Certainly. It's a pity that the Soviet Union collapsed before technological advances could realise such a vision.
Although to be frank, I never got the impression that Soviet computer technology was anything special.
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Red Cybernetics
In the 1960s, the US air force was sufficiently concerned about the soviet military prowess it issued this report.
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...r/sleeper.html
Here is a quote from the report that is particularly telling:
They then go on to quantify the process of soviet world domination.
The US Air Force no less!
There is of course a place for such a work in our policy prescriptions.
Do comrades think that the modern left should revive the "cybernetic" approach to our activism? Can our organizing efforts be more systematically analyzed in the framework of cybernetics (or, as it is apparently called in the anglo-saxon world, "operations research"?)
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Certainly. It's a pity that the Soviet Union collapsed before technological advances could realise such a vision.
Although to be frank, I never got the impression that Soviet computer technology was anything special.
The Human Progress Group
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker - Mikhail Bakunin
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains - Karl Marx
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value - R. Buckminster Fuller
The important thing is not to be human but to be humane - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Check out my speculative fiction project: NOVA MUNDI
Why do you suppose that was? I think it is one of the most fascinating problems of modern scientific history that the USSR fell so far behind in computing technology - in fact, by the end they were reduced to cloning models smuggled out of the west.
But yeah, I agree, Soviet science always had a strong theoretical bent to it. I think it emanated in part from the view that they couldn't compete with the trinkets Oppenheimer or von Neumann had, but they could go mano-a-mano on paper and pencil problems.
Having said that, now that most leftists have access to machines the US air force could only dream of 20 years ago, it is up to us to popularize and develop a more systematic and perhaps even "scientific" approach to social activism. Our enemies are unfortunately decades ahead of us on this, and it's good to know others here feel we can't be left behind for too long.
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If I recall correctly, cybernetics was, initially at least, regarded as a bourgeois pseudoscience. As well, there was a resistance to the introduction of computers and other systems of automation because it was thought that these technologies would somehow alienate workers from the end products of production, or something of the sort. In this respect it is not surprising why the Soviet Union fell behind in computing technology.
There was some interesting work done in the 1960's and onward on computing and planning, but much of it never reached the stage of implementation either due to practical limitations of the technology, or lack of political will on the part of the bureaucratic elite to implement these novel planning methods.
Well first of all let's not overstate the gap here. Or rather, let's put it in context. The USSR was joined by pretty much the rest of the world, with the possible exception of Britain, in falling far behind the US in this field. Indeed practically every major development in microprocessor technology in the past five decades occurred in the US, and specifically in one small corner of California. What differentiated the USSR from the likes of France or Italy was an economic system that it did not allow for mass import of consumer goods and that saw computers fulfilling a very different function
As an aside, considering your reference to 'clones', its worth remembering that with the exception of the Apple Mac every PC on the market today is effectively a clone of the original IBM PC
On the contrary it was that need to solve "paper and pencil problems" that drove Soviet research in computer science, largely because such theoretical problems presented very real practical challenges. Pioneers in mathematics and operational research (in particular Leonid Kantorovich) had devised a whole series of very impressive linear programming techniques in order to optimise the Soviet planned economy but even then the huge sums of data (hundreds of thousands of variables) led to agonisingly lengthy calculations. In the early years these were indeed done by hand but as early as the '40s the USSR began prioritising the development of electrical computers for this very purpose. I think it was the URAL series that was first commonly used for crunching these vast economic and military problems but by the 70s (at the latest) smaller computers were also beginning to make an appearance in factories for economic data collection purposes
Where the Soviet Union did miss out was in the development of PCs. As per the above, the focus of their research efforts remained relatively stuck on mainframes; computers were first and foremost considered calculation machines for Gosplan or the military. This would have some major repercussions when the West instead developed an interest in miniaturisation and the semiconductor revolution kicked off
There's a distinction that needs to be made here. Cybernetics did indeed come under ideological attack in the immediate post-war there was never any objection to computers per se. Their use as calculating machines was viewed positively and Soviet research certainly did not lag behind the West during the 40s and 50s. Indeed by the 60s computer science had become established enough that any ideological objections regarding the broader field of cybernetics were largely overcomeOriginally Posted by Hyacinth
March at the head of the ideas of your century and those ideas will follow and sustain you. March behind them and they will drag you along. March against them and they will overthrow you.
Napoleon III
Yes. There needs to be a focus on a goal and all actions being justified in terms of that goal, though it might take someone very experienced in activism to actually start making calculations. The problem is, though, that the goal for most Communists is vague (which I have complained about before).
Though slightly off-topic, the earlier part of the article, particularly the references to the early '60s, reminded me of something that was discussed over at the technocracy.ca forums a few years ago: Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov's OGAS (ОГАС) plan from the 1960s (1964?) and his DISPLAN (ДИСПЛАН) later on (1974?), which both were plans to plan the economy cybernetically using automation in manufacturing as much as possible, while DISPLAN was also focused on resource and energy flows (rather than money), and has been compared to the Technocratic plan, and focused, I am told, on reducing the need for human labour at all, achieving post-scarcity and through that Communism. According to my source, however, the original OGAS was rejected by the Communist Party due to opposition from "economists" (which I assume means orthodox Marxist-Leninists who do not account for the fact that Marx probably could not have foreseen the state of technology at that time) some time during the 1960s around the time Brezhnev got power.
I must add, though, that my source, a fascistic (NazBol) troll, should not be taken alone, so the details of these plans are still very hazy and most of what I said could be wrong. I do know that Glushkov DID think up two ideas called OGAS and DISPLAN, having found references (in Russian) to them and Glushkov. Information is difficult to find in English. By that I mean that Google does not come up with useful results (it even parses "DISPLAN" as "display"!!!). However, if you use the Russian acronyms I provided, you will get results, and I have recently started looking into this as Google Translate's Russian translator is quite good nowadays.
The best information to be found in English (apart from the rants of my unreliable source on technocracy.ca) is probably the wikipedia page I linked to, which says of Glushkov:
It is fascinating, isn't it, what might have been?
Names: Haraldur, Cult of Reason
Transhumanist Platformist Anarchist Communist Technocrat (Black Red Grey) / Technocratic Federalist
Technocracy Study Course Anarchist FAQ Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air
Where Communism/<insert abundant system here> is possible: Full Report & Synopsis
If links no longer work, PM me.
Socialism: Worker control of the means of production and distribution.
THOU SHALT NOT ATTEMPT TO DEFY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS.
It's surprising they would latch on the alienation angle, rather than the promises of reduced workloads and freeing up greater leisure time. If any government ideologue would be able to see this promiseone would think it would be the planners in the soviet union.
This nails it on the head. I see your broader point as being that the failure of the USSR to develop the PC first and subsequent miniaturization was a product of the centralized economic structure. In many respects, if they had a more decentralized economy the PC would have been a very sensible development.
Of course it is an interesting question why the US, of all capitalist economies, or less centralized communist countries like Yugoslavia or Cuba didn't develop something like the PC first. At least with respect to Yugoslavia and probably other capitalist states like France Japan or Germany had the technical know-how to, in principle, be the leaders in this field. Still, this is probably the one of the best arguments against centralized planning I have come across.
But is it? This is probably better suited for learning or theory or something, but on somethings virtually all leftists agree - like stopping imperialist wars and unionizing radical unions. Hell many groups seem to agree that building party membership is a central goal. Even within the confines of a narrow sect, one would think that these kinds of methods would be more widely used. Indeed, the silence is deafening.
That's fascinating. Let us know if you can confirm if indeed the record shows that the plan was doomed by the orthodox Soviet economists. I think the archives are declassified now so it should at least in principle be possible to figure out why the plan was torpedoed.
I will add this: every time the bureaucrats of the USSR had a chance to improve people's livelihoods or invest in a military technology they pretty much chose the latter. I think in terms of scientific priorities, soviet economic prowess played a distant second fiddle to concrete military applications or showy developments like the space program. The fate of Soviet medicine is a prime example of this, and computing would probably have been little different.
But of course this was what was said about the American internet and look what became of that piece of military hardware.
More broadly I take this as a very broad indictment of the Stalin and post-Stalin approaches to constructing socialism. The failure to adopt an exploit an efficient and promising technology when it comes along should speak volumes about the abysmal record of construction of "socialism from above". In many respects the capitalist states are guilty of this as well. In many respects they are not. because entire economic systems, and not states, appear to be the proper unit of analysis here.
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Yes. Yes it is. For a start, what have "stopping imperialist wars and unionizing radical unions" to do with the goal? I am not merely playing devil's advocate. Note that I do (and did) not say "a goal" but "the goal", i.e. Communism. To this day the only movement called "Communist" by themselves or by others that I have seen with a reasonably comprehensive description of their vision for the future society is the 1930s Technocracy movement, who described an energy accounting system, the area of the Earth affected, how the society would be organised into industrial sequences, how dwellings would be designed and how transport would function. This was on the second level of what could be called a hierarchy of goals:
Level 1: Have a society where all people have equal access to resources and high standard of living for the longest possible time.
Level 2: Have this particular society (the plan is too big to fit here).
Level 3: Achieve this society in this particular place (in their case, a subset of the Americas).
(The ones below are possibly inaccurate, due to lack of reliable sources, and probably varied):
Level 4: When "the crisis" hits (they thought there was an imminent collapse of Capitalism; excusable in the '30s, perhaps), take over the technical workings of the economy, such as electricity production and distribution, using technical personnel.
Level 5: Recruit technical personnel.
Level 6: Educate the general public and recruit as many as possible into the organisation, with focus on technical personnel
Level 7: and so on...
I think that in order for us to be a credible threat to Capitalism, the very least we should do is have a hierarchy of goals a bit like this (though, of course, it will be very much a tree structure in the lower levels). The highest level I have seen in the Marxist and Anarchist movements is that in the Communist Manifesto (progressive income tax and so on) which would probably fit on Level 4. It could be argued that 3 is filled (but is it the entire world or <insert state and/or "nation" here>?), and perhaps even 1 too, but if so the gap in 2 is even more glaring. Indeed, having level 2 missing should probably invalidate all below it as good plans usually need clear goals, as opposed to "I don't really know what I want, but maybe I will get it if I do this!" which, unfortunately, seems to be how our movement generally works. Go to a protest here, talk to/at a person there or, in different parts of the world, have an insurrection here, get elected there. Useless.
If I have not put you off with my rant, my contribution to working out level 3 (assuming a system for level 2 resembling the Technocratic one) should be found in my sig. (Note to people who might see this in the future if my sig has changed or the links are out of date: PM me and I will see if I can send you the file).
Still, I do agree with you that, for the mean time, these methods should be used for the intermediate goals, even if it is unknown whether those intermediate goals are helpful to the final goal.
I plan to, though I hope that I will be able to find them with Google and Google Translate, along with OGAS and DISPLAN themselves, rather than having to go on a trip to Moscow.
Of course, that means that I am not the only one who can do this.
Interestingly, my source, the NazBol, was quite a fan of Stalin and thought that Kruschev and, especially, Brezhnev fucked things up. The latter would certainly fit with the dates as Brezhnev became General Secretary in 1964. Isn't he associated with the stagnation of the Soviet economy?
Names: Haraldur, Cult of Reason
Transhumanist Platformist Anarchist Communist Technocrat (Black Red Grey) / Technocratic Federalist
Technocracy Study Course Anarchist FAQ Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air
Where Communism/<insert abundant system here> is possible: Full Report & Synopsis
If links no longer work, PM me.
Socialism: Worker control of the means of production and distribution.
THOU SHALT NOT ATTEMPT TO DEFY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS.
I wouldn't consider it a criticism of the planning system per se. Largely because every other country in the world also missed the boat on PCs (unlike the USSR, France et al were able to avail of mass imports) and the focus on mainframes did make more sense in the heavily centralised Soviet economy. Remember as well that it wasn't until the late 80s or early 90s that you began to see a PC on every office desk
There's a heavy irony in all this as the stagnation of the Soviet economy was due in large part to the ever multiplying computational requirements of a modern economy. Throw these huge calculations at an average PC today and it would do them in a few hours max. It today's technology that finally makes a mature centralised economy possible
March at the head of the ideas of your century and those ideas will follow and sustain you. March behind them and they will drag you along. March against them and they will overthrow you.
Napoleon III
Sure I agree. There are a few relatively coherent, goal- and method-oriented movements like syndicalists and DeLeonists, as well as third world maoists and pareconists out there but they are the exception rather than the rule. It boggles my mind why these groups don't attract a larger following, given the utter impotence of groups that engage in the kinds of struggles you mention.
Haha yeah I must admit this is more a historical curiosity than anything so I probably will be quite useless in this arena.I plan to, though I hope that I will be able to find them with Google and Google Translate, along with OGAS and DISPLAN themselves, rather than having to go on a trip to Moscow.
Of course, that means that I am not the only one who can do this.
Apparently he is but I think there are other posters around (eg., Comrade Om Random Precision Red Resistance etc..) who are far more qualified than me to address this.
You have a valid point viz. computing specifically. I was referring somewhat clumsily more to the limited potential for technological development more generally. It seems that a highly centralized planning apparatus constraints R&D. This exists to some extent under capitalism as well - for instance, companies that let their workers work on whatever they want (like ATT's bell labs) have impressive long-term productivity gains.
I've always been under the impression that it was the massive diversion of resources to the military that was the chief cause for stagnation - that once a certain standard of living had been achieved, the lion's share of economic and intellectual capital were devoted almost exclusively to military applications in the belief that people's lives were "adequate" and in any event better than right after the war.
We're getting closer but I think we're not quite there yet. Multi-core technology is just beginning to be realized and there's still a lot of research on parellilizing algorithms that's a wide open field. A lot of real-time discrete event simulations still take days or even weeks to run, and I think these need to be shortened to hours before we can seriously consider detailed computation of modern economies.
Having said this what is industrial engineering but a planned economy under any other name?
百花齐放
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-Quilapayun
AFAIK the centralised economy simply channelled research into areas that it perceived to be most productive. So while the Soviets might not have built great cars, their mining technology was superior to the West. At least until the eighties when everything started to go to hell
Of course the big problem here is that it relies on a concious decision making process. This did have its advantages but when the planning process itself started to degrade in the 70s everything, including research priorities, similarly stagnated or declined
The 'defence burden', to use the Soviet phrase, was unquestionably a major drain on the Soviet economy but the central issue with the stagnation was the near-collapse of planning practices. In a way the Soviet planners were victims of their own success - each year of continued growth in the Soviet economy produced more and more data, variables and decisions for the planners to process as the economy matured. The structures and means used to manage the earlier, more basic, economy were no longer adequate and the calculations required to maintain the various plans were simply too many. When efforts to decentralise the system failed the whole planning process became an unmanageable farce
Its no coincidence that increased corruption and data falsification began to creep into the system during the mid 70s. These were as much a symptom of the impossible situation facing the planners. By the very end it was only a parody of of a truly planned economy
I posted this on the command economy from an economic expert a year or two ago. Still worth the read
Well there are always advances to be made but let's not underestimate how far we've come in the last decade alone. Even today I can see a huge difference in simulation run times merely from using different PCs two or three years apart in terms of age. Compare the computational power available to any ordinary user today and that of high-end PCs at the beginning of the millennium. Its just incredible how fast we're moving
Exactly. This is actually where my interest in planned economics originated from. We have a whole wealth of mathematical methods for planning and optimising production, that can be applied on a factory or national scale, and we've had these for at least half a century now. As mentioned above, Soviet planners were hugely influential in developing operational research methodologies and these techniques are as valid today as they were when used in the early Five Year Plans or Second World War. The constant stumbling block has been developing the computational power... now that we've done that the fields of combinatorial optimisation and computer simulation are finally viable. Just a few decades to late to be of use to the Soviets
March at the head of the ideas of your century and those ideas will follow and sustain you. March behind them and they will drag you along. March against them and they will overthrow you.
Napoleon III
This is a most fascinating and informative discussion, keep it up guys.
The Human Progress Group
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker - Mikhail Bakunin
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains - Karl Marx
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value - R. Buckminster Fuller
The important thing is not to be human but to be humane - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Check out my speculative fiction project: NOVA MUNDI
I didn't know that, that is quite fascinating. One wonders if the problem had more to do with the metrics used in the planning process and the centralized, top-down nature of it. It would seem a democratic planning approach would have sacrificed optimum mining technology for better cars or research into personal computers. So while improving productivity in an ever more productive field has its advantages, using "productivity" as the metric instead of people's expressed wants would seem the fatal flaw.
That's quite fascinating, thanks for the link.
True, my only point was that we could go further still, especially given that clockspeeds have just about maxed out.
Good point. What needs to be done, it seems, is to advance an operations research approach that takes democratic decision making along the way into account. Both capitalist and I imagine Soviet optimization routines appear to assume production goals should be determined prior to commencing work. To some extent this can be handled by democratic decision making, but the nature of the beast strikes me as very different when adopting a regimen in the middle of the production process.
Given the computational capabilities you note, this is also one area of study that I could see as extremely useful to the movement. Perhaps the development of a more "cybernetic approach" to our activism could provide the germ of such a democratic operations research paradigm.
百花齐放
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la luz
de un Rojo Amanecer
anuncia ya
la vida que vendrá.
-Quilapayun
This is a key point, one that even socialists overlook -- in the struggle against capitalism we can't only argue for a workers' economy simply for the *sake* of a workers' economy. *Any* economy, even a post-capitalist, worker-controlled one, is just a means of production and distribution -- the ultimate question is *who* gets the stuff that's produced?
If people get the stuff they need and want, then no problem -- the class struggle has then, by definition, been superseded if that's the case. But until then we're stuck with some sort of elitism, whether it's from private property or bureaucratized property....
Chris
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^^ actually I'm going to lay credit to the quote you have in your post
I'd go a step further. Our goal isn't the abolition of elitism, in fact the persistence of elitism is just a symptom of the underlying problem you note, of people's needs and wants not being satisfied. Basically, enforced scarcity leads to elitism, and the goal isn't to abolish elitism per se but rather the conditions that lead to it.
百花齐放
-----------------------------
la luz
de un Rojo Amanecer
anuncia ya
la vida que vendrá.
-Quilapayun
Yup! -- Now let's bicker about which came first -- elitism or enforced scarcity -- I'm itching for a chicken-or-the-egg tussle here...!
= )
The Logic of (Exploited) Life
Since this thread seems like an appropriate place for it, here's a reproduction of a recent letter I sent out regarding an excerpt from a World Socialist Web Site article. Let's call it "The Logic of (Exploited) Life":
---
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oc...comm-o11.shtml
> Extraordinary sensitivity and extraordinary philistinism -- or worse -- have coexisted within quite remarkable artists. This is perhaps even more possible in art because we are not speaking about a purely conscious or rational process. Human beings feel deeply and sense the truth about many things in ways that never reach the level of conscious thought. Most people repress or ignore those feelings. The artist, whether he is cursed or blessed, cannot; he or she has access to them and they must emerge in the peculiar language of artistic imagery.
[This is in regards to the] observation contained in the excerpt above, that "extraordinary sensitivity and extraordinary philistinism [...] have coexisted within quite remarkable artists."
Using the tool of materialism I'd like to suggest that the process of artistic endeavors is -- or can be -- a matter of very high-level, intensive cognitive and emotional effort, and, as such, must be counter-balanced, or compensated, in like measure with access to, and indulgence in, a commensurate quantity and quality of gratifying pleasure.
The exertion of effort -- even if profoundly self-motivated -- is intrinsically alienating, as it represents a detaching and removal of work-force from one's own domain. The logic of materialism would suggest that a severe *existential* stress would be the result of this alienation from the product of one's own labor efforts, no matter how mundane or enlightened, if not compensated for with the indulgence in pleasures of one's own choosing.
I created a sociological diagram, based on materialism, that illustrates this reality in a graphic format. Please feel free to have a look:
G.U.T.S.U.C. The Grand Unified Theory of Society Under C_______
http://tinyurl.com/2c252w
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