Is the withering away of the state earth centric?

[Anarchocommunaltoad]

I doubt workers communes could colonize the stars in a manner that avoided an eventual reemergence of conflicting entities that i shall refer to here as "space states".

[Yuppie Grinder]

Why don't we worry about abolishing class society on Earth first and get to that later.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Viva Juan Posadas!:D

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

If things get out of hand, there'll always be a rebel band who'll shoot into a seemingly harmless vent or a bunch of teddy bears ready to kick ass old-school style. The evil star states will crumble and peace will reign throughout the galaxy or what have you.

[l'Enfermé]

Moon gulags. It's a thing. True story.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

I doubt workers communes could colonize the stars in a manner that avoided an eventual reemergence of conflicting entities that i shall refer to here as "space states".
If Earth has achieved communism, why would space colonies turn back the clock?

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

If Earth has achieved communism, why would space colonies turn back the clock?

Opportunism of reactionaries that have been waiting for their moment (a new frontier to forge their new empires) Because 6 movies of all kinds of crazy shit can come about just because of the taxing of trade routes...space, it's a big place and I guess the possibilities are just as endless.

[Will Scarlet]

Establishing communism from a blank slate would probably be pretty easy.

[Yuppie Grinder]

If Earth has achieved communism, why would space colonies turn back the clock?
lunar scarcity economy

[Anarchocommunaltoad]

lunar scarcity economy

Please let that mean something.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Please let that mean something.

if you don't know what scarcity economy is you for real need to read more theory bru

[Anarchocommunaltoad]

if you don't know what scarcity economy is you for real need to read more theory bru

I get scarcity. I don't get why interplanetary colonization would be negatively affected by a lack of natural satellites (reverse lunar madness perhaps?)

ps: I was being literal. Don't doubt my brilliance. But seriously, it is kind of hard to imagine communism or lefty anarchism in a civilization spanning billions of miles.

[l'Enfermé]

Wasn't Star Trek basically set in a pseudo-socialist world?

(I didn't actually watch more than a few episodes like a decade ago so I'm probably wrong)

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I doubt workers communes could colonize the stars in a manner that avoided an eventual reemergence of conflicting entities that i shall refer to here as "space states".

What would the source of the conflict be, exactly?

Water? There's shitloads of it in space. All those sci-fi stories of aliens invading Earth for our water are about as likely as the Alaskans invading Mexico for their ice. In other words, pure bunkum.

Food? Either you're growing it yourself, or you're dependent on some place elsewhere shipping it to you, or some kind of half-way house in between. Any attempt by food exporters to use their leverage will, if nothing else, serve to accelerate any tendency by colonies to become self-sufficient in terms of food. If getting out from under the thumb of a tyrant is as simple as being able to grow a reliable supply of food closer to home, then it will happen.

Energy? Again, fucking shitloads of it in space. Solar power, uranium, fusion fuel - there's so much more of it up there as opposed to down here. You also don't have to drag it up from the bottom of a gravity well, making space-based resource extraction that much cheaper, all other things being equal. Close to if not more than half the total energy cost of space travel includes the energy spent escaping from the Earth's surface.


Wasn't Star Trek basically set in a pseudo-socialist world?

(I didn't actually watch more than a few episodes like a decade ago so I'm probably wrong)

The situation in Star Trek is a bit weird because different writers portray the Federation differently depending upon their intentions as authors. Treating Star Trek episodes as documentary evidence would seem to indicate that for "core worlds" like Earth, there is no more money or private sector worth speaking of (Captain Sisko's dad appears to run his restaurant on Earth as something of a hobby rather than a business, plus no advertisements can be seen on Earth), but when goes an unspecified distance from such planets, one hears talk of "Federation Credits", although judging by the disdain given to them by the arch-capitalist Ferengi, they may not amount to much in the interstellar economy, which raises the intriguing possibility that they constitute some kind of "stop-gap" economic measure for still-developing colony worlds.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Wasn't Star Trek basically set in a pseudo-socialist world?

(I didn't actually watch more than a few episodes like a decade ago so I'm probably wrong)

It's classless and moneyless but has a world state. Utopian humanism, blech.

[Anarchocommunaltoad]

It's classless and moneyless but has a world state. Utopian humanism, blech.

But how can the state wither away when it is surrounded by other states? If revolution can only succeed when it is world wide, wouldn't that mean that it couldn't "complete itself until it was universal?

[Yuppie Grinder]

But how can the state wither away when it is surrounded by other states? If revolution can only succeed when it is world wide, wouldn't that mean that it couldn't "complete itself until it was universal?
Yea that's why I consider it Utopian. Classlessness implies statelessness.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I was going to move this thread to "non-political" or maybe even Science, but the "theoretical nature of star trek's society" discussion, means it stays here.:lol:


It's classless and moneyless but has a world state. Utopian humanism, blech. Yeah they bypass the question of class and social organization because they can manufacture all their needs through magic - I mean replicators. In the later Star Treks (Shatner movies and Next Generation) they are pretty explicitly post-capitalist, but there is no real hint of socialism in the sense of worker's power ever in the past. It's like they used technology to skip to a kind of communism where people only work volutnarilly. Of course being a show created by non-revolutionaries in present society, the characters, while idealized and "enlightened" in many ways, still hilariously reflect assumptions from our own time.

I'd like to see "Star Trek the Next Next Generation" when there has been a full social revolution by the red-shirts and people have developed in a post-capitalist, post-class way and act in ways that make no sense to us.