On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC aired a Star Trek episode featuring a concept that clashed mercilessly with what had just happened. Under the “Prime Directive”, starship captains in the fictional United Federation of Planets are banned from using technology to interfere with any community, even if non-interference might cost them their own lives.
It would have been unsurprising if President Lyndon B. Johnson had demanded Star Trek’s immediate cancellation after it had put forward such a radical anti-imperialist ideology. Luckily, he didn’t. And so it was that, over the 939 episodes across 12 different series that followed, Star Trek’s Prime Directive allowed writers and directors to explore the political and philosophical repercussions of such a concept, primarily its reliance on a prior transition to a humanist communism.
That Star Trek depicts a communist society, without of course calling it that, is crystal clear. In a 1988 episode, the starship USS Enterprise comes across a rusting old Earth vessel containing human plutocrats who had paid large sums to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that aliens might find and cure them of whatever disease was killing them. After the crew of the Enterprise thawed and cured them, one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, a businessman, demands to contact his bankers and law firm back on Earth. Captain Jean-Luc Picard is left with no option but to break the news to him that, in the intervening three centuries, much has changed: “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things.”
Their conversation points to the reason why the Prime Directive is incompatible with the spirit of capitalism. As long as accumulation, fuelling the expansion of markets, is our society’s motivating force and ideology, imperialism is inevitable. To escape it, humanity must first eliminate scarcity of material goods – an elimination that, in the United Federation of Planets, was achieved on the back of the invention and widespread deployment of replicators: machines that convert plentiful green energy into any form of matter one desires, from food to gadgets to spaceships.
This is not exactly a novel idea. In 350BC Aristotle predicted that “if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus… chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”
An avid Aristotelian himself, Karl Marx based his vision of a freedom-enhancing communist society on machines like Star Trek’s replicators that liberate us from non-creative, soul-crushing labour. In one of his early writings, he imagines what will follow the invention of such machines:
“I can do this today and that tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, look after cows in the evening, practice in theatre criticism after dinner — without having to be a hunter, fisherman, cowherd or theatre critic.”
Marx’s words resonate when we meet Captain Benjamin Sisko’s father who in the 24th century runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans for free because money is now obsolete — he is simply motivated by how much his neighbours appreciate the cooking. They also resonate with Picard’s answer to Offenhouse who, upon hearing that he was to be sent back to an essentially communist Earth, asks glumly: “What will happen to me? There is no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How do I live? What is the challenge?” “The challenge Mr Offenhouse,” replies Picard encouragingly, “is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself. Enjoy it!” Marx would have, I am in no doubt, applauded energetically.
Joy is not a word that naturally rhymes with communism, at least the Soviet variety. But pleasure is central to Star Trek‘s version of communism, which rejects the notion that escaping the logic of accumulation requires individuals to submit to a collective. Star Trek‘s writers make this point brilliantly by contrasting the Federation, made up of creative individuals who are free to choose their projects and partners, with the Borg — a dystopian cyborg collective made up of drones linked together in a beehive-like social order that expands by assimilating every species it encounters.
Star Trek rejects collectivism while still avoiding lazy critiques. We are treated to the traumatic reintroduction of a Borg drone to humanity, who experiences debilitating withdrawal symptoms, missing desperately the collective’s voice in her head. It is a reminder of how authoritarianism can be dangerously attractive to the lonely, but also of how important it is to pay the price of personhood.
But Star Trek does not just offer a vision of a splendid future. Like any other practical manifesto, it offers a theory of change: of social evolution founded on solid historical materialist tenets.
Consider, for example, the episode where the USS Voyager is locked in the gravitational field of a strange planet on whose surface time moves much faster than within the orbiting spaceship. The starship crew realise that during each one of their minutes the backward humanoids on the planet experience 58 sunrises. Thus, the crew enjoy a bird’s eye view of that society’s evolution, as if observing it unfold on fast-forward.
What they see is a rendition of humanity’s history — how technological innovations clash with superstitions and antiquated exploitative social relations, bringing about revolutions, progress, but also wars and environmental disasters. At times, it seems as if the species under observation, like humanity, might destroy themselves. But, in a happy ending, they too manage to overcome their imperialisms and their accumulative urges to press new technologies into the service of their common good.
Some of the most interesting insights occur at the edges of the Federation where its explorers encounter, and often wage war against, other civilisations that are either at a more primitive stage of development or have created technologically advanced tyrannies.
There, on the margin, alien species afford us opportunities for introspection, like the Bajorans who have just come out of the brutal occupation by the Cardassians, a supremacist species that ran Bajor like a penal colony complete with concentration camps and genocidal drives. In one episode a Bajoran freedom fighter identifies a former Cardassian concentration camp monster and works tirelessly to bring him in front of a Federation-Bajoran War Crimes tribunal. I can think of no other TV programme which, within 40 minutes, can better educate the young on the horrors of the Holocaust — a reminder that good science fiction is as much about the past as the future.
Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station where different species mingle to trade, a meeting point between the communist, post-money Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station, there is a sleazy bar run by one of the hyper-capitalist Ferengi who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until his brother, who also works for him, has had enough: he calls upon his fellow workers to form a union and strike for their basic rights. For the Ferengi, neoliberalism is more than an ideology or even a secular religion — it is also a culture, a way of being. Pitching their critique of neoliberalism at its most humourful, Star Trek’s writers portray the Ferengi as humanoids incapable of differentiating themselves from Homo Economicus. Judging from the lengths the scriptwriters went to compile all 285 of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Holy Book, they must have had enormous fun. “War is good for business,” but “Peace is good for business too.”
To balance the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny, Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet ruled by bureaucratic centralism. An abducted doctor is forced to work in a hospital where he discovers that medical care is dished out strictly in proportion to the patient’s social worthiness index — a number compiled by a centrally controlled computer.
Star Trek interrogates our humanity through encounters between the Federation and other species. In truly Hegelian style, the planting of alien officers inside Federation spaceships forces humans to reflect through the eyes of those with a sharply different philosophy and outlook. There are numerous examples, but the one face-off most pertinent to our own times is what follows when a supersmart android, known as Data, is introduced on USS Enterprise.
Data has no capacity to feel but nevertheless is driven by the urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data carefully studies our behaviour, and our art. He becomes not only a much-appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from today’s perspective, a character that serves our thinking about AI.
Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights comes to the fore. When a Federation laboratory requests that Data agrees to be disassembled for the purposes of replication, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and thus retained, Data raises a subtle objection that could have come straight from Noam Chomsky’s rejection of vulgar materialism: “There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure,” he tells the laboratory’s chief. When the latter shrugs his shoulders and suggests that Data has no choice, Captain Picard demands that the question — of Data’s agency — be taken to court.
The trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android is not sentient. Data, therefore, has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism. Instead, it acknowledges that simulating sentient beings, as Chat-GPT does already, is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion in which it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness like Data.
More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and technophobia. For example, the Federation heavily regulates genetic engineering, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities as done in eugenics. On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire, the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life — Captain Picard’s defence of Data on the trial concludes with the point that “Starfleet was founded to discover new life”— with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.
The United Federation of Planets is no utopia. The enemy within, xenophobia, is there, dormant and ready to sully the Federation’s humanism; ready even to rescind the Prime Directive. When the starship crew return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans abuses the ship’s doctor in what is a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell holds the rest of humanity at ransom until all aliens leave Earth. And it is not just populist speciesist extremists that the Federation must reckon with. Its own secret services, outfits such as Section 31, also pose a serious threat to its libertarian communism. And yet, as a defiant injection of hope, the Federation’s humanist communist values hold.
The question is: despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost 1,000 episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund Left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through a maze of threats? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s Left is that we need to avoid both a conservative technophobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ failure to appreciate the importance of property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.
In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared to dream that, by the end of the 20th Century, technological progress would have eradicated scarcity, poverty and exploitation. In The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he imagined a world where mankind’s “economic problem” had been solved:
“For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
The reason history disproved Keynes was not that humanity failed to invent the necessary technologies but, rather, because the property rights over the machines became ridiculously concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Is it any wonder that neither science nor compound interest delivered us from scarcity, poverty, exploitation and war? Is it any wonder that, instead of Keynes’ happy commonwealth, humanity has edged closer to an early Star Trek episode in which “cloud minders” live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines?
Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-optimists. Cloud capital and AI is a necessary but insufficient condition for our liberation. To make it sufficient, it will take a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons. At the same time, as Star Trek poignantly shows, our liberation depends on not falling into the other trap of authoritarian collectivism.
Today’s moribund Left could do far worse than to take its cue from Star Trek‘s bold embrace of a humanist anti-authoritarian communism.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/