They can hardly industrialize on a sustainable scale right? Tourism is their only possible lifeblood, along with extractive stuff like mining and fishing and being a tax haven. What viable path is there for them under a communist system?
They can hardly industrialize on a sustainable scale right? Tourism is their only possible lifeblood, along with extractive stuff like mining and fishing and being a tax haven. What viable path is there for them under a communist system?
it wouldn't look like capitalist planned obsolescence but you do want some product lifetime management where things eventually fail and can be replaced by actual advances in technology. if everything is maximally durable you've wasted all those extra resources when a better MRI machine is invented or whatever and you replace things with decades of usable life that are mechanically obsolete.
Circular economies have entered the chat.
Highly durable materials are much easier to dismantle and reprocess. The entire waste argument against durability presupposes an economy where we just throw everything into a landfill instead of putting the materials back into the economy. No economy can sustain itself on MRI machines being disposable.
there are a lot of components in things that aren't particularly reusable even in devices designed to last over a decade. MRI machines are by no means disposable, but they're going to break down at some rate, and imaging technology will improve at some rate and there's a sweet spot were you're not wasting resources over-building the things but they last long enough to be replaced on what amounts to a schedule.
there's also efficiency gains. It's all well and good that my monitor from 15 years ago still works, but it uses more electricity than a newer one the same size so at some point it's worth the cost to me personally now to get a new one and stop using this one even though i don't "need" to, and in a post-revolutionary society it would be worth the resources of manufacture to replace it even though it's not broken depending on the generation and other needs of the community. maybe some of these components are reusable but there are diminishing returns on energy intensive recycling processes.
Yes, and those components are waste. Reducing waste is a critical aspect of sustainable society, which means it's a critical aspect of communism. Components that are waste should not cause reusable components to be dumped in a landfill. They should be engineered to be removable without much effort or ideally engineered out completely. Inefficient older models can be returned to a reclamation center to reclaim the materials to create the circular economy. You can't claim energy efficiency as your goal when you rely on externalizing the waste of billions of products.