“Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.”
You’ve probably seen that as a meme if you travel in leftist circles online, or if you’re a fan of Star Trek, because that one gets used a lot.
It is most usually used as a joke, but I believe in it. Not the same tongue in cheek method as the meme, or so much as depicted in Star Trek, but the idea that humanity will reach a point where we will freely share with each other and our priorities will change from the acquisition of things as the sole purpose of our lives, and become one of learning and exploring, not just space, of course, but the human condition.
Some people believe that is a Utopian dream at best, but it is something that can be achieved. It is possible. We already live in a post scarcity society, it’s just the people who control where those resources go are few, and maintain power over the rest of us, rather than in the hands of the people who know better what to do with it, and how to see that everyone’s needs are met.
We could have it tomorrow if it wasn’t for the fact that humanity tends to adapt much more slowly these days, and that’s because the wealthiest people are vested in maintaining the status quo. It’s not a conspiracy, it simply is true. You can read about it every day in the very same papers owned by those wealthy people, because they are not ashamed of their wealth, they flaunt it and then tell you why it’s good they control 90% of the resources everyone needs to survive.
Look at articles from the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and you’ll find pieces talking about why too much freedom is bad, and why selling your blood to make rent money is good. Always from a pro-business, anti-regulation perspective, with occasional puff pieces about little girls raising money to pay for the cancer treatment of a friend, or kids selling cookies to raise money to pay off “lunch debt” in their schools.
We live in a dystopia right now. If we live in a dystopia, then anything other than capitalist misery will be seen as unrealistic.
Social memory is long, but human memory tends to be very short, myopic, and easily changed by people who, again, have a vested interest in keeping us from hoping and then fighting for something better.
The same policies US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed for 80 years ago are now seen as a socialist pipe dream. Roosevelt wasn’t a socialist, he was a liberal, folks! That is how far right we have shifted in this country, to the point where simply HAVING BODILY AUTONOMY is seen as a socialist nightmare.
That is where we are.
If we’re already here, suffering, and enabling the suffering of billions of others around the world, why aren’t we willing to push back against these horrific narratives? These draconian policies?
Is it because people fear socialism? That is certainly one aspect of it. The US, especially, has spent a century explaining why socialism is bad, meanwhile, capitalism has crushed the spirits of millions, the bodies of billions, and the resources of the entire goddamn planet, and yet *socialism* is the enemy here?
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household. My parents were also deep red Republicans when I was growing up. I remember my mother crying when Bill Clinton had won because she was afraid he’d destroy the country.
He really did fuck up the country, but not in the way she thought. Our presidents from Reagan onward have just been different types of Reagan. The militarism, the jingoism, the imperialism, the priority of putting capitalist interests first, over the needs of any human beings, all of that had a focal point: Reagan.
Yes, the US was an empire before Reagan, it’s history just as bloody and white supremacist before the Ol’ Gipper, but Reagan made it palatable. He made it almost delightful, because his folksy charm convinced millions of people that putting markets ahead of human beings was how we were all going to get rich, and even he knew it was a bullshit fucking lie at the time, but con men and charlatans don’t give a damn about what happens to anyone after they get what they want, and boy did he get it.
Ever since, the US has continued moving right, tossing a few social tokens to people to keep them complacent and willing to continue working within the system, and those few tokens still came at great cost.
There are people who still believe Reagan brought the Iranian hostages home, and that he was influential in tearing down the Berlin Wall. It’s light, rote, easy to understand history that makes people feel good without requiring any more thought into what really happened or why.
It is dystopian history with a feel good story wrapped around it, and yet people will more readily accept that than they will the possibility that we can have so much better and not for just the West, because we aren’t free either, but also for the Global South, for Africa, and for every nation the US has crushed, rolled, and coerced to get what it wanted while shouting “freedom! freedom!” from the rooftops, the same rooftops with the snipers in case protesters get any wild ideas like chanting about an end to war.
Is socialism perfect? Fuck no. Every country that has attempted to create a communist state has faced massive setbacks, and that’s because humans aren’t robots, we don’t take orders perfectly and we don’t execute them perfectly. We fuck up, we have our own thoughts and feelings, we have new ideas that we want to implement.
That said, the core component of socialism is the people. The core component is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The basis of socialism is humanity, it is made for human beings, not for investors, not for stock markets, not for the growth of profit, a pointless number that serves no purpose except to metastasize like a cancer until it consumes everything and everyone.
The heart of socialism is that everyone should have food, shelter, medicine, and everything needed to give them a solid foundation of security and safety, to allow for prosperity, evolution, change for the good, and that no person should be left out simply because they are not “profitable” to whatever soulless corporation has deemed them useless.
The wonderful thing about socialism is that each time it is tried, it gets better, it adapts more like humans used to adapt. Contrary to the words of capitalists, socialism does exist:
China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, DPRK (North Korea) are socialist countries. There are other countries slowly adopting socialist policies like Finland, Sweden, and others.
If your first thought when seeing China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and the DPRK is “totalitarianism,” then congratulations, friend, that’s propaganda. You have been fed a steady diet of why these countries are evil, told stories about all the horrific things they’ve done, and not once is the connection made as to what happened, or why.
When it comes to capitalism, like white male shooters, it’s never about systemic issues, it’s about a lone wolf. That’s on purpose. You are never supposed to connect the horrific things that happen in capitalist societies with capitalism.
On the other hand, if something terrible happens under a socialist society, it is endemic of the system itself, and you will be told the worst things, like that communism murdered 20 million people, or 100 million people, or 100 bajillion people, because everything that lead to someone’s death is considered “communism,” including US friendly fire.
Often, “The Black Book of Communism” is cited, despite the authors being later identified as former Nazis, and most sociologists and historians rightly pointing out that the numbers in that book are grossly exaggerated, and that the authors of that book included Nazis, and the people murdered in the holocaust in the death counts.
No, communist nations are not clean from committing violent acts. In context, many of them were attempting to protect their societies against sabotage by the United States, and if you don’t think the US engages in sabotage of other countries for its own ends, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
The thing is, while capitalism continues to rapaciously consume the Earth’s resources, and humanity’s spirit all in the name of endless profit, socialism has been adapting, changing to better embrace humanity and its flexibility. There’s still a long way to go, but the future I talk about, the future of Star Trek, or whatever gets you to see a possibility for humanity that isn’t dystopian, will only happen when we shift modes of production, when we put the power in the hands of the people who build the world, who create for the world, rather than the people who just want hoard power and wealth for their own ends.
Capitalism is exploitation. It requires a large labor pool of exploited people to work, because the end goal is always profit for a few, and miserable toil for the many. Socialism turns that concept on its head and says “what if we shared the resources of the world with everyone, so that everyone can contribute in their own way?” you know, like you were taught when you were young, what you knew as a human being, as a child, before you were taught that you had to compete with your friends if you wanted to survive?
We can have better than this, and not as a “utopia,” not as a pipe dream, but as a reality, as something humanity can have while maintaining co-existence with the earth, making it a true paradise, as much as one can, rather than letting capitalism turn it into a burned out cinder.
We can have this. It’s possible. It’s real. It’s not space that is the final frontier, but the human condition, and our ability to become better than what we are while keeping that spirit that makes us who we are.
Some recommended reading:
Democracy for the Few by Michael Parenti
Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti
The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin
Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein
.Red
