youthful race to another planet where they would eventually die. The crew of the Enterprise, infected with the planet's youthful vigor, reneges against Starfleet and saves the Ba'ku. And there is never a bit of moral ambiguity in their decision.

These themes come to the forefront in Voyager, where the crew has to make its way without the benefit – or the burden – of a nearby Starfleet. If Picard's driving ideology is altruism, Janeway's is explicit individualism. How many times throughout the Seven of Nine rehabilitation subplot did Janeway lecture Seven on the virtues of individuality? She's even been known to directly lecture the Borg Collective on the evils of collective consciousness. She called them a race "as close to pure evil as any race we've ever encountered," referring unambiguously to the forcible and imperial suppression of individuality.

So Star Trek promotes a Socialist utopia with a strongly individualist culture? Star Trek has always had a moralizing component to it. Though their stereotype of Capitalists could be called unfair, their utopia doesn't necessarily do injustice to economics, thanks to the replicator. So despite a political structure that would translate disastrously into our present world, the strong individualist themes of the show commend it far past its unfair stereotypes condemn it.

16 Comments

David Pontoppidan

I like this. However, you must remember that both trade and private property exist in the Star Trek universe and within the Federation, although in post-capitalistic ways of transaction and commerce. Star Trek is therefore not socialist by traditional definitions. I prefer to think of it as somewhat anarchistic.

But as a fellow friend of ours would say, it is only logical to assume that market-based systems would evolve and change drastically as technology improved the ways in which we live.

Above all else, Star Trek is about what it means to be human, and about moral questions. I was reminded of that tonight watching ‘Generations’, where Kirk gives up Paradise and provides the ultimate sacrifice to “make a difference”.

Some people do not understand, and they keep saying that they are socialists but in fact they are cumunitarians (no comunist too).

Joseph Sileo

It could be argued that scarcity wasn’t eliminated but transferred. For example it takes a great deal of energy to operate a replicator. It is shown in Voyager that resources were rationed because they were far away from their normal source of energy. A Market Economy immediately formed both aboard the ship,where crew members would use Holodeck time, replicator rations, and work details as currency, and between Voyager and other civilizations, where technology and other resources were traded. ST: Voyager is actually a great example of the natural emergence of a market economy. The reason the other series appeared to be Socialist Utopias was because matter was in infinite supply because they had the technology to convert energy into matter. The technology was also present to harness huge quantities of energy with little effort. (matter antimatter reactions)

Eventually as with all systems you get diminishing returns, so I would imagine with time scarcity would rear its ugly head. But who knows, technology could progress to the point where we can capture all forms of energy and all forms of matter, and convert the two. At that point wouldn’t we have a perpetual motion system?

Star Trek looks like a grand future to many people in the same way that the Soviet Union might have looked like a grand future to a starving medieval peasant. But relative to the potential and opportunity available within the Star Trek universe, there is clearly a lot of scarcity. What scarcity you ask? Materially, desires just shift: personal spacecraft instead of cars, grand estates instead of suburban homes, transporter travel vs high speed rail. And other kinds of scarcity are intrinsic and analogous to today: power and top jobs in science, exploration, management, politics.scientific research, opportunities for exploration, etc. are all still scarce. Scarcity never disappears. And the way those resources are allocated is typically socialist: through a bureaucracy, connections, and political influence.

And Star Trek allocates those in a typically socialist fashion: inefficiently, using a vast bureaucracy, uninformed centralized decision making, and based on power, status, and connections.

Yes, Star Trek is socialist, and it isn’t even a utopia.

Alexander Duncan

I think the problem you attribute to Star Trek is really a problem that you have invented yourself, i.e., the typification of Star Trek as “socialist.” If anything, Star Trek is technocratic, and technocracy is neither socialist nor capitalist – it represents thinking of another order altogether. Thus, of course there are elements of altruism and individualism in Star Trek, just as there are in human life. It has nothing to do with socialist political ideology at all.

Cameron Harwick

I tend to agree with you that that’s not the question it’s asking. But, rightly or wrongly, people really do think of it that way. E.g. http://www.volokh.com/posts/1241844798.shtml (negatively) http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=354 (positively)

Jim Osborne

Star Trek portrays a Socialist decentralized management model WHICH would allow more individuality and choices regarding career and education. That also allows for a smaller government which reduces gridlock (look at the us congress) and by getting rid of personal wealth resources are redistributed so that everyone has at least their basic needs and medical and education met. You confuse propaganda of the USSR and our own ideology from the cold war, when you eliminate poverty, a lot of things would go with it: hopelessness, and dispair, cuelty, and exploitation. Marx envisioned a workers revolution occurring in an already industrialized country due to extreme disparity of wages, and lack of benefits compared with management

The former ceo of Exxon got a 450 million retirement package while they managed to wriggle out of fiscal responsibility caused by the Exxon Valdez and damage continues today and the citizens of Alaska ended up being shafted. People’s wages since 1980 have barely managed to stave off inflation while upper management reaps huge payouts. With the death of unions goes fair wages and health benefits and even retirement wait til you see all the fees for managing your 401k

Socialist, yes, but they get rid of the social problems we’ve ignored for the last 237 years. And replication technology in their universe occurred sometime after 2269. (I checked)

Creating things out of thin air instantly is nothing more than science fiction magical that uses an idiotic ideology (Communism or Socialist) that history has shown time and time again doesn’t work.

Why Star Trek’s Future Without Money Is Bogus http://brainknowsbetter.com/news/2013/4/17/why-star-treks-future-without-money-is-bogus

Joshua Scott Hotchkin

I have written about this in the past. Non-scarcity and reputation economies will change the entire landscape of human civilization. http://www.unicornworld.org/86/star-trek-is-not-a-socialist-utopia/

Why does every discussion about star trek say there isn’t a monetary system. Capitalism is alive and well only with fine tuned guidelines on ethics that ensure entry into the market over that of wealth protection. Strong ethical guidelines with a monetary system, drive isn’t based on amount of items owned and instead quality of life, a lack of consumerism that is exchanged for personal mental fulfillment. Honestly the idea is that of how the united States founding documents came into being. Taking all forms of past government and political party ideologies extracting the good, discarding the failures, and evolving to something better. It has a thriving economy that is balanced. There are multiple fos of currency and trade between planetary systems and species.

James T Kirk

Just remember the needs of the many outweigh the few Gold Rush se08 e03

Robert Hutchison

Whether Star Trek is socialist or communistic or whatever, I leave up to people who are a lot smarter and knowledgeable than me. I only know I LIKE IT! Live Long and Prosper, Everyone…

FearOfStupidity

I’ve dreamed of a society where you could choose what you want to do without concern of the basic human needs: food, shelter, clothing. Where you know every person on the planet has that as well. Where instead of choosing what you need to do now to survive after 65, you choose your passions, you live your WHOLE life now instead of waiting to retire.

This doesn’t have to mean people can’t choose to be loaded, but the system of capitalism without wealth gap rules is a system of oppression in itself. You want to give out $30 million CEO bonuses? Then you must put $300 milion back into the company with staff bonuses, better health coverage, etc.

The need for a world currency of equal value. Markets are driven by profits instead of humanity. We will ship raw materials great distances to be manufactured and then shipped back over those distances again to increase profits for us, the shareholders. We the shareholders, putting all our money into stocks for our retirement.

Along with the racism, xenophobia, misogyny, religious extremism… it’s sad, it’s depressing, our humanity is so far from a way better deal then the greed of now.

When referring to the Insurrection events, you seem to blame the Federation and Starfleet for actions short of genocide, but fail to mention that Admiral Dougherty, who was in charge of the relocation, withheld relevant facts, such as Dougherty’s alliance with the Son’A, his plan of a forceful relocation of the Ba’Ku and rendering the planet irrevokably uninhabitable by collecting the metaphasic particles. If he would have been honest with the consequences and factors of the operation, Starfleet would never condone it, meaning they’re not the bad guys you set them out to be.

Michael Mallalieu

personally I think star trek is based on the idea of mutual cooperation for the benefit of all, whether that is brought about by socialist/communist ideologies or by a neo capitalist system whatever that is; I don’t know. But what I do know is that for the federation to have come into being in the first place that it took a great third or fourth world war of selfishly competing nations for resources and the invention of a weapon of mass destruction which could travel faster than anything else before (warp drive) that Vulcans in the nearby vicinity enacted first contact and thus brought about the beginnings of a dialogue between ourselves and the Vulcans and witnessing another way of life and a more utilitarian if you like way of doing things. This dialogue or trade of ideas between ourselves and the Vulcans was the catalyst to our envisioning of a a brighter future among the stars with help and friendship of the Vulcans (live long and prosper). So we put our petty differences away and realised the common good of all and joined the federation, as the federation was not a human construct it had been in place for god knows how long before and each emerging civilisation once the basic technological recommendations have been met ie warp drive, contact is initiated. Nowhere as far as I’m aware does star trek say what earths political/economic system is like only that earth is a member of the federation, my inkling is that as all systems had failed in the past on earth and with dialogue with the Vulcans we realised we need to pull together for the common good which at the time was the future of the human race and more importantly the future of spaceship earth and so we created a similar system to how I see how the federation works, maybe one were we have a system similar to a Federal United Nations here on earth. Which I think would be (FUN)

normand calvé

Before politics or economics, the first aspect to adress is morality, like, is the economy at the service of a a minority’s intere$ts, or to satisfy at the welfare and prosperity of the majority of the citizens ?

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Why Peter Thiel Fears “Star Trek”

A spectre haunts Peter Thiel: the spectre of “Star Trek.” Earlier this week, in a  cheeky exchange  with the  Times _ _columnist Maureen Dowd, Thiel dove headlong into one of science fiction’s most venerable debates. Asked by Dowd whether he was a bigger fan of “Star Wars” or “ Star Trek ,” Thiel replied that, as a capitalist, he preferred the former. “ ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one,” he said. “The whole plot of ‘Star Wars’ starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes, and so the plot in ‘Star Wars’ is driven by money.” This latest salvo in an ongoing nerd battle would be all fun and games were it not for Thiel’s deep involvement with the incoming Trump Administration—first on the campaign trail, and then as an adviser to the President-elect on technology. In an era when politics and entertainment are more entangled than ever, pitting the feudal heroism of “Star Wars” against the cerebral and technocratic “Star Trek” becomes more meaningful than it probably should. We’re way past  the 1986 “Saturday Night Live” sketch  in which William Shatner told his obsessive fanboys to “get a life.”

Peter Thiel has a life. A titan of Silicon Valley, he made his fortune betting on startups such as PayPal and Facebook. Yet he sometimes seems disenchanted by technology. In 2011, for instance, he  told George Packer  that he did not consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough. “Compare this with the Apollo space program,” he said, suggesting that feats of exploration, rather than advances in convenience and communication, are the real stuff of achievement. Two years earlier, in an essay published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, Thiel  expounded on his skepticism . “We must resist the temptation of technological utopianism—the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world,” he wrote. In other words, technology is not enough. Only the right politics can bring about a truly “free” (as in “free enterprise”) future. Such statements appear at odds with the popular vision of the Silicon Valley tech mogul, and especially with the image of Thiel, who has lately set his sights on vanquishing aging and death. (He plans to live to the age of a hundred and twenty.) So how do we make sense of them?

The truth is that, in certain ways, Thiel’s philosophy of tech aligns well with “Star Trek.” In the Trekiverse, technological progress is inseparable from society and politics. As even quasi-fans will recall, the TV shows and films feature a machine called the replicator, which can produce any inanimate matter on demand—food, drink, warp-drive parts. (In his interview with Dowd, Thiel calls this device the “transporter,” in what can only be a swipe at nerds. Surely he knows better.) The replicator solves, albeit fictionally, what John Maynard Keynes once called “the economic question”—that is, the imbalance between supply and demand, and the resulting need for markets and price mechanisms to allocate scarce resources. The society of “Star Trek” has decided not to exact a fee for the use of the machine. Thus the replicator can be an engine both for the equal distribution of wealth and for personal enrichment. It does not bring about social change on its own. The post-scarcity world in “Star Trek” is the result of a political decision, not of pure technological progress.

What is anathema to Thiel in “Star Trek” is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete. “Star Trek” replicators are nothing but Asimov’s robots disguised as coffee machines, let loose on the world as a public good. They dissolve the need for a pricing mechanism. They represent the logical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution, when all human labor has been offloaded onto machines. “Star Trek” and Asimov remind us that the market and all the behaviors associated with it are temporary and historically contingent. If that is so, then what Thiel thinks of human nature and motivations—that people are competitive, acquisitive, greedy—is temporary and contingent, too.

Contrast this with “Star Wars.” Although the galaxy that George Lucas created exists long ago and far away, it is in fact much closer to home than “Star Trek.” Forget the lightsabers and the Force: the essential story of the films is familiar, a techified version of a Wild West that existed only in Buffalo Bill’s travelling revue and its celluloid successors, the Westerns. In “Star Wars,” criminal potentates hire bounty hunters to recover debts from roguish smugglers. Robots are menial servants and sycophants rather than colleagues, and human slavery persists. Unelected tyrants and religious zealots make policy by fiat. A blaster, or a Death Star, is the only real guarantor of life and liberty. Fate and the lottery of birth reign supreme. It is a libertarian’s fever dream, a distilled expression of the idea that the greater good is best served through unfettered (and, if necessary, brutal) economic competition. This, rather than the liberal-democratic setting of the U.S.S. Enterprise, is the political environment in which Thiel seems to feel most comfortable. In his Cato essay, he places “confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” in opposition to “authentic human freedom.” Only the strong and lucky, like Han Solo, should survive.

“Star Trek” points to a future in which human civilization is advanced enough to provide everyone with the basic necessities of life. It also shows us the ways in which we have already achieved that society, even if we have not decided to make it available to all. (As the sci-fi author William Gibson has said, “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”) The significance of Thiel’s remark to Dowd, however offhand, comes from what it may signify about the course of our world in the next several years. As technology progressively eradicates the need for labor, will we cling to Han Solo, to individual toil and competition motivated by material want? Or will we bend what Thiel calls the “terrible arc of the political” toward something resembling collective freedom?

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Smith, Marx, and... Picard?: Star Trek and Our Economic Future

"In every revolution, there's one man with a vision." - Captain James T. Kirk

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What’s the Challenge?

In Star Trek: The Next Generation’ s “The Neutral Zone”, Lieutenant Commander Data beams aboard an ancient vessel adrift in space. He soon realizes that it carries cryogenically frozen humans. Data returns to the Enterprise with three of them, who can still be revived. Unlike the bodies of Khan Noonien Singh and his genetically-perfected superhumans in The Original Series episode’“Space Seed”, these are ordinary folks, preserved just as they died from typical ailments circa 1990.

They awaken to find themselves fast-forwarded three and a half centuries into the future. Among them is Ralph Offenhouse, who demands to call his lawyer. He needs to recover his fortune, which, presumably, can still be used for the sport of leveraged buyouts and corporate raids. Captain Picard scoffs, informing him that the very notion of money itself has disappeared. Mr. Offenhouse is beside himself. What’s he going to do now? Picard tells him, “This is the twenty-fourth century. Material needs no longer exist… The challenge, Mister Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.”

Life in the 24th Century

And so that 20th-century Earthling got a quick lesson in 24th century “post-scarcity” economics. As Manu Saadia highlights in his book, Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek , money is no longer needed because technology has advanced so far that nearly everything is available with the touch of a button. The replicators — accessible by everyone — generate food, clothing, musical instruments, or whatever might be desired. Transportation and communication are instantaneous. Energy is clean and nearly boundless, and computing is used solely for improving the quality of life, rather than for enslavement or fueling hate. Work and employment are purely optional.

Instead of nations, Planet Earth is home simply to Terrans, joined in the United Federation of Planets. The notion of globalization is quaint — there is no need for Americans to worry that the Chinese will take away their factory jobs. There are no Americans nor Chinese, nor are there any factories. People are free to retain their historical cultural identities, or not.

With few restraints at home, people roam the galaxy. Many of the humanoid societies they encounter demonstrate how far humanity has progressed. The violent Klingons are a throwback to a time before the Roman Empire, which has been reincarnated as the Romulan Empire. The Ferengi — guided by their Rules of Acquisition — are greedy 19th century Scrooges. The Cardassians are war-mongering fascists.

Economic Thinking

This futurist vision of peace and plenty was created by Gene Roddenberry, who imagined what was possible if people stopped hurting each other through unchecked selfishness, war, and hate, and, instead, focused on embracing their common humanity. The spark he ignited has formed into a magnum opus in a succession of great works by influential economic thinkers. They have, over the centuries, argued for alternative economic systems aimed to improve humankind. Their works, directly and indirectly, engage in dialogues with past writers — critiquing and arguing with them — and advancing new ideas. Based on these visions, we have implemented our economic realities.

Star Trek represents a work in this chain that began with Adam Smith in the late-18th century. It then led to a pushback by Karl Marx in the mid-19th century. Without mentioning economists by name, the series continues the tradition of arguing for and against parts of Smith and Marx’s respective economic insights. I believe it splits their two approaches down the middle to present a third worldview by offering the best of each economist. TOS and TNG, and to some degree Deep Space Nine (DS9) and Voyager , provide thought experiments to help us imagine a world that manages to be both relatively equal and fair but also prizes the rights of the individual. In short, Star Trek , at its core, argues for a new economic arrangement in the tradition of the best economic thinkers.

Wikipedia.com

In 1776, by completing his tome, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, established for himself the title of “World’s First Economist.” He argued that the material wealth of a nation will grow if it allows its citizens the maximum freedom to pursue their self-interests. The baker bakes not because she is hungry, but because she enriches herself when feeding her neighbors.

Rising incomes emerge through specialization, division of labor, and trade. Money, an essential facilitator, is not, in and of itself, the key element of wealth. You can’t eat gold (or gold-pressed latinum). Instead, productivity — the ability to generate accomplishments — is the real source of wealth. Smith, using the example of a pin factory, showed that one craftsman spending his whole day making pins from start to finish could not make more than a dozen. But if several workers organized to each specialize on one small task — say one heats the metal, another draws it out into wires, and a third cuts them into pins — the three could produce thousands of pins per shift.

But specialization is only profitable if the team can sell what they make. Thus, the marketplace needs to be open to all. Monopolies created either by the state or through corporate mergers, squash competition and innovation, and are harmful to the betterment of humanity. Smith argued, paradoxically, that by freeing the individual to pursue her own goals — via laissez-faire — social order and wealth would naturally emerge — as if guided by an invisible hand. His arguments were rather persuasive. In the early 19th century, nations around the world, in fits and starts, embraced industrialization and free trade.

Enter Karl Marx

Wikimedia.com

However, obtaining income through large-scale production requires organization by “team leaders” — the capitalists. Their job is to purchase various inputs and see that they are assembled in a manner that generates the most output for the least cost. The capitalists are incentivized to reduce expenses by using machines and deskilling labor. Their bets on new technologies are expensive and need to be first bankrolled by investors.

As the 19th century wore on, the industrializing West began to see a few downsides to Smith’s vision. Perhaps he could never have foreseen the rise of sprawling factories, darkening the air with smoke, and employing armies of lumpenproletariat . Alongside this vast inequality was the whipsaw business cycle. High profits financed more and more production, which generated gluts, which then gave way to factory closures, unemployment, loan defaults, and economic depressions.

The answer, as Marx, saw it, is to use capitalism’s bounty to generate an equal society. In fact, he saw this new world order as a historical inevitability. Fairness, rather than efficiency, was to be prioritized. The workers produce the wealth, therefore, they deserve to have it. The capitalists, on the other hand, create chaos and pay just enough to keep the working class alive. Private property is to be abolished and distribution from the collective soup bowl is to be allocated based on the rule: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

For the last century and a half, we have been arguing who was right. While Smith seems to have been pronounced the winner, no nation has a pure free-market economy. Most governments today try to balance what’s good for the individual versus the whole.

Smithian Star Trek

Despite the elimination of material scarcity, the future still retains elements that Smith argued for. Perhaps the most important is the sanctity of the individual and private property. For example, Captain Picard’s family owns their historical vineyards in France, and Commander Benjamin Sisko’s father runs his Creole Kitchen restaurant in New Orleans. The Holographic Doctor in Voyager is awarded a copyright to his holonovel (“Author, Author”). These are cases of the gains from trade that Smith described, and they stem from the freedom of individuals to specialize and hold ownership over, or get credit for, their output.

Similarly, Data’s battle to prevent himself from being disassembled and studied in “The Measure of a Man” is not just a moral issue but an economic one. Picard helps him win his right of self-determination on the grounds that a potential future army of Data’s could be exploited and enslaved — a system incompatible with a laissez-faire economy.

The Borg are the ultimate communists. For the good of the whole — or the body — there are no individuals. They represent the greatest threat to humanity, both literally and figuratively.  The contrast between the Borg collective and the primacy of individual freedom is demonstrated in “I, Borg,” when the Enterprise rescues a dying teenage Borg. On the ship, they encourage him to find his individuality. In the end, the newly named Hugh discovers and cherishes his new identity, but, by necessity, he must abandon it and return to the collective or face death. In “Descent, Part II”, we eventually learn that his individuality spreads like a virus and destroys the hive.

Marxian Star Trek

Despite the importance of the individual in the 24th century, there are many elements of the Marxian economy that technology makes possible. With no material scarcity, there is no money, and the greed it engenders simply melts away. And without money and greed, there can be no exploitation nor economic depressions. The lowliest worker has access to the Earth’s bounty just as the greatest starship captain. Arguably, the obliteration of exploitation is given its highest expression by the Prime Directive, which prohibits members of Starfleet from interfering with the internal development or affairs of alien civilizations.

It is, at heart, an anti-colonialism measure, designed to stop a more technologically advanced culture from the kind of oppression that Marx railed against in the Communist Manifesto . Though Captain Kirk can simply steal dilithium crystals from the Planet Halkan (“Mirror, Mirror”), he does not, for the Prime Directive teaches it is better to be fair than ruthless.

Though the Prime Directive speaks to the moral equality across societies, this notion is also upheld within human society, especially with computing technology. Computers are tools to enhance the human experience— they provide resources, information, and allow for scientific research and discovery more broadly. Since there is no money and no greed, all technology is open source and available to all. Computers are strictly prohibited from being used for nefarious purposes, such as for autonomous weapons of mass destruction, which are built on other planets as seen in The Next Generation ’s “The Arsenal of Freedom”.

Arguably, the one character who represents the ideal communist role model is Mr. Spock. He repeatedly reminds Captain Kirk that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (such as in “Space Seed” and in The Wrath of Khan ). His sole interest is in science and knowledge, and doing what is good for society and his fellow shipmates. He continually sacrifices himself each time a crisis arises, such as when he flies into a giant energy eating virus to discover its behavior in “The Immunity Syndrome.” In “Journey to Babel,” Spock refuses to give his own father a blood transfusion because he must command the Enterprise .

Is Such a World Obtainable?

Given the vision presented by Star Trek , it begs the question: is it feasible (putting aside the impossibility of things such as warp-speed travel)? Any future where technology produces such abundance that no one needs to work must still overcome some hurdles. The biggest one is still the need to link effort with reward. Capitalism succeeds because it efficiently connects the two. Work and investment generate income, which is then used to buy the things we want. On average, the more people apply themselves, the higher their incomes.

Socialist countries, which aimed to implement Marx’s vision, ultimately failed because of this problem. If the state guarantees the same resources to everyone, regardless of how hard they work, an entire society will be incentivized to provide minimal effort, which will generate a downward spiral.

In the Star Trek world, work is purely voluntary, since there is no money to pay wages or generate a return on investment. As Saadia points out in Trekonomics , the way to draw forth effort is thus to be “paid” by the respect of society and one’s peers — reputation is the new currency. This, however, is one of the most problematic features of Star Trek ’s vision. In small-scale societies, it can work. Everyone knows everyone else, and the individual’s behavior is easily monitored. The loss of individuality is compensated for by deeper social ties.

But in a decentralized, individualistic society, with billions of people, the ability to draw forth effort must come with tangible rewards. In the future, work takes on only a handful of forms. First are the “hobbyists” who produce for personal pride and pleasure, such as Picard’s brother working the family vineyards. Next are those in the rarefied high-skill or high-tech world, like Starfleet officers, who can gain satisfaction in completing their missions and moving up in rank.

But the need to empty the septic tanks on the Enterprise will likely remain. Here we return to the incentives problem. Either society develops a way to motivate this labor, or it exploits or enslaves a class of workers to do it. While robots could do it, they are banned on Earth in Star Trek . If robots are used for the dirty work, then there is still the possibility of an idle class, who may be susceptible to demagogues, seeking to divide humanity for their own selfish aims. We are then back to a dystopian future, so commonly depicted in science fiction.

Perhaps we need a new Star Trek series — another set of chapters in the history of economic thought that remains true to Roddenberry’s vision — to help fill in the gaps about how we can implement a society of peace, prosperity, joy, and fulfillment.

Jason M. Barr (he/him) is a professor of economics at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers. He currently writes the Skynomics Blog. You can find him on Twitter at @JasonBarrRU.

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Official Star Trek Website Promotes Communism As Key To Real-World Realization Of Series’ Utopian Future

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Though Communism has historically led to nothing but famine, death, and societal collapse, the official Star Trek website recently interviewed Will Nguyen, also known by the moniker ‘The Star Trek Communist’, and discussed his belief that the failed economic system is the key to achieving the utopian future presented throughout the franchise by the official Star Trek website.

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In an April 9th interview published to the Star Trek website, Nguyen that the only way to “actually achieve a one-world government with no national borders, where we’ve eliminated poverty and war and hunger and disease”, as exemplified the franchise’s United Earth government.

“The conclusion is, only through a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism, going to the next stage of human development, can you actually do that,” asserted Nguyen.

On the origins of his far-left ideological beliefs, Nguyen noted that he became an ardent communist after his generation, Millennials, were “affected by the crisis that is capitalism.”

“That’s obviously the Millennial generation and the Zoomers, right behind us, “said Nguyen.They were told that they just sort of go to school, and take on this debt, but then you’ll get a job. They play by the rules, right? But then they’ve emerged into a market that is virtually non-existent.”

Related: Star Trek Actor George Takei Blames Republicans For Atlanta Spa Murders

He continued, “They are swimming in debt. And then having almost all of their income go for rent, [they’ve] got to piece together multiple jobs, three or four side hustles, gig jobs…this is the best that capitalism can do. So, I think I became radicalized just by my experience, just like millions of other people, not just in this country, but around the world.”

“The reality is, we actually already live in a post-scarcity world. Now,” he further argued. “There’s often an argument that people say, ‘Oh, you only get the Star Trek future because you have a replicator box in the wall. And, you know, only then can you have socialism or communism,’ which I would say that’s a very disingenuous dodge because we already have the ability to house and clothe and care for everyone right now, that’s not that hard. The Earth has the ability to feed 10 billion people.”

At this point in the article, things get a bit bizarre, as despite having framed him as some sort of ideological pioneer, Star Trek website writer Sean Kelly admits that Nguyen’s approach to promoting his beliefs is based less on intellectual reasoning and more on throwing social media tantrums through his Twitter account (@BoomerNiner).

“His approach seems, at first glance, shallow — he doesn’t spend a lot of time debating his haters or engaging in nuanced descriptions of theory, though talking to him for even a few minutes shows that he is more than capable of doing so,” Kelly begrudgingly admits. “Instead, his pictures and memes serve as bait for those who grow enraged by his posts.”

Related: Star Trek Actor Manu Intiraymi Admits He Participated In “Systematic Racism”

Nguyen even admits to refusing to engage in debates with his critics, stating, “It’s the online culture of saying, you know, ‘change my mind,’ they want that argument. They want to have this debate, and I’ve already gone down that road a long time ago.”

He also attempted to position his tired social media antics as effective activism, telling Kelly, “It’s just actually a way to get people to ask me about socialism, Marxism, and communism. My DMs are actually open all the time, answering questions.”

Admitting that politics can be difficult to discuss with those who are “unitiated”, Nguyen tells Kelly that it’s easier to approach the subject by speaking to the character of Miles O’Brien, the prominent transporter chief and chief of operations seen across Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

“You know, he’s very proletarian,” Nguyen argued. “His [ancestor] was Sean O’Brien, a union man and he’s a real proletarian, but he also plays cello. He plays darts. He’s a family man, with children. Has a well rounded life, while also being the heart and soul of Deep Space Nine .”

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He further added, “And that’s exactly what we’re saying … if we free ourselves from living paycheck to paycheck, what couldn’t we do? How much of our lives would be freed up? If you didn’t have to worry about putting food on the table? That’s why people gravitate toward Star Trek , they look at Star Trek , ‘Wow, I really want to live on that nice pastel-colored ship.”

In conclusion to the piece, Kelly praised Nguyen, writing that not only does he fit in “with the best traditions of Trek fandom in that he’s an optimist”.

“Being part of an organized effort to reach people with these ideas, gives me a lot of optimism. It’s what we call ‘revolutionary optimism.’ [There’s] tremendous class consciousness right now, people are learning very rapidly,” Said Nguyen, before ironically concluding, “There’s no better time to market.”.

What do you make of Star Trek’s official promotion of Nguyen and his communist ideology? Let us know your thoughts on social media or in the comments down below!

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• General Trek Discussion

Is Star Trek Communist?

• Thread starter DeepSpace84
• Start date Nov 2, 2009

DeepSpace84

• Nov 2, 2009

I was speaking to another another person who has watched Trek before and he claimed that the future is Communist. Now, I admit there is no form of economy in the Federation, but does that it Communist? Communism is a philosophy of no hierarchy but of Social bliss, as the call it. I don't think Star Trek is Communist. If anyone read Communist history, they would know that human rights are not important, what is important is that state. The people of the Federation value human rights and diversity. Communists do not. In my opinion, the only group that resembles Communism is the Borg and they are considered a mortal enemy to humanity. What is your opinion? I don't want to create politics being so new but I want to know how all of you feel as someone brought this to my attention.  

Vice Admiral

While I never really got that vibe from TOS, TNG represents a certain 'utopian communistic ideal' made possible through the miracle of replication. You also have to keep in mind that TNG did consider individual rights well below the worth of the 'group'. You wouldn't see dissent on the bridge - that would be wrong. We even see episodes where Picard is willing to allow complete genocides in the name of political directives . We also see the Federation allow many of its own citizens to die for the 'greater good' several times. It's definately a commuinist society, but one portrayed as benign and benevolent on the surface. This is very much keeping with the 'Pro-UN world peace' view presented and embraced by the Hollywood-liberals of the 1990s. It's unrealistic, and it's the main reason that TNG has dated far worse than any other part of the Trek franchise.  

Fleet Admiral

DeepSpace84 said: I was speaking to another another person who has watched Trek before and he claimed that the future is Communist. Now, I admit there is no form of economy in the Federation, but does that it Communist? Communism is a philosophy of no hierarchy but of Social bliss, as the call it. I don't think Star Trek is Communist. If anyone read Communist history, they would know that human rights are not important, what is important is that state. The people of the Federation value human rights and diversity. Communists do not. In my opinion, the only group that resembles Communism is the Borg and they are considered a mortal enemy to humanity. What is your opinion? I don't want to create politics being so new but I want to know how all of you feel as someone brought this to my attention. Click to expand...

Kirkman1987

The obvious show to discuss is TNG. this element isn't too present in the other shows if at all. TNG is very liberal, no doubt. Its hard to say because of the technology. It may somewhat resemble a communist society, but it's really a post scarcity society. There's no limitation of resources, which means there's no need for capitalism, (in theory). It resembles communism, but it's really a type of system that's not possible now because of limited resources. And I disagree, individual rights were very important in TNG. Remember how Picard Treated Hugh In I, Borg.  

iguana_tonante

Is that time of the month again?  

24th century law recognizes concepts of intellectual property ownwership and control through the 12th Guarantee. This would not be law if the Federation was truly communist. Whatever political and economic system the Federation uses is pretty damn sweet. The Ferengi alliance is a joke and I am glad DS9 relagated them to comic relief. Daemon Bok couldn't even prevent a mutiny how does such weakness of organizational design bode for larger structures like interstellar goverments?  

Kirkman1987 said: And I disagree, individual rights were very important in TNG. Remember how Picard Treated Hugh In I, Borg. Click to expand...

chakotay_lover

I am not sure what I would say, everyone is still free, they are not told how they are to run their lives in order for there to be equality for all in society, becuase there is no money it is a hard subjec, the differences in our societies is how we are regulated by the goverment and how money is treated and distrubuted differently. In the case of TNG I would say not communistic at all, I agree that the borg are the most communist, because they have equality for all. Although no human in TNG(that i remember) was in poverty, or poor, they were not all equal....I dunno its hard to concieve a world without money.  

Vance said: And remember Picard's anti-religion screeds. (The Prime Directive applies in all cases, except for religion, then we can fuck the planet up all we want.) Click to expand...

Rear Admiral

Kirkman1987 said: The obvious show to discuss is TNG. this element isn't too present in the other shows if at all. TNG is very liberal, no doubt. Click to expand...

Neutral Zone

I would not say communist as there are freedoms that would never be tolerated under a communist regime. But I would say that they have the 'Ideal' soceity that has evolved and struggled for over the centuries. It's a pity that we do not have a society like that at this present time.  

Vance said: It's definately Communist, in the worst sense, in all it's leanings. The difference is that it had the Hollywood trappings of the 'perfect controlled utopia' where everyone got along, all the time, and did the Right Thing (TM). It was such a rediculous fantasy that, as I said, TNG very much stands out as an accidental 1990s masterpiece of pro-UN propoganda more than science-fiction. Click to expand...

"Liberalism", as used in the United States for the past generation, is actually leftism. And most of you are missing the point. I didn't say that TNG was Stalinist, but it is certainly communist. Specifically, it's a 'communist utopia' as defined by a lot of psuedo-intellectuals that had a few too many tokes in the 1960s and came to power in Hollywood in the 1970s. It's very much that 1990s view of a perfect socially engineered ideal, the sort of thing that many 'social elites' wanted (and still want, actually) to turn the United Nations into.  

Vance said: Specifically, it's a 'communist utopia' as defined by a lot of psuedo-intellectuals that had a few too many tokes in the 1960s and came to power in Hollywood in the 1970s. Click to expand...

Caped Trek Mod

• Nov 3, 2009

Vance said: "Liberalism", as used in the United States for the past generation, is actually leftism. And most of you are missing the point. I didn't say that TNG was Stalinist, but it is certainly communist. Specifically, it's a 'communist utopia' as defined by a lot of psuedo-intellectuals that had a few too many tokes in the 1960s and came to power in Hollywood in the 1970s. Click to expand...

It's very much that 1990s view of a perfect socially engineered ideal, the sort of thing that many 'social elites' wanted (and still want, actually) to turn the United Nations into. Click to expand...

Ward Fowler

Kirkman1987 said: It may somewhat resemble a communist society, but it's really a post scarcity society. There's no limitation of resources, which means there's no need for capitalism, (in theory). It resembles communism, but it's really a type of system that's not possible now because of limited resources. Click to expand...

Sounds like Vance has an axe to grind. There may be leftist leanings in the depiction of the Federation and Starfleet, but I can also see libertarian and even conservative leanings in some of its stances. The Prime Directive is akin to libertarian ideas of staying out of others' affairs, similar to Ron Paul's avowed opposition to the U.S. intervening abroad. And Starfleet, as an older institution bound by tradition, certainly has conservative leanings. I see the Federation as a post-socialist, post-capitalist society that we as 21st century folks can't classify, the same way a medieval peasant would be unable to picture a society that wasn't governed by the feudal model of divine right of kings. I agree with Ward Fowler and Kirkman1987 -- the Federation is a post-scarcity society, to be sure, due partly to replicator technology. -- RR  

Red Ranger, it's not really an axe to grind. As I said, the overwhelming majority of Trek never shows this communist hyper-utopia. It ONLY really exists in the first two seasons of TNG, and that was a direct result of Gene Roddenberry himself. If people WANT to see Star Trek in a 'communist manifesto' light, it's very easy to point to those two years. Outside of that, I really don't see Trek going far off the typical national mood, or at least the 'safe' zone that Hollywood distills for television. So, a little to the right at times, a little to the left. For me, personally, TOS (with the approach of tackling a problem with three points of view all the time) really struck the best balance overall.  

Fleet Captain

I see Star Trek as more "Idealist" than political. Of course that doesn't stop those of a liberal persuasion from hijacking it as their own... But I think that's the appeal of Star Trek -- we all have to one degree or another an idealistic streak (and that regardless of political affiliation, BTW). I think we'd all like to live in a world like Roddenberry's 23rd and beyond centuries...  

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A friendly reminder regarding spoilers ! At present the expanded Trek universe is in a period of major upheaval with the continuations of Discovery and Prodigy , the advent of new eras in gaming with the Star Trek Adventures RPG , Star Trek: Infinite and Star Trek Online , as well as other post-57th Anniversary publications such as the ongoing IDW Star Trek comic and spin-off Star Trek: Defiant . Therefore, please be courteous to other users who may not be aware of current developments by using the {{ spoiler }}, {{ spoilers }} OR {{ majorspoiler }} tags when adding new information from sources less than six months old (even if it is minor info). Also, please do not include details in the summary bar when editing pages and do not anticipate making additions relating to sources not yet in release. THANK YOU

• Memory Beta articles sourced from comics

Communism was a political ideal that means the well-being for all.

This ideal was embraced by a number of nation states on Earth during the 20th and 21st centuries , these nations states weren't really communist at all, ranging from Marxists to authoritarian socialists. The most notable of those were the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China .

Marxism was a political ideology founded by Karl Marx, which purported to create an economic system of enforced equality for all people, via extensive governmental oversight of national economies. The ideas of Marxism were eventually used to herald an authoritarian ideology in the states where it was implemented. During the latter half of the 20th century, the competition between free-market capitalism and communism constituted the Cold War .

In the United States of America and a number of other nations, pejorative slang terms came into popular use for people who were proponents of communism, which included "pinko", "red" and "commie." When Captain Benjamin Sisko was experiencing visions sent by the Prophets , the character of Douglas Pabst had insinuated that Herbert Rossoff was a proponent of communism. ( DS9 episode & novelization : Far Beyond the Stars ) Similarly, Professor Eugene Eckhart accused Gary Seven of being a communist, along with all opponents of the Vietnam War . ( TOS - Star Trek: Assignment: Earth comic : " My Name Is Legion ")

By the late 20th century, the shortcomings of Soviet style communism became apparent - the country was suffering economic hardship brought on by extensive military spending and inefficiencies of central economic planning. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a program of perestroika , or "restructuring," to liberalize the Soviet Union - which was to include the elimination of corruption, simplification of bureaucracy, and production improvements. Hardliners in the Soviet government attempted to roll back the reforms by staging an attempted coup in late 1991, which failed within a few days when the leaders of the coup were unable to consolidate power. After the coup was defeated, many of the Soviet Union's constituent members began to assert their independence, and the Soviet Union was dissolved on 25 December 1991 . ( TOS novel : Probe )

At the least, some of the ideals of communism survived in Russia into the 23rd century. When the senior staff of the late starship USS Enterprise traveled back in time to 1986 , Pavel Chekov explained to Admiral Kirk that they would not have needed money if they landed in Russia . Several bystanders overheard Chekov apparently praising communism, leading one bystander to mutter that Chekov was a "...pinko commie exchange student." At this point, Kirk cautioned Chekov to not antagonize the Americans of the time by praising communism in their presence. ( TOS novelization : Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home )

External links

• Communism article at Memory Alpha , the wiki for canon Star Trek .
• Communism article at Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia.
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Communism was a political and economic ideal and philosophy that was embraced by several Earth nations in the 20th and 21st centuries . The pillar of the Communist philosophy was equality and pre-planned economy. Nations that embraced it included the Soviet Union and China . Slang terms for a person who followed this ideal, better known as a communist, included "pinko", "red", and "commie." It was the clash between communism and capitalism that drove the Earth Cold War .

A subtle additional reference might be found in " Bar Association ", where Rom briefly quoted the The Communist Manifesto .

In an alternate timeline , Lenin was assassinated by an unknown assailant in 1916 , and no one managed to take his place. As a result, Russia never turned to communism. ( ENT : " Storm Front, Part II ")

In 1953 , Douglas Pabst insinuated that Herbert Rossoff was a proponent of communism. ( DS9 : " Far Beyond the Stars ")

In the early 2020s , the Neo-Trotskyists came to power in France , and by 2024 had failed to quell student protests , leading to the belief among higher-class Americans that " Europe [was] falling apart." ( DS9 : " Past Tense, Part I ")

The Kohms of Omega IV were named from a corruption of the word communist, an example of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development at work. ( TOS : " The Omega Glory ")

In 2364 , Q adopted the guise of a United States Marine Corps captain and cynically suggested that the USS Enterprise -D " go back to your world and put an end to the commies ". ( TNG : " Encounter at Farpoint ")

In 2401 , communist was listed as one of the results in Raffaela Musiker 's search for the "red lady". ( PIC : " The Next Generation ")

In a deleted scene from " The Big Goodbye ", Beverly Crusher mistakes puppet Charlie McCarthy for Senator Joseph McCarthy , whom she describes as " the man who hunted communist witches ". [1]

In the script for " Encounter at Farpoint ", it was said that in the aftermath of a nuclear war in the 21st century , Humans rejected communism, and its antithesis capitalism , in favor of a dictatorial government .

External link [ ]

• Communism at Wikipedia
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Peter Thiel Thinks ‘Star Trek’ Is ‘Communist’ While ‘Star Wars’ Is ‘Capitalist’

Billionaire also tells New York Times that Meryl Streep is overrated and that “no corruption can be a bad thing”

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd on Wednesday, billionaire tech giant Peter Thiel defended his support of President-Elect Donald Trump and offered some characteristically esoteric opinions on everything from Meryl Streep to “Star Wars.”

To a question noting that “President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness,” Thiel replied, “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

And in a rapid-fire sidebar , he also agreed with the president-elect that Meryl Streep is “probably very overrated, especially by all the people who are vociferously saying that she’s overrated.”

And he stated a clear preference for “Star Wars” over “Star Trek” in a way that generated much comment on social media.

“I’m a capitalist. ‘Star Wars’ is the capitalist show. ‘Star Trek’ is the communist one,” he told Dowd.

“There is no money in ‘Star Trek’ because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need,” he added. “The whole plot of ‘Star’Wars” starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in ‘Star Wars’ is driven by money.”

The rationale for Thiel’s preference for “Star Wars” sparked an immediate online response, particularly from those who concluded that Jabba the Hutt — the guy to whom Han Solo owed that debt — would emerge in his thinking as one of the franchise’s heroes.

https://twitter.com/squarelyrooted/status/819382301117349888

Peter Thiel's model for an ideal capitalist system is Jabba the Hutt pic.twitter.com/pw0nunak8O — flglmn (@flglmn) January 12, 2017

peter thiel, angrily fast-forwarding past the part where leia throttles jabba with his own chain — flglmn (@flglmn) January 12, 2017

This is AMAZING bc it means Peter Thiel thinks the ultimate hero in STAR WARS is Jabba the Hutt, who has given Han motivation for success. pic.twitter.com/D03rcDsrOa — Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) January 12, 2017

Someone tell Peter Thiel about the Ferengi. — Jay, in electronics | ✊ (@xeromachine) January 12, 2017

Marvel and 'Star Wars' take note. 'Star Trek' is now Hollywood's ultimate shared universe

From 'Discovery' to "Strange New Worlds' via 'Lower Decks' and 'Prodigy', 'Star Trek' is leading the way.

Shared universes go back way further than Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and co sitting down for some post-Chitauri shawarma. Superheroes have been moonlighting in each other's comic books for decades, while Cheers regulars frequently paid Frasier a visit in Seattle. It wasn't until Marvel Studios launched the MCU ( Marvel Cinematic Universe ), however, that the concept started to gain serious mainstream traction. 

By incorporating the contrasting adventures of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and Black Widow into one gigantic, overarching narrative, Marvel successfully blended cinematic spectacle with the "must-watch-every-episode" ethos of serialised TV. The MCU's famous end-credits stings also had the unexpected side-effect of convincing us all to stick around until the end of the closing titles of every movie, y'know, just in case. 

From a business point of view it's one of the shrewdest creative decisions ever made in Hollywood, a move that helped turn the MCU into the most lucrative franchise in history, while spawning an army of imitators. Some fell quickly by the wayside — Universal's planned Dark Universe didn't survive beyond its first release, "The Mummy" — while others (most notably DC's original answer to the MCU) simply felt tired in comparison. But with apologies to box-office behemoths Marvel, Star Wars and the Monsterverse home of Godzilla and King Kong, the most exciting shared universe of them all is currently located somewhere on the final frontier.

It's not quite "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" (sorry, Mr Spock), but " Star Trek "'s guiding principle since "Discovery" brought the franchise back to TV in 2017 has been variety. "Discovery" started out as an "Original Series" prequel, before warping off to the even-more-distant future of the 32nd century. That left a gap in the timeline for the less serialized voyages of a pre-Kirk Enterprise in " Strange New Worlds ". "Picard" picked up the story of the ageing Jean-Luc Picard two decades after "The Next Generation" crew's final voyage, while a pair of animated series — kids' show " Prodigy " and all-out comedy "Lower Decks" — were given freedom to take the most daring swings in "Trek" history. 

Throw upcoming spy adventure " Section 31 " and cadet-themed "Disco" spin-off " Starfleet Academy " into the mix, and it's clear that — beyond the obligatory warp drives, phasers and frequent violations of the Prime Directive — the main element unifying these very different series is their shared universe. Even their settings are far enough apart — geographically and chronologically — that there's little danger of storylines colliding in Spacedock. 

The contrast between the Alpha Quadrant and a certain galaxy far, far away is stark. Until " The Acolyte ", every canonical "Star Wars" movie and TV show had been set within a few generations of the Skywalker family tree. But even ignoring the limitations of that brief timeline, there's a creeping homogeneity to much of the saga's storytelling and dialogue. 

Scenes from "The Acolyte" (set around a century before "The Phantom Menace") feel interchangeable with moments in " Ahsoka " (several years after "Return of the Jedi"), while the powers-that-be at Skywalker Ranch seem more preoccupied with plugging holes in existing lore than telling stories for their own sake. What was the final episode of "The Acolyte" season one if not a prequel to the prequel trilogy?

"Star Wars" should be an exhilarating interstellar playground capable of supporting any story you can imagine, but it's increasingly constrained by strict rules that must, it seems, never be broken. "Star Wars" is calling out for its own "Lower Decks"-style comedy" , while the upcoming "'Goonies' in space" " Skeleton Crew " could be the kid-oriented launchpad that Prodigy has been for "Trek". "Star Wars" arguably needs both because right now, all that canon could easily feel daunting to anyone eager to take those precious first steps into a larger world.

Not that the current iterations of "Star Trek" deny the franchise's rich past. The glorious final season of "Picard" was a nostalgia-fest from start to finish, bringing back familiar friends and foes to give the "TNG" crew the send-off they deserved — if it's possible to replicate your cake and eat it, that season showed the way. "Prodigy" also goes big on the deep cuts, but crucially, it doesn't matter if you have no idea that the name of the USS Voyager-A's resident whale (Gillian) is a reference to "Star Trek IV". Or that a mention of the "dysfunctional" crew of the Cerritos is a callback to "Lower Decks". All of the in-jokes are simply window dressing holding the universe together, without excluding newcomers. 

That's the genius of the modern "Star Trek" universe, whose guiding lights clearly understand that expecting every viewer to be up-to-speed with the more than 900 episodes and 13 “Star Trek” movies in the back catalogue would be a surefire route to failure. The MCU and "Star Wars" lived charmed lives when they were built around a relatively small number of movies, but both franchises are now too vast and unwieldy to demand that even casual viewers become completists. 

Nobody should have to watch everything , so surely it's better for everyone if we accept that some people will set their targeting computers on "The Mandalorian" but avoid " Andor ", just as some "Discovery" fans can skip "Picard" without feeling they're missing out. 

Besides, we probably shouldn't be surprised that it's "Trek" leading the way, because this isn't Starfleet's first away mission to a shared universe. Back in the ’90s "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine", "Voyager", four movies and even prequel series "Enterprise" shared characters and plotlines, to the extent that after hundreds of hours of TV, planet Earth was losing interest in shows that were becoming increasingly formulaic. Sound familiar? The franchise's latest overseers have boldly taken note — now "Star Wars", the MCU and the rest should follow in their warp trails.

"Discovery", "Picard", "Strange New Worlds" and "Lower Decks" are all available to stream on Paramount Plus, along with "The Original Series", "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine", "Voyager" and "Enterprise". "Prodigy" is available on Netflix.

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Richard's love affair with outer space started when he saw the original "Star Wars" on TV aged four, and he spent much of the ’90s watching "Star Trek”, "Babylon 5” and “The X-Files" with his mum. After studying physics at university, he became a journalist, swapped science fact for science fiction, and hit the jackpot when he joined the team at SFX, the UK's biggest sci-fi and fantasy magazine. He liked it so much he stayed there for 12 years, four of them as editor. 

He's since gone freelance and passes his time writing about "Star Wars", "Star Trek" and superheroes for the likes of SFX, Total Film, TechRadar and GamesRadar+. He has met five Doctors, two Starfleet captains and one Luke Skywalker, and once sat in the cockpit of "Red Dwarf"'s Starbug.  

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• Mars Tafts I have been a Star Trek fan since 1966 and even I don't believe this article. Reply
• Amin Abakery Is this some kind of Joke? Paramount did worse to Star Trek than they did to Halo, than Disney ever did to Star Wars, its an insult not just to science but to morality and human decency. I used to grow up watching star trek, proud that it was written by scientists and good people like her. Now it seems to be written by your average twitter user. With an adulterer Spock and mushroom drive spinning ships. Reply
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Even Republicans don’t think America will become communist

Former president Donald Trump keeps invoking the specter of communism. No one appears to be buying it.

It is not because of Donald Trump that the Republican Party is associated with the color red (for that you can largely thank George W. Bush and the state of Florida ), but few Republicans have embraced the color as enthusiastically as have Trump and his followers. Trump’s branding skills might be overstated, but he has made red baseball caps an unusually potent political signifier.

To someone of a certain age — like, say, 78 — red was at one point associated more firmly with the Soviet Union and communism more broadly. (That it aligned with the GOP only after the fall of the U.S.S.R. is probably not a coincidence.) A “red” was someone believed to hold views antithetical to the United States, someone to be uprooted from 1950s society and government.

It’s interesting, then, to see Trump lean into the idea that the nation faces a new communist threat — one that even his supporters aren’t convinced exists.

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On Monday afternoon, hours before the Democratic convention kicked off in Chicago, Trump — in his inimitable fashion — presented a sweeping argument against the left.

After President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris , he wrote on his social media platform that he has to beat “a Radical Left Marxist, Comrade Kamala Harris.” He added that “the good news is that she should be easier … to beat than Crooked Joe in that the USA will never allow itself to become a Communist Country.”

This is hardly the first time he’s made such a claim. In 2016, he regularly disparaged Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as a communist. During the 2020 election, he took to describing the left and Biden as advocates of socialism or Marxism or communism, or all of them. There wasn’t much differentiation; each was a term of disparagement understood as such, in particular by Americans who lived through the Cold War.

Something interesting happened in 2020, in fact. Usually, search interest in “communism” follows a regular pattern, dropping in the summer and rising through the fall before peaking in the spring. There’s an obvious explanation for this: Communism generally comes up as a topic of conversation in school.

The year of the coronavirus pandemic, there was an anomaly: Searches for “communism” remained relatively high through the summer. This was certainly in part because restrictions on activity aimed at limiting the spread of the virus were compared to the heavy-handed tactics of communist regimes. It’s probably also related to the virus’s point of origin. Use of the term “Chinese Communist Party” to refer to China’s government surged in the wake of the pandemic.

Trump’s campaign was deliberate about highlighting the idea that Democrats endorsed communism in part because of whom the campaign was targeting that November. The Republican convention featured a Cuban-born immigrant warning about the risk of America collapsing into a communist system like the one he’d escaped. On Election Day, Trump beat expectations in South Florida, home to many Cuban American expats who were the target of that message.

By late 2023, though, it was clear that Americans weren’t really worried about the idea that the country was on the brink of collapsing into a communist dictatorship. YouGov asked Americans specifically about the likelihood of such a shift in the next 10 years. A surprisingly large percentage of people said it was likely, but most people described such a change as not very likely or not likely at all.

The group most likely to say it could happen was Republicans. But only a quarter of Trump’s party indicated that this was somewhat or very likely. And this was nearly three years into Biden’s presidency.

Again, it’s very unlikely that Trump is arguing that Harris, if elected, would establish communes in which people would collectively own systems of production. He’s instead raising the specter of left-wing authoritarianism — explicitly as a response to the left’s suggestions that he would seek to establish a right-wing authoritarian state. (“THE DEMOCRATS ARE, ‘A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY?’” his social media post concluded in his idiosyncratic style.) Trump, of course, has repeatedly embraced other right-wing authoritarians and actively endorsed erosions of liberal democracy, making the rejoinder more than a little specious.

It’s been noted that Trump is largely a product of the 1980s, and that holds true here. In 1984, about the worst thing you could call someone was a communist. In 2024, that’s about the worst thing Trump can gin up, too.

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A storyteller retraced Mao Zedong's historic Long March through China—this is what he learned

Paul Salopek spent three years crossing the communist country on foot while witnessing the forces reshaping it. Read the latest adventure in his bold quest to walk the entire world.

For going on three years now, I've been walking across China. When done, I'll have logged some 4,200 miles.

Starting in the southwest   in October 2021 and rambling northeast, I’ve roughly followed an imaginary geographical divide called the Hu Line, which separates China’s lusher, densely populated east from its more arid and roomier west. I haven’t spotted too many motorized Chinese out stomping my trails. In a nation of 1.4 billion, this felt odd sometimes, to claim horizons for myself. Which isn’t to say I’m not meeting ghosts.

When you walk the world—and I’ve been trekking from Africa to South America for almost a dozen straight years, following the pathways blazed by our prehistoric ancestors out of Africa—you begin to read terrain like a palimpsest. Some places barely offer up a passing word. Others are layered with the whispers of feet and time. China is like this, a densely narrated landscape.

( Follow Paul Salopek's route with this StoryMap. )

In Yunnan Province I w alked the Burma Road , sluiced with the sweat and blood of 200,000 village laborers in World War II. Later, I hunted the cobbled remnants of the thousand-year-old Silk Roads in Sichuan Province. And in Shaanxi Province, my boots raised puffs of dust on the Qin highway, built more than two millennia ago to speed galloping imperial cavalry to the frontiers of Mongolia—a distance of 450 hilly miles—in just three days. Or so legend goes. But the one phantom trail in China that resurfaced often to mind, particularly in the hinterlands, was the Chang Zheng—the Long March.

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Every Chinese schoolchild knows the tale: Ninety years ago this October, in 1934, as China lurched through a terrible civil war, the fledgling Communist Party and its peasant Red Army fled their bases in southern China, routed by the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. To escape total destruction, the Communists walked. They embarked on a 6,000-mile retreat over the eastern Himalaya , across rivers defended by artillery, and through swamps where men and pack animals vanished whole. More than 80,000 troops and camp followers—men, women, children—began this exodus. A year later, only 8,000 still stood. After holing up in the caves of Shaanxi, the survivors rebuilt their revolutionary movement, and by 1949 they’d swept across China, changing the country and the world forever.

“Has history ever known a long march to equal ours? No, never,” crowed Mao Zedong, who, Moses-like, recast his comrades’ retreat as a glorious tale of rebirth. “The Long March has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes.”

Walking through China today, almost nobody talks of the Long March. It’s a patriotic school lesson: a historical cliché, like Washington crossing the Delaware or Hannibal crossing the Alps. But when I sit on curbs in half-empty Sichuanese villages, guzzling yet another bottle of Nongfu Spring lemonade, or while tottering over the frozen cornfields of Shaanxi, I can almost hear, if I cock my ears, the   whisk whisk whisk   of thousands of grass sandals shuffling by, footfalls from a spectral column that once stretched 50 miles.

And again I ask myself: Where is China marching now?

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I leave Yunnan   in the first days of 2022 through the ice peaks of the Hengduan range. The lowest passes scrape 14,000 feet and are shin-deep in snow. Below spreads all of Sichuan. I ricochet down rocks to a monastery called Muli, where ethnic Tibetan monks shoot hoops. They wear saffron and American basketball shoes. “PRACTICE BUDDHISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS” urges a giant red placard slung across the temple.

Mao and his Long Marchers met fierce resistance in this hypoxic frontier. The Communists hailed from China’s sweltering lowlands. To them, the mountains hard by Tibet were an alien barrier populated by non-Han minorities: a mix of ethnic pastoralists, inhabitants of a so-called tribal corridor. The Red Army’s standard goodwill gesture of redistributing feudal property made little impression among the seminomads.

“Passing into the Mantzu and Tibetan territories , the Reds for the first time faced a populace united in its hostility to them, and their sufferings on this part of the trek exceeded anything of the past,” writes Edgar Snow in   Red Star Over China,   the seminal book immortalizing the Long March for Western audiences. “They had money but could buy no food. They had guns but their enemies were invisible.” The famished army raided turnip patches. They starved.

Fortunately, I don’t. People are kind. There is always food. One day I skid through a frozen highway tunnel two miles long. Its hermit caretaker, an ethnic Yi handyman named Shen Hao, lives alone in the generator building with a wood-fed stove. “I have everything I need. Things with price tags? You cannot take them with you when you die,” Shen reminds me, filling his dim lodgings with woodsmoke as he prepares us yak butter tea and steaming noodles. “Things without price tags, like love and friendship, maybe those you can take.”

( A remote village in China pins its hopes on the stars. )

I think about Shen’s words as I stumble, giddy with altitude, into villages of brand-new mansions built of stone. These extraordinary manors, facilitated by easy rural loans, are mostly occupied by wizened couples whose ancestors defied the Red Army. The local roads are impeccable, made of poured concrete. There is decent internet signal. I wonder if such amenities are yet another goodwill effort, this time launched after the 2008 Tibetan uprisings. It seems an old bargain is being struck: prosperity for calm.

On a whim, two spirited teenagers decide to guide me along the road to Jiulong.

One girl is ethnic Yi, the other Tibetan. They don’t speak their minority languages. They don’t need to, they shrug. Classroom instruction is delivered solely in Mandarin. They have marched ahead, leaving their parents marooned in a traditional world.

“Why should we even learn English?” winks one girl. “Soon Chinese will be the language spoken everywhere.”

( In this part of China, hands—not machines—define the rhythm of life. )

In the spring I walk   a looping highway. Road workers share their lunch of tangerines. I reach Luding Bridge, the scene of the iconic battle of the Long March. It was fought in 1935. At issue was a strategic, iron-chain span across the Dadu River. As Edgar Snow describes it with zeal: “One by one Red soldiers stepped forward to risk their lives, and, of those who offered themselves, thirty were chosen. Hand grenades and Mausers were strapped to their backs, and soon they were swinging out above the boiling river, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains.”

Today the bridge is a Red tourism site. Elderly Tibetans square-dance next to it, their boom box throbbing out Chinese folk-pop.

Mao and I temporarily part ways in the river canyon of the Dadu. His ghostly revolutionaries file north, eluding Nationalist armies, to disappear into the wild grasslands and swamps of Gansu. I pivot east, toward big-city Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. But first, I must scale 11,000-foot Erlang Mountain to meet a man who may be the world’s last living   beifu.

Beifu are fabled tea porters. For 250 years, they hauled back-cracking burdens of tea from Sichuan into the Tibetan highlands. (Even children undertook these incredible journeys of woe.) The porters’ grit was legendary. Often traveling barefoot, the beifu traversed 150 miles of snowy crags, lugging bamboo containers of tea weighing up to 400 pounds. Some collapsed of hunger or exposure on frozen mountain trails. Others fell to their death. The corpses were rolled into anonymous graves. Their loads were carried on.

( Walking in the footsteps of China’s historic caravans of tea porters. )

“There used to be many robbers between Kangding and Luding,” Wang Shikang, 89, rasps loudly, in the way of people hard of hearing. “The bandits couldn’t care less about our tea. They always attacked us on the return trip, after we’d been paid. We walked in groups of 20 for protection.” The pay for each Olympian three-week circuit: a handful of coins that would buy a sackful of corn.

“I can still feel the pain,” admits Wang, a stoic, red-faced grandpa who may be the final porter still alive after the foot caravans began to fade 80 years ago. “I have rheumatism in my knees and back.”

I climb Wang’s austere trails of heavy fogs, ice, snow, and strong winds. Pausing to catch my breath, I spot curious holes drilled into flat bedrock. These were worn by the action of hundreds of thousands of wooden   guaizi,   the indispensable walking sticks of vanished legions of tea porters. Here lay a monument to China’s true superpower, I think: the incomprehensibly vast, unrecorded tenacity of its so-called ordinary people.

( At a remote temple in China, a Kung Fu master keeps the past alive. )

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I tramp onward   through pages of Edgar Snow, whose 1937 book is both praised as a classic of revolutionary China and condemned as too naive regarding the Communists. A correspondent for the   Saturday Evening Post,   he traveled secretly to meet Mao in his Shaanxi redoubt, vaccinated “with smallpox, typhoid, cholera, typhus, and plague germs. All five diseases were prevalent in the Northwest.” An outbreak of bubonic plague especially worried him.

Nearly a century later, I wade through the sticky Sichuan summer, zigzagging around COVID-19 lockdown zones.

Chengdu is my first megacity. Population 16 million. A garden city. A cultural city. But unpredictable quarantines erupting across its neighborhoods force me to keep going. I must power stride through the colossal metropolis in three days.

Six months later in Xi’an, my next urban center, China’s draconian COVID lockdowns are abruptly canceled. I discover this by startling awake to a silent December dawn. There is no 6 a.m. loudspeaker urging citizens to fall out for PCR tests administered by   da bai,   the “big whites” in hazmat suits. I blink sleepily out my window: In the courtyard of my cheap hotel, guests with bed head are dancing. Protests against relentless quarantine policies had been erupting across Chinese cities for days. In the age of Mao Zedong as in the era of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, an addiction to centralizing power still works—until it spectacularly doesn’t.

( These 3,000-year-old relics were torched and buried—but why? )

China manufactures   13 billion pairs of shoes each year. This is enough to shoe 60 percent of humankind. China also assembles 60 percent of the world’s mobile phones, 70 percent of our toys, and nearly 80 percent of our solar panels. Soon it will be selling us most of our electric cars. In addition, more people inhabit caves in China—tens of millions—than anywhere else on Earth.   The latter factoid you learn by walking.

Second winter in China. I leave Xi’an and walk into a cosmos of dry gullies and hills. Everywhere, there is a coating of macaron yellow dust: on roads, on my eyelashes, in my bowls of tofu fried in chili sauce. Dust colors the very sunlight that drips from a wax sun. At night, dust settles into my dreams. Blown loess: a steady rain of particulates falling over millions of years from Mongolian steppes. This is the famous Loess, or Yellow Earth, Plateau.

Here, I begin to spot hundreds—thousands—of cave houses called   yaodong.

“Warm in the winter, cool in the summer,” Tong Yue, a jolly apple farmer from Baishe village, proclaims, using a sales pitch that must date from the Pleistocene. “Cheap to build too.”

Tong’s shelter is invisible from the surface. I nearly walk past it. Hand-dug 20 feet straight down, it looks like a sunken courtyard, or a drained swimming pool with doors bored into the bottom of each vertical wall. Such structures are the clever brainchildren of poverty and innovation. Many yaodong today sit empty. Their former residents have migrated up and out to cities. Optimistically, Tong has converted her cave into a rural motel. I am her first foreigner.

Her underground rooms are clean, bunkerlike, chilly. A geological silence steeps my whitewashed chamber. At dawn, after a breakfast of Tong’s buckwheat noodles, I shrug on my parka and pack, and step outside. The sky above is square and brightening to the hue of shining steel.

One hundred and sixty miles to the north, hunched at a desk in his own cave house, Mao spent years inventing Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics. A tough American foreign correspondent named Agnes Smedley once visited   Mao there, in the ’30s, and punched his wife in an argument.

I read this particular anecdote on my laptop in a Kentucky Fried Chicken while being watched by secret police. All of this occurs in the remote plateau city of Yan’an. It is a redoubt procured by the Red Army after 368 days of walking. After 18 mountain ranges were crossed. After 24 rivers were forded. After fighting 10 warlord armies and the national army of Chiang Kai-shek. The terminus of the Long March.

On the trafficless   byways in Shanxi Province, I ramble into a village called Tangzhiwa. It is the spring of 2023. Two elderly women sit against a house, deftly hand-stripping poplar branches of young leaves. I ask them if it is edible. “Boil it five times to get the bitterness out,” says Li Qin, explaining the recipe for a famine food eaten today only by the very aged, out of a hard nostalgia.

Li and her friend are among the last people in the village. This is not new. China’s rural spaces have been emptying for generations. Maybe 500 million people have made the shift already. What is new: Rural or urban, they’re all getting older. China is aging. This is the next huge sociological revolution rattling the nation. Many Chinese women today can’t be persuaded to bear even one baby, per the country’s extinct “one child” policy. The rapid graying of China soon will trigger colossal economic impacts globally. Over the next decade, a staggering 300 million people will age out of the Chinese workforce: nearly the population of the United States. Who then will staff the “factory of the world”?

( China’s population is shrinking. It faces a perilous future. )

I walk across the green scrub hills of Hebei Province. I am nearing Beijing. Fourteen years after the Long March, Mao occupied the city and declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China from Tiananmen Square. He’s still there, sealed inside a crystal sarcophagus. You can visit him starting at 8 a.m. daily except on Mondays.

“A genius,” a young artist from Yunnan once told me of Mao. “He knew how to inspire men’s hearts.”

“He killed my grandfather,” muttered a middle-age farmer in Sichuan. It wasn’t the right moment to ask whether he meant in battle or likelier through policies that swept away multitudes. (The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s misbegotten stab at industrialization, ended up starving some 30 million Chinese.) Officially, the Chairman’s reputation appears to be ascendant. President Xi has revived the cult of personality, seeking to emulate the Great Helmsman’s grip on power.

Twenty-five miles west of Beijing I visit Tianyuan Cave. The shallow cave is among the oldest   Homo sapiens   sites in Asia. The ancient man whose bones were found there died 40,000 years ago. This makes him among the earliest anatomically modern humans to tread what is today China. Scientists, studying his toe bones, even hypothesize he may have worn shoes—if true, another first in our long prehistory of settling of the globe.

What did Tianyuan Man dream of? What was his main complaint? That he was not loved enough? That his life’s path seemed a maddening circle? That he was driven cruelly on by his heart or belly? I stand squinting at the cave’s mouth, looking down over the hills toward the unseen metropolis. Cicadas trumpet the broiling June day. The hills are fuzzed with apricot and oak. We have come so far. And we have so long yet to march. And my heart turns over. And I can feel it already, as I begin my descent to the old capital that Marco Polo called Cambaluc. I will miss China.

( Walking the Earth for 9 years plays tricks on your mind. )

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