this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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The Federation is Socialist, but Star Trek is not a Marxist piece of media.
It follows a Liberal, Democratic-Socialist, Reformist line of thinking - that, at least once the world has been shocked by the brutality of global war and eugenics - Humanity will "come to it's senses" and move towards Democratic Socialism through reform. When post-scarcity is achieved, the Capitalist class will just let this happen.
It is a Socialist world devoid of the ideas of class conflict; it presents a world compatible with Socialist ideals but not one compatible with scientific Socialist theory.
That's not to say you can't still like Star Trek as a show or use the Federation as an example of a good Socialist society. You just have to keep in mind that the world's history does not make sense when viewed through the lens of Marxist class conflict.
If anything, i've seen much more direct claims (not mine) that it's anticommunist: https://communistkenobi.tumblr.com/post/737508042870079488/the-missing-context-from-this-post-is-that-any
https://communistkenobi.tumblr.com/post/737463878390366208/ok-so-the-omega-glory-episode-in-tos-written-by
I do, however, have no first-hand experience of watching any ST installments.
This is completely wrong, and you probably shouldn't be answering if you haven't watched a single trek show.
Can you explain further? Or do the articles you posted in your top level comment do so?
That specific TOS episode sounds pretty dire as described. So id like to know what the counterpoint is.
Yeah, read those first, or better, watch the show. I'd have to recall that specific episode, but a single star trek episode can't undo several series each with hundreds of episodes of fully automated luxury gay space socialism. The op had not seen a single series, and was arguing by proxy.
The old show had some cringe moments and episodes, but it's spirit was also anti-imperialist and socialist. It even had chekov, a russian character, at the height of the cold war. Could you imagine a show nowadays having a chinese or russian character that isn't openly liberal.
Using the Original Series episodes for this examination is a bit unfair. That show was on a shoestring budget and they were making up the world building as they went along. Thr futuristic post scarcity utopia thing came more with TNG. In the time between TOS and TNG, Roddenberry wasn't getting much TV work and did the convention circuit a lot where he was worshipped a bit too much and too often by fans and was also a beatnik sex guy who was drinking and doing pills a lot and started believing his own hype. Star Trek always presented a better future and something to strive towards but in TOS the society and economic model was shown to still be pretty similar to 1966 America (tos had currency, it gets mentioned often), but it the time between with Roddenberry's ego getting pumped and him attending Q&A sessions where he'd just make shit up about the world building. By the time TNG came around he had all these half baked utopian ideas going around his drug addled brain and was given wayyyy too much creative control at the start of tng and took things too far in many places like arguing that a child wouldn't morn his dead parents cause they were too enlightened for that now. After he died things got rolled back by about a third to a semi reasonable but poorly thought out utopia.
As a big retro Dungeons and Dragons fan, I've grown really tired over the years of the "Anything that even remotely resembles a 'Colonial Trope' is bad" arguments.