World Socialism too utopian? Extraterrestrial socialism = utopianism?

[jondwhite]

Someone mentioned the

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

to me recently and it reminded me of what I've read about The Dispossessed and Bogdanov's Red Star. It got me thinking.

Does the establishment of a socialist society other than on earth count as what Engels dismissed as utopian socialism? Since it is not an experiment of building a little island of socialism within an old society?

[DJP]

jondwhite wrote:

Does the establishment of a socialist society other than on earth count as what Engels dismissed as utopian socialism?

Sounds like science fiction socialism to me!

[ALB]

Actually, the space engineer Douglas Mallette has made the point that any Mars or Lunar Base would have to be organised on the lines of what the Zeitgeist Movement call a "resource-based economy"or on what we would call on socialist lines, i.e without money and with needs supplied free among other things. As here for instance:

Quote:

As an engineer, more specifically a space geek engineer, what TVP [The Venus Project] offered as a solution option made complete sense to me right away. Why? Because what they described as a Resource Based Economy (RBE) is exactly how a Mars or Lunar base would HAVE to operate in order to maintain the lives of the astronauts that lived there.

So perhaps this isn't an off-topic joke after all.

[jondwhite]

Very interesting. Wikipedia says of Utopian socialism"The utopian socialist thinkers did not use the term utopian to refer to their ideas.""utopian socialists generally don't feel class struggle or political revolutions are necessary to implement their ideas""They often feel their form of cooperative socialism can be established among like-minded people within the existing society and establish small enterprises designed to demonstrate their plan for society"Would a space colony count as "within the existing society"?The Wikipedia page even mentions"Ursula K. Le Guin (born 1929) wrote about an impoverished anarchist planet in her book The Dispossessed, which was published in 1974. The anarchists agree to leave their home planet and colonize the barren planet in order to avoid a bloody revolution."

[alanjjohnstone]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/24/asteroid_mining_economy/This article may represent the future…private companies. A return to such companies as the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company?

[jondwhite]

Good point. Wonder if we will ever see a Weyland Yutani "building better worlds" mining and terraforming planets.

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