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]
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