I want to see a libertarian Star Trek
By: Mike Hearn
Tags: Star Trek, Capitalism, Sci-Fi, Communism

There are no corporations

Star Trek is huge. There are hundreds of hours of shows and films. At no point in any of them do you see companies. Despite being set on a ship literally called the USS Enterprise, there is no evidence of free enterprise or entrepreneurship anywhere in the Federation.

Things notable for their absence in the 24th century include:

Logos or products

Advertising

Employees, employers

Wages

Everything is built and owned by the Federation government, which appears to have a monopoly on production (i.e. it must have seized the means of production given the existence of companies in the past). All technology is standardised: the only time you see tech different to what you see on the bridge of the Enterprise, it’s alien technology. Don’t like the rather plain Federation computers or clothing styles? Tough.

Star Trek doesn’t elaborate on why this is. It’s never stated that forming a company is illegal, in fact the characters hardly reference anything being illegal (except for gene editing and their precious Prime Directive of non-interference). In fact Star Trek rarely elaborates on any of the puzzling social characteristics of the future. Like ….

There is no money

Of course there is one famous type of society that doesn’t have companies — a communist state. There are hints of this possibility scattered throughout the show, like in the frequent claim there is also no money:

“The economics of the future are somewhat different. Money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” — Captain Picard

This kind of talk was typical of Karl Marx, who believed that if capitalism was overthrown people would naturally outgrow vices like greed or corruption.

But even in the 21st century most jobs in developed economies are service jobs. The Federation has professional bartenders. Do they really work to ‘better themselves’ by serving drinks all day?

Jake Sisko: “I’m human, I don’t have any money.”

Nog: “It’s not my fault that your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favour of some philosophy of self-enhancement.”

Jake Sisko: “Hey, watch it. There’s nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Nog: “What does that mean exactly?”

Jake Sisko: “It means… it means we don’t need money!”

Officers make absurd claims about society

“Hairdressers cut hair because they’re good people” is one of many implausible things routinely implied about Federation society by Starfleet staff. There are two possible explanations for this:

After having been stable for tens of thousands of years, human nature has changed beyond recognition in just 300 years. Picard is reciting official propaganda. In reality people would still rather play in the Holodeck than cut hair or wait tables, but they’re forced to work via some mechanism left unshown for obvious reasons.

The Federation claims the answer is (1). Star Trek states that when humanity made contact with the Vulcans (an event depicted in the film First Contact) everything changed forever. Wars ended, humanity became fundamentally good, money disappeared and we went on to unite a quarter of the galaxy in a benevolent alliance headquartered in San Francisco.

But that’s exactly the sort of claim a communist dictatorship would make about its own history: the USSR made similar claims about the impossible awesomeness of its citizens and society. This frequently surfaced in the early years as a concept called “the new Soviet man”, and was most famously summed up by the Stakhanovite movement:

The term Stakhanovite originated in the Soviet Union and referred to workers who modelled themselves after Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.

That’s the same as “our citizens work to better themselves and humanity”.

There actually is money

In totalitarian states the government’s claims about how society works don’t match reality. Picard frequently claims there is no money in the Federation. Here he is at it again in “The Neutral Zone”:

RALPH: Then what will happen to us? There’s no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How will I live?

PICARD: This is the twenty fourth century. Material needs no longer exist.

RALPH: Then what’s the challenge?

PICARD: The challenge, Mister Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.

But material needs do still exist, and money isn’t gone. We hear lots about a precious metal called Latinum. Latinum appears to be the primary way races outside the Federation trade with each other and is often used for illicit transactions.

The idea that a universe with starships and replicators uses bars of precious metal to trade with stretches suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, and is never explained. But it’s enough to know that Picard is lying when he claims there is no money and no material needs. Why would he lie? Because he’s a very senior military officer in a dictatorship, and that’s what such people do.

Most of this can be explained by the writer’s attempts to follow the hard-left worldview Roddenberry had picked up over the decades, whilst still trying to write plots that didn’t have gaping holes:

“By the time I joined TNG, Gene had decreed that money most emphatically did NOT exist in the Federation, nor did ‘credits’ and that was that. Personally, I’ve always felt this was a bunch of hooey, but it was one of the rules and that’s that.”

— AOL chat with one of the writers, 1997

The military is in charge

Perhaps it sounds strange to describe Captains Picard, Janeway, Sisko etc as military officers. One of the most puzzling aspects of Star Trek is the ambiguous and delusional way characters describe their own jobs.

Whatever its staff may believe, Starfleet is very clearly a military. Members wear uniforms, use military titles like Captain/Lieutenant/First Officer and obey orders without question regardless of personal danger. The authority of the captain is absolute and he can jail or fire officers at will. Ships are heavily armed and regularly engage in battle with invaders.

Worse, in the episode “Paradise Lost” it’s revealed that Starfleet can deploy an army on Earth so huge it can impose martial law on the entire planet. Starfleet’s top admiral nearly commits a coup against the Federation and the only person who could stop him was another Starfleet captain! Most bizarrely of all, Starfleet has a secret police wing called Section 31 that almost no citizens are aware of yet which seems to covertly control political events. When Dr Julian Bashir discovers the existence of this organisation, it turns out both him and his captain are powerless to do anything about it and don’t even bother reporting it to their superiors.

“Is that what we have become? A 24th century Rome, driven by nothing other than the certainty that Caesar can do no wrong?” — Dr Bashir

What of politics? The Federation does have a President who is nominally elected, but it’s unclear how — he appears to have no checks on his power and no evidence of any political activity is ever seen. He theoretically commands Starfleet, but I say theoretically because Starfleet officers are constantly engaging in conspiracies and assassination plots against various leaders yet this seems to have no impact on the organisation whatsoever.

Despite all this Starfleet likes to claim it’s some sort of research or exploration agency. Every episode of TNG begins with Picard saying that their mission is to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. But what sort of society gives exploration and diplomatic tasks to heavily armed ships? A communist one.

Capitalists are ugly and stupid

The most damning evidence that Star Trek is propaganda must surely be its depiction of capitalists. They look like this:

Quark!

There’s exactly one race in the Star Trek galaxy that explicitly identifies itself as interested in commercial activity: the Ferengi. They are invariably presented as shifty, ugly, stupid, short, untrustworthy, annoying, oddly attracted to human women, backward and fantastically greedy. They are, of course, not members of the Federation.

What’s especially incredible about this is that whilst the Ferengi ended up being played for laughs, they were meant to be the primary threat to the Federation — a replacement for the Klingons after the Federation and Klingon Empire made peace. In the 60s the writers depicted danger as a culturally aggressive and warlike race, obsessed with personal honour in battle. Not bad! By the late 80s, on being asked to create a race scary enough to replace the Klingons, the writers came up with capitalists:

After Gene Roddenberry tasked Herb Wright with inventing a new species to regularly menace the crew of the Enterprise-D, Wright set to work. Recalling that inspiration for the conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in The Original Series had come from hostility between the US and the USSR during the Cold War, Wright sought an equivalent relevant to the US of the era he was living in, the 1980s.

Right. So the Ferengi vs Federation was meant to be an analogy, where the Ferengi were both the enemy and also the USA … and therefore the Federation was the USSR. Doesn’t get much clearer than that. What’s amazing is it took test screenings and audience feedback for the writers to realise capitalists aren’t scary.

Luckily for the franchise, their second attempt at this problem created the Borg, one of the most awesome and menacing alien races ever imagined.

Common objections

Some people don’t like the idea that Star Trek is advertising the virtues of dictatorship. They say …

It’s because of replicators! Replicators are neat but can’t explain a fundamental change in society any more than 3D printers can. For one, replicator technology is shown as limited. We see starships being built in dry docks by people because, it’s explained, you can’t replicate something as big as a starship. For another, you can’t replicate services and most jobs are service jobs, even in the Federation.

The Federation is democratic! No, the Federation claims to be democratic but all dictatorships make such claims, so that doesn’t mean much. The Star Trek writers found time to show many trivialities of Federation society through hundreds of hours of TV and film, with many seasons having repetitive plots stuffed with endless technobabble. That’s why it’s good for getting to sleep! But they never showed political campaigns in any episode I’ve seen, nor Starfleet staff dealing with mission changes due to elections, not even in passing. They could have done but chose not to. The USS Enterprise lives its life entirely untouched by democratic politics of any sort.

It’s needed for storytelling purposes! But no. Star Trek is notable for all the dumb stuff it does that wrecks its storytelling. Somehow it succeeds despite violating most rules of good scriptwriting. Roddenberry decreed that Starfleet officers never fight each other even though conflict is the heart of drama, which is why so many episodes show crew members being taken over by mind controlling aliens of various kinds (the writers called this rule “Roddenberry’s Box”). The replicators mean nothing is unique. The characters are all flawless in every way and never make mistakes. Every problem is always solved with a technological deus ex machina. Whatever the reasons for Star Trek’s strange society, it’s certainly not to make it easier to tell stories.

What might a libertarian Star Trek look like?

Star Trek is popular partly because it’s relentlessly optimistic. Whatever our problems and flaws are today, it says, in the future they will all be gone.

Given the years I spent working on Bitcoin and given that I now still work on decentralised technology, I’d be interested in watching some sci-fi that showed a happy, idealistic future spacefaring society characterised by massive decentralisation. What might such a positive vision look like?

Every town, every city on every planet having its own highly democratic government, its own laws, its own currencies and unique cultures.

Advanced technology being used to automatically smooth over the various differences encountered as the characters travel around, so the kaleidoscope of variety doesn’t overwhelm them.

All power generation being hyper local via things like solar panels, wind farms and personal fusion devices.

Spaceships are small and everyone has their own, like cars today. People roam freely at will, and their stories are not dictated by the constraints of missions but rather, their own goals and wishes.

Almost all decisions being made through markets, digital referendums or joining and leaving various affiliated groups. Politicians would not be very prominent and their role would be restricted to intelligent advocacy, but discussion of societies problems and how to collectively solve them would be a major pre-occupation of the characters — unlike in Star Trek, where human society is imagined to be perfect already and appears to never change. Only aliens need improving according to Starfleet!

A society so wealthy that even very trivial incomes are sufficient to let people explore the galaxy and live easy, fulfilling lives. Rather than a universe without money at all, the desire for money would come from the desire to embark on more ambitious projects than simple space tourism — but for those without such goals, occasional work would suffice to fund a comfortable lifestyle, even for people with very long lives. There are no weekends in this alternative 24th century, because work is the exception rather than the rule. This is a simple extrapolation of the already existing trend for poverty (defined in absolute terms) to keep falling, and the physical strain of work to keep reducing (e.g. steelworker to office worker).

Size caps on companies. A typical sci-fi trope is the quasi-governmental corporate conglomerate. But there’s no inherent reason companies must be very large. If there were limits on the number of employees a company could have, then to tackle larger problems they would have to set up more standalone firms and partner with them — but those firms would then be free to also partner with their competitors. This is an idea I’ve often wanted to explore, and sci-fi seems like as good a medium as any with which to do it.

I’m probably not going to get my wish — the “Libertarian sci-fi” wikipedia page claims there’s lots of it and loads of libertarians are into writing it, but can only cite five notable examples in the entire history of books. That’s not very much. Despite the huge wealth and success that democratic capitalism has yielded, there don’t seem to be many creatives willing to imagine a non-dystopian logical extrapolation.

Perhaps the sort of people who believe in it are the sort who aren’t big into daydreaming — being as they are more trusting in the unpredictable outcomes of evolutionary processes. Or maybe it’s just easier to write stories with interstellar governments. Whatever the cause, it’d be nice to try it out and see what happens.