As I am not American I grew up with socialism being a positive connotation in day to day culture, so much so it’s wild to me that this needed to be veiled in Trek’s past. Star Trek should be as explicit as possible with this. “Hey, you want Utopia? This is how you earn it!”

Rom was in way before SNW:

I think so, the federation is often seen and portrayed as close as you can get to a utopia (Since it's practically impossible to achieve a "true" utopia). They still have issues, make mistakes and wrong calls, and even some (albeit greatly reduced) crime.

So having more positive association/references for the term socialist, a term that most general people can have a connection with, cant hurt.

I've noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a "dirty word," though she qualifies the statement by first saying "I'm not a communist."

It was always socialist. That was blindingly obvious even from the days of TOS. Remember, Star wars universe everyone had just come out of the third world war, practically everything had been destroyed and there was virtually no infrastructure left, people were willing to take pretty much any kind of government going.

Then replicators were invented and once you've got that it's pretty difficult to have anything other than a socialist government or a dictatorship.

It's good because most of the American audience is too politically miseducated to recognize it otherwise.

Yes, although I do find that the penal labor in the Federation prisons are a bit concerning for a utopia

they explicitly use the term socialist to describe the Federation economy in SNW.

I'm going to need a source and context for this, apparently it flew by me in between all the parallel timeline nonsense required to shoehorn James Kirk into the series. Also, the "Gorn, but Xenomorphs" retcon.

Generally speaking, I was fine with Socialism being a quiet part of Trek economics for 50+ years. I don't do a lot of mental gymnastics aligning the minutiae of a fictional future with contemporary concepts. Science fiction is a reflection of our real world, sure, but I have as little use for connecting the dots between 21st and 23rd economical concepts as I have for schematics for the replicators on Enterprise. A lot can happen in 2-300 years, especially when Trek concepts are metaphors and narrative shortcuts for telling stories about a future that recontextualise our own times.

But I get what you mean, it was always Socialism, wasn't it? Our real world has taken a weird polarised turn that makes Trek's space utopia seem more far fetched than it has for a long time. Even if "the culture wars" sounds like something the franchise might have introduced as a philosophically apt concept back in the '90s...

In that regard I too appreciate that the show's producers put their company scrip where Trek's mouth has been all those years. It seems that some very loud "culture warriors" never grokked that this was a deeply left (or at the very least humanist) leaning show. It's a little late in the day to spell it out for them that, yes — "Trekonomics" are frigging Socialist, but apparently that's the level of media illiteracy we're dealing with here.

So good on SNW for letting its red flag fly. It will probably piss off some people who still can't separate Socialism from whatever garbled idea of "Red scare" indoctrination has been passed down through generations. Whatever, they're pissed off no matter what.

It is ironic to me that this "Socialist" discourse is coming from a franchise(!) so ensconced in capitalist production and economic structures that it is gauged for marketability and profit. That's the big elephant in the room throughout all the "Trek so woke" outrage cycles: We'll never get to a post-scarcity future resembling Star trek by sitting around watching Star trek.

It's not really socialist. Socialism is an economic model that involves taxing the rich and redistribution of wealth to the working class through welfare programs.

But in ST, there is no economy, no taxes, no rich people, no wealth, no working class. The only thing from that definition that they do have is welfare, but it's a completely different form of it.

ST is a magical post-scarcity utopia. Any economist would tell you that economics is first and foremost the study of how to allocate scarce resources. In a post-scarcity society, the whole concept of economics breaks down. Replicators break everything we know about economics. Everyone can get everything they need and it costs them nothing but electricity (which they conveniently can generate for basically no cost).