This is not a “gotcha! checkmate idiots!” post, I’m genuinely curious what you think about this. This is the forum for asking questions right?
I have very niche interests. I like specifically shaped plushies of a specific franchise called fumos. I like data hoarding so I like being able to buy a 16TB hard drive and just dump whatever the fuck I find on the internet on it. I like commissioning gay furry porn. I can think of many other niche things. A specific brand of cheese I like, a specific brand of shoes that don’t hurt my feet, specific kinds of fashion I like to wear, etc etc etc.
I like being able to do these things despite them not really appealing to a huge majority mass of people. And I understand why I can do that in capitalism: because it’s a market everyone can sell stuff in and people (theoretically) chose what to buy, instead of it being chose for them. Thus, it’s viable and sometimes even optimal to find a niche to appeal to rather than to make something general and for everyone. That’s why it’s profitable to make fumos.
Under a planned economy, how exactly can this work, though? An overseeing body will care about an overarching goal, and therefore things that are not useful to achieve that goal will be pushed back or completely discarded. Put yourself in the lens of some top-of-the-hierarchy bureaucrat: why bother making something like fumos? It’s a luxury no one truly needs. It’s a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. Why bother with 16tb hard drives for personal computers? Most people don’t need more than 1tb or 2tb. Better to just give those to state companies that need them for servers and such. Giving them to data hoarders is again, a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. You can just save (what you deem) important things in a central archive.
I know I am talking purely about luxuries, but these things can be severe too. Why bother finding treatments for illneses that affect only very small percentages of the population? Why bother with clothes that can fit specific body shapes that are not found in the vast majority of people without hurting them? Why make game controllers shaped for the minute proportion of people that don’t have five fingers?
Actually why make games in the first place, even? Wouldn’t it be counter productive? That shit can lead to addiction and workers slacking off, meaning less productivity. From the point of view of The Administration it’s only a waste of time. It furthers the goal more if there’s no games. Why fund them?
I understand this kind of thing sort of happened in the USSR, there being very few brands of things to pick from, all the economy being spent on the army instead of things that made people happy, etc. I’m no historian so I’m not going to dwell on it specifically too much though.
I don’t want to live in a world where everything is only made if it fits The One General Purpose. I guess the reply to this would be “fine, some things can be independent”, but what is allowed to be independent and what isn’t? How is that decided? How can we be sure it’s enough?
For the record, I don’t think niche things can only exist with a profit incentive. But I do think they can’t exist without an incentive at all. If the body that controls all the funding and resources has no incentive, even if people out of the kindness and passion in their hearts want to do these things, if the government says “no, that’s useless”, there’s nothing they can do.
I also don’t think the solution to this can be “well just make sure The Administrators do allow these things”, systematically they have an incentive to never do it, and a system that depends on a dice roll for nice people over and over and over is not a system I’d ever trust
Anyway thanks for reading. I mean no ill harm this is an actual question. o/
[pictured: a fumo]
Once again, the Soviet Union under Stalin had hundreds and thousands of artels, cooperative and collective enterprises that formed the backbone of the Soviet light industries, with strong support from the central government for the provision of low interest loans and access to raw resources overseen and regulated by committees at multiple levels.
Khrushchev liquidated all of them in 1960 because he had this weird obsession with Western consumerism and vowed to compete with the Western capitalist light industries using state planning, which led to disastrous outcome.
Planned economy is meant for heavy industries, public infrastructures and services, as well as cutting edge technologies that require significant investments from the state and close cooperation between various agencies that could not simply be achieved or executed efficiently by private enterprises under capitalism.
Nobody needs a state planned economy to make clothing or toys. They are going to be decided by the cooperative and collective enterprises run by the people themselves.
I’m beginning to think that the reason that Gorby and Krushchev are thought of more positively in the west than other Soviet Leaders is because they sucked.
Something something we must have bread but also roses, and something if the revolution doesn’t dance i don’t want it.
The western view of the eastern bloc as joyless misery is vastly overwrought. It’s also deeply confused with the actual horror of the years in the 90s after the USSR was destroyed and the wave of counter revolution.
The GDR had state sponsored gay clubs and gay lifestyle magazines. There were personal computers in the ussr, usually owned by clubs as restricted supply made them quite expensive. People had all kinds of clubs for special interests of all kinds.
And - people can make an astonishing variety of hyper-specific bespoke stuff when they’re not crushed by poverty and overwork. 3d printing makes all kinds of accessible controllers and tools not only possible, but relatively inexpensive - you need bored engineers, a 3d printer, and some electronics tools.
A 16 tb hard drive is just 16 1tb drives. And data hoarding has a great deal of value in distributed preservation of information and storage. If you want to get industrial qualities of storage you could get a data hoarders club going, maybe using your library for server and drive space, and petition for industrial storage volumes, or just pool money and buy them or whatever rep economy or post-money thing we come up with.
Gay furry porn is already craft production by individual artists and that’s unlikely to ever change.
One of the really nice things about a planned, rational economy is that it’s efficient. Everyone’s employed so you can have more people working fewer hours per person. You don’t have to worry about profit which creates more flexibility in how you run your plants and what your priorities are with automation and efficiency goals.
With modern technologies - 3d printing, automation, etc, it’s very possible to create small runs of very specific or even per person customized goods. Combine that with vast numbers of people who have precious free time to pursue arts they’re pasisonate about and you have a society and economy ready to make weird shit beyond your wildest imagination.
As an example with clothing - there are currently services that will take your measurements and send you a custom fitted made to order garment. When your entire textiles industry is built around making people good quality clothes instead of “fast fashion” based around planned obsolesence and a constant cycle of rapid consumption fueled by horribly exploited labor and the cheapest possible materials there’s a great deal of freedom both for small runs but also bespoke stuff.
Seriously, go look up leisure in the ussr. The situation was not nearly as dire as it’s made out in popular western imagination. There were lots of shortages at times but people weren’t sitting around bored with nothing to do.
Also - in a system where you can train doctors and scienctists until your run out of people who want to be doctors and scientists, and medical research is geared towards helping people and not profit, two of the major obstacles to orphan disease treatment are removed. A large part of the reason the situation for rare diseases is so dire is the artificial shortages created by artificially limited seats in medical schools and the residency system, the vast cost of becoming a doctor, and by the ruthlessly for-profit anti-human nature of the pharma industry.
Part of the problem here is you’ve got a bit of a caricatured misconception of what planning looks like; you’re imagining an all-powerful, central bureaucrat dictating from their ivory tower “I don’t care what the people want, I know what they need.” The thing about the USSR is they still had workers, the workers still earned wages (less than the value they produced; hence state capitalism), and they still chose what products to buy from the state-owned stores. So the bureaucrats knew what was flying off the shelves and what was collecting dust. And because there was so much of this to track, the central planners were highly dependent on regional and local bureaucrats to get a realistic idea of what the consumption and needs of individuals looked like. Those planners, like any other workers, had their incentives; if they were constantly underproducing in-demand items and overproducing goods that sat dusty on shelves, they could lose that job.
The ability to get accurate information about the state of the economy and consumption has advanced significantly since then. There’s a much finer detail of data now about who’s buying what, what demos are interested in what, that central planning is in a much stronger position now. There’s no mystery as to how many Fumos are being sold, whose buying them, what store they’re buying them from, and what payment method they’re using.
As far as essentials vs luxuries, obviously a socialist economy is going to be more dictated by democratic will than markets, but generally I can’t see that will being “we will have no fun things just dull essentials!” Of course, depending on real material limitations certain resources could be restricted to critical systems; if the choice is a new video game system gets developed or we have enough NICU incubators, the latter any day of the week. That being said, I do think a lot of our happiness via consumption is the result of our alienation in late stage capitalism. So while I don’t want to sound utopic, I think in a socialist economy that kind of consumption will lessen not because of central planner machinations but because we’ve filled that hole with more meaningful social organization and interaction.
Something I think about a lot - flush with compute cycles and driven by the whip of infinite growth, the coding, art, and design of modern games is crude and ugly. It doesn’t matter if it’s elegant or efficient or if there are tens of gigabytes of bloat that could be removed. It doesn’t matter if a little art direction could make hd textures much more effective than artless 4k photorealism. What matters is that it gets released and turns a huge profit.
But if your hardware cycle is slower, and you’re not driven by ruthless release cycles and profit motive, maybe devs would stop cranking out aaa garbage and maybe, just maybe, start developing light, elegant, effective code and assets.
Not intending this in any inflammatory way, but this is a utilitarian liberal understanding of what a planned economy is for because you’re not questioning the fetishized capitalist “productivity” mindset.
Is there a material reason we need to exclude portions of the population from planning or is it just because it’s what you thought of? In the real world and all throughout human history, humans have gone out of their way to help and support each other, even the ones that “weren’t productive”. Is a wheelchair a luxury? Are glasses a luxury? Are cancer drugs a luxury? Is joy and amusement a luxury? If you presuppose that you must do things in the most efficient, most productive way that serves the biggest portion of the population only, then they probably are.
As a supplement, I would highly recommend checking out the Srsly Wrong podcast’s episodes on Library Socialism, which imagine alternative property relations that can only come about through a planned economy.
The USSR had video games.
And of course also supplied actually physically addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco, even while running public health campaigns to attempt to curb both smoking and drinking.
