scarcity of thingy

If you have any source comparing the magnitude of gulag use in zarist times vs USSR times i'll gladly peruse it.

My somewhat superficial knowledge of this specific topic indicates that scale improved massively during communist time but i could be wrong; while i remember clearly reading about widespread secret police brutality in zarist time, apparently analogous to what happened a few years after the reds took power.

Practically every other episode of Star Trek is solving some kind of oppression/exploitation issue (and violating the prime directive in the process).

There was definitely a lot of competition for resources and crew members traded credits. Roddenberry insisted money and credits didn't exist in the federation but in Deep Space 9 and Voyager crew members traded replicator credits.

Basically Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be a post-scarcity money less world but he couldn't figure out how exchanges/a location of resources would work without something equivalent to money.

I must admit that my knowledge of the star trek universe is limited mostly to originals + next generation so if DS9 and voyager changed the economical layout somehow i missed that

I tried the most neutral, general word i could think of. People happen to give value to the most strange occurrences; If you can help me find a better hyper-generical word that includes goods, services, position in a hierarchy, location of residency and so on i'll be glad to use it in the future in similar conversation. I am not a native english speaker and one of the reason i write in english speaking forums is to get better at english, so if you can help me, i'd appreciate that.

Even during TNG lack of money is a load of crock. Crew members gambled all the time using various credits (holosuites for example) and there were references to United Federation borrowing to build the Star Fleet in preparation for all kinds of threats (Klingons in original then Borg in TNG for example.)

I think Roddenberry just wanted to focus on the philosophical issues he liked and didn't like the idea pretty much every real world problem/conflict had a monetary/economic dimension.

so let's just stipulate that secret police and gulag occupancy increased post-goat-revolution. Just innate iniquity the cause , eh?

There were about 6,000 katorga (labour camp) convicts in 1906, rising to 28,000 in 1916, just before the Revolution. By the 1920s, under Soviet rule, the system held about 100,000. In 1935 it was over 800,000, with another 300,000 in labour colonies that weren't strictly camps. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953 it was 2.4 million, of whom about half a million were 'politicals'. The mortality rate was high in winter, particularly in wartime, with about 25% of prisoners dying in winter 1941-2 and more than 500,000 total during 1941-3. In all, about 6,000,000 died during Stalin's reign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

Once you achieve a proletariat takeover of society.( a pretty singular accomplishment )

maintain it by any means necessary. They incarcerated dissenters and fancy lads that thought they knew better... and conspi******s on par with today's Alex Jones devotes. Zero problem with it

They'd have had to be quite old to remember the previous regime, though. You might need to make considerable allowance for nationalist sentiment (I remember a Red Chinese official insisting that we didn't have free healthcare in Britain, and he simply wouldn't be told otherwise), as well as for the person's relatively privileged position, and also for their awareness of what to say and what not to say in a society where you could spend a very uncomfortable evening at police headquarters if you ever get ratted-on for speaking out of turn, especially to a foreigner.

Soviet leaders weren't proletarian, they were an elite curial class of the kind seen under the Roman Empire.

endless revolution and counter-revolution... whoever ultimately held power after all that choas whatever. Still on board with no-nonsense suppression of any the least bit sympathetic to ideas just overcome

Drama requires some level of conflict, and conflict comes from scarcity. Eliminating all scarcity makes creating a drama beyond difficult. Especially when that drama is presented to an audience most of whose conflicts revolve around money.

Which is a problem for a TV series, but lessening the amount of drama in actual real life doesn't really have that issue. Less drama in real life is desirable.

Star Trek didn't being that stuff into the story because they couldn't figure out solutions, it was just that the solutions would have been insanely boring.

Useless gold!

I love this scene/ movie, and it's where I obtained my understanding of this issue, so please forgive me

I've always thought that the warning sign that the government was sketchy was when it tried to portray itself as still being revolutionary when it gained power. That allows the people in power to still take harsh actions under the pretense that they are still fighting oppression rather than being oppressive.

Having this dynamic has nothing to do with economic systems.

For my money the most USSR style government on the planet today is Iran. It's a revolutionary Islamic state. If you go through their gibberish and substitute marxist jargon for Islamic jargon, its pretty much that. Even the structure of the party having more power than the government is there in that the mullahs run things and the elected president more or less just says mean things about Israel.


Basically also MAGA, since 'America' is to the typical Trump supporter some vague sense of economic and cultural values (white men working with their hands, going to church, being heterosexual, wearing baseball hats with curved brims while the wives make sandwiches etc) that in their minds is under attack. So they need to have guns, to put brown children in cages, and hate environmentalists that would close coal mines.

Emma Goldman wasn't that well spoken.

It's working for these guys alright!!!!!

Not only is a poor class inevitable in a capitalist economy, it is inevitable that that poor class will grow and grow until it is unmanageable and revolution will eventually occur. The whole purpose of a capitalist economy in the first place is to extract "surplus value" from labor--there is no way to do this without impoverishing more and more of your "middle class" population until there is pretty much none left. FDR-style liberal reforms are usually used by the capitalists at this point to calm the masses down and give them some scraps, but the capitalist class in 2018 has grown exceedingly greedy and ambitious.

The floor is lower than you think.



Capitalism, in its current form, is completely inseparable from racism:

I understand that from the revolutionary point of view, and the realistic ruling class point of view as well, social welfare programs are buying off the oppressed just enough to stave off revolution, but the FDR style liberal reforms did actually reduce inequality. I'm not sure why it isn't manageable and, aside from robots and stuff in the future, why revolution is inevitable. The cycle could just repeat. And revolutions haven't really proven to be durable anyway.

Only a bigger monster like Capitalism can bring to life the monster of Communism.

One takes a century to die, the other will require 3.

We will survive both and get it right eventually!


Scientific Society

What exactly is Surplus Value and why do the capitalists insist on extracting it from us every single day of our lives?

I’m confused by the part in the end of the video about Vietnam. Maybe if they go communist they can get rid of their lopsided wealth distribution problem?

I would also recommend this thread. We can learn from the successes of socialist/communist projects in the past while also learning from their failures and shortcomings. The science should continue to advance, not remain static.

Yeah i controlled wiki before talking on it, but i suppose that microbet has different sources and i could accept those as he seemed very intellectually honest all this conversation (and in other threads too). Still waiting for microbet source that gulag intensity of use was similar in zarist and ussr times.