Production for use

Some thinkers, including the Austrian philosopher and political economist Otto Neurath, have used the phrase "socialization" to refer to the same concept of "production for use". In Neurath's phraseology, "total socialization" involves calculation in kind in place of financial calculation and a system of planning in place of market-based allocation of economic goods.^[6] Alternative conceptions exist in the form of market socialism.

• Karl Marx referred to the "production of use-values" as a feature of any economic mode of production, but characterized capitalism as a mode of production that subjugated the production of use-value for the self-expansion of capital (i.e., capital accumulation or production for profit). In contrast, socialism was vaguely defined as a system based on the direct production of use-value free of the process of continuous capital accumulation.^[7]
• Friedrich Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring that in the socialist mode of production the law of value will no longer apply and money will no longer be the measure of the exchange value of commodities. It would still be necessary an economic planning, which will ultimately be determined by the "useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production" without the need for the concept of "value."^[8]
• Eugene V. Debs popularly used the phrase when running for president of the United States in 1912, stating that capitalism is founded upon production for profit, and in contrast, socialism is postulated upon production for use.^[9]
• Norman Thomas, a presidential candidate in the United States for the Socialist Party of America in the six elections from 1928 to 1948, contrasted socialism with capitalism by stating that socialism is based on production for use and an end to the profit system.^[10]
• Upton Sinclair devised an elaborate production-for-use plan, including confiscation and repurposing of idle factories and farms, that was central to his unsuccessful End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign for governor in 1934.^[11]
• social democrats in post-World War II Europe as a rejection of socialism in the technical sense.^[12]

Production for use in some form was the historically dominant modality until the initial primitive accumulation of capital^{[citation needed]}.

Economic planning is not synonymous with production for use. Planning is essential in modern globalised production both within enterprises and within states. Planning to maximize profitability (i.e., within industries and private corporations) or to improve the efficiency of capital accumulation in the capitalist macro-economy (i.e. monetary policy, fiscal policy and industrial policy) does not change the fundamental criteria and need to generate a financial profit to be reinvested into the economy. A more recent critique of production for profit is that it fails spectacularly to address issues such as externalities which the board and management of a for profit enterprise are often under a fiduciary responsibility to ignore if they harm or conflict with the shareholders' profit motives^{[citation needed]}.

Some socialists suggest a number of irrational outcomes occur from capitalism and the need to accumulate capital when capitalist economies reach a point in development whereby investment accumulates at a greater rate than growth of profitable investment opportunities. Many theories, such as the

Planned obsolescence is a strategy used by businesses to generate demand for the continual consumption required for capitalism to sustain itself. The negative effect planned obsolescence has to environment (mainly), is due to constantly increasing natural material extraction to produce the goods and services to satisfy a never ending added demand, linked with a non-caring disposal of end products.^[17]

The creation of industries, projects and services comes about for no other purpose than generating profit, economic growth or maintaining employment. The drive to create such industries arises from the need to absorb the savings in the economy, and thus, to maintain the accumulation of capital. This can take the form of corporatization and commercialization of public services, i.e., transforming them into profit-generating industries to absorb investment, or the creation and expansion of sectors of the economy that do not produce any economic value by themselves because they deal only with exchange-related activities, sectors such as financial services. This can contribute to the formation of economic bubbles, crises and recessions.^[18]

For socialists, the solution to these problems entails a reorientation of the economic system from production for profit and the need to accumulate capital to a system where production is adjusted to meet individual and social demands directly.

As an objective criterion for socialism, production for use can be used to evaluate the socialistic content of the composition of former and existing economic systems. For example, an economic system that is dominated by nationalized firms organized around the production of profit, whether this profit is retained by the firm or paid to the government as a dividend payment, would be a

The economy of the Soviet Union was based upon capital accumulation for reinvestment and production for profit; the difference between it and Western capitalism was that the USSR achieved this through nationalized industry and state-directed investment, with the eventual goal of building a socialist society based upon production for use and self-management. Vladimir Lenin described the USSR economy as "state-monopoly capitalism"^[21] and did not consider it to be socialism. During the 1965 Liberman Reforms, the USSR re-introduced profitability as a criterion for industrial enterprises. Other views argue the USSR evolved into a non-capitalist and non-socialist system characterized by control and subordination of society by party and government officials who coordinated the economy; this can be called bureaucratic collectivism.

Multiple forms of valuation have been proposed to govern production in a socialist economy, to serve as a unit of account and to quantify the usefulness of an object in socialism. These include valuations based on labor-time, the expenditure of energy in production, or disaggregated units of physical quantities.[23]

The classic formulation of socialism involved replacing the criteria of value from money (

Cybernetics, the use of computers to coordinate production in an optimal fashion, has been suggested for socialist economies. Oskar Lange, rejecting his earlier proposals for market socialism, argued that the computer is more efficient than the market process at solving the multitude of simultaneous equations required for allocating economic inputs efficiently (either in terms of physical quantities or monetary prices).^[26]

In the Howard Hawks-directed 1940 film His Girl Friday, written by Charles Lederer based on the 1928 Broadway play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) interviews accused killer Earl Williams (John Qualen) in jail to write his story for her newspaper. Williams is despondent and confused, and easily accepts it when Johnson leads him into an account of the events preceding the killing, which revolves around the desperate out-of-work man's hearing the expression "production for use" and transferring the concept in his mind to the gun he had: it was made for use, and he used it. This is the story about Williams that Johnson writes up, to the admiration of the other reporters covering the case. This version of Earl Williams' motivations differs significantly from that presented in the original stage play and the first film adaptation of it from 1931. In those scripts, the killer was a committed anarchist who had definite political reasons for the shooting, and did not need to be influenced by a stronger personality into a false narrative.^[29]