At least I can argue my case based on the relevant literature, as opposed to stills from Star Trek!
Mars lovers in all countries — Unite!
Well were Quark and Harry Mudd Communists or Capitalists, what do you think it was that motivated them, was it greed?
Well fact is whatever was on Star Trek, doesn't prove anything about economic systems, as that was fiction, perhaps this post ought to have been in the Martian Chronicles, not in Martian politics and Economy, saying it worked in Star Trek doesn't prove a thing in the real world, if the writers wanted it to work, it would work!
]]>No, my dear Tom!
The communists are Picard, Janeway and the various crews.
Oh you mean this Picard?
How about this guy?
Or this guy?
Picard is part of a military service called Star Fleet. You know in the military they do things differently. Not everybody in the United Federation of Planets is a part of Star Fleet, Harry Mudd wasn't, and neither was Quark.
Time and time throughout this franchise, the Captain of the different ships go on a bit of a rant about how the Federation has done away with money, eradicated poverty, dropped the concept of the nation state and achieved true equality.
What's this, if not communism?
These are the main goals of communism, and the signs of a society that has reached communism!
Communism was never reached in Eastern Europe as they never got close to doing away with money. As for the USSR, it went through "the dictatorship of the proletariat" for a while, it then things moved onto socialism / state capitalism. They never got particularly close to Communism.
Additionally in the Federation:
Women are clearly as emancipated as anyone could wish, and childcare seems to be a responsibilty of the collective. Communism, to some degree favours children raised collectively and independence for women (although never this radical feminism that has become the cause celebre for the "new left").
So there you have some more proof.
As for the Borg, they seem to exist to do the will of the Queen. Their behaviour is expansionist, imperialistic and destructive. Reminds me of a certain superpower I know, across the Atlantic... Either way, typical capitalism.
]]>Tom Kalbfus wrote:"Space, the final frontier."
"These are the voyages of the Starship Proletariat."
"Who's Five Year plan is to seek to spread the Revolution of class struggle against the Borgeoise greedy capitalists exploiting the masses,
and to boldly overthrow those who have never been overthrown before!""You see unlike that other show, the comrade Captain and everyone else all wear red shirts, the result being that we have to replace our captain quite often as the aliens mistake him for some expendable extra."
Are you an NSA psy-ops agent with the objective to infiltrate the Mars community to spread US capitalist propaganda?
Imperialism, US exceptionalism or corporatism is in almost all your posts.
Give it a break with your 1950s CIA agitation! McCarthy is dead and the US system is being exposed for what it is, thanks to Snowden, Wikileaks and Russia's comeback.
And for what it's worth Tom, Mars is RED. Get over it.
That post dates from 2007, and you know what, I don't remember posting it, it sounds quite clever though.
In Star Trek this is Communism.
These are communists, they live communally in Borg Cubes, they have suppressed their individuality and have become true Communists. Do you want to belong to a future that looks like this? The Borg are the Communists of the Star Trek Universe, they seek to assimulate every civilization they come in contact with, and you know what, so too did the Soviets!
"Space, the final frontier."
"These are the voyages of the Starship Proletariat."
"Who's Five Year plan is to seek to spread the Revolution of class struggle against the Borgeoise greedy capitalists exploiting the masses,
and to boldly overthrow those who have never been overthrown before!""You see unlike that other show, the comrade Captain and everyone else all wear red shirts, the result being that we have to replace our captain quite often as the aliens mistake him for some expendable extra."
Are you an NSA psy-ops agent with the objective to infiltrate the Mars community to spread US capitalist propaganda?
Imperialism, US exceptionalism or corporatism is in almost all your posts.
Give it a break with your 1950s CIA agitation! McCarthy is dead and the US system is being exposed for what it is, thanks to Snowden, Wikileaks and Russia's comeback.
And for what it's worth Tom, Mars is RED. Get over it.
]]>"You see unlike that other show, the comrade Captain and everyone else all wear red shirts, the result being that we have to replace our captain quite often as the aliens mistake him for some expendable extra."
]]>Any particular reason you don't see anarcho-syndicalism working, Yang Liwei Rocket? It would be interesting to see what your objections are.
It might work later on in time, when cities are up and running and Mars becomes more self-sustaining, but trying to establish the labour/unionism deal when the first people are landing on Mars just isn't going to Mars. We are talking about the running of very critical Mars equipment, and keeping the red planet's colony/base running correctly. The class struggle will have to be fought another day, they will need Earth too much to just rebel, and the new industrial workers will have to make sacrifices.
A colony on Mars is going to rely heavily on robot labor, since the first landings are in the 2030s, I suspect a full fledged colony won't be established until the 2040s. Ray Kurzwel estimates that computers will have the processing capability of the human brain in 2027, so by 2040 alot of artificially intelligent robots will be walking around. I for one do not want the robots being organized into labor unions or us having a class struggle with robot workers, as by that time they will most likely be our intellectual superiors and may drive us into extinction if they were allowed to have free will. I'd rather have servile robots that obey their masters and are programmed to be "happy" doing so. There are no "worker's paradises" in the future, instead we humans will be on top of the economic pyramid while the robots will be on the bottom doing all the heavy menial labor, and I find nothing wrong with this as robots are not beings or creatures with innate rights, they are rather things, and so long as we do not program them to be anything other than things, we should not have to worry about robot rebellions on Mars. A colonized Mars is also a MArs of the distance future, the era of men working on the assembly line in factories will be long over by then.
]]>Any particular reason you don't see anarcho-syndicalism working, Yang Liwei Rocket? It would be interesting to see what your objections are.
It might work later on in time, when cities are up and running and Mars becomes more self-sustaining, but trying to establish the labour/unionism deal when the first people are landing on Mars just isn't going to Mars. We are talking about the running of very critical Mars equipment, and keeping the red planet's colony/base running correctly. The class struggle will have to be fought another day, they will need Earth too much to just rebel, and the new industrial workers will have to make sacrifices.
]]>Martian Republic, and others: Actually, communism does work, but only on a small scale, say 450 people or less. This is the way the kibbutzim were run in Israel in the early days (some of them still are), and how the early Baptist communities were run (based, of course, on the descriptions of early Christian communities in Acts).
For a system that would be able to administer an entire planet, we would have to look elsewhere.
Anarcho-syndicalism is one possibility - it may seem a contradiction in terms, but this is organised anarchism. Again, it may only work on a small scale (my brother-in-law lives in an anarcho-syndicalist community in Germany), but it's never been tried on a large scale. It may be instructive to read The Dispossessed, by Ursula le Guin; she imagines anarcho-syndicalism as a planet-wide system (well, a moon-wide system, actually), in opposition to capitalism on the main planet.
I can't see Anarcho-syndicalism working on Mars
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