Nope. It's a convenient screen for authoritarians to hide behind, but it doesn't produce anything permanent. Markets will exist as long as humans do; you can twist and bend them, but you can't eliminate them.
I think we should learn certain aspects from communism.
Capitalism only paved way for "The New Prosperity" of planned obsolescence. It called for products with limited lifespans on the basis of profit. This can be evidently seen in the Centennial Light that was produced before the Phoebus Cartel started and is atleast 113 years old (still counting). The Phoebus Cartel standardised the light bulb to 1,000 hours inorder to cut off costs and increase profit. Companies started investing research on how to decrease a product's lifespan, rather than increase it, leading to consumer culture that produced more waste and pollution than ever.
Learning from the communist times, resources were scarce so they hired scientists and manufacturers to use as little as possible whilst yielding the highest possible product lifespan, as they could not afford otherwise. Today in past Soviet states, you can still see products in use from communist times, because they made sure a refrigerator had to last a minimum of 25 years.
At the same time, environments in Communist countries themselves deteriorated just because there was no real democratic accountability for individuals in charge of managing said environs.
Where healthy market competition exists, there's no reason for planned obsolescence to also do so. Perhaps some measure of regulation could sort out the monopoly holding everything up...
Is Communism the Superior System?
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Nope. It's a convenient screen for authoritarians to hide behind, but it doesn't produce anything permanent. Markets will exist as long as humans do; you can twist and bend them, but you can't eliminate them.
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chole
8 years ago
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I think we should learn certain aspects from communism.
Capitalism only paved way for "The New Prosperity" of planned obsolescence. It called for products with limited lifespans on the basis of profit. This can be evidently seen in the Centennial Light that was produced before the Phoebus Cartel started and is atleast 113 years old (still counting). The Phoebus Cartel standardised the light bulb to 1,000 hours inorder to cut off costs and increase profit. Companies started investing research on how to decrease a product's lifespan, rather than increase it, leading to consumer culture that produced more waste and pollution than ever.
Learning from the communist times, resources were scarce so they hired scientists and manufacturers to use as little as possible whilst yielding the highest possible product lifespan, as they could not afford otherwise. Today in past Soviet states, you can still see products in use from communist times, because they made sure a refrigerator had to last a minimum of 25 years.
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seekelp
8 years ago
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At the same time, environments in Communist countries themselves deteriorated just because there was no real democratic accountability for individuals in charge of managing said environs.
Where healthy market competition exists, there's no reason for planned obsolescence to also do so. Perhaps some measure of regulation could sort out the monopoly holding everything up...
--
chole
8 years ago
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I wish it were true but if you do genuinely believe that this is so, you are sorely mistaken about how our system works.