State-Capitalism failed 3th Industrial Revolution?

[Guardia Rossa]

Why did State-Capitalist economies failed to enter the Third Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. Digital Revolution)?

[Guardia Rossa]

IF someone can correct the title pls?

State-Capitalism failed 3th Industrial Revolution?

[Armchair Partisan]

I think it was just political incompetence. The Western bloc placed a heavy emphasis on computing development, so the Soviets wanted to do the opposite thing and focused on analog systems instead. It's not like they couldn't produce computers. Near the end of the Cold War, Bulgaria had a thriving little computer industry that had a sadly short life before the free plunder-uh, market system ensured that it collapsed. It was just too little, too late. Also, of course, the fact that the Soviet Union held a small share of the world's resources didn't help either (although that was a problem for almost every sector of their economy), plus their chips were manufactured according to a different standard which made trade impossible.

[Cliff Paul]

Well it's not like the rest of the capitalist world has undergone the digital revolution yet. When you compare the USSR to Western Europe or the USA it's going to look 'impoverished' and 'backwards'. In 1892, someone wrote in The Economic Journal:

"While Europe generally has economically been advancing quite rapidly, Russia has been falling backwards. Russia now is in the condition in which Ireland was in the first half of the century, in which India and China still are, that is to say, the bulk of its people live so close to the verge of destitution that they are plunged into famine by the failure of a single harvest."

Now when the Bolsheviks took power the Russian economy had obviously advanced somewhat, but living conditions in Russia were basically analogous to many other third world countries (per capita gdp in the Russian Empire was estimated to be around the same as Mexico's but right before it's collapse, the USSR had a per capita gdp that was 50% larger than Mexico's).

[Guardia Rossa]

Well it's not like the rest of the capitalist world has undergone the digital revolution yet. When you compare the USSR to Western Europe or the USA it's going to look 'impoverished' and 'backwards'. In 1892, someone wrote in The Economic Journal:

"While Europe generally has economically been advancing quite rapidly, Russia has been falling backwards. Russia now is in the condition in which Ireland was in the first half of the century, in which India and China still are, that is to say, the bulk of its people live so close to the verge of destitution that they are plunged into famine by the failure of a single harvest."

Now when the Bolsheviks took power the Russian economy had obviously advanced somewhat, but living conditions in Russia were basically analogous to many other third world countries (per capita gdp in the Russian Empire was estimated to be around the same as Mexico's but right before it's collapse, the USSR had a per capita gdp that was 50% larger than Mexico's).

????
Digital revolution (according to Wikipedia) was from 1950 to 1970
Of course State-Capitalism excelled at the era of the second indrev.

What I wanted to know is why it never made it into the Third indrev

Armchair Partisan's explanation was good, but can someone elaborate it more? Was there a lack of silicium or whatever the hell was missing to mass-produce computers?

If the USSR didn't fell could we see it reaching Western's production levels or it would stay back forever?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The Wikipedia article conflates many, many different things. And while I'm sure digital music storage is nice, it really doesn't have a lot to do with the development of the productive forces.

The Soviet Union was a massive consumer of early computer technology. This changed somewhat in the seventies, when serious discussion about cybernetic control in the industries of the Eastern Bloc spooked the bureaucracy, which was accustomed to skimming money from state enterprises illegally, which would be made more difficult by cybernetisation. In short order it was discovered that cybernetics was a Western bourgeous ploy.

As for the production of industrial robots and the like, the Soviet Union ranked with the US and Japan, despite ridiculous statistics sometimes cited by the US government (at one point claiming there were less robots in the entire SU than there were kinds of robots being produced by the Soviets). This is impressive in itself, since the productive forces in revolutionary Russia were barely above those in the colonies, excepting some major industrial centres, many of them destroyed by war.

Consumer electronics never really took off in the Soviet Union, but the Soviet economy was notoriously unresponsive to consumer demand, on account of the political power of the bureaucracy. There were more serious examples of this than a lack of early computers, however, for example the building of metros in the fifties, while many workers took mud paths to work. If you asked the Soviet workers if they would rather increase the production of the necessities of life or have the Soviet economy start producing some kind of KomDiv64 on a massive scale, I'm fairly sure the KomDiv64 would lose.

[ñángara]

oops!

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

(1) Relevance?

(2) That's N. Yezhov.

[ñángara]

You can manage without i-tech as the photo of dwarf Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov shows him before and after falling in disgrace from Stalin (without using photoshop)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Voroshilov%2C_Molotov%2C_Stalin%2C_with_Nikolai_Ye zhov.jpg/220px-Voroshilov%2C_Molotov%2C_Stalin%2C_with_Nikolai_Ye zhov.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg/220px-The_Commissar_Vanishes_2.jpg

[Rafiq]

To put it shortly, the Soviets could have pioneered individual computer technology, as they had the technical base for this and - there were clear implicit predispositions to it. Development of independent computer technology couldn't keep up with military demand, so they scrapped the project, fired a bunch of computational scientists and started copying western models so that they could mass produce them for the military.

Many prominent Soviet computational scientists who were sacked would go on to become prominent leaders in western companies after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of them even oversaw the development of the Pentium processor at Intel.

[tuwix]

Why did State-Capitalist economies failed to enter the Third Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. Digital Revolution)?


Some of them didn't fail. Cuba and North Korean still exist and try to accommodate to digital revolution. There are even unconfirmed informations about North Korean hackers attacking some western websites.

[Luís Henrique]

The Soviet Union and similar "working class paradises" were very inefficient in turning science into techonology, and techonology into daily products available to common citizens.

As it is often said, they could put a satellite in orbit, but could not put butter in the tables of common people; they could assemble nukes enough to destroy the world, but they couldn't assemble freezers that actually kept common people's meat fresh.

That failure obviously extended to computer techonology: they had impressive mainframes the size of a whole floor in a huge building, but they could not produce personal computers available to their citizens.

And without that mass industrial base, they were doomed to eventually become obsolete.

What caused such deficient relations between science and industry, that is the long, difficult question.

Luís Henrique

[StromboliFucker666]

North Korean still exist and try to accommodate to digital revolution. There are even unconfirmed informations about North Korean hackers attacking some western websites.

I would not consider N.Korea to be an authoritarian socialist place. Hell, they even got rid of all references to socialism!