Unlike many classic works of sci-fi, Star Trek offered an optimistic vision of humanity’s future — one where democracy triumphs, exploitation is ended, and everyone’s material needs are met.

It’s the year 2364 and a tatty old space shuttle containing former Wall Street capitalist Ralph Offenhouse, who was cryogenically frozen in 1994, has just been discovered floating through space by a starship called the Enterprise–D. Upon waking, Offenhouse discovers that, although science has found a cure for his previously terminal illness, his bank accounts and investments have all gone. To his horror, not even his beloved Wall Street Journal has survived the ravages of time.

“A lot has changed in the past three hundred years,” the ship’s captain Jean-Luc Picard tells him. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

It’s particularly striking that in a genre that trends toward bleak, dystopian futures, Star Trek is an outlier in science fiction for offering an optimistic vision for humanity’s future. In fact, while it may be overly simplistic to say that Star Trek depicts a socialist society, its utopianism owes much to the ideas of Marx in that it imagines a future where collectivism triumphs, money is obsolete, and every material need is met.

Beyond Capitalism

The show follows, in various incarnations, a spaceship and its crew whose enduring mission is to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” But as Captain Picard explains in First Contact (1996), “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Instead of working just to live, humans are free to spend their time exploring the cosmos, or inventing, or making art — and sometimes doing all three. This optimistic view of human nature is in stark contrast to films such as Pixar’s Wall-E, which follows the right-wing line of thinking that achieving a postscarcity society (what Keynes calls the “economic problem”) would lead to sloth and hedonism, and ultimately the demise of humanity.

In Star Trek, geopolitics is a thing of the past. Instead, there’s the United Federation of Planets, a United Nations–inspired organization founded on the principles of liberty, equality, justice, progress, and peaceful coexistence, which is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the universal enfranchisement of sentient life. It is a world in which economic conditions allow each person to contribute to society according to their ability and consume according to their needs.

It’s worth noting here that Star Trek is a product of a political era that preceded post-Fordist, neoliberal conditions, when different futures were not only imagined but contested. Star Trek: The Original Series aired between 1966 and 1969 — a fertile period for the political imagination in spite of great unrest.

Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, certainly subscribed to this optimism. He believed that humanity, rather than being doomed to self-destruct, was destined to evolve out of our political myopia. It was thanks to Roddenberry that The Original Series, though dated by today’s standards, was ahead of its time with its multinational, multiethnic, and multigender crew. Famously, the show featured the first-ever televised interracial kiss (in an episode banned by the BBC), and Martin Luther King once said that Star Trek was “the only show I and my wife Coretta will allow our three little children to stay up and watch.”

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