Also, there's a lot to say about cybernetics and how a lot of it is pretty dead and for good reasons. I imagine most people see the cool Star Trek-like control room and enjoy Cybersyn on a visual design level than a "this was a good idea for government" level.
I think its obvious that authoritarian governments do poorly with information technology, outside of whats needed for military dominance, due to its democratizing effects. The SU couldn't have a Western-style internet because it would have become a political threat to the SU and strangled in the cradle.
Allende was a little left of, say, France, who had a system like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
France's Minitel network doesn't get enough ink, imo. Its impressive this proto-web network took off. We're talking nearly 10m sales in a country that had about 50m people at the time. France Telecom estimates 25m people had access to Minitels, so half the population. 50% wired in 1980s is very, very impressive.
Citation needed. Information technology has not done one whit to democratize China.
In China, policies like the great firewall exist because the internet does challenge the central government. China is stable because 1.) people are happy with the CCP's economic results, 2.) the state controls large Chinese tech companies, and 3.) the government regularly "disappears" vocal dissenters. Expect a state crackdown if their economy starts crumbling.
The outcome of the Arab Spring has also not exactly resulted in democracy across the board, either. Remind me - how have things in Syria been, lately?
> In China, policies like the great firewall exist because the internet does challenge the central government.
As it turns out, you can just use more IT to repress the 'democratizing' effects of IT.
Speaking of closer to home - if the United States were to turn into a authoritarian state tomorrow, the 'democratizing efforts of IT' would not protect you. If jack-booted thugs were knocking on their literal office door, Facebook, Google, Apple, Snapchat, etc will turn you over faster then you can blink.
GPG won't help you, either. In fact, it'll make it all that much easier for them to find you. A dictatorship doesn't need to decrypt your messages, if using encryption to communicate is enough to send you to the GULAG. (Or if they can employ the $5 rubber hose.)
Incidentally, what I described is all possible in China. So much for computers liberating us.
That's almost 15 years of technological progress, of course the web/internet would replace it, the same way it replaced all other dial-up/BBS services.
>The Minitel was technically free to get but expensive to use since you had to pay heavily taxed services at the minute instead of data volume.
This, historically, was the telecom model. In the US (pre breakup) the telephone company would hand you a free phone for your home and it would be paid for by monthly fees. You never bought it nor ever owned it. This isn't a novel thing nor a real criticism imo.
> Soviet Unions brutal authoritarian communism ... is the only practical form of large scale communism as per history
This is wrong. The USSR started as a socialist republic, but Stalin turned it into a totalitarian dictatorship. The USSR was as communist as the DPRK is democratic (that is: not at all)... their failings are the failings of a dictatorship.
The failings of the Soviet Union are the failings of an ideology whose explictly stated goal was the overthrow of every existing social institution. Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale.
Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin).
> Stalin merely implemented the Bolshevik vision on a much grander and bloodier scale.
I have a serious hunch that you haven't actually done any scholarly inquiry into the ideological landscape of the revolution and how that fits with its material reality.
> Unless your argument is that the Bolsheviks were wrong (which would include people before Stalin).
Well yes, of course they were wrong. The government Lenin established had to make essentially impossible compromises in order to survive. Lenin himself wrote about how they were making ideological compromises due to the exigencies of their circumstances. He thought that those compromises could be undone once the state had been stabilized. He died before that happened, and it never happened. The Soviet Union was always in a state of constant peril due to internal and external forces. It does not help that they were always militarized since its inception. No good civil institutions can come out of a state of perpetual war.
My personal hot take which is not a position I would take if I had to give my opinion grounded in scholarship about the time period is that the revolution could have succeeded if the SPD hadn't order the Freikorps to crush the revolution in Germany; granted that they did so, it would have perhaps been better for the socialist cause for the USSR to collapse than cling to power.
On the other hand, Stalin's USSR did the lion's share of the work in defeating Nazi Germany. What would have happened if he were deposed and the Soviet Union failed to industrialize?
Mostly because their own ideology forced them into stupid policies that constantly caused chaos.
That is exactly how history works.
Many of the things Stalin did can not be explained by that theory. Stalin already was in complete control, more so then almost any other dictator even.
Yet he risked when he collectivised agrocultre that for essentially idiological.
We know that Stalin saw himself as an intellectual, he read a lot and not just marxism. His last great work was a book about the economy, he spent years working on it. Everything we know about him, and how he grow up shows his intense interest in marxim.
Read his letters when he was in exile, all he does is ask for books.
I mention de Mesquita because I think his collectivization policy was very much in line with reducing the size of the selectorate and strengthening his control. That said it's hard to assess that theory in terms of collectivization and industrialization in only a couple of sentences, so I apologize if that seems hand-wavey.
My problem is just that while the farmers had power as a collective, they could really not threaten the political survival of the dictatorship.
History suggest to me that Stalin had reached absolute power and then he finally could dedicate himself to what he actually wanted to do.
The reason collectivization does not make sense as a strategy for political survival is that it massively endangered his position. He had major opposition to these polices because of how extremely damaging they would be.
However, when you try to completely change a whole society, destroying a very large quantity of its economic assets, while also doing massive internal reforms, both in the state and the party, you put yourself in a dangerous situation. Not primary because of the farmers but rather that the very political system you build your power on starts to collapse.
> Stalin was able to blame the farmers for trying to hoard grain and eliminate their leaders
Not sure what you mean by 'he was able to blame', of course he was, he controlled virtually ever channel of information.
Most of the population, and certainty the farmers did not 'buy' this propaganda.
> And as we can't see the future, it wasn't obvious beforehand how bad of an idea collectivization would turn out to be, so I presume he felt it was a gamble worth taking.
Literally every single expert, including communist from his own party knew it was a horrible idea. Its not like this was the first time they tried to get the farmers to do things they did not want to do. During the initial (1917-1921) attempted to claim the farmers property they learned that it was not at all an easy thing to do. The hole regime almost collapsed in 1921 and they had to bring back markets even when they hated the concept.
He had to replace lots of people and use every political tool in the book to actually manage it. Its a true testimony of Stalin political control that he was able to pull this off.
Lenin's idea of transitional phase did not materialize until the failure of "war communism" policy in 1918-1920 became apparent. That phase was more-or-less direct attempt at implementing the tenets of Communist Manifesto literally.
The USSR was a miserable failure, but it was not a totalitarian dictatorship prior to Stalin's rule... "merely" an authoritarian oligarchy. The Bolshevik's ideology did not align with their actions - they didn't destroy the state, they built it.
Their best achievement was scaring the US into going to the Moon.
Class struggle is no joke if done properly, this isn't your typical plastering of Che posters in the campus these days.
No he was not smart enough. He pushed the idea so far that they were about to collapse and then in a emergency move they liberalized because they had no other option.
He and everybody else hated allowance that they had to make for the market. All of them absolutely hated it and the thing they debate most is how to get ride of the market.
> If Lenin didn't kick the bucket too soon, the whole experiment would probably last a bit longer.
It was not so much a 'experiment' as something that was forced on them because they did not have enough power. The NEP was collapsing because even within the NEP the USSR did so many counterproductive things, it could not have continued so much longer.
Stalin did exactly what everybody wanted, but most people disagree with him about if they could actually do it.
Also oddly enough, all the students from grade school and on where indoctrinated into the communist mindset using communist texts and rhetoric.
I lived there before the collapse. It was a communist state. With centralized planning. And all the waste that goes with it.
After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments (with an elect and/or rotating boards), such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power. Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest.
A dictatorship did not exist there in the form of a president.
Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them. Nor change the fact that they don't cure human suffering, they produce it.
The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.
Are you thinking of the Premier (formal head of government before 1990), or the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state)?
> Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest.
The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.
> Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them.
Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
I was being general (and going throughout USSR's history, not just after 1990). There were all kinds of titles and offices and committees, with a central official that the public could see: Chairman, General Secretary, First Secretary, etc.
"President", from the outside perspective [we are not in the Soviet Union], is good enough for the description against the argument that was being made (of a Stalin type "dictatorship").
If you have to nitpick on the word, your argument will never end...
> The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.
And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?
The answer is "its an etheric dictatorship that could be this or that or anything I want it to be to for the arguments sake"?
> Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes. None of which you are going to want to ingest. Because if you do, its only a matter of time before you die.
Uh, since I said the list included all three Premiers that were also General Secretaries of the CPSU, that's equivalent to naming Kruschev. (Lenin was before Stalin and Stalin was Stalin.)
> Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes.
Arguably, in the case of Marxism vs. Leninism, it's more similar to the relation between the abstract concept of a “democratic republic” and the concrete state known as the “German Democratic Republic.”
That is not a dictatorship. I'll provide an example -
Saddam Hussein was a dictator... He had the power/authority, ability, and the will, to kill half the country's population to control the other half. Not that he did it.
Thats a real dictatorship.
Another way to think about this -
Within the Soviet Union, Russia spans 11 time-zones. Just by size alone (and the diversity it provides), the country was too large to have any effective dictatorship over because of all the different regional alliances. And they had constant problems that would never end, to prove it.
Even today, Putin himself has admitted that one of the biggest problems in Russia is that both state organizations and regional authorities will not do what they are told.
It did not have any reservations before expropriating crops from peasants and then killing said peasants with chemical weapons when they uprisen. Meanwhile in cities OGPU will happily shot you after a trial by three people, or even without one.
Leo Trosky, who is still unfortunately sometimes considered as "Stalin done right", reasoned like this:
Communists in power have to extract production from workers whether they like it or not, and maybe in the future the socialist state with advance to the condition where these workers will no longer feel expropriated. But until then, just use force.
Lenin himself set up the Soviet system and he himself put Stalin in control. It was a brutal dictatorship from literally day 1.
This socialist fairy tail of the 'good' soviet union that was destroyed by the evil Stalin is socialist self-rationalizations.
The USSR was communist in the sense that it was lead by people who strongly believed in communism and had a socialist economy that they hoped to transform into communism.
Stalin was a strong ideological believer in communism and his communism was just as real as that of Trotsky or Lenin. His actions, specifically collectivization, very clear target the achievement of an ideological goal, that the majority of the party ideologically agree on.
Except his last testament was to ask that Stalin be removed from power because he was too controlling.
Stephen Kotkin in his Stalin biography goes into a lot of detail on all aspects of the testament.
Also, threw-out his career he went with Lenin and Lenin put him into the positions. Basically he had Lenins support all the way until days before he died. A bit strange to say the least.
That's a misrepresentation at best, since the documents were written up over several months. In any case, it doesn't matter, since Stalin created the Troika, ensured that Lenin was unable to contact outsiders without his authority, made sure that his will and testament was never to be spoken of in public, and consolidated power and control to himself.
Communism is about giving the power to the proletariat. Stalin can hardly be said to have done that.
> In any case, it doesn't matter, since Stalin created the Troika, ensured that Lenin was unable to contact outsiders without his authority
This is at best an exaturation. Many non-Stalin allies had contact with Lenin during most of that time.
> That's a misrepresentation at best, since the documents were written up over several months.
When these things were actually written is not at all clear. The information is actually inconsistant and we don't have the original documents.
The testament was known and debated extensivly inside the party.
> Communism is about giving the power to the proletariat. Stalin can hardly be said to have done that.
Literally the first thing Lenin did is take as much power for himself as possible. So much is made out of the differences between all of these guys, but in reality they are more simular then different.
The theory they were opperating under was that the state should take control guided by the proletarian party to transform into communism. That was Lenin and many other people interpretation of Marxism and Stalin was very much a studend of Lenin in that respect.
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin is a great new biography of Stalin it goes into great detail on the testaments and Stalin idiology.
Genuine belief is hard to assess, especially in an end-state goal like Communism that is remote from the immediate means sought to pursue it. What is absolutely clear, though, is that Leninism was fundamentally divorced, both in it's understanding of the prerequisites circumstances for the socialist step on the route to communism and in it's understanding of the implementation of that step from the form of Communism (Marxism) which it claimed to be an expression of.
Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin may have hoped for Communism, but their actions built a brutal dictatorship. I don't care what they called themselves - I care about the results. No one "accidentally" builds a dictatorship.
I'm not supporting Communism, or the USSR, I'm calling out intellectual laziness. Communism is a specific ideology, there are plenty of real and valid criticisms - but "look at the USSR" is not a valid argument.
The USSR is a good argument against dictatorships, monarchies, totalitarianism, on and on... but Communism is one thing it was not.
With Communism there are massive amounts of problems, but a major one is how to think of the transition, and how to enact the transition.
The USSR had to be a dictatorship because otherwise they and everybody who thinks about it for 5 min understand that the transition to communism will simply not happen.
So if you have a ideology that practically unreachable then that is a massive problem for that ideology and its ability to actually improve the world.
The very extreme proposition dictated by communism forces the people who follow the ideology into extreme actions.
It is true that it was Lenin who brought Stalin into the inner circle of command.
Later on, however, after Lenin was bedridden due to strokes, Lenin explicitly stated that Stalin was not to assume party leadership. This directive was ignored because of Lenin's declining authority in the party.
> The CIA attempted, directly, to foment a military coup in Chile.
Gerovitch seems as good a guide as there is to the topic, speaking as someone who's been hearing about it and reading bits and pieces for over 10 years (of course it's never mentioned in CS programmes).
Eden Medina's 2011 book about Cybersyn was well received and tends to crop up in trendy bookstores. I don't mean to disparage all this but there are good reasons why the notions of cybernetics are not central to pedagogy in any field these days.
In fact, any business that can make a profit without subsidies has solved the economic calculation problem, at least on a smaller than nationwide scale. Maybe if Amazon in 20 years has vertically integrated enough that it is the only business operating in the country and it replaces money with just telling everyone what to do and the whole thing operating on pure faith in Amazon's benevolence it would have solved the economic calculation problem.
One of Sam Walton's big points is that Wal-Mart's success was not due to scale. It was because they were moving data around instead of inventory. Retail used to involve lots of product taking up space in warehouses, store back rooms, and shelves in the store. All that costs the retailer money. Wal-Mart was the first big chain to get this under control, so that product flow followed sales flow very closely. This has an enormous financial benefit. Big retailers typically pay 30 days behind shipments. Wal-Mart (and presumably Amazon) usually have sold the product before they even have paid their supplier. So their inventory cost is negative. Now that's cash flow management.
Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to bar-code everything. They meant everything. Wal-Mart has a buying center in Bentonville, known in retail as the Corridor of Doom. They put up signs along the line of "If your product isn't bar-coded, don't bother coming in". In typical Wal-Mart fashion, they made the suppliers apply the bar codes, both at the retail item and case level. (They've been trying to move to RFID, but it hasn't worked out as well.)
Gosplan was always very slow. They had a monthly information cycle and an annual decision cycle. Wal-Mart had a daily information cycle and a weekly decision cycle years ago, and it's probably faster now. If Gosplan had made it to the bar-code era, they might have been able to make centralized planning work.
The general idea that 60s cybernetic thinking has little relevance to the concrete present possibilities of economic coordination via internet, that seems sound to me.
That 60s cybernetics is not the answer is pretty clear and that it has little implications on modern potential answers is also pretty clear.
Let's say you have two uber customers at 1am on a Saturday night and one available car, A needs to get to work or they lose their minimum wage job and B is a young professional out drinking with friends who just got a text for a booty call. Which do you suppose is going to get the ride according to uber's "solution" to the economic calculation problem?
Though I would like the see the actual argument other that "some dude on twitter said".
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina...
Centrally planned economies had most to benefit from such systems as it could create feedback loops based on economic indicators, how to optimally scale up economy.