Assuming you mean "major ranks"*, that's exactly how it was in Communist countries. Admirals, generals, party bosses and Academy of Science members were the elite -- and their children had the fast track to similar positions. * If you meant "mayor" as in city mayor, it was still true.
Care to refute the article point by point? Or even ANY of its points? OK, so Star Trek is Communism without material deprivation. It still has complete state control over almost all aspects of life. Now that I think of it, given the variety of consumer products that could potentially exist in the world with replicators, Federation citizens ARE materially deprived. Their clothes, hairstyles, quarters and all other material possessions are remarkably bland, colorless, and non-varying.
point by point? im not that bored. just watch the show and read what communism is. its hardly the same thing. its just that in ST humans have advanced so thats why you get the feeling as if you have this communist like society. you just have abundance in ST.
I don't have time to watch the show any more, and having lived in USSR (when it was still USSR) for several years and having been married to a Russian for a while, I think I am adequately informed. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! They are still unnaturally conformist. In real life abundance is always accompanied by variety -- of opinions as well as things.
This is a fun idea! Captain Pickard: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Pickard has fought bravely for many years to eliminate the evil of bad hair styles, all through-out the Galaxy, stay brave!
Gah! Communism is an economic system....Dictatorship and despotism are governments. It is simply that almost all of the communist governments that ever existed had dictators as leaders, unfortunately.
Because Roddenberry had his spies mind meld with HUAC and persuade them otherwise. This also coincided with a surprising amount of logic in politics afterwards.
(Let's start a debate) Star Trek was a capitalistic society. The unit of currency was "energy from trilithium". Each crewman on the Enterprise was assigned a ration of food and a stipend- proof of this is in TOS with "food chips" fed into the replicator to replicate food and in TNG with "Ten Forward" where you are served galaxial beverages. In the TNG episode "The Most Toys", the Enterprise buys hytritium from Kivas Fajo. I would assume we paid him with latinum- a metal that cannot be replicated. Or perhaps tons of replicated gold, or perhaps a few dilithium crystals. In any case, it was hard currency... not worthless "UFP dollars". It's also safe to assume that a cloud of hydrogen is a million times as easy as a bar of gold for a replicator to make- that the staff had a limit to what they could replicate (otherwise you'd just replicate 10 tons of gold and emigrate to a planet as a trillionaire). What we take for granted with Star Trek is that we're seeing seamen-cum-spacemen... "the best of the best"... crewmen on spaceships or occupants of a colony or space station... Star Trek is NASA times a million... we are seeing a half-step towards the next step in humankind. What we don't see in ANY Star Trek is the result of the action of the United Federation of Planets. The closest we ever got to an end-result was in Star Trek 3- where we make a new Earth. I posit Star Trek as a whole is but phase one in humankind- that we'd need to jump ahead another 500 years to 3001 to see what the original intent was. Debate away-
You should read: Star Trek: Articles of Federation. It's not communism because there are offices and there is a currency. Federation citizens are allowed to trade and earn currency with other races.
Use your head. If people can replicate gold, then it will be basically worthless because there will be an unlimited supply of it, and you won't be able to retire with a pile of it. Only things that can't be easily replicated (like trilithium or latinum) are valuable. Anyway, as someone else already point out in this thread about a year ago, the real issue is that the ST writers weren't at all consistent with whether or not they have money. In some episodes they explicitly say they don't use money and act like they don't understand the basic concepts of banking or investing, while in others they're shown buying and selling things. What the hell are they paying Quark with in every DS9 episode if not money? Clearly they have something valuable that Quark wants, that they can trade with him in exchange for the stuff he's selling. It MUST be something that they have a limited supply of, or Quark wouldn't accept it as payment. So how does the federation decide how much of this scare, valuable thing each officer in entitled to? Obviously they have some way of getting paid.
How does the fact that there are offices and currency make it not communist? You think that soviet Russia didn't have currency or offices? Of course they did. The fact that they can trade with other races doesn't mean anything either; when Russians visited other countries during the communist era, they were of course allowed to buy things from people. How else would a Russian tourist pay for his hotel/food/souvenirs etc in another country? Anyway, I don't think "communist" is really the best way to describe them, although I can see why people would say that. They seem to be sort of a weird post-scarcity socialist state. It's not clear exactly how industrial production in the federation works. If a person wants their own spaceship, can they buy one? How do they go about acquiring the money to pay for it? That sort of thing is never explored.
