The bottom is the society that will happen post-socialism. No matter what political system follows, it will always end up in the hands of those who seek to abuse it. Everybody wants to be wealthy and pain free, socialism requires that everyone feel the same degree of pain and suffering no matter what.
We are doomed to be on this rock to the end of our days, unless we can destroy it slowly enough to show us that we are ruining it, and give us the ability to feasibly evacuate it.
Mad Max is just a documentary of the Australian outback
Socialism good, capitalism bad. Agree?
Both scenarios could actually happen at the same time
That’s the future under post-scarcity, not socialism. They have replicators, which has made manual labor, capitalism, and socialism obsolete. We do not have any such technology and therefore cannot achieve such a thing at this time.
We already live in a “post-scarcity” world… there is absolutely nothing humans could need that we couldn’t grow or produce. All the scarcity you see around you is artificially created and maintained - and that means socialism is far, far from obsolete.
there is absolutely nothing humans could need that we couldn’t grow or produce.
Yes, but much of it is made using human labor. Labor is what’s scarce in real life and not scarce in Star Trek, and a technological Holy Grail is required to bridge that gap.
So no, present-day scarcity is not artificial. Not entirely artificial, at least.
Labor is what’s scarce in real life
No, it isn’t. We have more labor on this planet that we would know what to do with if we stopped repressing it in order to keep a small group of billionaire parasites in the money.
and a technological Holy Grail is required to bridge that gap.
Absolutely not… there is nothing humans would need that we couldn’t produce in spades using already existing methods. The heinous abuse and mismanagement of human resources in our current mode of production does not require techno-fetishizing non-solutions - it requires a social solution. Hence, socialism.
I think it’s closer to communism than socialism or post-scarcity. There’s no democratic control of the workplace to be seen; everybody just shares everything. But they don’t have infinity starships for everyone.
I think the best episode which explores this idea is the DS9 baseball card episode. The card isn’t post-scarcity; it’s extremely valuable personal property.
They don’t have infinite starships because they don’t have infinite energy and raw materials. What they do have is effectively infinite labor, since they can trivially make just about anything (with a few exceptions, like latinum) out of whatever resources are on hand.
I didn’t see the episode you mentioned, so I can’t comment on it.
