Star Trek and Socialism

If we hope to arrive at the future depicted in Star Trek, we would need to radically change the world we live in today. All utopian art and writing imagines that this is possible, but many disagree on how we should accomplish it. Is it a socialist future we are reaching for when we imagine the world of Star Trek?

Star Trek fans like to believe that we have reason for optimism that a better world is possible, something I wrote about early on in the newsletter as “the optimism effect.” If we combine it with real politics, what would it look like? On a large scale, we are talking about revolutionary changes in society that would move us away from capitalism, competition, and ecological destruction. Utopians have been writing about these goals for more than 300 years.

Utopian socialism is the vision presented in various forms by 19th century writers like Henri de Saint Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. Fourier's ideas are a good example to use here. He advocated for cooperative communities living in social harmony, the equal distribution of wealth, and gender equality to address the oppressive elements of traditional gender roles and marriage.

Many of these are the broad strokes we could identify in the future imagined by Star Trek. The socialist utopia of the future in Star Trek is as vividly imagined as anything in Fourier's work. But there's a nagging question eating away at the edges of this fictional world. How did the world of Star Trek get to a socialist utopia? What made it possible? In the 19th century Marx and Engels had significant questions about the possibilities of utopian socialism too. Their criticisms of the utopian socialists give us a few useful ways to reorient how we think about a Star Trek future.

The first and most significant criticism that historical materialism poses to utopian socialism is the question of social change. The scientific nature of the Marxist viewpoint suggests that utopian socialists have not explained the "how" of getting from today to the utopian future. Historical materialism emphasizes that social change must arise from both material conditions and class struggle relative to the means of production. History moves forward as a result of the this struggle, but utopian socialists have failed to appreciated this. Instead, they relied upon society as a whole accepting the need for social change and moving there through moral persuasion and reasoning.

Marx and Engels had very strong words in the Communist Manifesto for socialists who thought they could arrive at socialism without class antagonism:

I think this brings us very soundly to a fundamental criticism of how Star Trek sees the future and how we might arrive there. The first part of the problem is that Star Trek isn't very clear about the future history of the Federation. There are a few brief instances where Captain Jean-Luc Picard defines the 24th century attitude towards capitalism and the accumulation of wealth. A device that Star Trek often used was to contrast 24th century values with the 20th century. In “The Neutral Zone,” (The Next Generation Season 1, Episode 26) the Enterprise rescues 20th century survivors who are cryogenically frozen. One of them is a "financier" named Offenhouse who blusters about needing to speak to his attorney and his bank. Picard regards him with pity as a simplistic child and tells Offenhouse, “people are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy.”

Picard repeats this same little speech almost exactly in the film First Contact when trying to reason with a 21st-century woman transported aboard the Enterprise. He tells Lily Sloane, "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." Sloan replies, “no money? You mean you don’t get paid?”

These scenes give us a sense of the material values elevated by humanity of the 24th century but very little notion of the process of historical change that drove this revolutionary change. Gene Roddenberry wasn't particularly interested in exploring what this might have looked like in either The Original Series or The Next Generation. But with the arrival of Deep Space Nine introduced stories more willing to offer conjecture about the middle period between today and the 24th century. Many of these stories were actually about the 20th and 21st century.

Star Trek was always interested in parsing through the big ideological debates of the 20th century on the canvas of science fiction. But while Gene Roddenberry and his co-creators were veterans of World War II and concerned with the battle against fascism, a subsequent generation of Star Trek creators turned their attention to American history and the struggles of the 1960s. Show-runner Ira Steven Behr's influence over Deep Space Nine steered some of its best stories towards 20th century debates.

In "Past Tense" (Deep Space Nine Season 3, episode 11) some of the crew of Deep Space Nine is set to return to Earth. But in a transporter malfunction, they arrive in the year 2024. Produced in 1992, “Past Tense” was intended to fill in some of the early middle period of Star Trek future history, but it does so with an eye towards the class politics of both the 1960s and the 1990s. Realizing they have returned to the past, Commander Sisko and Dr. Bashir find themselves interred in a San Francisco "Sanctuary District. In the Earth of 2024, American inequality had become so extreme that the impoverished were interned in walled ghettos enforced by a fascistic police state.

The 1990s part of the story was born from debates that rocked Los Angeles in the early part of the decade over just this type of solution to the rampant homelessness in the city. The writers of "Past Tense" and many of the production team on Deep Space Nine were upset by the anti-poverty politics overtaking California and these fears were written into the episode as a dystopian future realized. Dr. Bashir is unfamiliar with this period of Earth history (“too depressing,” he admits) and so Sisko fills him in: "By the early 2020s, there was a place like this in every major city in the United States” Bashir can hardly believe that Earth ever went through this dark period.

The irony now, of course, is that there are in fact homeless encampments that look worse than the Sanctuary District in every city in the United States and Canada. Attitudes towards this extreme poverty are scarcely better than the worst that Star Trek writers could imagine in the early 1990s.

The 1960s element of the story arrives as Sisko and Bashir realize that a key figure from history has been prematurely killed: Gabriel Bell. Sisko knows that Bell played a key role in leading a protest and subsequent riot in the very San Francisco Sanctuary District where they find themselves imprisoned. Sisko must assume the identity of Gabriel Bell to lead the protest and prevent the timeline from being disrupted. The riots depicted are Star Trek's attempt to grapple with both Kent State and the Attica Prison riots, presenting a fantasy about how American society might have responded to these uprisings - with revulsion for the inhumanity and injustice of state violence. In Star Trek future history, after hundreds were killed in the Bell Riots the American public was so horrified that it fundamentally changed the shape of American society and altered attitudes towards inequality.

This is Star Trek's overture to the idea of class struggle, but not its realities. The Bell Riots were a flashpoint of resistance and violence but not a protracted revolution or uprising against the ruling class. Instead, Deep Space Nine suggests a very socialist utopian notion - that the immorality of the state response convinced elites that they occupied an impossible position and needed to change.

This is the very persuasion that utopian socialists of the 19th century believed would prevail. Marx and Engels, on the other hand, believed that class struggle and conflict would drive history forward, not represent a flashpoint at the start or the end of this process. What would Marx have said about Deep Space Nine's idea of revolution? Of the way it explained our pathway to utopia? It is certain Marx would side with the rioters, that he would applaud their struggle, and would place the blame for the events on the American government which conceived of Sanctuary Districts in the first place.

We do know something of Marx’s response to class revolt in the 19th century. In 1857 Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune about the the Sepoy Indian revolt, concluding, "There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself." But it is probably true that Marx had no faith that the British government would see things his way. It's a beautiful idea that Star Trek imagined an event like the Bell Riots could change the course of history, but Marx reminds us that moral persuasion is a losing bet.

Still, Marx was also appreciative of the contributions of utopian socialists for their contributions to socialist thought in the decades before the development of scientific socialism. The utopian socialists inspired revolutionary thought, and were an important first step in the development of class consciousness. A big leap here I know, but we can look at Star Trek's first forays into introducing class consciousness to its story in the same way. Any time spent online reading the thoughts of Star Trek fans makes it clear that the franchise has the same inspiring effect as the first great works of utopian socialism. Is it too much to hope that we might we one day get a Star Trek grounded in scientific socialism?

There's a response to this question of course that also runs through the promenade of Deep Space Nine and a labour action by Ferengi bar workers against their exploitative employer. But I'll save "Bar Association" for the next newsletter!

Thanks for reading, friends. LLAP 🖖