Cyber-Soviet Socialism

[ComradeRed]

I've been thinking quite a bit, and I've come to the conclusion that the duty of a centralized government is to be "effecient"; however, why can't we use the internet for such a task? Commune A has x kilos of wheat, Commune B has y kilos of misc., etc. This is registered on the net(a centralized website), and the communes come togather in democratic meetings saying "Holy Crap, we need this" and search the net for this product.

The duty of the soviets would be to organize the most effecient work, put the number of products made online, etc.

What's wrong with this? I know there must be something.... ;)

[Zingu]

Are you talking about the whole 'Economic Calculation' problem that plauged the Soviet Union? Why not take the idea further? Automate jobs, caculate the economy over powerful supercomputers!

[ComradeRed]

Sort of. What I am talking about is certain communes saying "Hey, we are short products x, y, and z. Commune A has this, let's contact them and order this much of produt x, y, and z" The purpose of a central organ committee is to calculate this out and calculate the number of products made; I believe the internet could be better at this.

[Zingu]

Why not supercomputers? No room for human error, would be faster in calculations, but I do see the points you have in it through the internet, if managed easily without becoming a complicated network of users, such a system could adapt much faster to changes in the economy.

[Anti-Prophet]

Or why dont we just make robots that make goods and have them all put the goods into a huge storage building in the center of the world and then we could make other robots that follow people around and when people need something they just tell the robot and the robot goes to get it at the storage building at the center of the world and. it wouldnt take the robots much time because they have rockets instead of legs that makes them travel 10 times the speed of sound so it would take them much time to go to the storage at the center of the world. Also we could make robots in the storage center that calculate when we are short of a certain good and they could tell the factory robots to make more of them. We could also make robots that take dumps for us so we dont have to anymore since its so time consuming.

[redstar2000]

Obviously, a communist society would take full advantage of computer technology. In fact, it may be that advanced computer technology is materially necessary for communism to work at all.

Some scientists are presently working on "quantum computers"...devices that would be as far advanced over what we have now as a contemporary super-computer compared to a 1940s adding machine. Enormously complex problems that would take our existing computers millions of years to solve could be solved in a few seconds.

Right now, unfortunately, they're at the "2+2=4" stage of development...and it remains to be seen if this idea is really practical.

But it looks promising.

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.fightcapitalism.net)
A site about communist ideas

[enigma2517]

If you read "Towards A New Socialism" there is a lot of stuff in there about the use of IT technology, planned/macroeconomics and so forth. Its worth a look.