Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

volodya_ilich ,

Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can't compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It's just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a "shortage economy" as opposed to western capitalism's "surplus economy". In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that's simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • technology@lemmy.world
  • incremental_games
  • random
  • meta
  • All magazines