Will planned obsolescence have a role in a socialist economy?

Will planned obsolescence have a role in a socialist economy?

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I don't see how there would be any need for it without the profit motive.

A factory makes a billion lightbulbs that last 40 years a piece. What happens to the workers when there are no more customers?

They can fucking chill and/or do other more pressing matters.

why is there a bunch of workers making an item so easy to automate

They do something else. Maybe work at some other job, work essentially part-time as part of a rotation with all the other factory workers (reducing hours spent in a week working substantially), or just relax and find something else to do with their lives besides obsess about work. Their needs are already being met anyways; automation and product longevity under socialism are welcome when it comes to reducing labor requirements while sustaining the modern standard of living we've come to know and expect.

This is a serious problem under capitalism, because they were only making those bulbs to sell. Not only do they lose their livelihoods when demand is fulfilled, but people who need lightbulbs but don't have money due to the system's inefficiency won't be able to use the stockpiled bulbs to fulfill their needs, meaning that they all go to waste.

Under socialism, where production is for use and not for exchange, this is not a problem. Workers work only so long as there is a need, and they work to satisfy this need. Once it's satisfied, they do other things, whether to produce other things that people need or to just fuck around if there's no more work to be done. The best part is that since things are alloted according to need or contribution and since contribution is not measured in accumulated currency but rather contributed labour-time, we preclude the curious outcome that comes about under capitalism, where people starve while food is thrown away and people sleep in the streets while houses go empty and abandoned.

they find another area of work, and so on until there is no need to work at all

As awful as exploitation, depression, alienation etc. are, there's just something about the waste of capitalism and planned obsolescence that disgusts me more than any other aspect.

Cybersyn/OGAS will send excessive lightbulb makers to work on something else.

Unless you create a system with a profit incentive, no.

Socialism doesn't automatically have production for use. Labour vochers are also for exchange. There's not supposed to be private property.

I think you could still have a profit incentive scheme for highly-needed things while avoiding planned obsolescence. By allowing people to pay more than a commodity's cost in labour-time when it's in short demand (and consequently having the producer's contribution count for extra) you could have a system to avoid the sorts of shortages you see in planned economies while avoiding most pitfalls of for-profit production, as even if you produce 10,000 loaves of bread in an hour, you still contribute 1 hour's worth of labour-time even if you wouldn't be able to turn a profit from bread.


I'm pretty sure that most imaginings of labour vouchers don't have them being exchangeable or used for profit, just as a measure of an individual's contribution to the socialist economy. I think a good modern equivalent would be something like a credit card that you use to buy stuff, paying the SNLT of the items in question, and then working off the debt in hours of your own labour time.

The answers ITT generally center around a 'planned economy' socialism right?

I take it the anarchist solution would just be to smash some lightbulbs?

Also, an interesting documentary on OP topic.

youtube.com/watch?v=-1j0XDGIsUg

I think paying someone in snlt is a terrible idea tbh since it doesn't regulate the distribution of labour. I'm currently working something out for that but I'm not quite there yet

You're not paying someone in SNLT. You're just adding the item's SNLT to your debt.

You could get a loaf of factory bread whose SNLT is 5 seconds, but the person who works at the bread assembly line for 4 hours still gets 4 hours of time against his account which he can use to get 4 hours of goods in SNLT.

The difference in the profit incentive scheme is that you have the option of paying more than an item's SNLT if you need to due to factors such as scarcity, excellent craftsmanship, personal preference for so and so flavour over the currently produced one and so on and so on (sniff). The extra labour time is given to the workers responsible in order to encourage them or others to produce more such items, until such time as demand is met and they go back to having 1 hour of work per hour of work with no extra per-item reward.

I think it would work, wouldn't it?

*4 hours of time against his account, irrespective of how many loaves of bread he produces

Labor vouchers aren't exchange.

Under that system, completing a certain amount of work entitles you to some amount of the general social stock. The labor voucher isn't "exchanged", it's merely presented to show that you completed such and such an amount of labor and the resultant amount of goods you're therefore entitled to. The store doesn't keep the voucher like currency, it's destroyed upon being turned in.

That means the exact same thing. I meant paying someone in snlt as a society, not when i buy a bread.

If what I've read on ltv (or whatever the order of letters is) the exchange price is not equal to the value, because of supply and demand and all that. All this then comes together to make sure not everyone makes the same products, since it wont sell.

Im trying to fully understand it now because I have an idea in my head as to how a simulated market disproportionately reward people as to incentivise the people to distribute their labour in such a manner that it approacher exchange value == value

If the state would own all the means of production democratically by society, money would work the same way. You pay money to the workers for their labour and then they use it to buy products back from societies stock, the state then gets the money back and does the same thing again. Effectively, the money is destroyed every time.

I'm afraid you lost me here. Can you clarify? Using examples, perhaps?

Damn this is satisfying.

youtube.com/watch?v=Hsd80kNRl38

It wouldn't, not really. The money we used today is a commodity with artificially-created demand (via taxes and debts) produced by state-ratified agents such as banks. That's also not how money works. Money's actual value as a commodity is near-nil, and in many cases the money itself doesn't actually exist at all. Its value relative to other goods or exchange value is regulated by supply and demand and it's not really a store of anyone's contribution in the same way as a labour voucher would be. You also run into the problem of how much to pay the workers and on what basis, which is neatly circumvented if you just credit them for every hour worked without putting a given amount of X commodity (money) as a pricetag on each hour.

Society pays people their wage in credits equivalent to the SNLT they did in your world. You produce breads and their snlt adds up to 4 hours? get paid 4 hours.

If you actually mean this:
then you will probably end up with a broken system for the following reasons:
1. If you even make a tiny mistake with calculating the total amount of value created by society, then the products will be priced wrong, because people dont get paid correctly.
2. Working but not doing your best still pays you the same, since you get paid by the hour, not the products you make. A person baking 4 breads and hour and one baking 1000 an hour would get paid the same, even though the one baking 1000 lowers the snlt. This means that every individual in society is incentivised to freeload and not do his best, because his loss of things he can buy shrinks when society grows. His not doing his job doesnt impact the prices much at all, but he has a much easier job.

If you insist on using snlt as a measure for labour, then pay people in the amount of snlt they produce, not the hours of labour they do.


How is it not? If you can buy a car that costs 1000 hours to make, then the car stores 1000 hours of labour. Therefore since a car is a commodity and according to you, money is too, then money can store value.

See paragraph above. Also, you dont solve the problem, you just ignore the problem and pay everyone the same. Also, as I said, I am trying to work out ltv exactly because there is a way to automatically reward those who work on products that are scarce in a simulated market, without allowing profit to be made, markets to be controlled or prices to be manipulated, by simply altering the wage paid to people by society. This would ensure people who make mudpies dont actually get paid, but people who do important jobs nobody wants to or can do get paid more.

by paragraph above i meant the reply to your other post.

Also this argument
is fucking stupid because the exact same thing is true for labour vouchers. If labour vouchers, which dont exist and their actual value is near nil, can store then so can money

(BTW this is the reason why i think labour vouchers are autistic as fuck, they are basically money except with more bureaucracy and chances for fraud)

You can attribute exploitation to ignorance or oversight of capitalists, but planned obsolescence is intentional, conscious evil.

That is what I mean, yes.
That's the beauty of it - you don't actually have to know the total economic output of society if you count wages in hours of work and prices in SNLT. Assuming the SNLT of a good is accurate, then by purchasing a 1-hour bread with an hour of your own work, you are essentially pledging that were it needed, you could have made that bread for yourself but instead did some other useful thing with your time. You're basically saying "I contributed 1 hour of work, now give me the amount of things I could have made in that time", since if you were actually were making things, then you contributed an equivalent amount to what you're taking.

The SNLT is a rough estimate, not a calculation of the actual average time it takes to make a commodity. It could vary from bakery to bakery and between different types of breads, but the idea is you jot down how much time it takes to make X commodity under average conditions in your workplace, add the SNLT cost of inputs and get your SNLT price. If one bakery takes 40 hours to make a bread (it's a deluxe artisanal luxury bread) and the cost of inputs (including constant capital) is 2 hours, then the SNLT of that specific bread is 42 hours. You can also use the first half of this measure as a quota, disciplining anyone who falls well below this figure in order to avoid punishment at the hands of angry mobs or government officials for defrauding the public.

Yes, but the exchange value is EXTREMELY inflated over its actual value. You could make $1,000,000's worth of bills in maybe an hour, but people don't get paid $1,000,000 an hour because we work with exchange value, not SNLT-value.


They are not, not in the slightest. A labour voucher is something like a certification that you worked an hour of time doing social labour in so and so occupation. It's not something that circulates and it's not something that is scarce - every time someone works an hour, a labour voucher is generated - or, in my scheme, a credit is assigned to your labour card by your employer.

Money, on the other hand, is a commodity that is exchanged for other commodities and given out per hours of work in the form of wages. Its exchange value is determined by supply and demand, with the demand generated by an arcane combination of market attitudes, speculation, interest rates, the pope's bowel movements, confidence in authority, and so on and so on. By using fiat money, you don't actually have any control over its purchasing power vis a vis whatever commodity, its existence is built on usury and coercion, in the form of interest to the banks that loan it and taxes required by the government, which together generate its demand. Without these two forces, fiat currency literally cannot exist as there would be no demand to sustain its exchange value.

One possible problem with this scheme is that people will spend their time making mud pies instead of useful things because an hour spent making mud pies is worth an hour making cars. If you allow people to pay more than SNLT for in-demand commodities and generate a profit for their makers as incentive, however, then market forces should fix that problem as the proportion of people doing useless work would cause the price of commodities/services that are useful to rise to such a point that the wasters cannot afford them and will thus be forced to do other work.

Forgot my shitposting flag.

First point is bullshit because the labour time of the avarage person does not align with the snlt. Products are made by skilled people. An inexperienced baker can't make bread nearly as quickly as those that do it for their job.

Furthermore, it still encourages slacking off.

For the second point. Snlt IS EXACTLY THE AVARAGE TIME SOCIETY NEEDS TO PRODUCE A COMMODITY. Please don't pretend you know what you are talking about if you don't. Snlt is not on a bakery to bakery basis, it's about comparable products.

no shit that's called exploitation and has to do with the avarage rage of profit in society. Snlt isn't the holy grail of being paid, the exchange value is being pushed towards it by forces of exchange and society. It is the ideal price of a commodity in a society with perfect distribution of labour and perfect competiton.


You fucking donkey. There is nothing arcade about supply and demand, you sound like a cappy. Supply and demand are driven by labour and use value. You get paid per hour, just like labour vouchers. Labour vouchers are also scarce simply for the fact that I takes labour to get them from an artificially scarce source just like how money is artificially scarce.

good. You SHOULD allow disproportionate reward to distribute labour so that it can reach a point where every hour of labour is of equal importance (even if this is impossible, but you can approach it). Your system however, cannot do this at all. In the end you have to resort to allowing "profit" ie different wages and so your stupid system that is literally the real version of the mud pie strawman doesn't work.

So yes, you basically prove me right.

The only way planned obsolescence could be useful is if it centers around biodegradable products that are designed to be replaced by future advances in technology or design, rather than replaced for profit.

If it more efficient to replace an item once it has been to improved upon, then there is nothing wrong with that. Parts could be recycled or reused. If it were more efficient to upgrade an item, then that would take precedence.

i remeber seeing some news thing about a light bulb that was made like 100 years ago and was still working, and they were all "wow, isnt that something". And im thinking, if they could make that 100 years ago they could make a light bulb today that lasts 1019309049305903459 years.