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.
Black CEOs are more likely to have “baby faces” for the same reason
you’re blowing my mind. Why is this the first time I’m hearing about these
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
After the revolution I’m joining the artel that makes anime pillows
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.
god i fucking hate this guy
What is scary of splitting the planned economy from the independent economy is that the planned economy controls the independent one regardless. Sure, there can be independent worker coops and enterprises and such, to try and make stuff. But they need resources and funding for that stuff, which is definitely mostly generated by the planned part. And the planned part can say “fuck off” at any time. There’s a big incentive for them to use this power over them to lead them in certain ways.
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.
Yeah that’d be incredible
Thanks a lot for the explanation, it makes sense in my head.
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.
Economies are dialectical! Who knew!
I think you have a great point, in the sense that tracking and getting raw genuine data for the planner bureaucrats to use has never been easier. In a way it sounds awesome that they could do that… though I’m also terrified of it going overboard. With how much data services like Facebook and Google collect about every single one of their users, to think the government would have extremely easy access to it all and make choices with it in mind is terrifying.
Well, the government already has access to a lot of this data and makes choices with it. The Facebooks and Googles like to stay on the good side of regulators and so tend to hand over data freely. So it’s really more a question of, do you want this power in the hands of a state that answers to the bourgeoisie, or one that answers to the working class?
I don’t want this power in ANYONE’s hands, no matter who they claim to serve
States and governments only serve themselves anyway
I get what you’re saying, overwhelming state power is subject to abuse. That’s why strong democratic inputs are necessary to keep that in check.
However, I don’t like the framing that states are self-serving and that class hegemony doesn’t have bearing on them. That’s the sort of argument libertarians use to pretend bourgeois democracy doesn’t really and the politicians that are bought and paid for by the capitalist class aren’t really their hired goons. Like a mob boss claiming he’s just as vulnerable to his henchmen as the person those henchmen are currently torturing at the mob boss’ instructions.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter. like… i totally agree that politicians are paid by the capitalists and most are just goons, but even if they weren’t goons, they’d behave in the same way. maybe the favours would be less, maybe they would be to different people, they’d do x or y thing differently, but the core abuse of power and trampling are always going to happen, perpetuating your rule and reach and protecting your power and position will always matter more than any reform or serving
of course I’d much rather have strong democratic checks than nothing but I still don’t think it’d be enough to justify it
I know I’m kind of a doomer on this but I just have never seen or read about a ruling structure that didn’t behave this way
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.
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.
It doesn’t have to be about productivity though. The Goal can be any other thing. Industrialization, militarization, independence, whatever. Whatever The Goal is, the planned economy is subservient to it, and that may result in the things I’ve been concerned about in this post
That’s not something specific to a planned economy though. Under capitalism The Goal is something determined by the owning class to facilitate further capital accumulation because it’s the fundamental mechanism to exert control over an economy, whether planned or market based. As always capitalism remains the problem!
oh yeah I didn’t say it was any different in capitalism, it’s the same thing. I’m trying to tell you it’s mostly the same thing. it’s the position of massive control over the economy paired with a goal thats the problem to me, not the ideology of the people in that position, that can lead to variations but the problems with the approach are the same either way
Right, we agree on that. My disagreement is that because communism has completely different property relations and no capital accumulation, a planned economy cannot functionally work the same as under capitalism.
can you elaborate?
Communism as full political-economic system requires the abolition of private property through common ownership and the abolition of the commodity form in favour of need based distribution (use value instead of exchange value). Under capitalism, even if there is common ownership of production, the commodity form compels capital accumulation because distribution of commodities is based on their capital-value not their use-value, so a planned economy in this state is still stuck with planning around capital efficiency. Likewise, by abolishing the commodity form but not socializing ownership of production, a planned economy is still controlled by the small owner class (this was essentially what feudalism was). However, when we combine these two changes together and try a planned economy we now have a socialized ownership class that must use something other than capital as its central planning mechanism, which to communists is based on need.
TL;DR / e.g. “we have X number of people that need insulin, so we must produce that much insulin” vs “we have X number of people that need insulin, how can we price it to produce more insulin” vs “we do not need to produce insulin because the minority ownership does not need it” And you can substitute insulin in for whatever else.
What would ensure the central planning mechanism always puts the needs of the people as the goal, and not the needs of the central planning structure, or the needs to perpetuate and protect it?
I personally don’t think that any economy should be 100% planned. There is a very healthy place for small artisans and creators. Maybe guilds. The only question you really need to answer is how to decide to provide these people with more resources for their creations if they’re a bit more complex than just knick knacks.
In that decision is the problem, because that decision is still guided by The Goal, and no matter the number of independent guilds and such, if The Plan denies them resources, they have no other choices.
Something that changed my understanding of Marxism was the simple realization that nowhere in Marx is it required that all private enterprise be abolished. It is exploitation that is abolished, and central planning is a part of that abolition because it allows the largest enterprises in society to be controlled by a democratic government, rather than by unelected capitalists - but this arrangement leaves plenty of room at the small and mid-level for solo and cooperative enterprises.
The central planning bureau deals with demand, and assigns resources to the various state owned conglomerates to meet that demand. The solo and cooperative enterprises that want to make plushies do so by requesting (or, if money hasn’t yet been phased out, purchasing) felt, pillow stuffing, etc. and the added demand for those products becomes part of the central planning bureau’s calculations. The system should naturally grow and shift to account for every demand and for changes in demands over time.
There’s all sorts of ways for this to go wrong of course, just like how in the free market there are all sorts of problems that aren’t covered by the general supply and demand model, but the whole point of socialism is that the decisions are made by democratically-accountable bodies all the way up, rather than the profit algorithm.
They’ll come from the factory that makes them now, but that factory will be owned and operated by the people who actually make the plushies.
In a socialist economy, production is geared towards fulfilling a social need instead of for profit or because some powerful asshole thought it was a good idea. Social need is not just survival need, so luxury goods are a form of social need. Virtually every single culture and society has some form of artistry and decoration. Very few people throughout history wants to live in some shitty drab setting. The concept of makeup and jewelry was independently discovered in virtually every single human society. This speaks to a human need that goes beyond mere survival. Stuff like wheelchairs also fulfill a social need even if the majority of people aren’t in wheelchairs. Imagine someone trying to argue HIV medicine or glasses don’t fulfill a social need because the majority of people don’t have AIDS or don’t need glasses. That would be a ridiculous thing to say.
In terms of the actual organization, most likely the central government would be in charge of raw material and the intermediates that require specialized equipment to manufacture while local cooperatives that are more sensitive to the particular social needs of the local community would do the actual manufacturing. Distribution can be shared between the two levels. Central government distribution is far more wide-reaching but is subject to whatever regulations the central government want to tack on. I could see a healthy situation where various artisan goods of particular artistic designs have purposefully limited distribution, which incentivizes people to actually visit the state/province/city in order to purchase the good.
For stuff like Funko pops, maybe local cooperatives are the ones that actually produce the Funko pops while the central government is the one that manufactures molds for the Funko pops, thus controlling the design of Funko pops (so no Hitler Funko pops) as well as control how much plastic pellets each cooperative could use per month on Funko pops. Funko pops wearing tradition clothing of the local cooperatives would have limited distribution which facilitates tourism because tourists outside the region or country are incentivized to visit in order to buy that particular Funko pop.
There’s no difference in the number of powerful assholes in the market or the socialist economy, only a difference in their goals, I think. It’s not about what should be right, because regardless it all ends up to the buraucrat with The Plan. The higher you are in the hierarchy the more brutal you are, by how much abstract everything else becomes
Imagine someone trying to argue HIV medicine or glasses don’t fulfill a social need because the majority of people don’t have AIDS or don’t need glasses.
that’s the thing I can totally imagine an all powerful economy overseer immagining that! When you’re managing at such a high level, it’s extremely easy to detach and dehumanize, and think in terms of raw numbers and extreme utilitarianism
I could see a healthy situation where various artisan goods of particular artistic designs have purposefully limited distribution, which incentivizes people to actually visit the state/province/city in order to purchase the good.
That’s actually a really good idea! I like that
Large hard drives do have use in data centers so I think your data hoarding hobby will be fine under socialism.
Also, money existed in the USSR, you could buy commodities you wanted, luxury ones even. The lack of certain consumer goods were of course a issue since USSR prioritised heavy industry but I think other eastern bloc countries had limited electronics industries like GDR and Bulgaria.
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?
Not really. Video games are a form of art. There were TV Shows and Movies made in the USSR and other socialist states. Games aren’t really different.
Also, USSR wasn’t the only form of socialism. Look at other countries like Yugoslavia. And also keep in mind USSR died in 1991 and what it would be right now had it not is unknown.
In many ways the current capitalist system is more treat constraining with all the chronic unemployment especially in the neoliberal era.
I remain extremely skeptical that games, in the abstract, can correctly be called addictive. Gambling? Sure. That re-wires your brain in a way that lines up with addiction as medically defined. But much like porn, i think “gaming addiction” is more about people"s perceptions of what they should enjoy not lining up with what they do enjoy - in the case of games people are playing a lot of games bc of disintegrating social environment, but don’t know how to articulate that (what no theory etc) and so fall back on the only language they have for when people do too much of something - addiction.
Also - the Soviets semi-famously said “why the fuck is champagne expensive? There’s nothing special about it, it’s just carbonated white line” and went on to make what I understand was a good quality champagne that normal people could afford. I think a couple of former Soviet states still make it. A lot of luxuries are luxuries bc of farts - forced artificial scarcity, and not because the thing itself is necessarily rare or valuable. Gems can be made cheaply in factory labs, someone figured out how to harvest caviar without killing the sturgeon recently, things like that.
And there’d likely be major changes in what people perceive as desirable. We all know that demand is induced by marketing propaganda and isn’t necessarily organic. A culture that isn’t constantly trying to tell you you’re ugly, sick, etc isn’t going to have the same destructive consumer culture.
“why the fuck is champagne expensive? There’s nothing special about it, it’s just carbonated white line”
based, modern Western “gastronomy” is just the illusion of diversity for European cuisine through the use of a gazillion native names like “kielbasa” that literally just mean stuff like “sausage” (but simultaneously never applying native names anywhere outside of Europe)
Also most of these items have literally no consistency whatsoever by their claimed manufacturers, at least in general (idk about EU PDO products)
Even certain apple cultivars have zero flavor consistency
Also, daily reminder that even the best wine snobs can’t differentiate that crap after a certain point (confirmed by study). Probably because bitter tanninic grape alcohol has such an overwhelmingly strong flavor that it’s difficult to pick up on anything else
Nah, I have an addictive personality. With some kinds of games I can feel the hooks sinking in.
Personally I think you’re addicted to gaming if you get mad when you lose
If you feel unaffected when you lose, or if losing/winning isn’t even a thing, then you just enjoy the process
But I think there could be a specific type of “completion addiction” for RPG games
To start; a lot fo my concern is semantics and different definitions of addiction in day to day life versus medical usage. Totes acknowledge that. Now here we go!
I can’t agree with that. I think being mad, the stereotype of throwing controllers, is an emotional regulation problem. If you take the game away from someone they’re still going to have emotional regulation problems in other parts of their life; at work, at school, with friends. They’re people who rage out when they get “cut off in traffic” or their order is wrong at the treats store.
With alcohol, opiates, xanax, and other addictive substances, if you take the drug away their health is going to plummet and they’re going to go in to withdrawal. Apparently gambling and a few other things do it too. I’m sure that there are some people who get that effect from video games, especially gatcha and loot crate games that are gambling games.
But the average guy who has epic gamer moments, i don’t think that’s addiction, or should be called addiction. That’s emotional regulation, tolerance for frustration, and I imagine a lot of toxic masculinity and living in a culture where “winning” is seen as a zero-sum thing.
Re: completionists; i think a lot of them are just doing what stamp collectors or card collectors do. Again, there are folks who have problems with compulsion (which is a distinct set of issues from addiction), especially folks with conditions like autism or adhd (and companies exploit psychology to target these people), but that’s distinct from addiction, and requires different tactics.
But the average guy who has epic gamer moments, i don’t think that’s addiction, or should be called addiction. That’s emotional regulation
But I’m sure tons of alcoholics also wig out when they’re denied alcohol, right? Emotional dysregulation is just one of the myriad ways through which addiction can present itself.
The way I see it is the guy is addicted to the dopamine rush from winning. And when that rush is denied from him, he wigs out
In some sense you could call this addiction to winning rather than gaming per seI think addiction to gaming could exist in other forms, too, like being addicted to escapism via roblox etc which isn’t really win-dependent
definitely true
Also under communism productivity has an actual goal, which is to provide people what they need. Once that’s been done for the season or whatever time frame you’re talking about you’re done… that’s it until next X time frame. It’s not like capitalism where it’s just and endless sea of shit that has to be produced to keep the line from falling.
The Soviet Union made a lot of enamel pins
You’ll see a lot of that stuff still exist imho. Pretty much in the same way you commission the gay furry porn. Someone wants it and someone else has the skill to make it so it exists. Maybe you won’t exchange money, maybe you will who knows. The point being when people are liberated from their conditions they have more time for their personal goals which would include artistic pursuits. I couldn’t imagine people not modifying their shoes to fit better or making plushies in their spare time.
New archeological finds keep pushing the origins of money back further and further to the point it’s got me wondering if money in the sense of easily exchanged, portable tokens of value isn’t a truly ancient basal technology.
Graeber’s Debt is a good read on the subject
I need to sit down and read that.
extremely worth the time. it really helped a lot of stuff click for me.
I’m on it. Turns out I already had it in my book thingy.
probably millions of years old, just like farming
I have a feeling that it would be more along the lines of the patron-client model that propped up the creative economy of Renaissance-era Italian city states. The key difference being that, with basic needs met, you’ll no longer have to bear the last name Medici to have the resources needed to become a patron.
On the other hand, I also think that, in light of the climate crisis, we may have to significantly scale back the commodity economy. One way I envision this playing out is a reservation system for raw material on a community basis that would enable a grassroots patron-client and gifting ecosystem.
[pls note I have no sources to back these theories up. They’re a hodge-podge of stuff I’ve come across over the years]
My theory for commodities under global warming is reject planned obsolescence, embrace planned endurance. Focus on making everything absurdly tough, user servicable, and repairable. Sure, you might not get a new cell phone for 83 years, but your cell phone is designed to last, with some replacement parts, indefinitely.
That is one part of the equation, sure. Buy It For Life should be a cornerstone of transition economies, at least. However, I feel like future policymakers will have to be more radical and find ways to shelve commodification as a mindset altogether. This includes the concept of “shopping” as a leisure activity, but also other things such as consuming entertainment at the volumes we do today, and reduction in the role of consumption in courtships. I’m not even sure if such a shift is possible, and would possibly cause widespread resentment if it were to be implemented at scale.
We weren’t always like this. If it can be done it can be undone. It’s hard to overstate how hard all the marketing and credit card companies work to keep people buying shit. If you controlled the advertising you could turn it around, tell people that what they really want are things that and durable and well made.
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.
this is us now though, the illusion of choice we’re mired in is staggering. The medicines are already deprioritized, else prohibitively expensive
You’ll still be able to buy furry porn after the revolution
also all the old stuff people enjoy is being phased out right now due to unprofitability
it’s honestly harder to find torrents these days, stuff like demonoid doesn’t exist anymore, probably the same thing with porn (I heard from a friend)
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.
Already wrong. Try this: when you see “planned economy”, replace it with “democratically planned economy”. Right now the economy is planned: business interests use the US government to choose interest rates, sustain the war companies, make huge warehouses of cheese to ensure that the market can’t knock out cheese farmers, yadda yadda. Government sets the broad shape of the economy and private enterprise (vaguely mediated by consumer demand) fills in the details.
Instead, socialist states have democratic governments - actually representing the people - that picks these high-level criteria. You have several options for feedback mechanisms to fill in the details. One option is keeping a market. Often feedback is mediated by administrators with twin obligations: to the central/broad priorities and to their constituency. If people are not getting any luxuries, there’s a method for them to replace the administrator. If nationals check in and the administrator spent all the labor budget on fumos, they also get fired.
But yes, there is going to be some stuff that’s unavailable. Some stuff is also unavailable under capitalism. For instance, an extremely rare disease that has like 2 patients won’t get a research lab under capitalism since those two patients can’t pay a bajillion dollars each. Consumer goods too. I want a French fry press with removable (i.e. sharpenable) blades in a triangle pattern, as a push-down apple corer type hand tool. Nobody sells these. I could make it in my free time if I got some machine shop time, and try to start a business if I made a prototype and it was good. A socialist state will also require some pathways for innovation that happens outside state research labs; good ideas are not always planned.
TL;DR it’s not about what people “need”, it’s about what they want. Axiomatically, in a worker’s state the workers decide; there is no third party who claims to know better than they do.
