The Federation are Communist?

posted on December 10th, 2010, 5:36 pm

The official name of the Soviet state ideology was "Marxism-Leninism". The party was called Communist because the communist society was its declared final goal, but they did not consider the Soviet Union to be a Communist state.
Of course the Warsaw Pact nations were colloquially called communist in the west but when we discuss Communism as a political philosophy and not as a simple colloquial name, then we should use correct terminology.

The Borg are not fascist btw. A central concept of fascism is "the firm belief that not all men are equal" (quote by Mussolini in his "Fascist Manifesto"). Facism does believe in individuality but also in strong hierarchy and elites.
The Borg cannot be classified as a society by human standards nor can their organization be called a political philosophy.

posted on December 11th, 2010, 4:28 pm

@protean:

I think "the good of the collective" is closer to fascism, which is often considered to be on the opposite extreme of the ideological spectrum as communism (though the two are actually very similar in some ways).  Communism represents the triumph of the individual, while fascism represents the triumph of the state (and I think the Borg aren't fans if individuality).

I agree with the rest of your post, though.



When writing the post before that I thought about connecting the Borg to fascism, too. But I think machinor is correct when saying you can't compare the Borg with anything there is in humanity. One could bring up similarities between capitalism and fascism, too btw, but I consider those comparisons always to be nonsense. It's nothing more than poltical agitation to connect all of the enemies of your political system. Stalin called the social democrats social fascists, the social democrats called the communists "red fascists" - both of it is rubbish.
@Lt. Cmdr. Marian Hope:

You have a point there, but I still think there's a value in making the distinction.  Marx's communism can generally be summed up with socialism.  Yeah, there's a difference, but I think it's a subtle one at best.  The media constantly calling something a certain term can actually change the meaning of the term.  I mean, even "Christian" (to use your example) doesn't mean what it did a few centuries ago.  (Please, don't get into a theological or political argument over that.)
I think I'm repeting myself when saying that socialism is only one part of Marx' theory, communism is another one. The usage of a term can bring in a new semantic,of course. One can talk about the usage of the word communism in western media on the one hand, on the other hand one may talk about what the theory actually means. The result is that the first is very different from the latter. Imagine the media would state 1+1=5. It would never become correct, even if they say it a thousand times.

I pointed out that the KPSU is specifically called communist because you said something along the lines of "Soviet Russia never claimed to be communist".  They are generally regarded as being communist, and most people think of communism as being their system.  They changed their name to communism (from being called Bolsheviks) for political reasons, not ideological ones.
Their ideology of course was named after what they claimed to try to achieve(in my eyes their politics speak a different language, I don't see how they wanted to achieve communism the way they did.

I find it interesting that you brought up Venezuela and Cuba as being societies where communism can work.  Neither of those countries are generally considered to be great examples of it.

I didn't say there was communism in South America, I've been talking about the connection of socialism with democracy. The "warsaw pact states" lagged that, when they tried to do it, the Soviet Union came with tanks('68 Prag). In Venezuela, Bolivia  you see democratic governments which were incredible succesful in increasing democracy, economic power and wealth. Cuba is under illegal blocking since decades and they realized now that they have to change sth. in their economy, but what do they do? public referendum! Imagine they would have asked the peoples of the industrialized states after beginning of the crisis what to do, I don't think they would have voted for: "well, take our money and give it to the bankers so they can play with it once more."

Btw I think we are moving a bit away from topic... I should throw in something about the Federation here to come back, but Star Trek offered us very little about economy, or elections. The only thing we get to know is there is president and a federation council...

posted on December 11th, 2010, 4:31 pm

Trek didn't go into detail about elections, all it gave up was "The president was elected" and nothing else.