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]
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.
Thanks a lot for the explanation, it makes sense in my head.