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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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That's the future under post-scarcity, not socialism. They have replicators, which has made manual labor, capitalism, and socialism obsolete. We do not have any such technology and therefore cannot achieve such a thing at this time.
We already live in a "post-scarcity" world... there is absolutely nothing humans could need that we couldn't grow or produce. All the scarcity you see around you is artificially created and maintained - and that means socialism is far, far from obsolete.
Yes, but much of it is made using human labor. Labor is what's scarce in real life and not scarce in Star Trek, and a technological Holy Grail is required to bridge that gap.
So no, present-day scarcity is not artificial. Not entirely artificial, at least.
No, it isn't. We have more labor on this planet that we would know what to do with if we stopped repressing it in order to keep a small group of billionaire parasites in the money.
Absolutely not... there is nothing humans would need that we couldn't produce in spades using already existing methods. The heinous abuse and mismanagement of human resources in our current mode of production does not require techno-fetishizing non-solutions - it requires a social solution. Hence, socialism.
It's like with famines: globally we produce more than enough food to feed everyone, we just choose not to.
Our problem isn't the production of goods, but the allocation.
Pretty much.
We would run out of it very quickly if there wasn't anything compelling laborers to perform labor. Nobody's going to grow crops for you out of the goodness of their hearts. That's hard, miserable, thankless, dangerous work. That's why capitalism exists in the first place.
That has already been attempted several times, each attempt ended in catastrophic failure, and that failure itself involved heinous abuse and mismanagement of human resources.
Machines may yet solve this problem for us, but humans definitely won't, and we've got the history to prove it.
No. We wouldn't. The labor would simply be spent on that which people find important.
Says who? PragerU?
No, Clyde... that's not it. Maybe don't extrapolate your politics from Civilization games, okay?
Yes, it has... and everywhere it was tried it was destroyed by fascists, capitalists and other power-hoarders because they were afraid it might work. For instance, Catalonia in the middle 30s and Ukraine in the early 20s.
No, they won't.
Alt-history doesn't actually count as real history.
I think it's closer to communism than socialism or post-scarcity. There's no democratic control of the workplace to be seen; everybody just shares everything. But they don't have infinity starships for everyone.
I think the best episode which explores this idea is the DS9 baseball card episode. The card isn't post-scarcity; it's extremely valuable personal property.
They don't have infinite starships because they don't have infinite energy and raw materials. What they do have is effectively infinite labor, since they can trivially make just about anything (with a few exceptions, like latinum) out of whatever resources are on hand.
I didn't see the episode you mentioned, so I can't comment on it.
If you're a trekkie I guarantee you'll enjoy it. A fantastic episode.