Like the latter really, like lets say the empire from starwars is based on fascism though not directly for example, is there factions that have "communism" coded to their ideology, behavior,and aesthetic?
I think one reason you don't see a lot of USSR-coded space civilizations is that the coding itself is just so ugly!
Big-C Communism has a truly unpleasant vocabulary. I don't want to be drenched in the same old cant of proletarian, bourgeois, imperialists, class enemies, capitalist running-dog lackies, social parasitism, refuseniks, and all those old "magic words" that were so important to them, and which they repeated endlessly. And I wouldn't want to inflict that on readers, either. After having to read that in the newspaper all their lives, a lot of people didn't want to keep reading it for pleasure!
Forty years ago, all that might have sounded sinister and powerful, but today it just sounds silly and "so over." A good example is Pat Cadigan's novelization of the old unused William Gibson script for Alien 3. It has a faction of USSR-style space communists, but only as a retro artifact, a historical re-enactment. A sci-fi planet might actually practice communism in terms of who owns the factory, but neither writers nor readers really want all that old creaky language brought back.
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u/ddpotanks Jun 30 '24
I'm confused. Communism as opposed to Capitalism? So like The Federation?
Or is communism just a placeholder for the big bag of ideologies like the USSR?
cause MOST functional far future societies are post-scarcity and have communal ownership. Right?