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Yo Check This Out / Re: Draw Every Pokémon: Planning Thread
« on: January 30, 2018, 05:49:42 PM »
we'll be done in no time!
u sure about that? :mastermind: :emotes that are on discord but not the forum:\
Attachment to material things under socialism takes on a different form. Obviously there is a great emphasis on the equal distribution of real-world things--food, housing, medical care, etc--and, contrary to popular myth, there's nothing necessarily spartan or austere about socialism, since a majority of socialist projects have set a rich cultural and social life for the people as a goal and achieved such in many ways. I think the difference here that is relevant for the discussion is that these are no longer personal possessions--food and housing are simply things you get for being part of a society, and no longer need to be scrounged for or worried over. And while equal proliferation of material goods is still part of society's economic lifeblood, there's less of an emphasis on luxury and waste (since accelerating the rate of profit naturally demands the perpetual expansion of wasteful goods, whereas creating durable goods and encouraging thrift helps achieve a point of "market saturation" that is actually desirable under socialism.)This is a really interesting point, and I think super important, because there is such a vision (at least from what I have seen and people I have talked to) of socialist societies having problems with resource allocation. For example, I took a microeconomics class this spring--interestingly from a professor who is increasingly disillusioned with the current capitalist system, although he has had a healthy distrust of capitalism for a while, from what I can tell--and he mentioned in one lecture the problems that the Soviet Union under Stalin encountered with food distribution. Namely that while food was cheap, it was so scarce that there were incredibly long lines to get it, and most people didn't get enough. I haven't studied this situation much, but it makes sense from what I do know about the production and distribution of goods.