Cybernetics was most popular in the USSR in the Khrushchev period, when the CPSU was claiming that Soviet citizens would be experiencing communism in 20 years' time, colonizing planets, etc. But supporters of cybernetics had opposition from both "the establishment" (government ministries didn't want to replace existing planning methods and were concerned about issues like unemployment if so much human labor was no longer necessary) and from supporters of a more market-based approach (who argued that cybernetics was a waste of time and resources which would only result in a further centralization of the economy to the detriment of its efficiency.)
There's a book about the subject titled From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics, which can be found here: b-ok.xyz/book/899907/0135f4
Here's an excerpt from page 273:
With issues like that, it isn't surprising that cybernetics was criticized as impractical. Soviet planners and Party leaders did constantly talk about the need to implement the "scientific and technological revolution," but they envisioned it as assisting current methods to plan the economy rather than anything drastic.
James Clark
And then I bet he'd just be like "huh" and he'd go back home, get up in the morning for a 12-hour shift in the factory and go home to an empty table, content that he might be starving and exploited, but at least he isn't providing material for massively overblown propaganda, right? Get fucking real. This is more or less the exact same argument that was used to justify feudal exploitation - "yeah shit sucks and you'll die at 30, but then you'll go to heaven, so don't try to improve your living conditions or anything." And almost all of it is demonstrably bullshit, and even then, when push comes to shove and people are fucking sick of capitalism - sick enough to fight for something else - people aren't going to care too much about whether or not the Ukrainian famine was man-made or how many sparrows Mao personally killed when they can grasp by experience that nothing short of the dictatorship of the proletariat is in their own self-interest.
Again - what should the workers and peasants of Russia, of China, of Korea have done instead? Even at the time, nobody expected full communism to be right around the corner; Marx and Engels had already said that the higher stage of communism would be reached given further societal development and technological advances, as did Lenin in State and Revolution. This idea that "the material conditions for full communism didn't exist, so they shouldn't have made revolution" is ridiculous, since it was never expected that the material conditions for full communism would exist at the time of revolution in the first place.
Brayden Carter
How can you manage such a complex pre-computers state without a massive bureaucracy?
If Trotsky were to have taken power, he would have created the same kind of apparatus. Stalin would have been exiled to Mexico and wrote polemics about "Trotskyist Bureaucracy". There was no real difference between the two ideologically - just personal grudges.
Brandon Garcia
What number of operations per second can a computer perform today?
Aaron Cruz
No. The Stalin-era planning system was fantastic for its time. If revisionists hadn't taken over, they could have transitioned into full communism by continually revolutionizing their economic system.
Luke Sullivan
we can all thank corn man for delaying full communism
I am very very skeptical of this idea that communism is perfect and easy now that we have the right technology or that all or most historical missteps of the left were just due to not having access to the magic bean.
Kayden Wright
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS A top of the line commercially available Intel can do 700 GFLOPS, In 1997 a Supercomputer hit 1 Teraflops. Supercomputers now are hitting 50+ Petaflops Which is 50 thousand trillion a second.
check out the table at the bottom of the wiki page to see how much cheaper a GFLOP and TFLOP is now too.
Ian Ramirez
Strictly speaking, no. Manual planning techniques, in the USSR and the rest of the Eastern Block, proved perfectly sufficient for expanding primary industry (mining, heavy industry, chemical industry, military industry, etc.). The types of inputs are not terribly varied, and there aren't an enormous amount of potential outputs for that sort of industry.
The problem is that manual planning of the Stalinist kind, while effective in kickstarting industrialization, is insufficient for managing either the consumer economy or a tertiary industry like advanced electronics. The USSR didn't have the resources to provide the same level of consumer goods as the West, but they exacerbated the gap by not embracing and advancing cybernetic planning.
As points out, in some ways it was the cyberneticists who jumped the gun. They saw the potential of computing for planning, but the technology wasn't quite there yet for the sort of macro-scale planning necessary. That being said, computer technology by the 1980's was advanced enough to implement a cybernetics-based reform of the planning system. That this did not happen is largely down to revisionist tendencies and some instrinstic failings of the structure of the Soviet government.
Jaxon Price
Technology only goes the way the political system and economic model go. Just look at modern products and technologies today, we could have achieved total environmental sustainability and complete automation by this point (just look at Cuba for instance, total sustainability even when their agricultural equipment are far behind the capitalist world), but doing that will also mean capitalists in imperialist countries can’t maximize their profits. So instead we get phones with better spying equipment for selling information to advertisers, beauty products, expensive as shit self driving cars, and sweat shops in China.
Capitalists will never push technology toward serving the masses but just for serving themselves. Also don’t forget all of the technological achievements the Soviet Union made, without the space race I doubt that space exploration would even be a thing since it’s not profitable enough.
If we don’t get a global revolution in the next 20 years or so and if human civilization don’t collapse by global warming then expect a future where everything is automated but everyone will still have to wage slave away to keep the rotting corpse of capitalism going, but this time any resistance will be detected the minute they’re thought up and crushed under the steel boot of drones and robots
