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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

The Soviet Union made a lot of enamel pins

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

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.