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| Date | Episode | Title |
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I'd say they're post-scarcity anarchist. There's no central/communal resource dispersal as needed for socialism, nor the central/communal resource allocation/planning needed for communism.
There's seemingly no authority outside starfleet exerting any power, nor does anyone ever claim a motivation beyond exploration or study (to do something meaningful). The lack of money and unlimited access to replicated resources pending available dilithium also points to a society without exploitative discrepancies.
The humans also never are reported to have any resource hogging, the only tensions/stratification seem to be militarily (and against external parties also diplomatically), meritocratic, and even then the bottleneck seems mostly to be to not fall behind other races.
I don't see neither capitalism, socialism, communism, despotism, theocracy, nor fascism, but many aspects of anarchism. If you've read anything about The Culture, they openly speak about being anarchist, and it's very similar to Star Trek.
But the Federation is a government, so can't be anarchist
Anarchist doesn't need to mean without government, simply that no one is above another, which is echoed in how the Federation is structured towards the other races.
I thought it meant no laws and no government
That's one form of it, but there are plenty other schools of thought that overlap quite significantly with the Federation, check out the primer on Wikipedia.
Will do
@MrSaturn So by whom is this government elected? Are there elections in the Federation?
I agree, this is also a perfectly valid read. Unfortunately Star Trek spends a lot of time with Starfleet and The Federation and almost not at all with Earth to understand the nuances of governance of productivity. But they are still supposed to be several billions of people, it's hard to imagine there's only ad-hoc organization going on to keep something as massive as Starfleet and The Federation going. Even the Vulcans had the High Command. Earth must have something akin to a government structure going on to produce a representative diplomatic corpus. The Federation is supposed to be a Republic after all, and that's not anarchy. Perhaps a system of direct democratic municipalism, but we don't know for sure.
It's a federation, which means it's a group of government who decided to get some of their rules and organzations in common. Each government in the federation can be different, although there are some implications for the federation to work: they must recognize the borders and laws of the federation, and they must participate in its function.
Which is inherently anarchist :P
As it seems a common confusion in this thread, I repeat, anarchism doesn't have to be without government or rules, several forms of anarchism are focused on not limiting individuals freedoms and/or not allowing power over eachother (while accepting government and rules not contrary to that). Both of which I believe describe how the Federation works.
I certainly don't know much about anarchism, but different planets in the federation can and do have different kinds societies.
If we consider the vulcan in brace new world for example, their society seems very much aristocratic for example, where influence gives authority and power. I doubt the klingon are anarchists either. And in lower deck, the orions have a monarchy.
The federation is the government of the collection of planets, but each planet still has its own government and culture.
Precisely, so the Federation may be anarchist, even though the member races aren't.
With what we know about how the Federation interacts with other races and planets, real world logic would indicate that the humans could be (and live) the model that the Federation is built upon.
All this is conjecture ofc, and is probably as much an exercise in understanding post-scarcity anarchism as possible Star Trek lore :p
Starfleet is not anarchist. There are admirals. There are federation laws and judges (1st directive, in strange new worlds, laws against eugenics). Those laws and positions of power are decided on a federal level. How do you do that in an anarchist organization?
I fail to see how a federation can not be a representative government (because different worlds have different political systems, representative democracy is the only one that can make them all on an equal footing).