Socialism in Space (Patreon)

My name is Jean-luc Picard, and I am here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat on his brow? NO says the man on Vulcan it belongs to science and reason! NO says the man on Kronos it belongs to the most honourable warriors! NO says the Borg it belongs to everyone! I rejected those answers, and chose the impossible. I chose… space, the final frontier. Where no youtuber would fear the censor, where no gamer would be bound by petty feminism, where Curio can watch as much KilianExperience as he wants and end up putting the Andrew Ryan speech into every video from now on…

Hey everyone, I just wanted to take some time to talk about how fucking cool everything is going to be when we’re living in Auto-Gay Luxury Space Communism. I know this is a bit off-brand for my channel - I promise my next video is about games. I have - let me check - 4.5 thousand words on Frostpunk. I even have 20 pages explaining my opinions on Bioshock 2 in full detail which I’ll never release and you’ll have to kill me if you want them you cowards.

Today though, we’re just going to have a nice cup of tea and talk about how great socialism is, and I’m deleting all opinions I disagree with from the comments because as we all know, that’s what socialism means. Before we get going, I’d like to have a little look at why Capitalism doesn’t belong in space.

Section 1: Capitalism does not belong in space

There about eight things people need, like really need that the government can provide: housing, food, healthcare, power, water, education, travel, internet. Now obviously, some of these are needed more than others. Like internet is pretty clearly more important than food or water, and when we do away with Capitalism we’ll be able to SOCIALISE GAMING!

There’s a philosophical term you may know, called the is/ought gap. It refers to the difference between statements about how things are versus how things should be. An interesting application of this idea is where people look at how the world is and, unable to find a reason why it is, start to think that’s the way it ought to be. I think a lot of us see that there are homeless people, people who can’t afford healthcare, people who can’t afford to eat healthily, and because we can’t explain why that is or maybe because we can’t imagine changing it, we rationalise it as something that ought to be. Is there a good reason a society shouldn’t make making sure there are no homeless people its number one priority? I can’t think of one, to be perfectly honest.

Jeff Bezos says “The solar system can easily support a Trillion humans and if we had a Trillion humans we would have 1000 Einsteins and 1000 Mozarts and unlimited - for all practical purposes - resources from solar power and so on.” Jeff, buddy. Come the fuck on. The biologist Steven Jay Gould said “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.“ Jeff: How many Einsteins are working in Amazon factories right now?

Bezos is the richest man in the world with an estimated (by Forbes) net worth of over $100bn. If you want to talk about “unlimited resources for all practical purposes” then let’s talk about the fact the average american earns and spends somewhere in the ballpark of $2mn in their lifetime. That means Jeff could make it so that himself and forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people could live without worrying about money roughly their entire lives. And that’s making it so they’re taken care of for life, which isn’t even what I’m talking about when I talk about these basic needs a person has. The average house price of america is still around $200k which means Bees-man could buy 500,000 houses and just give them to homeless people, which is roughly all the homeless people in america on any given night. If he gave people $20,000 each, he could cover 5 million Americans’ healthcare costs.

What is that, for life? Oh that’s only two years? Wow guys, what the fuck are you doing?

My point is that the Bees-man could redistribute his money, and help some people an enormous amount, or more people a bit less, or tonnes of people a bit less than that but still loads. Instead though he’s planning to use his money to help a very very small number of people to go into space, and do… stuff? Even if his big vision is the human race spread out among the stars, that’s not what Blue Origin is going to be doing right now. 

The changes I’ve suggested are put forward semi-facetiously, because the best use of this enormous amount of money probably wouldn’t be to have it doled out in this manner but used to affect systemic changes, create systems that serve people, and in all fairness estimated net worth and cash-in-hand are very different things.

But why am I picking on poor Jeff? He’s a huge Curio fan, he watches every video, it’s not fair for me to tell him he has to give up all his wealth. I’m just doing a section on Capitalists here so I thought I’d go after the richest Capitalist, but okay, let’s talk about money that is part of the public sector budget anyway. The US military budget for 2018 was $700bn, so with that money you can effectively take all the calculations I made earlier and multiply them by 7. That’s 350,000 people who could just be financially taken care of for life, 3.5 million houses, or 14 years of healthcare coverage for 5 million -- okay seriously guys just sort your healthcare the fuck out. You pay more per person for healthcare than any country in the world and have on average the worst healthcare outcomes of all the richest countries.

Peter Coffin has already talked at length in this video about how the “only capitalism could have created the iphone” myth is like… well it’s a myth… every technology that enabled the iPhone was researched through publicly funded study.

A lot of good research gets done through the military for sure, and historically has done, but does it have to? I don’t think so. I don’t know if you know, but socialists aren’t really super keen on borders, or for that matter nations, and therefore by default war as a general concept. You can just ask a socialist about that one, it’s true my dudes.

If the money didn’t necessarily have to go through the military to do this research, the research could be being done into even more varied fields, and the other money which goes towards bombing children and giving young, physically fit people lifelong PTSD could go towards other things like… Well I don’t know… I wish I had a handy list of say, eight things that we could put the money towards... 

I recently found out about an app idea being researched - eMortal - for preserving family legacy: your pictures and videos and so on being saved for decades after you die so that your descendants can see them. A part of me thought that was pretty neat, a part of me was slightly apprehensive, but then I found out they were asking how much people would pay for this service. I knew it was research for a business but I didn’t think about the idea of people having to pay.

Imagine in the future your great grandchildren can’t access their own family history because you invested in this service and then somewhere between now and then your family wasn’t so fortunate with money, or god forbid someone had the gall to get sick under the american healthcare system? I find something about the idea of your own family history being kept by a company kind of uniquely horrifying and alienating.

Charlie Brooker doesn’t even need to come up with Black Mirror episodes any more, he can just go on angelList and see what the new startups are up to. In fact, the horror in an awful lot of Black Mirror episodes (pretty much all of them) come from capitalism being a controlling force in the future. I mean, in Kapital Marx wrote that we’d be living in some sort of nightmare hellworld if factory workers couldn’t afford the things they manufactured, or waiters couldn’t eat at the restaurants they worked at, or clerks couldn’t buy things that they sold, and those are like… the basic facts of our lives now.

We see this kind of divide all over the place in media. When people want to portray a good vision of the future, everything is provided for. It’s Auto-Gay Luxury Space Communism. When they want to let us know things will be just as depressing and shit in the future, the future is Capitalist. Look at Deckard - sure, the guy has a hover-car, but he still has to pay money for his ramen noodles. What a chump. What an absolute rube! When Capt. Picard wants ramen noodles he just presses a button.

One of my favourite books is The Martian by Andy Weir, which was recently adapted into a film starring Matt Damon. The book was written based on tonnes of research and collaboration with NASA, so the science of the story is spot on. There is actually only one factually wrong bit of science in the story, and it’s the storm that causes the problem in the first place. Weir had to exaggerate the wind speeds on Mars to make a plausible premise.
In the book, astronaut Mark Watney is swept away during a storm on Mars and his crew have to leave without him. NASA, the US government and eventually the Chinese space program scientists all collaborate in the efforts to get Mark back home while stranded. Mark uses his botany expertise and very rudimentary engineering and science knowledge to survive. What’s incredible about this story is the spirit of collaboration, and in particular the plot point where the Chinese scientists decide to hand over technologies they had been working on in secret to help bring Mark home. The scientific community reaches past borders, and nations to help someone out, just human being to human being.

You know who doesn’t figure in the story? Elon Musk. And boy is he ever bitter about it.

It’s time for me to tell you all once again to read White Trash by Nancy Isenberg. I can be stopped from recommending this book only by a silver bullet through the heart or my Patreon surpassing $1000 per month. Your move.
At the time that many people started to set out from Europe to America as a new chance for a better life, the exact kinds of promises were made about the way things would be in America as Jeff Bistro is making now, about how the future will be living all around the solar system. There will be unlimited resources - enough room for everyone to be fruitful and multiply.

If the systems of power in 19th century Europe had been open to reform, the people who were unhappy with their lives there wouldn’t necessarily have needed to leave for “a better life in America” because they could have instead built a new system with real direct democracy, where people aren’t alienated from their labour and everyone gets basic support as a bare minimum. Or they could have made an authoritarian hellworld where the people in charge control every tiny piece of everything everyone does, because as we all know, that’s what socialism means.

Socialism is where the government does stuff and the more stuff the government does the more socialister it is.

Okay, huge pet peeve time:

Authoritarian/Libertarian is not an inherent leaning of left/right. Claiming it is, is just collapsing two axes into one, and is a horrendous fallacy. There are authoritarian right wingers, libertarian right wingers, there have been authoritarian left wingers and libertarian left wingers.

Obviously things are interrelated. You can't seriously think that being economically conservative isn't going to hurt people, so trying to be economically conservative and socially progressive is… flawed… troublesome… problema--

So just to be clear, authoritarian government is not inherent to socialism. But we all get that right? None of you are coming into this video fully expecting that any form of socialism means total dictatorship right? Right?

Okay let’s talk about Star Trek.

Section 2: Automatic luxury gay commulism in space

I need you to get really optimistic with me. I’m saying this explicitly because I know that optimism isn’t lots of people’s natural state, especially right now, especially with everything going on. That’s why I’m asking you to just max your hope bar, just put your all into being really, really optimistic with me, for about 15 minutes.

Let’s talk about Auto Gay Luxury Space Communism - so called because everyone is automatically gay and if you try to be straight you are executed, because as we all know that’s what socialism means.

(heterometer)

I must have been 10 when I first saw Picard say that they have no money in the future, and that just seemed fucking wild to me. I had said and thought a lot as a child that money seemed to be something that made people unhappy, and I was starting to grasp why it was necessary so that people could trade goods and services efficiently, so hearing the idea of a society without it, and not a prehistoric society but one in the far future - that’s some good shit.

Just a note: it might be helpful to try looking at governmental policy in terms of socialism that is possible and socialism that is already happening. A full socialist government isn’t the only one that can implement socialist policies. In fact, one of the modes of governance socialists push for is Social Democracy. If you don’t know, that’s basically how things are now in the US, UK, EU and so on, except that all the basic needs of people are taken care of - the eight things I mentioned earlier, except internet because these fools lack sufficient vision.
So let’s talk about providing for those eight basic needs.

Housing: Right now, in the modern day, there are more empty homes in the US and the UK than there are homeless people. Do I need to say what I think should happen there?

Food: In countries we call “developed countries” about 100kg of food is wasted every year per person at the consumption stage - as in, just thrown away uneaten - which is over 10% of the average American yearly food consumption. That doesn’t mean from your plate or out of your fridge - the largest wastage happens in the bins out the back of the supermarkets. In fact, many restaurants and shops have started giving their “waste food” to foodbanks or letting people take food for free or extremely reduced prices shortly before closing. Clearly, the system could be made a heck of a lot more efficient and better for people who are hungry and can’t afford food. The point is - scarcity is manufactured. For profit. The food we need is there, and it is thrown out, rather than leak profit through devaluation. On a global scale, wealthy nations “throw out” surpluses produced by subsidised farmers by dumping them, via aid programs, in poorer nations, crashing internal food markets of counties that are forced to participate in global capitalism from a weaker position, without market protection. I don’t really know why more people don’t understand the idea that it makes people money to pretend there’s only so much to go around. Incidentally, pretty much every government in the world subsidises farms at times depending on the economy. Ensuring food production keeps going is a natural part of government already, and is one of those things we could label “socialism already happening”, but you don’t see Charlie Kirk rallying to stop subsidising farms. Or maybe you do, the guy has pudding for brains.

Water + Power: Here in the UK, utilities companies, as essential services, are heavily regulated to protect us. They have to make sure you can pay your rent before taking your bill payments, and if you can’t they try everything possible to prevent having to turn off your supply. At that point, the government may as well run the companies itself, and ensure access to these essential services regardless of income, without the profit motive to raise prices.
Healthcare: Healthcare is dealt with differently in different countries around the world but… to be honest, if you’re american reading this and you need convincing that your healthcare system needs work, this video might not be for you bud. Just come back next time and I’ll tell you why Spyro: Year of the Dragon is racist. Here in the UK we have the NHS, which provides healthcare free at point of use to all citizens. It’s pretty fucking neat, and if you were born in the UK since 1948 you already benefited from socialism so ha, we fucking got you. 

Education: Free education is something that according to pretty much all the indicators, profits the country economically.  We already have free education up to the age 18. It’s even mandatory! So does the US, and you don’t see Charlie Kirk arguing to make children pay for… actually nevermind. 

Travel: Nationalised systems of travel is a sticky one, and seriously varies absolutely enormously country to country and even just region to region, but giving people access to cheap or free travel lets them commute to work easier, so in terms of benefits to the economy holistically, it’s a pretty easy one to see. I’ll leave you with Shaun’s video about trains and just remind you that Virgin Trains in the UK takes subsidies from the government while turning a multi-million pound profit.
GAMING AND ANIME Internet Access: The internet is an odd one I know, but there are various arguments you can make about nationalising or rather socialising the internet. The first and probably simplest is this fairly philosophical argument that the internet has so completely transformed the whole world that restricting people’s access to it is in some ways restricting their access to the modern world. I mean have you ever tried to explain what a meme is to your mum? My mum’s actually a lecturer in linguistics so she explained mimetic theory to me… but that’s not the point!

The next argument is that if we look at the internet as a secondary space, another realm we exist in, tonnes of people effectively commute to work through the internet now - there are loads of people who earn money online, myself included, and this month is the first month in my life ever that the money I earned online was more than the bill I pay to be online every month. Furthermore, if we’re picturing the internet as “a place” there’s an analogous argument to the one we make about housing - as in, everyone deserves a place on the internet.
The last argument is that the infrastructure for the internet already exists in most places and will exist pretty much everywhere very soon, and on a technical level the infrastructure of the internet is very similar to say the electrical grid, or the water system. The argument here is that the internet is essentially a utility, and so the arguments for nationalising the internet are in line with the arguments for nationalising water or power.
So which argument am I going to go with? All of them, my dude. Those aren’t mutually exclusive points. Like, pick the one you find most compelling if you want but these are all good reasons to make sure the internet is for everyone in my opinion.

Did you ever hear of [REMOVED: the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the wise] the tragedy of the commons? It’s a social science term that describes a situation in which individual users acting in self-interest collectively deplete or spoil a common resource, ruining it for themselves. Imagine a group of shepherds sharing a field, grazing their… hang on this is the socialism in space essay. Imagine a group of scruffy looking nerf herders grazing their nerf in a shared meadow...in space. There are commonly agreed rules, like no overgrazing, bring beer on Wednesdays, keep an eye out for Tusken Raiders. If one of the herders uses the field too much, breaks the rules, that individual will benefit in the short term, but in the long term, if enough people do this, everyone loses as the meadow becomes unable to support grazing at all. One way that capitalism convinces us that the “is” is the “ought” is by wreaking that tragedy upon the commons. It allows business to carelessly deplete and spoil our resources for profit while aiming to meet only the profitable portion of societys needs, convincing us that we don’t have the capacity to meet everyone’s needs. This is capitalism manufacturing scarcity for profit. It benefits a company in the short term to charge people for their basic needs, but long term society becomes a grassless meadow. Capitalism is an ongoing tragedy of the commons across many dimensions. It's all of us being made to exploit each other to live. It's everyone collectively thinking, simultaneously “if only I pee in the pool nobody will notice.”

Capitalism is the removal of the collective rules that keep us from ruining the things we need. 

So by now we’re all agreed on at least a social democracy - in other words that all basic needs but especially access to video games and anime should be nationalised and belong to everyone. I hope we’re all agreed, but I am also looking forward to the pedantic response video by someone with more copies of Atlas Shrugged than even I have explaining why not every human being deserves a house to live in or food to eat but they definitely don’t think that because of racism or classism or anything else they’re just overwhelmingly rational.

Great, let’s talk about how sweet the future is going to be now.

In Star Trek generally, a vision of the future is presented where everyone works together to basically just do cool shit all the time. In Star Trek, food scarcity is a thing of the past because machines can conjure food out of thin air, overcrowding isn’t a concern because humans have spread out across the stars, automation takes care of pretty much all the necessary systems, so people can choose to do anything they like.

If someone wants to be an artist, they just create the art they want unburdened by profit motive. If someone wants to write they can write whatever they want and it doesn’t have to make them money to live. Not only do they not have to worry about censorship, they don’t have to worry about appealing to what people already expect and want. They can experiment and play around. Can you imagine how much dang free speech we’re gonna have under socialism we’re gonna have so much dang free speech!

(Incidentally, if you want to know what unburdened beautiful free speech looks like on the right wing, um… you’re welcome)

In short, in Star Trek, they’re socialists. Not only are they socialists, but they’re all different kinds of socialists. In The Next Generation we see Picard say at one point that humans don’t use money any more and everyone is taken care of and works for the betterment of mankind. This fact is repeated across the different Star Trek series, making it pretty resoundingly clear that the Federation’s society is some form of Socialism. Democratic socialism is the name for democratic government along with these kinds of provision - everyone being taken care of as priority number one. It’s pretty fair to imagine the government in Star Trek works a lot like western governments like the US or the UK, except that as stated, there is no money and everyone is taken care of (so, nothing like those governments) because it was imagined mostly by white western writers from those places.

I know it’s news to some people that Star Trek takes place in a socialist society. I mean they have stuff - how can they have stuff? They should have had all their stuff down to their underwear seized by the state, because as we all know, that’s what socialism means.

One kind of Socialism is Libertarian Socialism, which I’ve talked about a little before, and is mostly known as anarchism. It isn’t even really fair to call this “one form” of socialism because there are a bunch of different kinds of anarchism too. The basic divide in socialists is between anarchists, who don’t believe in any hierarchy that can’t justify its power, and therefore typically don’t think that any kind of government or state should exist, and state socialists, who think that a state should exist to provide for everyone. 

(I don’t know of good examples of anarchist societies in Star Trek, and when I searched for anarchist fictional characters I immediately turned up an alien terrorist who appears in like one episode so thanks I guess.)

There are arguments for the different sides, and I won’t go deep into them now, but I will link people who discuss the different arguments. When you become a socialist (which by the way is what you’re doing now, right now, with this essay, welcome friend,) you find out that there are plenty of different positions to take within the sphere of thinking people deserve things like housing and healthcare.

In TNG, the original series and so on, the Federation are evidently democratic socialists. Right out on the edge of Federation space, on the space station Deep Space Nine however, money and business does exist. The characters in DS9 are therefore living in a Social Democracy, like I discussed before.

Can you imagine how much democratic plurality we’re gonna have under socialism we’re gonna have so much heckin’ democratic plurality.

I don’t believe very much in presenting information written by me about this stuff without telling you where I’m coming at this from. I think pretending I’m an invisible and objective disembodied voice is a bad move so I want to go over what my position is in all this.
I agree with anarchists that no hierarchy should exist that can’t justify its existence. However I think that a governmental system can justify its existence in the efficiency of distributing resources out to large numbers of people. I have suffered from depression quite a bit, so frankly the idea of living on a commune where I’m expected to contribute continuously rather than a system that can pick up the slack for me doesn’t appeal. I like the anonymity of cities and I find comfort in large systems to be perfectly honest. I think safety nets allow people the space to grow and excel. Anarchism works better as a model for people who live out of cities and socialism works better in an urban environment. I think one solid possibility is that cities could be part of a state, operating under a government, and anarchist communes could exist legally distinct from the state and negotiate trade between the two. I think we could make a mix of urban state socialism and agrarian anarchism work, and in case that wasn’t enough of a clue, my official position is: I’m a socialist. I’m not particularly fussy about what kind of socialism we have as long as people’s basic needs are provided for and individuals aren’t victimised and exploited by greed all the time.

What I'd like us to do, at least what I think is the most likely way for us to get to our hyperqueer future where machines take care of the important legwork and we get to be whoever we want, is for us to get our governments to start providing the basic things, and get to the social democracy stage, and then if everyone's into it, we'll just stop bothering with money altogether.

As you can see, we have all the technology we need to provide for everyone, take care of all their basic needs and free us all to work towards a brighter, better future, IN SPACE! Or you know, like… not in space? Maybe just like, here. Now? Please?

Section 3: Conclusion

Your Elon Musks, your Jeff Bezoses… Bezoes? Bezi? These space-race billionaires aren’t visionaries if they can’t see the difference between how things are and how things ought to be. Jeffs and Elons are Wilson Fisk - they know some of the problems are there, they think that all the problems can be solved, and they all think they’re the guy to do it. In reality though, they’re keeping the systems in place and profiting off them.

If there’s a colony in space, on mars, whatever - it’s not going to have currency. It’s going to have a planned economy. The efforts and luxuries and so on of the people there will have to be governed either by a socialist state or the whole group through direct democracy. If there are only 5 people there, it wouldn’t make sense to elevate any of them above the others. If there are 5000, why should money exist? If there were literally 5000 people on the whole planet, would you like there to be some with more and some with less? I wouldn’t. What number of people necessitates inequality?

The 2015 film Tomorrowland by Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof is about a very smart young woman who finds out about a secret project to engineer the best possible future for all mankind which has been recruiting young inventors and taking them to… the future? Well actually it’s not super clear. The film is a bit of a mess, it’s not very good, and it isn’t the kind of story I’d usually give much credit. I mean it’s about a secret city where all the super genius people go to be unrestrained by the petty tyranny of regular life and lead the world with their vision and genius… It’s um… well it’s kind of Atlas Shrugged isn’t it?
Anyway, in the movie George Clooney used to be a little genius boy and he got recruited to Tomorrowland and he made a future predicting machine and everything went bad and they shut it all down and now he’s a bitter old hermit.

Like I said, Tomorrowland is a bit of a libertarian screed, and I’m not even sure that’s the intention. It’s very silly, and it fits right into the libertarian canon with stories about a poor oppressed visionary held back by people lacking in sufficient similar vision. There is however, something I still really like in that movie. George Clooney’s future predicting machine thinks the future will be totally awful. Pretty much as soon as it was switched on it went to 100% certainty of total annihilation for the human race. When the protagonist looks at it though, she makes it change a little. She introduces a new variable into its calculations, because she has hope - optimism. So the machine starts to change and show a possible good future. What I’m saying is, we get the future we think is going to happen. My dad used to say when you ride a bike you go where you look, and if you look at the ground you’ll end up on the ground.

I used to spend too much of my time just looking at the Tories or at Trump and thinking about how awful everything is and how we’re totally fucked forever. After a while though, I realised that just isn’t a good way to live. I realised we need optimism. So I started looking at Bernie instead of Trump. Corbyn instead of the Tories. And not just them, because you can’t look at one person and pin all your hopes on them. I started looking at Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ash Sarkar, Boots Riley, the DSA, Momentum. I got more involved with leftists on leftie YouTube and here we are now, ready to kick some ass. 

If capitalism were the guiding ideology of the future, Jean-luc Picard might really seriously give a speech at the start of every episode not that different from Andrew Ryan’s definitely-not-a-giant-baby speech from the start of Bioshock. He doesn’t though, because ultimately the Star Trek vision of the future isn’t through the lens of politics. The characters don’t need to constantly espouse their beliefs, the basic assumption that they will all work together for what is good underpins everything they do.
And so Picard doesn’t give that Andrew Ryan speech - instead he talks about discovery. He talks about exploration and life and adventure - because as we all know, that’s what socialism means.

Instead he says:
Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship: Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!