Hello comrades,

I'm trying to understand how a moneyless economy would allocate resources optimally. Here is a silly example to illustrate the specific problem I don't understand.

Let's say that the only vacuum cleaners currently available are corded. A vacuum cleaner company democratically decides to design a cordless stick vacuum cleaner for greater comfort. Consumers are attracted and are starting to choose it over traditional corded vacuum cleaners (for free). Noticing the success of its product, the company produces more of it. Since cordless vacuum cleaners require a lithium battery, more lithium must be extracted from the earth. As we know, lithium is a finite and rare resource. This means a larger portion of the total lithium available is allocated to cordless vacuum cleaners.

The problem is that cordless vacuum cleaners are just a convenience option. People can still clean their homes with traditional battery-less corded vacuum cleaners. But some products strictly require a battery, like electric cars for example (I know hydrogen can be used too but that's just for the sake of the example). To wisely choose the best lithium allocation, we should therefore consider not only the material needs of society (electric cars), but also the adjustable preferences of individuals (cordless vacuum cleaners). We can calculate the total amount of lithium in kilograms needed to produce the electric car batteries we need, but we can't really compare it with the "desirability" of cordless vacuum cleaners. We could say: just reserve the lithium that's strictly required, and use the surplus for convenience enhancements, but we can't predict the total amount we will strictly need ahead of time.

Under capitalism, the rarefaction of lithium is supposed to increase the price of the final product. At some point, consumers will find cordless vacuum cleaners too expensive, stop buying them, and return to traditional corded vacuum cleaners. How would this work in communism without prices? What would stop consumers from grabbing cordless vacuum cleaners until the earth's lithium runs out, when it could have been put to much better use in electric car batteries? And how do we decide when to stop lithium extraction altogether to stop destroying the environment?

I'm not saying that communism doesn't work or capitalism is more efficient, I'm just trying to understand. Some argue that the internal planning systems used in today's large companies could be reused, but I think they are optimized to maximize a single goal, profit, based on prices, so I don't understand how it could work without them.

Of course my example is stupid. There are probably much better uses for lithium than electric cars and cordless vacuum cleaners, and we should probably use as little as possible of finite resources. Nonetheless, the problem already appears in a simplistic economic model with only 2 products. How would it be solved with longer and more complex supply chains, with multiple vacuum cleaner manufacturers, multiple lithium suppliers, where manufacturers would not know the proportion of lithium they consume and lithium extractors would not know the final allocation of lithium in consumer products?

How would it work in centralized vs decentralized economies?