“‘No need for/Evolved past the need for money’ … yeah, wtf, lets just completely ignore that ever-present bit, it’s to scary & perverted to comprehend.” - avg capitalists Trekkie (or “Trekkie”)
Comment on I liked Star Trek before it got woke. /s
Matombo@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Don’t forget that the whole Federation is a post captialist utopia which is a political statement in itself.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
studychinesisch@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I like this idea too but ST only partially supports it.
In ST, the only reason they’re ostensibly post capitalist is because they’ve solved the shortage problem. The replicator and anti-matter reactors are mulligans that get them a post capitalist world without making any social decisions. They don’t restructure their society or economy to create an alternate method to distribute limited resources, they just get unlimited resources. That limits the usefulness of the analogy because we’ll probably never achieve that.
Later on ST goes further and starts discussing several resources that are, in fact, limited. There’s “latinum” which really only exists as a post scarcity exception. It doesn’t really seem to have any uses but the scarcity is enough to drive the entire Ferengi economy and it’s valuable enough that people want to trade with them.
The much bigger exception is the scarcity of trilithium. The Federation fights wars over it the same way real world Earth powers fight over oil. It’s the scarce core resource powering their entire post-scarcity economy.
octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Great point!