Project SPHINX – When the USSR tried to change the computer (2019)
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The article doesn't touch on the architecture of the actual computer at all, but we can presume that, like most designs of the era (both Soviet and non-), it followed industry standards.
The Setun creator N.P. Brousentsov made a lot of dubious claims, including that Setup "worked correctly at once without even debugging" [2].
Balanced ternary was never competitive in transistors. It was hypothesized to be more efficient for vacuum-tube based ring counters, and even that was "only approximately valid, and the choice of 2 as a radix is frequently justified on more complete analysis" [3].
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2541.html
[2] https://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
[3] http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/era/High_Speed_Computing_Devices_1950.pdfThanks - that clears some things up. It also appears that DSSP (Soviet trinary Forth, yes there was such a thing), postdates Forth, was based on Forth, and was not an independent discovery as it is sometimes represented. http://www.euroforth.org/ef00/lyakina00.pdf
Ware definitely is not claiming that they didn't build the Setun in hardware, nor that they emulated it on a base-4 machine, only that the circuit elements they used were capable of four states. Brousentsov's account certainly says they built it. Ware is careful to disclaim, "Among other things, the difficulty of communicating across a language barrier introduces uncertainties in the information."
As for the debugging, it's entirely plausible to me that they debugged the logic equations well enough on paper before building the computer, and designed it conservatively enough (operating 1 MHz transistors at 200 kHz, for example), that they didn't have to correct any design defects after it was built. Of course, this would have been very likely if they had simulated it on another machine first, as you seemed to be saying, but I don't think they had one available.
Brousentsov's other claims (that a balanced-ternary machine doesn't have an unsigned type or require unsigned comparisons, that rounding is achieved simply by truncation, that people common reason informally with three-valued logic, and that programming is easier in ternary) seem either uncontroversially true to me or subjective; which ones did you think were dubious?
The potential economy of ternary, which is marginal to begin with (5.7% greater density in one-hot circuits like those mentioned), does of course disappear when your "trits" are represented as pairs of bits, as in the realization that Ware saw. (There's a diagram of a ternary Setun shift-register stage on p. 128 (141/205) of Ware's report, figure 53.) But it seems from Brousentsov's account that they were able to eventually build some ternary gates as well; the machine wasn't ready for "official testing" until the year after Ware's report. Then they manufactured 50 units in total over the next five years, which could of course have incorporated hardware simplification. Surely they all had to use binary core memory, though, which means the 2916-trit RAM (worth about 4621.8 bits) would have been 26% larger if it had been configured as 5832 bits instead.
Incidentally, Ware's Appendix III starting on p. 171 (184/205) is a relatively in-depth look at the square-loop ferrite logic ("switching") cores that were a less popular alternative to transistors and tubes at the time, the core of the ferrite/diode systems that remained popular in the USSR until the end of the 01960s. They finally lost out because they couldn't scale to the high densities, low powers, or high speeds that transistors could (even the Russians had 400 MHz transistors at the time of Ware's report), and their assembly was much less amenable to automation, putting them at an even greater disadvantage in the US. They did have the merit of being considerably more robust than transistors.
Thank you very much for bringing these delightful documents to my attention!
Maybe we can take some inspiration on the design utopias of the past.
The keyboard suggests some kind of awesome galaxy brain user experience like the Space Cadet keyboard, but would probably be more like operating a phone switchboard.
The article just talks about design and only briefly mentions capabilities.
The Soviets did have computers and did have a semiconductor industry. It was a bit behind the west but not terribly so. For example the Intel 8080 was launched in 1974 and The Soviets were able to fab clones starting in 1979.
That had more to do with cost than it did the advance of tech. But it did mean that competitors had a chance to catch up and get into the market before they were blown away.
In the case of professional workstations and up, midrange, big iron etc the difference was felt far more. This was especially true in military tech where NATO forces we able to become fully digital sooner than the Warsaw pact.
Competing with Apple and "Wintel" - there wasn't much. Enthusiast computers like the Atari ST and Commmodore Amiga and, in the UK, the Archimedes, targeted a sort of odd market of folks who would really have liked a nice workstation or big box Mac but couldn't afford one. They didn't sell many. There really wasn't anybody who "caught up" by introducing an 8-bit after the early eighties - maybe Amstrad in Europe? They pivoted to PC clones, didn't they?
It also had a pre-emptive multitasking OS in ROM which other platforms got only many years later. Like the Mac I'm the early 2000s.
"This picture of a parade in Berlin in 1987 shows one of the very few original PCs ever produced in a Socialist State, the VEB Robotron PC 1715 manufactured in East Germany"
The PC1715 was actually a run-of-the-mill CP/M compatible office computer and fairly common (together with the higher end IBM PC compatible EC 1834: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834).
For some actually 'original' computers, check out the KC85/2../4 computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85) and the extremely rare "Mansfeld MPC": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfeld_MPC
Nothing "revolutionary" of course, but also not straight clones of Western designs (like the PC 1715 or EC 1834).
At the beginning of the 70s, Eastern Germany didn't have chip manufacturing capabilities at all, and at the end of the decade it was able to manufacture Z80 clones along with all other chips needed to build Z80-based computers, and two years later 16-bit CPUs (the Z8000 clone U8000). What CPUs did (for instance) Western Germany build at that time? ;)
The UK did OK - Acorn launched the Archimedes in 1987 (without a parade) - but the rest of Western Europe was never really a personal computer or IC design powerhouse either. Commodore did some assembly in Germany, and I remember being appalled by the large display of obviously horrible Thomson home computers at a department store in Germany in the mid-eighties. The store's buyer must have been out of his or her mind to stock them, or just entranced by the light pen, but apparently they were big in France.
This.
All manufacturing capability of USSR was based on equipment looted from Eastern Germany.
If "all" of USSR capacity were stolen from the East Germany, how did USSR managed to produce all the tanks and planes which caused East Germany to start its sad communist existence?
What they did get from East Germany was a lot of R&D, and ok terms of productivity per capita yes there was some "looting".
A lot of university students in Moscow, Kyiv, St. Petersburg or any bigger Soviet city weren't actually born there. If you were from another city the university will give you dorm room if you pass the entry exams.
In case of Pajitnov luck is more about getting a job at Academy of Sciences, but probably it has something to do with his talents.
Education-wise, YES, the USSR was a meritocracy, way more so than the United States. My father was born in a God-forsaken Ukrainian village, and he studied in then Leningrad.
After you graduate, of course, it's different. It requires significant maneuvering in the political system and ample butt-licking to get anywhere serious.
Wow, amazing vision considering the early tech.
I love the design too. I had no idea that size flat panels were a thing back then.
> A large flat-panel display and TV with *two spherical satellite loudspeakers*, for home entertainment, and video-conference.
Imagine if everyone had Unix instead of PC-DOS…
A lot of companies thought that making a better computer was enough, but the PC was so poorly designed that people had to write software that directly used the hardware to make it run at bearable speeds. This nullified any advantage those who built better PCs had.
Later I ran AutoCAD on a PC-XT with a CGA and an MDA. The graphics were on the CGA, but all the text was on the MDA screen, which had, I think, a slightly nicer font; the lack of a shadow mask made the letterforms break up less, although it was the same shitty green phosphor as the Z-100. Even bypassing the BIOS, line drawing was slow enough that when you erased a line it would just draw the line in the background color, leaving spaces wherever it intersected anything else; periodically you would have to type REDRAW and wait a second or two, which would have been unbearable if you had to do it after every erasure.
Games got by with blits to small parts of the screen, commonly with XOR (a trick AutoCAD used for drawing the crosshairs and rubberband lines, and ended up having to pay a patent troll for). Some, like ASTROTIT (nsfw), managed to draw a fixed background with sprites on top of it, redrawing it when they passed.
This was the era when 3-D CAD systems still used "calligraphic" displays from Evans & Sutherland (called "random stroke CRTs" in less pompous times), like the vector displays used in the arcade games Tempest and Star Wars, but so expensive I never saw one in my life. You could do 3-D on a CGA (3-DEMON was a super fun first-person CGA Pac-Man clone, like an FPS but with no shooting) but at its shitty resolution, 640x200 (or half that if you wanted color), and updating the whole CGA screen was, as I said, noticeably slow. The same 16 kilobytes of RAM used for a vector display would have been enough to put 5000 lines on a 4096x4096 "calligraphic" display, and you could move any of them whenever you wanted --- or change the camera matrix.
Such a missed opportunity… it’d be easy to set up a memory-based terminal to be read/written at QBUS speed… It could have a serial keyboard, as those were relatively abundant, and a composite monochrome output.
It’d make a world of difference. And they could sell it to DEC customers who used PDP-11’s as technical workstations. If there were companies using IBM 1130’s connected to 2250’s, there has to be someone who used PDP-11’s…
Terminals of that epoch were full of missed opportunities. Woz was smart enough to see them and avoid them, but most companies didn't even have a position where someone would have been in a position to do what Woz did. And that's a major (necessary but not sufficient, of course) reason that Apple is bigger than Datapoint, Olivetti, Tandem, Heath, Kaypro, and Hewlett-Packard today.
Google Soviet engineer Intel and look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski
His achievement is overstated in Russia (mainly from the urban legend that his surname led to Pentium). He is a great engineer, but Intel never had a shortage of people of his caliber.
From his Wikepedia page:
> At the beginning of 1990s, he immigrated to United States where he worked at Intel and led the team that developed the architecture for the Pentium III processor
In the same manner that the US space program would have advanced without input from Wernher von Braun [2], the development of Pentium III would have happened minus Pentkovski, though their presence pushed development faster and in directions that the projects would have taken longer to reach without them.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
When Victor Belenko defected with his MiG-25 in 1976 the CIA found that it was still using vacuum tubes when the US hard introduced the F-14 two years earlier which had the world's first microprocessor. Although the existence of it was classified for decades and until recently it was thought the Intel 4004 was the first.
Why they were behind, I'm not sure. They were definitely ahead in some other places but the technological gap continued to increase the later you got into the cold war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Wester...
You can imagine state economy composed of 30-40 large corporations, like Walmart or LIDL running every grocery store, or Microsoft being the only software manufacturer. Remember stories of turf wars in Microsoft, between old and new technologies? Same thing was in the entire USSR.
Soviet government distributed investments, so you had to convince them. This was possible if you had a lot of political weight.
If you managed to get investment funds, your enterprise could not gain extra profit, because prices were regulated, and even if you were more efficient in production and over-produced for high demand, you did not own the extra money.
So, the prize for introducing a new product would be just a bonus and probably a state decoration. And it was often not worth the trouble fighting with the higher ranks in the ministry.
Another issue was central planning ahead of time. For instance, my father in his research institute would make demand plans for microchips and other electronic parts 2 years ahead (so that if there's more demand, the manufacturers have time to plan and budget for that).
This meant, it was really hard to introduce new hardware, and little incentive to try manufacturing new chips.
It was much easier to run the enterprise and do the plans as usually.
France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, Yugoslavia would have had closer allies against the more authoritarian USSR. Czechoslovakia and Hungary could have remained more independent, etc. - no Vietnam war, no Prague Spring clampdown, no Cuban missile crisis.
May 1947 crises - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises
Operation Sunrise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I...
As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?
I guess there’s no point discussing impossible alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting country to live in.
Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social democratic parties with actual communists.
The Scandinavian liberal and egalitarian political outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for example Anders Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as "socialism" which is a later construct.
Wellfare state itself of course was born after second world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set in an earlier egalitarian view of man.
It's more accurate to say that socialism is a later expression of the same ideals - which actually date back to the late 18th century, when they appeared around Europe during a period of revolutions and enlightenment-inspired liberalism.
To a great extent he was correct in his analysis of existing conditions, but, as it turned out, not about their inevitability or about how to improve them.
Marx was quite particular amongst socialism because he did not believe humans were equal in ability.
Indeed, he argued with other socialists and believed that different people had superior and inferior abilities, and even that the more productive people logically deserved a higher wage, and so did the people with greater need.
This is why unlike other socialists of the era, Marx did not advocate for equal wages - he thought that people that were more productive should have a greater income (as well as people who needed it, ie, people with families, handicapped, etc...)
He also did not believe that conditions would not improve - he was a radical proponent of economic growth, and thought that things would improve for a significant amount of time until a plateau was hit, at which point a transition to communism would be the only alternative to decay.
Instead, Marx's argument was not that capitalism created inequality - he thought that inequality was inherent to the human condition - but that capitalism fundamentally engendered inequality on the basis not of personal ability, but on the basis of artificial social relations that rewarded the ownership of capital far more than the inherent inequality of humans ability and human need.
He also would vehemently disagree that voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class - he wrote extensively about how capitalism was an immense improvement over feudalism, and how it would and was improving the situation of the working class materially. The issue he had is that the thought that this material improvement would eventually stop contributing to well-being, and that eventually the social harm caused by the capitalist social relations would lead to a plateau then decay of overall wellbeing.
If you look at his immediate suggestion in how to improve them, you would find them much more inline with modern welfare states than anything else, and indeed that was why Lenin basically instated a welfare state when he took power.
Here are the actual policies that Marx wanted to see implemented:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
These are certainly quite radical. But all of these are suggestions that are either already implemented today in capitalist countries, or that liberal capitalists have advocated for. Except for 1., 3. and 2., he was actually correct about how to improve the conditions of the working class - the abolition of private property of capital was his eventual goal, yes, but he was incredibly precient about the policies that would be used to improve capitalist society.
Still, I don't think you can be a liberal capitalist and favor "confiscation of the property of all emigrants", "equal liability of all to work", or even "abolution of property in land", or even an exclusive monopoly on credit, and given that "the means of communication" here presumably means newspapers (as opposed to mails and telegraph companies) I don't see how a liberal could be in favor of that either, since it abolishes freedom of the press; and centralization of the means of transport in the hands of the state eliminates freedom of domestic travel. In countries that have abolished freedom of the press, property in land, freedom of domestic travel, and/or the freedom to emigrate without having all your property confiscated, it has not in fact improved the conditions of the working class; very much the contrary, it has been used to enslave and impoverish them. Even inheritance abolition and heavy income taxes are not clearly compatible with liberalism, but they aren't as central to liberalism as land tenure and the freedoms of the press, travel, and emigration. (Georgists want to abolish land ownership too, but George didn't claim to be a liberal.)
I didn't mean to say that Marx claimed that voluntary exchange worsened the condition of the working class more than feudalism, just that in its capitalist form it still tended to the immiseration of the working class.
As for "prescience," I'm not sure it was a question of prescience; I think that to a great degree the Russian Revolution and the Warsaw Pact simply moved the Overton Window a long way toward Marxist policies. I think capitalist societies adopted Marx's policies not, in many cases, because they would have anyway, but because (a) they were under pressure to do so when the policies were popular, so people wouldn't emigrate to Russia or replace their own governments with Communist ones, and (b) they were under less pressure not to do so when the policies were unpopular, because there were less and less places where you could escape from those policies.
As far as the things you quoted - confiscating the property of all emigrants really means capital controls. Many liberal countries did in fact do this during periods of reform, such as Iceland in 2008.
But beyond that, capital controls were instituted under the Bretton Woods system. The idea of preventing people from leaving with their capital was indeed quite popular, and in that it allowed for example Iceland to reform their banking system, or a country from instituting public education and raising income taxes, many economists do think that they improve welfare.
Equal liability of all to work was also something that liberals implemented - here it basically just means public works projects open to all.
As far as "the means of communication", Marx does mean mails, telegraphs, and radio communication. He had argued otherwise for public newspapers, but argued against any kind of censorship of the press - making this actually yet another policy liberals would adopt :
In order to combat freedom of the press, the thesis of the permanent immaturity of the human race has to be defended. It is sheer tautology to assert that if absence of freedom is men's essence, freedom is contrary to his essence. Malicious sceptics could be daring enough not to take the speaker at his word.
https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/On_the_Assembly_of_the_Estate...
A historical document such as this one needs to be read in it's historical context. At the time, the income tax in England was of 3% - our modern income taxes of 20-30% are what Marx was referring to by saying heavy income taxes,
As far as abolishing property of land and renting it out, this is essentially just another way of saying "Land value tax". While it's not a liberal policy in essence, it is a policy that liberals advocate nowadays, and that many liberal capitalist countries such as Denmark, Singapore and Taiwan implement.
Completely abolishing inheritance of capital is something that no country has done in the capitalist world, yes, but it is again something that many liberals do advocate for, and nowadays inheritance tax rates of 50% do exist.
As far as saying that capitalism made the working class better off but that it will never completely stop immiseration of the working class, is that not what I said?
I don't know, but I don't think the answer depends on how socially beneficial these policies are; it depends on how much support they had among elites in different countries. It would be wonderful if elites favored all helpful policies (and only helpful policies), but surely nobody thinks that that is the case.
> The idea of preventing people from leaving with their capital was indeed quite popular, ... many economists do think that they improve welfare.
I was saying these aren't liberal policies. They certainly are popular, and it's unsurprising that many people disagree with me about whether they improve the welfare (generally or of the working class in particular.) However, I think "confiscating the property of emigrants" goes very significantly beyond what we normally understand as "capital controls"; an emigrant might return, after all, or rent out his house to tenants who pay the rent to his factor in the city, and these are not possible if you confiscate his property.
> Equal liability of all to work was also something that liberals implemented - here it basically just means public works projects open to all.
I read "liability of all to work" as a universal corvee system, which would be completely incompatible with liberalism, and which was in fact implemented (with some exceptions, for example for children and retirees) in officially Marxist societies. Clearly you know Marx's work much better than I do; can you point to something where he clarifies what he and Engels meant here?
> As far as "the means of communication", Marx does mean mails, telegraphs, and radio communication.
Since the Communist Manifesto was published in 01848, and Bose's first public demonstration of radio communication was in 01895, and Marconi's the following year, it seems unlikely that Marx meant radio communication. As for mails and telegraphs, do you know of anywhere that he or Engels went into more detail on this?
> He had argued otherwise for public newspapers, but argued against any kind of censorship of the press - making this actually yet another policy liberals would adopt:
Here by "freedom of the press" Marx seems to mean "freedom of information" in the FOIA sense; specifically the policy he is advocating is the "unabridged and daily publication" of the debates of the Provincial Assembly. Since such things are normally done by the State if they are done at all, this doesn't seem at all incompatible with the newspapers being all State-owned, much less the death penalty for posting broadsheets calling Stalin a wanker.
> At the time, the income tax in England was of 3% - our modern income taxes of 20-30% are what Marx was referring to by saying heavy income taxes,
I suppose you are right about this. Thank you.
> As far as saying that capitalism made the working class better off but that it will never completely stop immiseration of the working class, is that not what I said?
I think those two clauses are inconsistent with one another; it is impossible for them to be simultaneously true in any possible world. The immiseration of the working class would be the gradual decrease over time of its wages down to the bare minimum required for survival. An increase over time of the wages of the working class is precisely the opposite. Unless you mean that the working class had less income than previously but at least wasn't literally enslaved any more?
But, looking again at what I originally wrote, I see that my original point seems to have been that Marx was comparing the capitalist system of voluntary wage-labor, not with the feudal past, but rather with a hypothetical future Communist system, which also wasn't based on voluntary exchanges. Within a feudal system, where wealth is understood as land, it's easy to imagine how people would readily conclude that any voluntary trade had a winner (who received more value than they gave) and a loser (who gave more value than they received); this mentality is still common in many places.
But the ideologies of liberalism and capitalism were based on the widely shared presumption of positive-sum transactions, and in the face of conspicuous rapidly increasing general wealth, plus the gradual capitalist replacement of relations of involuntary servitude (including chattel slavery, indentured servitude, captured apprentices, impressed soldiers, the corvee labor later reinstated in places like the USSR, and manorial serf labor, as well as the much more recent prohibitions on debt bondage) with voluntary wage-labor, the zero-sum worldview would seem to be implausible, which you would think would give rise to the common-sense presumption that transactions would only occur when both parties believed they benefited by them, and that they would usually be right about it.
So, I was saying, Marx had to do a lot of work to construct an account of how such voluntary exchanges were still harmful to the workers. Nowadays we have much better conceptual tools for this, like the Nash equilibrium, the whole apparatus of game theory, Schelling's theory of negotiation, behavioral-economic experimental results on things like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and so on.
> As far as abolishing property of land and renting it out, this is essentially just another way of saying "Land value tax". While it's not a liberal policy in essence, it is a policy that liberals advocate nowadays, and that many liberal capitalist countries such as Denmark, Singapore and Taiwan implement.
I don't think the people who are advocating a land value tax are liberals, and surely you would agree that Denmark, Singapore, and Taiwan have significant departures from liberalism; Singapore doesn't even have freedom of the press. I also don't think a land-value tax normally amounts to abolishing property in land.
(Not being a liberal policy doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. The liberals could be wrong. But I think it's important to be clear about the reasoning behind different policy proposals.)
> Completely abolishing inheritance of capital is something that no country has done in the capitalist world, yes, but it is again something that many liberals do advocate for, and nowadays inheritance tax rates of 50% do exist.
Again, I don't think the people who are advocating such policies are liberals.
Thank you again for taking the time to explain your understanding of the situation to me!
If you look at the rapid industrialisation and growth of Italy through to the 60s starting from a similarly dire start, they leaped ahead of Yugoslavia. Yes Italy suffered recession through the 80s and 90s, but the Yugoslav economy completely collapsed. 150% inflation in Italy spread over a decade? Try 9,000% inflation in Yugoslavia over just 6 years in the same era. They were even a net importer agricultural produce despite 29% of their work force being in agriculture.
More recently since you brought him up yes Berlusconi was an idiot that hurt Italy, no question, but to really wipe out an economy right down to the roots there's no substitute for Marxism.
About your last statement, you seem to forget some of the attempts at Neoliberal Edens in South America of the '90s. They didn't go that well, haven't they?
I didn't quite say the two were the same thing, although some - n.b. some - ethical assumptions are cut from the same cloth.
The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no communist government has succeeded in any industrialized nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an authoritarian command economy without massive repression. There are too many people who own property and land who won't agree to be dispossessed.
There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it.
But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are liquidated.
In both countries they already held ministerial positions, so this just isn't true.
In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate, like happened in San Marino, and eventually France too.
Stalin was a lot less patient on this and instituted forced mass collectivism, with catastrophic consequences.
No one believes that foreign investment is anything more than a necessary evil - being reliant on foreign investment means that you can't mobilize your own capital.
The idea that markets are necessary for some industries is not at all incompatible with Marxist economics. Lenin's side of Marxist economics would be fine with markets as long as the property was owned cooperatively, until a post-scarcity society.
Stalin's turn towards state planning was out of perceived necessity, not because he was less patient. He, and others in the party, decided that it was acceptable to sacrifice overall economic development in order to develop the heavy industries necessary for war with capitalist countries, that he thought was inevitable if they were too weak. That, and he thought agricultural development was too slow. While it was a failure for agricultural output, it was objectively a massive success in its primary goal, and development of heavy industries at the speed of the NEP would have probably led to the USSR losing WW2.
Sure, communists were elected to the government of the Czech republic up until the latest election. That only tells you that a share of the nation is radicals -- enough to elect some radical candidates to represent them.
But to actually become a communist nation, you need to confiscate the means of production from the rest of the nation. First, you don't get that just by winning some seats. You don't even get that by winning a majority of seats. That's a constitutional rewrite situation, not a political party situation. Something like that requires seizing control of much of the organs of civil society -- you have to get courts to not honor private property, for instance.
> In both countries they already held ministerial positions, so this just isn't true
Holding a ministerial position does not correspond to being able to eliminate private ownership of capital. The two are rather different.
> In practice they'd likely end up becoming more moderate, like happened in San Marino
The Most Serene Republic of San Marino? The 10 square mile tourist trap? Now you've lost me. If your claim is that these communist ministers would realize that they can't actually make their nation communist and just keep the name of communism while advocating for vaguely social democratic reforms, then absolutely. But that does not make the nation a "moderately communist" nation, it makes it a social democracy. Or are you one of those people who thinks social security is "communism" and your definition of a "moderately communist" country is present-day France? Is that what you mean?
And nationalisation of "private property" and land reforms have happened outside of communist governments, e.g. in Nasser's Egypt, the Mexican oil reserves, Mossadegh and the Iranian oil reserves, the Shah's White Revolution, etc.
My whole point is that communism and communist parties didn't need to be seen as some radical "other" system, but could have become more moderate as society gradually accepted strong trade unions, co-operatives, and nationalised resources without the Cold War (much like the transitions to parliamentary democracy). Unfortunately the Cold War polarised everything, and now we're stuck with a society where the existence of billionaire is sacrosant.
I mentioned San Marino because they were governed by the communist party for 10 years, and weren't so extreme - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammarinese_Communist_Party
Because they never tried to make San Marino into a communist economy, seeing as how it is not really an independent nation with any kind of economic sovereignty. The only thing it does is sell its own postage stamps and sell some commemorative gold coins. It's a big castle surrounded by some vineyards. They make money from tourism and duty-free shopping, and of course tax-avoidance.
It's like if you elect a communist to be the leader of your Elks Lodge, and then praise his moderate communist rule.
They were far from alone in doing so, notably Marx and Lenin agreed and advocated for similar trajectories, so it was far from a fringe position.
A popular communist program for developped countries is to remove all political influence as a result of money, encourage cooperatives, nationalizes key industries (as in China), and manage productive surpluses to provide for everyone, removing markets where they are zero sum of negative sum (housing, etc...), and coordinating markets for optimum growth, until the economy is developped enough that the entirety of the local economy can be ran as either part of the nationalizes sector or by cooperatives.
It's a fairly mild program when compared to Stalin. There is not really any reason to abolish private property until the economy is large enough that it can be fully run by the workers from a communist point of view - Stalin did it because he judged that heavy industry was not developing rapidly enough, which was a strategic judgement mostly on grounds of the preservation of the state (and therefore himself). Otherwise Lenin's policy of managed capitalism/socialism for a hundred years or so was in place.
As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.
I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want.
Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz.
Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz.
But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time.
BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.
(Anarchists would also add that protecting property rights by violence is one of the primary functions of any state.)
Right. That is basically how primitive societies (not meant as a value judgement) worked. You could own whatever you could physically defend, or convince your allies to help you defend.
Unfortunately that means that political considerations will decide who owns what, at which point a hierarchical group will form, and it will be well organized, and it will conquer the decentralized society of individuals and small communities. So you are left with the eternal problems of decentralized societies, which is that they are just weaker than centralized societies.
So then you say, we will have a strong hierarchy, but the sole purpose of the hierarchy is to guarantee our values, and now you are back in the authoritarian camp, and very quickly the party that runs the society will be more interested in domination than preserving whatever founding values they had before.
There is just a big gap between what is intellectually appealing, and what is stable and defendable in a hostile world.
As for defense against organized authoritarians in general - the middle ground is a decentralized federation, where (relatively) small communities run their own day-to-day affairs, but band up together for defense. Bookchin's libertarian municipalism is an example of that kind of framework, and Rojava is trying to build something like it. They seem to have fared quite well in combat against their more authoritarian opponents who are on a similar technological level (mostly ISIL and other Islamist groups, and very occasionally, Assad's forces). Not so much against Turkey, but the disparity in resources there is extreme.
Cuba has also liberalized their economy but is trying to keep one party in control. Cuba recognized private property in 2018, but even before that time there was a huge black market that was tolerated because it provided necessary goods and services.
Well, so have we. I'm being 70% sarcastic.
While the USSR was effectively a dictatorship it had no mechanism for inherited leadership. It was actually more like Imperial Rome, with the nominally elected leader acting as Emperor until death, in charge of a semi-loyal but fractious Senate (Politburo).
Putin reinvented this recently, but without the friction.
The omens strongly imply that Trump would have followed the same playbook if he'd won the last election.
In comparison, Imperial Rome had full-fledged private property, and it was entirely possible to be rich outside of politics, or for a politician to retire and still make use of all the capital accumulated by their application of power.
(One could also reasonably argue that this is why USSR was ultimately dismantled from the inside by the very bureacrats who ruled it: they all wanted to secure their slice of the pie.)
It’s like running a performance test while constantly unplugging some instances or knocking out power to the data center. The results are tainted.
The destruction wrought by any kind of communist policy is so devastating as to make its true effect obvious. This is unlike social democratic policies which are a weaker economic poison and thus can cause decades of stagnation/deindustrialization without total collapse.
Without being able to outproduce rivals, all it takes are a few arms races and your economy rots, no matter the system.
The destruction wrought by "any kind of communist policy" still led to outcomes that were above the global average. Yes, they eventually lost, but they were very much in the same order of magnitude as the rest of the world, and were slowly catching up until political factors caused destruction, which was arguably the greatest weakness from a competitive point of view.
Economic policies that are immediately devastating don't cause 60 years of frenetic existential anxiety. If communism was as obviously devastating economically, the USA wouldn't have spent so much time worrying about losing its economic dominance.
As far as attributing deindustrialization to social democratic, all I can say is that this is laughable. Exporting your capital to countries where the wage share will be lower is the cause of deindustrialization, and it's simple economics. You need government policy in the form of direct or indirect capital controls to prevent that from happening.
>>The destruction wrought by "any kind of communist policy" still led to outcomes that were above the global average. Yes, they eventually lost, but they were very much in the same order of magnitude as the rest of the world, and were slowly catching up until political factors caused destruction, which was arguably the greatest weakness from a competitive point of view.
No, the Soviet bloc's economic statistics were over-stating their performance. They were seeing continuous depletion of intangible capital like work ethic, social trust, etc. The corruption in their societies grew to enormous proportions, with party insiders amassing huge amounts of power through their positions, and the privileges it gave them in the undergdound econonomy, including the blat system of favor-trading where high up officials who could bypass government controls on currency and goods had the most favors to sell.
Many of the current crop of billionaire oligarchs in Russia are former Soviet officials or relatives of these officials: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/organized-crime-russi...
The lack of diversification and economic complexity was also obscured by the lack of a market economy to assign goods/services with prices. If such a market existed officially, then the extreme scarcity in basic consumer goods like toilet paper would have been reflected in high prices, and in lower inflation-adjusted income.
>>As far as attributing deindustrialization to social democratic, all I can say is that this is laughable. Exporting your capital to countries where the wage share will be lower is the cause of deindustrialization, and it's simple economics. You need government policy in the form of direct or indirect capital controls to prevent that from happening.
You finding it laughable while regurgitating a layman's understanding of deindustrialization is pretty egregious. Advanced economies can and ofter-do see more rapid growth of their manufacturing sectors than developing economies, and this is because other factors besides labor costs, like logistic costs, which are affected by infrastructure and proximity to the supply chain, access to abundant energy resources (e.g. natural gas, which the US has in abundance), an efficient and reliable legal system, a stable political system and the skillset of the workforce, can make a country the least costly place to site manufacturing, despite it having high labor costs.
The cause of the West's deindustrialization is broadly speaking, the capture of its economies by rent-seeking unions and regulatory agencies.
The first seeds of the economic destruction were planted in the 1930s, when laws like the NLRA granted totalitarian powers to unions, like the power to prevent companies from replacing them with workers outside the union.
The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.
The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.
Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
Every dollar taxed for social welfare programs that end up as pension payments to public sector workers, is one less dollar spent on infrastructure, or private sector investments that expand the country's capital (e.g. factories, R&D, etc).
Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to be regime-changed and those leaders killed.
I CIA what you did there.
Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.
Cybernetics has little to do with computing. It's just a subset of control theory applied to non-technical areas. In particular, politics - which of course was considered by Stalin/the party as an attack on their authority. So they declared cybernetics as bourgeois pseudoscience, after Wiener's book got popular.
Communist party's condemnation of cybernetics, which lasted whopping 4-5 years in 50s, got absolutely nothing to do with either computers, computer science, electronics, or control theory as an engineering discipline. In fact it had zero effect on anything, it was simply a moral panic in the media. Nobody "emigrated to California" (how on Earth?..) as a result of that propaganda stunt, in particular because they couldn't. Actually, USSR developed their native computers in that period and after that. It was long before they decided to copy IBM.
I have no idea why cybernetics in USSR became such a meme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
https://www.root.cz/clanky/prichod-hackeru-pribeh-profesora-... https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonín_Svoboda
Notably, a clone of a western design. Which is a recurrent theme in Soviet computer industry, there were very few indigenous Soviet architectures, and the few that existed were mostly limited to high-end mainframes that saw only handful of installations.
But that wasn't always the case. And the K1801VM1 and family is one of the exceptions. It's a clone of the PDP-11 which was popular in the USSR and they had software that ran on it. It has the same instruction set and a Q-Bus-like interface like a PDP-11 -- but it was an original design throughout electronically and not some mask ripoff of DEC. Originally designed as a microcontroller unlike anything DEC ever used the PDP-11 architecture for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801_series_CPU
I take it half (or none) of those peripherals didn't work or were really bad?
Like, I can say the flat speakers using the tech available at the time would've sounded absolutely horrible. And the flat screen was very likely just a mockup.
I'd be surprised if anything worked (even if the keys could be pressed). It's still a pretty impressive - and prescient design though.
Some well known examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(rocket_family)
And of course the list would not be complete without:
Americans stole plans for super secret soviet stealth fighter. Every time Lockheed-Martin engineers try to replicate the design according to documentation they end up building steam engine. So Americans kidnap one of the Soviet engineers to help them to decipher the design. Once he sees the documents he points at the small remark at the very end: to get the desired device after building a steam engine shape it manually with a file.
This joke is a pretty accurate description of the state of precision manufacturing capabilities of USSR. Manually created single prototype is not a "complex thing that worked".
Mostly jews
> physicists
Mostly jews
was a copy of a German design, not independent invention.
> They made a lot of them
Most was just garbage. You'll have to know a year and a serial number range to have higher probability of picking an actually usable weapon.
Kalashnikov did draw inspiration from other designs, of course, same as any other gun designer. M1 Garand was arguably the design that influenced it most - most notably, the trigger, but also the principle of long-stroke piston action. This is further supported by Kalashnikov mentioning Garand as one of his favorite designs several times. But even then, AK is very much a distinct design.
Here's a detailed analysis: https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/05/05/rifle-paterni...
And I have no idea where you got the "most was just garbage" claim from. It's certainly not true, and I haven't heard it before.
And with 'modern' capitalism in Ukraine Antonov aircraft factory is as good as dead.