In the 1960s the world was facing riots and protests by socialists and feminists, the demise of Europe’s imperial weight and the Cultural Revolution in China. Meanwhile the threat of complete nuclear annihilation loomed over the Earth. It seemed like things couldn’t get any worse (I imagine). Gene Roddenberry wanted to tell humanity that we can change for the better and showed us through the creation of ‘Star Trek’ that the rejection of capitalist materialism can ultimately benefit people.

For the uninitiated among you, ‘Star Trek’ is not just a sci-fi about space exploration; there is a deep humanitarian and socialist message ingrained within it. Earth is part of the ‘United Federation of Planets’, the European Union of the Milky Way, if you will, (just not a capitalist quasi-dictatorship). This federation is a post-capitalist society, as Captain Piccard explains to a woman from the 21^st Century while he is stuck in the past in the film ‘Star Trek VIII: First Contact’:

“The economics of the future is somewhat different; you see: money doesn’t exist in the 24^th Century.”

“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives; we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Whilst the Federation represents a utopian vision of socialism, the main antagonists represent the problematic political and economic structures of today’s world: the ultra-capitalist philosophies of the Ferengi result in terrible oppression of the workers; the fascist dictatorship of the Cardassian Union carries out genocide against the Bajorans and the Stalinist Borg Collective destroys all individuality. This picture is of course simplified and idealistic, but it clearly shows that a liberal socialism is better for the greater good.

Quark: a Ferengi in pursuit of profit (taken from DS9 episode “The Nagus”)

A system of mutual cooperation is more beneficial to humanity than greed driven individualistic capitalism; and a system within which the improvement of oneself is the driving force of progress is ideal. The problem is that this wonderful vision of a perfect future has proved impossible to achieve despite successive attempts in our own history.

Revolutionary socialism has, despite success at first, always resulted in a corrupt government resorting to the abandonment of communism in order to stay in power. It ended with the Stalinist Soviet Union, which the Borg of ‘Star Trek’ emulate and the state-led capitalism that we see today in China.

Meanwhile democratic socialism has systematically failed to achieve its goals as it operates within the liberal democracies that discriminate in favour of wealth creation rather than the improvement of society.

We therefore have to ask ourselves: how can we achieve a true socialist society? In the ‘Star Trek’ canon, it takes hundreds of years of mentoring from the logical Vulcans before humans become the selfless characters of the 23^rd and 24^th Centuries. We as humans need to evolve ourselves before we can change the society in which we live, otherwise our individualistic human nature will always cause us to revert back to capitalism. It is my hope that in real life we can evolve into 24^th Century humans in less than two hundred years and without the help of Vulcans.