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 in Vietnam: the Prime Directive – a general ban on its Starship captains from using superior technology (military or otherwise) to interfere with any community, people or sentient species, even if non-interference might cost them their own lives.
Turning such a radically anti-imperialist ideology into the cardinal rule of the fictional United Federation of Planets, which American audiences identified as the logical extension of the United States of America, it would have been unsurprising if President Lyndon B. Johnson, or the Pentagon, had demanded Star Trek’s immediate cancellation. Happily, it didn’t. And so it was that, over the 939 episodes (across 12 different series) that followed, Star Trek’s Primary Directive allowed writers and directors to explore its political and philosophical repercussions, including ethical conflicts that led to its frequent violation though never its annulment.
It also allowed for something else: the inference that this futurist Federation could never have matured enough to adopt the anti-imperialist Prime Directive before a humanist version of communism had been established on Earth!
Star Trek’s libertarian communism versus authoritarian collectivism
That Star Trek depicts a communist society, without of course calling it that, is crystal clear. In a 1988 episode the USS Enterprise comes across a rusting old Earth vessel carrying cryogenic crypts 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 in 1988. 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.
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Picard: People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We have eliminated hunger, want and the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.
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Offenhouse: You’ve got it all wrong. It has never been about possessions. It’s about power.
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Picard: Power to do what?
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Offenhouse: To control your life, your destiny.
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Picard: That kind of control is an illusion.
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Offenhouse: Really, I am here, aren’t I?
Offenhouse’s allusion to the penchant for accumulation that underpins the will to power 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 had 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, which, says the poet, “of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods;” if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”
An avid Aristotelian himself, Karl Marx based his vision of a freedom-enhancing communist society, in which both the state and the market have withered, 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:
“In a communist society, where no one is confined to a single sphere of activity, but can excel in any field he wishes, society regulates total production, and thus I can do this today and that tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, look after cows in the evening, practise in theatre criticism after dinner – without having to be a hunter, fisherman, cowherd or theatre critic.” [The German Ideology, 1845]
Marx’s words resonate when we meet Captain Benjamin Sisko’s father who, in the 24th Century, runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans only because he loves the look of appreciation in the face of neighbours who love his cooking, for free of course since money is now obsolete. 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.
Eschewing lazy critiques of collectivism, Star Trek rejects it while also acknowledging its lure. When Captain Catherine Janeway rescues a Borg drone (Seven-of-Nine) from the Borg Collective, we are treated to her traumatic reintroduction to humanity. As she is weaned off the Collective, she experiences debilitating withdrawal symptoms, missing desperately the Collective’s voice in her head – 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, even at the risk of loneliness which only friendship and creative work can counter.
Star Trek’s Historical Materialist Theory of Change
For any manifesto to have practical utility, it must offer a theory of change, not just a vision of a splendid future. Star Trek does not shirk from this responsibility. While respecting the Prime Directive, the Federation keenly watches the evolution of primitive species around the galaxy for clues into humanity’s own history. Moreover, it offers a coherent theory 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. Soon Captain Janeway and her officers 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 – indeed, even to liberate Voyager, setting it free and on its way back home.
Another narrative strategy for outlining how a luxurious, freedom-expanding communism arose by the 24th Century was to use time travel to go back to our near future. It turns out that the 21st Century was pretty brutish. In episodes screened in 1995 we learn, for example, about the Bell Riots of September 2024 which put paid to the system of apartheid in San Francisco where the city’s wretched, poor and sick had been hitherto walled off in a ghetto. That rebellion, along with a devastating World War 3, put humanity on course to eliminate nationalism, capitalism and, lastly, expansionism.
Insights from the Federation’s edges
Perhaps the most interesting insights arrive when the screenwriters take us to the edge 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 an episode which could easily be staged on the theatrical stage as a one-act play 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. With a soul-wrenching plot twist the script delivers an unexpected catharsis – a reminder that good science fiction is not so much about the future but rather an extraordinary tool for revisiting our past. Indeed, I can think of no other TV program which, within forty minutes, can better educate the young to the horrors of the Holocaust.
Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station (DS9) where different species mingle to trade; a meeting point between the communist, post-money and post-waged labour Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station there is a sleazy bar ran by Quark, a Ferengi, who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until, that is, 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. When his employer-brother tries to bribe him, he picks up a tablet and reads slowly from its screen something he has downloaded: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!”
For Quark, like for every other 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. Here is a sample: “Profit is its own reward” (41). “Feed your greed, but not enough to choke it” (43). “Expand or die” (45). “Exploitation divided by time equals profit” (54). “Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them” (111). “A wealthy man can afford everything except a conscience” (261). “War is good for business” (34). But, “Peace is good for business too” (35).
To balance off the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny – the bureaucratic centralist version – Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet along with the USS Voyager’s abducted doctor who is forced to work in a hospital where, to his horror, 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 whose coding is primed to reflect the bureaucracy’s valuation of each citizen’s worth.
Environmental negative externalities also make an appearance near the borderlands beyond which the Federation’s jurisdiction ends. Two alien scientists, that had been lampooned as cranks, succeed in proving that Federation and non-Federation spaceships travelling at warp speed (i.e., faster than the speed of light) inflict serious damage on the fabric of the surrounding time-space continuum. When Captain Picard confirms the validity of their science, he strives to convince Starfleet that the time has come to reduce the damage by slowing down, or even immobilising, their spaceships. Echoing contemporary arguments against net zero legislation in Western countries (e.g., “If the Global South continue to burn coal, why should the West inflict upon itself massive costs for cutting down?”), the Federation’s government is reluctant to act unilaterally, unless non-Federation civilisations act too.
AI and what it means to be human
In truly Hegelian style, Star Trek interrogates our humanity by planting alien officers inside Federation spaceships so as to force humans to reflect in the eyes of beings with a philosophy and outlook that is sharply different to theirs (e.g., Vulcans, like Spok, Tuvok and T’Pol, who have a well-honed capacity to repress all emotion). However, the one face-off that is most pertinent to our own times, today, is what follows when Lt Cmdr Data is introduced on the bridge of USS Enterprise.
Data is a supersmart android with no capacity to feel. Nevertheless, he is driven by a massive urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data studies carefully not only our behaviour but also our art, music, drama, literature. As a result, not only does he become a much appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from our perspective, a dramatis persona that, in the age of large language models and Chat-GPT bots, serves our thinking about AI well.
Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights come to the fore. Does he have any? When a request comes from a Federation laboratory for Data to submit himself to it, for the purposes of being disassembled with a view to replicating him so that Starfleet can equip every starship with a Data, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and, thus, none of ‘him’ will be lost, 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, no matter what, Data has no choice but to obey, Captain Picard demands that the matter of whether Data has the right to refuse his dismantling be heard by a court – offering to be Data’s advocate.
During the ensuing trial, the judge rules that the question before the court is whether Data is property or whether he has agency – or a soul, as she puts it more dramatically. The laboratory’s advocate proceeds to demonstrate that Data is a machine made of mechanical parts and sophisticated software which allows ‘it’ only to simulate sentience. As for ‘its’ refusal to submit, he rhetorically asks the judge: ““Would you permit the computer of your Starship to refuse a reset?” Picard realises that he is hitting a brick wall.
During a recess, Picard has an epiphany of how to win the case, on Data’s behalf, after a chat with the ship’s bartender, a black woman played by Whoopi Goldberg. He decides to focus on Starfleet’s intention to replicate Data so as to manufacture an army of Datas. “Once we create thousands of Datas”, he asks the court, “is there a point when they become a race? And won’t we be judged by how we treat that race? Now tell me: What is Data? What is he?” “A machine” replies his adversary, to which Picard responds with his final pitch to the judge:
“Your Honour, this courtroom is a crucible where we burn away irrelevances in order to be left with pure product, the truth, for all time. Sooner or later, this laboratory, or some other, will succeed in replicating Lt Cmdr Data. The decision you reach here today will determine how we regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of people we are. It will significantly redefine the boundaries of liberty and freedom, expanding it for some, savagely curtailing it for others. Are you prepared to condemn him, and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery?”
Lastly, he throws a piercing look at the judge before concluding: “Starfleet was founded to discover new life.” Pointing at Data, he adds: “Well, there it is. Waiting.”
Data’s trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android Commander is not sentient – and, thus, that Data has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism, acknowledging that AI capable of passing the Turing test and simulate sentient beings (as Chat-GPT does already) is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion that it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness – like Data (or, in another episode, the nanites who also evolved into sentience).
More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and techno-phobia. For example, the Federation regulates genetic engineering heavily, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities, lest such technology fashions a supremacist sub-race (something that did happen in the 22nd Century triggering the eugenics wars). On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire (as it did in an episode narrating the evolution of a righteous rebellion by holographic AI beings into a dangerous fundamentalist religious sect), the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life – with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.
Conclusion: The answer lies in politics, not technology
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 crew of the USS Enterprise return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans attacks the ship’s Denobulan doctor in what was a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell hold 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: It is also its own secret services, outfits like Section 31 who 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 one thousand episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through the maze of AI technologies, mass xenophobia, the New Cold War, the climate emergency etc.? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s left is that we need to avoid both a conservative techno-phobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ error of focusing on the technology and failing to appreciate that it all boils down to property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.
In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared 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 imagines a world where mankind’s ‘economic problem’ has been solved; that:
“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 had edged closer to an early Star Trek episode entitled The Cloud Minders, who live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines? (Nb. This episode inspired me to refer, in my Technofeudalism, to the Big Tech brotherhood as the cloudalists.)
Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-fetishists. 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.
A shortened version of this article was published by UNHERD
