Big Data and Super-Computers: foundations of Cyber Communism

 Date: July 24, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott / From his BlogSpot


Transfinancial Economics is similar to what is referred to here as Cybernetic Economics, or Cyber Communism. However, TFE starts within the Capitalist System in a way which is both pragmatic, and progressive. It can though ofcourse  lead to a more "advanced" society that is  more in line with Socialism and Communism but with a very high degree of democracy as opposed to some totalitarian state devoid of human rights. See  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics









I shall be elaborating on the following theses:

• The inability of 20th century socialism to progress to communism led to the crisis of the USSR.
• Communism requires a definite stage of development of technology.
• This stage was only reached at the very end of the 20th century.
• But this problem of technical adequacy can not be understood in just humanist  terms of ‘plenty’ or in terms of ‘the realm of necessity’.

In the process I will address what I see to have been misconceptions about communism on the part of the Soviets, before going on to look at the transitional stages a modern economy would need to achieve communism.

1 What is a mode of production

Is Socialism a mode of production?
The standard account, derived from Stalin, is that a mode of production is a combination of productive forces and production relations:
Mode of production = productive forces + production relations
This was sumarised by Stalin as

the productive forces are only one aspect of production, only one aspect of the mode of production, an aspect that expresses the relation of men to the objects and forces of nature which they make use of for the production of material values. Another aspect of production, another aspect of the mode of production, is the relation of men to each other in the process of production, men’s relations of production. [19]

This has been the orthodoxy, but I think it is wrong. Another meaning of the phrase mode of production is, according to Marx, the mode of material production. This mode of production, according to Marx’s 1857 preface, conditions the social and political life. The relations of production only have to be appropriate to the productive forces.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.[12]

This conception had been expressed by Marx ten years earlier in his pithy phrase :

The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. [11]

In this conception the essential feature of capitalist production is that it is machine industry, production by means of (steam) powered machines. But this should give us pause to think, for is not socialism also characterised by machine production, by the use of artificial forms of energy?
Recall that Lenin expressed this very idea when he gave the following equation:
Socialism = Soviet power + Electrification
Since the difference between steam power and electrical power is secondary, and we know that capitalist economies also use electricity, the important point is that capitalism and socialism share the same mode of production.
We can summarize this in two equations defining the mode of production:
Capitalist mode of production = powered machine industry.
Socialist mode of production = electric machine industry.
So the socialist mode of production is a subset of the machine mode of production – that which uses nationwide electric grids. Hence the first aim of the USSR was to set up GOLERO the electricity plan.
Socialism and capitalism differ not so much in mode of production as in the social relations.

Capitalist production relations =

Commodity production +
Private ownership +
Wage labour+
Market anarchy

Socialist production relations =

Commodity form of consumer goods+
Public ownership +
Wage labour +
Planning

The significant differences are firstly that socialist production relations can restrict the commodity form to the consumer goods market. Within the publicly owned sector there is no change in ownership as means of production go from one state factory to another – hence these goods are not commodities. Secondly the socialist economy substitutes public for private ownership. Third it replaces the anarchic market with directive planning. These are differences in production relations but not in the mode of production.

2 Marx vs USSR on Communism

Marx, in Critique of the Gotha Programme presents a three stage process of transition to communism.

1. Capitalism
2. First stage communism No commodities or money, no private owners, payment in labour tokens according to physical work done. Public services paid for by an income tax on labour incomes.
3. Second stage communism Payment according to need, large families etc get higher incomes.

Note that even in the first stage Marx assumes the abolition of money. There is also – contrary to the impression spread originally by Bukharin[1] – no mention in Marx of the idea that all goods will be distributed for free in a communist system. Distribution according to need is based on an objective assessment of need – life saving healthcare may be freely available to those who need it, but cosmetic surgery -no.
Now let me contrast this scheme with what became the Soviet orthodoxy derived variously from the Bukharin text mentioned earlier and from Stalin[18]. Again we have a 3 stage model

1. Capitalism
2. Socialism: Commodities and money are kept, state+coop ownership, payment in money wages according to work done and status of work ( male jobs paid more than female ), indirect taxes on sales not income tax provide the main state revenue.
3. Communism: Commodity production replaced by barter, free distribution of many goods, full state ownership.

The significant differences are that the Soviets identified the first stage of communism with something much less radical : socialism. They forget that Socialism was a much wider trend than communism, and that in the Communist Manifesto a whole chapter was devoted to explaining how the Communists were different from socialists. The socialism of the USSR was essentially the 1902 socialism of the still revolutionary Karl Kautsky[17,10]. All the key elements were in that work by Kautsky. The pretence that a socialist monetary economy was the same thing as a non monetary communist one, was a misrepresentation.

3 Why did USSR not reach communism?

The material and technical basis of communism will be built up by the end of the second decade (1971-80), ensuring an abundance of material and cultural values for the whole population ; Soviet society will come close to a stage where it can introduce the principle of distribution according to needs, and there will be a gradual transition to one form of ownership-public ownership . Thus, a communist society will in the main be built in the U.S.S.R . The construction of communist society will be fully completed in the subsequent period. (Programme CPSU 1960)

The USSR in 1960 was still very ambitious. They had a very optimistic time table for overtaking US and in many key industries this goal was in fact achieved. The transition to communism was seen solely in terms of quantity of output not in terms of changed social relations. A key technical development was still seen to be electrification: Electrification, which is the pivot of the economic construction of communist society,plays a key role in the development of all economic branches and in the effecting of all modern technological progress. It is therefore important to ensure the priority development of electric power output. It is notable that no particular attention was paid to information technology as an enabling technology for communism.
How well did they actually do? Well table 1 shows that in their key goal of electricity the USSR was already by 1990 doing better than the leading European capitalist countries had achieve a quarter century later.

 Table 1: Comparison of power available to different economies converted into human labour effort equivalents per head of population. Assumption is that a manual worker could do 216 KWh per year of work.

	year	Gwh	human labour
			equiv per head
China	2014	5665000	19.2
US	2014	4331000	63.1
EU	2014	3166000	19.7
USSR	1990	1728000	27.3
USSR	1940	48000	1.2
USSR	1931	8800	0.3
Russia	1913	1300	0.0
GB	2014	338000	24.8
GB	1907	61320	7.3

Was this enough power for communism?
What about food production?
How well did the USSR achieve its goals there?
Pretty well according to Table 2.
Table 2: Comparison of late Soviet with UK, Brazil and US annual per capita output of major protein foods. Note that for all categories the late USSR had better figures. Sources [14], FAOSTAT and USDA databases.

	Year	Meat	Milk	Eggs
		Kg	Kg	Units
USSR	1988	69	375	299
Brazil	1988	49	96	163
UK	1988	55	265	201
USA	1988	58
USA	1990			236
USA	1995		259

Was this enough food for communism?
But Soviet growth slowed down. The Kruschev era had assumed continued exponential growth and had defined communism in terms of achieving exponential growth. The assumption of exponential growth was unrealistic. Actual growth can not be exponential for long, it inevitably starts to slow down. Actual growth tends to follow a logistic curve like this.
c

Khrushchev s Communism downplayed social change

Under communism there will be no classes, and the socio-economic and cultural distinctions, and differences in living conditions, between town and countryside will disappear ; the countryside will rise to the level of the town in the development of the productive forces and the nature of work, the forms of production relations, living conditions and the well-being of the population. (Programme CPSU 1960)
But the concrete programme gave no measures to abolish classes or abolish money and commodities. When the impossibility of continued 10% growth made itself felt, this was seen as the failure of communism, since social change had not been at its core. If society was not moving forward, it failed to morally inspire people and by the late 1980s communists could not resist the pressures from capitalist ideology.

4 Bourgeois theorists said Communism impossible

Von-Mises

Only money provides a rational basis for comparing costs Calculation in terms of labour time impractical because of the millions of equations that would need to be solved.

Hayek

Market is like a telephone system exchanging information to tie up economy Only the market can solve problem of dispersed information
There was some limited truth in this. Marx s communism was not yet possible in 1960 due to limitations in information processing. Marx s Communism stage 1 assumed

• No money
• Calculation in terms of labour time and use values
• Payment in labour credits

But to work out the labour content of every good required the solution of millions of equations. 1960s computers were not powerful enough. This had its effects in limitations of Soviet Socialism.
Money was still needed for economic calculation even in the planned sector. There was a problem of aggregation in planning which required setting monetary objectives. There was an inability to handle disaggregated plans at all Union level. Money was still needed for wage payments. But cash led to black markets, corruption and pressure to restore capitalist relations.

5 Key developments in productive forces since 1960

But since 1960 there have been a set of technical advances that allow us to remove these old objections to communist economics.

Internet

which allows real-time cybernetic planning and can solve the problem of dispersed information – Hayeks key objection

Big-data

allows concentration of the information needed for planning.

Super-computers

can solve the millions of equations in seconds – von Mises objection

Electronic payment cards

allow replacement of cash with non transferable labour credits.

Computational complexity

How easy is it to solve the millions of equations. There are some problems that become computationally intractable even for the largest computers. Is economic planning or the use of labour accounting like that?
No it is not. In a series of papers[2,6,5,4,9,8], Allin Cottrell, Greg Michaelson and I have shown that the computational complexity of computing labour values for an entire economy with N distinct products grows as Nlog(N) This means that it is highly tractable and easily solved by modern computers

Direct Democracy

It is also possible to harness computer networks and mobile phone voting to allow direct democratic control by the mass of the population over the economy. This allows major strategic decisions taken democratically, questions like: How much labour to devote to education? How much to health, pensions, sick? How much to environmental protection? How much to national defence? How much to new investment?
All this can be done by direct voting using computers or mobile phones every year. We have prototyped software to aggregate the wishes of the public this way[7,15,16,3].

Equivalence

Marx s principle was that non-public goods should be distributed on the equivalence principle – you get back in goods the same amount of labour – after tax – that you perform. Hence goods are priced in labour hours. Cybernetic feedback from sales to the plan adjusts output to consumer needs as shown in Figure  1.

Figure 1: Cybernetic planning
Marx argued that calculation in terms of labour time would lead to greater efficiency. The wages system undervalues the real social cost of labour and deters the use of the most modern machinery. Transition to communist calculation will lead to the rational use of labour time, and faster growth of labour productivity.

Figure 2: The growth of labour productivity has been shrinking over the last half century in the UK. Growth rates computed as moving average over last 5 years fron ONS data for output per worker for the whole economy.

Figure 3: The decline in productivity growth is an international phenomonon. Data obtained from

Date: July 24, 2017Author: Paul Cockshott19 Comments

I shall be elaborating on the following theses:

• The inability of 20th century socialism to progress to communism led to the crisis of the USSR.
• Communism requires a definite stage of development of technology.
• This stage was only reached at the very end of the 20th century.
• But this problem of technical adequacy can not be understood in just humanist  terms of ‘plenty’ or in terms of ‘the realm of necessity’.

In the process I will address what I see to have been misconceptions about communism on the part of the Soviets, before going on to look at the transitional stages a modern economy would need to achieve communism.

1 What is a mode of production

Is Socialism a mode of production?
The standard account, derived from Stalin, is that a mode of production is a combination of productive forces and production relations:
Mode of production = productive forces + production relations
This was sumarised by Stalin as

the productive forces are only one aspect of production, only one aspect of the mode of production, an aspect that expresses the relation of men to the objects and forces of nature which they make use of for the production of material values. Another aspect of production, another aspect of the mode of production, is the relation of men to each other in the process of production, men’s relations of production. [19]

This has been the orthodoxy, but I think it is wrong. Another meaning of the phrase mode of production is, according to Marx, the mode of material production. This mode of production, according to Marx’s 1857 preface, conditions the social and political life. The relations of production only have to be appropriate to the productive forces.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.[12]

This conception had been expressed by Marx ten years earlier in his pithy phrase :

The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist. [11]

In this conception the essential feature of capitalist production is that it is machine industry, production by means of (steam) powered machines. But this should give us pause to think, for is not socialism also characterised by machine production, by the use of artificial forms of energy?
Recall that Lenin expressed this very idea when he gave the following equation:
Socialism = Soviet power + Electrification
Since the difference between steam power and electrical power is secondary, and we know that capitalist economies also use electricity, the important point is that capitalism and socialism share the same mode of production.
We can summarize this in two equations defining the mode of production:
Capitalist mode of production = powered machine industry.
Socialist mode of production = electric machine industry.
So the socialist mode of production is a subset of the machine mode of production – that which uses nationwide electric grids. Hence the first aim of the USSR was to set up GOLERO the electricity plan.
Socialism and capitalism differ not so much in mode of production as in the social relations.

Capitalist production relations =

Commodity production +
Private ownership +
Wage labour+
Market anarchy

Socialist production relations =

Commodity form of consumer goods+
Public ownership +
Wage labour +
Planning

The significant differences are firstly that socialist production relations can restrict the commodity form to the consumer goods market. Within the publicly owned sector there is no change in ownership as means of production go from one state factory to another – hence these goods are not commodities. Secondly the socialist economy substitutes public for private ownership. Third it replaces the anarchic market with directive planning. These are differences in production relations but not in the mode of production.

2 Marx vs USSR on Communism

Marx, in Critique of the Gotha Programme presents a three stage process of transition to communism.

1. Capitalism
2. First stage communism No commodities or money, no private owners, payment in labour tokens according to physical work done. Public services paid for by an income tax on labour incomes.
3. Second stage communism Payment according to need, large families etc get higher incomes.

Note that even in the first stage Marx assumes the abolition of money. There is also – contrary to the impression spread originally by Bukharin[1] – no mention in Marx of the idea that all goods will be distributed for free in a communist system. Distribution according to need is based on an objective assessment of need – life saving healthcare may be freely available to those who need it, but cosmetic surgery -no.
Now let me contrast this scheme with what became the Soviet orthodoxy derived variously from the Bukharin text mentioned earlier and from Stalin[18]. Again we have a 3 stage model

1. Capitalism
2. Socialism: Commodities and money are kept, state+coop ownership, payment in money wages according to work done and status of work ( male jobs paid more than female ), indirect taxes on sales not income tax provide the main state revenue.
3. Communism: Commodity production replaced by barter, free distribution of many goods, full state ownership.

The significant differences are that the Soviets identified the first stage of communism with something much less radical : socialism. They forget that Socialism was a much wider trend than communism, and that in the Communist Manifesto a whole chapter was devoted to explaining how the Communists were different from socialists. The socialism of the USSR was essentially the 1902 socialism of the still revolutionary Karl Kautsky[17,10]. All the key elements were in that work by Kautsky. The pretence that a socialist monetary economy was the same thing as a non monetary communist one, was a misrepresentation.

3 Why did USSR not reach communism?

The material and technical basis of communism will be built up by the end of the second decade (1971-80), ensuring an abundance of material and cultural values for the whole population ; Soviet society will come close to a stage where it can introduce the principle of distribution according to needs, and there will be a gradual transition to one form of ownership-public ownership . Thus, a communist society will in the main be built in the U.S.S.R . The construction of communist society will be fully completed in the subsequent period. (Programme CPSU 1960)

The USSR in 1960 was still very ambitious. They had a very optimistic time table for overtaking US and in many key industries this goal was in fact achieved. The transition to communism was seen solely in terms of quantity of output not in terms of changed social relations. A key technical development was still seen to be electrification: Electrification, which is the pivot of the economic construction of communist society,plays a key role in the development of all economic branches and in the effecting of all modern technological progress. It is therefore important to ensure the priority development of electric power output. It is notable that no particular attention was paid to information technology as an enabling technology for communism.
How well did they actually do? Well table 1 shows that in their key goal of electricity the USSR was already by 1990 doing better than the leading European capitalist countries had achieve a quarter century later.

 Table 1: Comparison of power available to different economies converted into human labour effort equivalents per head of population. Assumption is that a manual worker could do 216 KWh per year of work.

	year	Gwh	human labour
			equiv per head
China	2014	5665000	19.2
US	2014	4331000	63.1
EU	2014	3166000	19.7
USSR	1990	1728000	27.3
USSR	1940	48000	1.2
USSR	1931	8800	0.3
Russia	1913	1300	0.0
GB	2014	338000	24.8
GB	1907	61320	7.3

Was this enough power for communism?
What about food production?
How well did the USSR achieve its goals there?
Pretty well according to Table 2.
Table 2: Comparison of late Soviet with UK, Brazil and US annual per capita output of major protein foods. Note that for all categories the late USSR had better figures. Sources [14], FAOSTAT and USDA databases.

	Year	Meat	Milk	Eggs
		Kg	Kg	Units
USSR	1988	69	375	299
Brazil	1988	49	96	163
UK	1988	55	265	201
USA	1988	58
USA	1990			236
USA	1995		259

Was this enough food for communism?
But Soviet growth slowed down. The Kruschev era had assumed continued exponential growth and had defined communism in terms of achieving exponential growth. The assumption of exponential growth was unrealistic. Actual growth can not be exponential for long, it inevitably starts to slow down. Actual growth tends to follow a logistic curve like this.
c

Khrushchev s Communism downplayed social change

Under communism there will be no classes, and the socio-economic and cultural distinctions, and differences in living conditions, between town and countryside will disappear ; the countryside will rise to the level of the town in the development of the productive forces and the nature of work, the forms of production relations, living conditions and the well-being of the population. (Programme CPSU 1960)
But the concrete programme gave no measures to abolish classes or abolish money and commodities. When the impossibility of continued 10% growth made itself felt, this was seen as the failure of communism, since social change had not been at its core. If society was not moving forward, it failed to morally inspire people and by the late 1980s communists could not resist the pressures from capitalist ideology.

4 Bourgeois theorists said Communism impossible

Von-Mises

Only money provides a rational basis for comparing costs Calculation in terms of labour time impractical because of the millions of equations that would need to be solved.

Hayek

Market is like a telephone system exchanging information to tie up economy Only the market can solve problem of dispersed information
There was some limited truth in this. Marx s communism was not yet possible in 1960 due to limitations in information processing. Marx s Communism stage 1 assumed

• No money
• Calculation in terms of labour time and use values
• Payment in labour credits

But to work out the labour content of every good required the solution of millions of equations. 1960s computers were not powerful enough. This had its effects in limitations of Soviet Socialism.
Money was still needed for economic calculation even in the planned sector. There was a problem of aggregation in planning which required setting monetary objectives. There was an inability to handle disaggregated plans at all Union level. Money was still needed for wage payments. But cash led to black markets, corruption and pressure to restore capitalist relations.

5 Key developments in productive forces since 1960

But since 1960 there have been a set of technical advances that allow us to remove these old objections to communist economics.

Internet

which allows real-time cybernetic planning and can solve the problem of dispersed information – Hayeks key objection

Big-data

allows concentration of the information needed for planning.

Super-computers

can solve the millions of equations in seconds – von Mises objection

Electronic payment cards

allow replacement of cash with non transferable labour credits.

Computational complexity

How easy is it to solve the millions of equations. There are some problems that become computationally intractable even for the largest computers. Is economic planning or the use of labour accounting like that?
No it is not. In a series of papers[2,6,5,4,9,8], Allin Cottrell, Greg Michaelson and I have shown that the computational complexity of computing labour values for an entire economy with N distinct products grows as Nlog(N) This means that it is highly tractable and easily solved by modern computers

Direct Democracy

It is also possible to harness computer networks and mobile phone voting to allow direct democratic control by the mass of the population over the economy. This allows major strategic decisions taken democratically, questions like: How much labour to devote to education? How much to health, pensions, sick? How much to environmental protection? How much to national defence? How much to new investment?
All this can be done by direct voting using computers or mobile phones every year. We have prototyped software to aggregate the wishes of the public this way[7,15,16,3].

Equivalence

Marx s principle was that non-public goods should be distributed on the equivalence principle – you get back in goods the same amount of labour – after tax – that you perform. Hence goods are priced in labour hours. Cybernetic feedback from sales to the plan adjusts output to consumer needs as shown in Figure  1.

Figure 1: Cybernetic planning
Marx argued that calculation in terms of labour time would lead to greater efficiency. The wages system undervalues the real social cost of labour and deters the use of the most modern machinery. Transition to communist calculation will lead to the rational use of labour time, and faster growth of labour productivity.

Figure 2: The growth of labour productivity has been shrinking over the last half century in the UK. Growth rates computed as moving average over last 5 years fron ONS data for output per worker for the whole economy.

Figure 3: The decline in productivity growth is an international phenomonon. Data obtained from Extended Penn World Tables. Note that this data only goes up to the start of the 2008 recession.
Throughout the capitalist world this law is in effect, slowing down the growth of labour productivity. The capitalist class seek cheap labour, which systematically holds back technical progress. They show chronic unwillingness to invest. Orthodox economists call this secular stagnation .
You can see the effect clearly in the decline in the improvement in labour productivity shown in Figs 2,3.

6 Transition steps to first stage of communism

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.[13]

Nevertheless, in most socialist countries, the following communist measures will be pretty generally applicable.
Immediate measures

1. Monetary unit converted to the labour hour set at the average value created per hour.
2. Move from state funding from profits of state enterprises to state entirely funded by progressive income tax.
3. Legislation to give employees right -before tax to full value created in enterprise
4. Conversion of remaining private firms to cooperatives
5. Develop centralised internet system to track all purchases and sales.
6. Withdraw all paper money and coins, replace with electronic cards

During the preparation commodity exchange between enterprises still exists, and monetary transactions still possible, but exploitation is eliminated. In the next stages the following measures might be appropriate:

• Private circulation of money eliminated, and money only used by consumers to purchase final goods from public stores.
• Commodity exchange between enterprises replaced by computerised directive planning
• Equalisation of pay rates between men and women and between different professions and trades

Technical advance on a world scale is being held back by the wages system. There is a growing contradiction between the social relations of capitalism and the potential of the new productive forces. The new information technology permits a direct transition to communist mode of calculation. The new communist relations of production will abolish class differences and allow technical and humanitarian progress to resume.

References

[1] Nikola Bukharin. ABC of Communism.
[2] Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. Labour value and socialist economic calculation. Economy and Society, 18(1):71-99, 1989.
[3] Paul Cockshott and Karen Renaud. Extending handivote to handle digital economic decisions. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science Conference, page 5. British Computer Society, 2010.
[4] W Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. Economic planning, computers and labor values. conference Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century, Havana, Cuba, May, pages 5-8, 1999.
[5] W Paul Cockshott and Allin F Cottrell. Information and economics: a critique of Hayek. Research in Political Economy, 16:177-202, 1997.
[6] W Paul Cockshott and Allin F Cottrell. Value, markets and socialism. Science & Society, pages 330-357, 1997.
[7] WP Cockshott and K. Renaud. HandiVote: simple, anonymous, and auditable electronic voting. Journal of information Technology and Politics, 6(1):60-80, 2009.
[8] Allin Cottrell, Paul Cockshott, and Greg Michaelson. Is economic planning hypercomputational? The argument from Cantor diagonalisation. School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (MACS), Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, available at: www. macs. hw. ac. uk/ greg/publications/ccm. IJUC07. pdf (accessed December 10, 2008), 2007.
[9] Allin Cottrell, WP Cockshott, and Greg Michaelson. Cantor diagononlalisation and planning. Journal of Unconventional Computing, 5(3-4):223-236, 2009.
[10] Karl Kautsky. The social revolution. CH Kerr, 1902.
[11] Karl Marx. Poverty of philosophy. 1847.
[12] Karl Marx. Preface and Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Foreign Languages Press, 1976.
[13] Karl Marx and Friederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. S. Moore. Moscow: Progress.(First published 1848.), 1977.
[14] Bertram Patrick Pockney. Soviet statistics since 1950. Aldershot (UK) Dartmouth, 1991.
[15] Karen Renaud and WP Cockshott. Electronic plebiscites. 2007.
[16] KV Renaud and WP Cockshott. Handivote: Checks, balances and threat analysis. Submitted for Review, 2009.
[17] M. Salvadori. Karl Kautsky and the socialist revolution, 1880-1938. Verso Books, 1990.
[18] Joseph Stalin. Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. Moscow, 1952.
[19] Josif Vissarionovic Stalin. Dialectical and historical materialism. Lawrence & Wishart, 1943.

 

 

Red Plenty

Book Review: Paul Cockshott

Red Plenty;A Road Not Taken – Cybernetic Socialism in the USSR

Blog Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

21st Century Socialism 

This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as a novel whose hero is an idea and a fairytale. The hero idea is that of optimal planning. The idea of running a planned economy in just such a way as to ensure that resources are optimally used in order to deliver the ’red plenty’ of the title. Combining real and imagined characters, politicians like Khrushchev, mathematicians and economists like Kantorovich and Nemchinov with fictionalised minor characters, it gives a gripping and apparently realistic picture of life in the USSR during the 50s and 60s. It is not a single narrative as one expects from historical fiction. Instead it gives us a series of snapshots from the lives of individuals, separated by years. The common link is the project of the Cybernetic economic reformers, and the ambitions of Khrushchev to attain communist plenty. The author shows real skill as a science populariser, explaining such diverse topics as how the Pentode valve logic of the early BESM computers worked, to the molecular mechanics of the carcinogenesis mechanism that eventually killed its designer. He vividly portrays the enthusiasm and self confidence of the USSR in the late 50s when Khrushchev’s boasts that they would overtake the USA by 1980 and achieve communism seemed plausible. He gives a good didactic account both of the basic mechanisms of the Soviet Economy, and, through the lives of incidental characters paints a picture of its real operation that is more detailed and convincing than any academic history. He traces the idea of cybernetic economic management from the hope of the 50s and early 60s to its sidelining under Kosygin, and the eventual relegation of Kantorovich to the less ambitious task of optimisating steel tube output for the oil and natural gas industry. Ironically, says Spufford, as growth rates slipped in the 70s, it was only the exploitation of petroleum for export that allowed Soviet living standards to rise. This is a book that should be read by anyone who is seriously interested in the possibility of a different sort of economy from the one we now have. It shows both the strengths, and the hidden weaknesses of the most serious attempt so far to construct an alternative to capitalism, an attempt that was born when the idea of a communist future was taken very seriously by a whole society. To read it is to be convinced that whatever the truth of standard leftist criticism of the USSR as being undemocratic and bureacratic, there was much more than that at issue in this tragedy. It raises real political and philosophical issues that would have to be faced by any future socialist project, and draws attention to a forgotten history that today’s socialists ignore at their peril. The bulk of what we read and hear about the USSR focuses on the 20s and 30s. The remaining 50 years of its history fade before the glamour, grandeur and horror of the early years. But the early 1960s, when Russia was already an industrial country, with many areas of internationally competitive technology in aviation, space, computing holds more relevant lessons for the European left than its early years. It is clear what lesson orthodox economists will draw:     "It’s a timely exploration, now so many people have gone off the idea of markets, of why the alternative is worse." But such conclusions betray an unjustified and callous smugness. It is a smugness not justified by the elegaic last paragraph of the book. The restoration of the market mechanism in Russia was a vast controlled experiment. Nation, national character and culture, natural resources and productive potential remained the same, only the economic mechanism changed. If Western economists were right, then we should have expected economic growth and living standards to have leapt forward after the Yeltsin shock therapy. Instead the country became an economic basket-case. Industrial production collapsed, technically advanced industries atrophied, and living standards fell so much that the death rate shot up by over a third leading to some 7.7 million extra deaths. If you were old, if you were farmer, if you were a manual worker, the market was a great deal worse than even the relatively stagnant Soviet economy of Brezhnev. The recovery under Putin, such as it was, came almost entirely as a side effect of rising world oil prices, the very process that had operated under Brezhnev. But this does not excuse us from seriously considering the problems so vividly raised in the book. Spufford recounts how the attempt to follow the reformers' recomendations and raise the price of food to provide more income for farmers provoked strikes by industrial workers, which were suppressed with great brutality. The same scenario played itself out in Poland in the 70s and 80s, when any attempt to raise the ridiculously low subsidised meat prices led to strikes. Spufford brings out the disconnection between the recomendations of the reform economists and the real lives of the people that the reforms would impact on. Food subsidies were the bad conscience of inequality. They were necessary because without them, those on the lower wage rates could scarcely have survived. Marx had advocated that in the first stage of communism everybody would be paid in labour vouchers not money - 1 hour's work getting 1 hour's vouchers. Goods would be directly priced in terms of the labour required to make them and social expenditure would be met out of a tax or time-levy on incomes. Soviet prices deviated considerably from labour values for two reasons:     * The well known subsidies on essential foods and housing.
    * The turnover tax was, I think, calculated on the basis of total turnover not just wages, as such it was similar to the fixed percent markup Marx posited for prices of production. Given that due to subsidies, wages underestimated the real value of labour power, this sort of markup would mean that the deviation of prices from labor value would actually have been bigger than under capitalism. To have furthered Khrushchev’s avowed aim of communism, Kantrovich would have had to propose egalitarian pay rates and a shift in state finance from turnover taxes to income taxes, before prices could be rationalised. Spufford gives greatest emphasis to the policies of those around Kantorovich and Nemchinov, who were advocating price reforms as part of a programme to allow optimal operation of the economy. Kantorovich argued that these prices - objectively determined valuations - arose out of the objective technical structure of the economy. If actual prices corresponded to objectively determined values, then the signals that these prices provided would guide individual factories to produce in accordance to what the plan needed. There is of course a strong similarity between this argument and that put forward by Western economists about the role of prices in guiding resource allocation in a market economy. It is probably no accident then that Kantorovich was the only Soviet economist to get a Nobel Prize for economics. But there was a fatal paradox in this whole notion, one that Spufford brought out in a meeting between Kosygin and a leading reformer: how were these optimal prices to be calculated? The maths was well understood, but the technical problems of handling that much data with 1960s computers were vast. And if Gosplan could concentrate the information and could have done the computations, then the indicative prices would have been unneccessary - the whole process of calculation could have been done in-natura with the Objective Valuations only having a fleeting existence as coefficients within the matrices of the planning computers. So the programme of Kantorovich ended up requiring the same level of computing resources as that of his rival cyberneticist Victor Gluschov who apparently advocated the complete abolition of money - something superficially closer to Krushchev's vision of communism. In this context it is worth reading InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network by Slava Gerovitch. It would have been interesting had Gluschov appeared as a character in the book, rather than just as someone who is refered to indirectly. In the afterword it becomes clear why Gluschov remains such a shadowy figure to Spufford. Spufford reveals that he relied entirely on English language sources. What he knew of Gluschov came from Gerovitch’s brief account. All in all, let me say again, this is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in economic alternatives.


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by Editors @ 7:18 am on July 3, 2010. Filed under Marxism, Russia, Socialism

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1. William Bowles says:

   July 4, 2010 at 6:39 am

   Fascinating. Back in the 1980s I got hold of a book called ‘Cybernetic Medley’ by V. Pekelis published by MIR publishers in Moscow. Sub-titled ‘Impressions, Godsends, Incidences, Notes, Reflections, Things that were heard of and seen — a Variety of Reasons to Discusses Cybernetics’, it reflected the Soviet intelligentsia’s fascination with the potential for cybernetics to transform the Sov

Towards a New Socialism

Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics


This book (first published in 1993 by Spokesman, Nottingham, England) is our attempt to answer the idea that socialism is dead and buried after the demise of the Soviet Union.
The core of the book consists of a series of chapters spelling out what we believe would be efficient and democratic methods for planning a complex economy. We also examine issues of inequality and its elimination, systems of payment for labour, a democratic political constitution for a socialist commonwealth, the commune as a set of arrangements for living, and property relations under socialism.
The book "Towards a New Socialism" (TNS) is copyright (c) 1993 W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. The copyright holders grant you permission to copy and redistribute the English-language text of TNS as you wish -- in printed, electronic or any other form -- on the following conditions: (a) you acknowledge the authorship of Cockshott and Cottrell; and (b) if you make modifications, you distinguish clearly between the text as written by the original authors and your own modifications. Please note that this permission may not apply to translations of TNS into other languages. That is, the publishers of translations of TNS may assert exclusive rights to their translation.
From this page you may access:

• Information on the printed book from Spokesman or amazon.com.
• An HTML version of the Introduction.
• An HTML version of the Table of Contents.
• The complete book in Adobe's PDF format, or as a postscript file.
• For your downloading convenience, a zipped version of the PDF file, or a gzipped version of the postscript file.
• The book in e-book format: TNS.epub. (See idpf.org for details.)
• A Czech socialist website that has a translation of the book.
  
• Some companion pieces to the book:
  • A new preface (in English) to the forthcoming Czech edition of the book. Quite a substantial piece, which answers several questions about the book. In US letter format, preface-us.pdf, or A4 format, preface-a4.pdf.
  • 'Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again' (Review of Political Economy, July 1993) in PDF format: calculation_debate.pdf. Our analysis and response to the historic 'socialist calculation debate' involving Mises, Hayek, Lange and others.
  • 'Socialist Planning After the Collapse of the Soviet Union' (Revue européene des sciences sociales, 1993) in PDF format: soviet_planning.pdf. Analysis of what went wrong with central planning in the USSR, and implications for the socialist calculation debate.
  • 'Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek' (Research in Political Economy, 1997) in PDF format: hayek_critique.pdf. Counter-argument to Hayek's influential critique of socialist planning in his article `The Use of Knowledge in Society'.
  • 'Economic Planning, Computers and Labor Values' (working paper, 1999) in PDF format: aer.pdf. Includes a detailed consideration of the argument of Samuelson and Weiszäcker on optimal pricing under socialism.
  • 'Un modèle de planification efficace', a summary of our ideas on socialist planning, prepared for the Marx Congrès II in Paris, September-October 1998, in PDF format: paris_paper.pdf.
  • "Slides" for a talk given by Allin Cottrell at the Primer Encuentro de Pueblos y Estados por la Liberación de la Patria Grande, Sucre, Bolivia, October 2006: sucre.pdf.

Cybersocialism

Though it has passed,  the talk below is an extremely rare one on Cybersocialism by someone called Paul Cockshott. I, also, put up some relevant posts on the related Facebook site, and ofcourse, gave reference to my own evolving project of Transfinancial Economics. However, the latter believes that we need to "revolutionize" capitalism before we can (if desired) possibly enter into a more "socialist" type of cybernetic system with an open democratic framework. See http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

Dr Paul Cockshott on Cybersocialism Nov 18th Dublin

Kevin Flanagan/P2P Foundation.net/Blog

14th November 2014

Left Forum Public Meeting: “Cybersocialism”

Left Forum public meeting on the subject of “Cybersocialism”, by Dr Paul Cockshott of University of Glasgow.
The talk will explore questions around how a centrally planned socialist economy could be realised using mathematical techniques supported by advanced information technology.
For anyone who read the novel “Red Plenty” this should be right up your street.

Time: 7:30pm, Tuesday 18 November

Place: Unite Hall, Middle Abbey St., Dublin 1

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You might also be interested in – Towards a New Cybernetic Socialism

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1. On the recent return of ‘acceleration’ ideas in relation to transition/rapture ‘strategies’ from above | Social Network Unionism Says:
   November 15th, 2014 at 7:17 pm […] up. Here is an interesting and relevant debate to take place in London: Cybernetic Socialism – http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/dr-paul-cockshott-on-cybersocialism-nov-18th-dublin/2014/11/14. In his recent post on the networked labour list, in reply to George Por, Michel Bauwens gives […]
2. Bob Haugen Says:
   November 16th, 2014 at 2:17 pm If anybody attends, I’d be interested to learn if Cockshott will address Cosma Shalizi’s criticisms again:
   http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/919.html
   Not that I totally agree with Shalizi. I think the problem is solvable, just not all top-down or “optimal”. Not totally bottom-up, either, but the coordination needs to be bottom-up in reactive P2P feedback loops. (But that’s a longer discussion.)
   I also wonder if Cockshott understands what is being done now in advanced supply chains. I’m pretty Shalizi does not. (I don’t anymore either, I’m out of touch, but I knew what was being done and researched 20 years ago and it was enough to solve the problem. I’m pretty sure it is better now

Paul Cockshott

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia/Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

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Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952 in Edinburgh) is a Scottish computer scientist and a reader at the University of Glasgow.
In the 1970s, Cockshott was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, but he and several other members became unhappy with B&ICO's position on Workers' control.^[1] Cockshott and several other B&ICO members resigned and formed a new party, the Communist Organisation in the British Isles.^[1] During the 1980s when studying for his PhD in Edinburgh he was recruited to the CPGB along with fellow computer science student Muffy Calder.
He has made contributions in the fields of image compression, 3D television, parallel compilers and medical imaging, but became known to a wider audience for his proposals in the multi-disciplinary area of economic computability, most notably as co-author of the book Towards a new socialism, advocating for more efficient and democratic planning of a complex economy.^[2]

References[edit]

1. ^ Jump up to: ^{a b} What is the Communist Organisation in the British Isles? in Proletarian, No. 1, c. 1974.
2. Jump up ^ Cottrell, Allin. "Towards a new socialism". Retrieved 17 March 2012. 

External links[edit]

• Video interview with Paul Cockshott about his book "Towards a new socialism" on YouTube
• Towards a new socialism, complete book download
• Review Essay to Towards a New Socialism? by Allin F. Cottrell and W. Paul Cockshott by Len Brewster
• A Reply to Brewster „A response to the critique of Towards a New Socialism by the right wing economist Brewster" by Paul Cockshott

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Towards a New Cybernetic Socialism

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Book: Towards a New Socialism: Introduction. W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, 1993
URL = http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/intro.html
See also: P2P Theory and Marxism

Contents  [hide]  1 Introduction 2 Background and Context 2.1 Description 2.2 What is the theoretical basis for a new socialism? 3 Synopsis of the book 4 Discussion

Introduction

This book by Scottish authors Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell combine a focus on cybernetic coordination, participatory democracy, and the labour theory of value, see http://reality.gn.apc.org/germanpreface.pdf
The complete book, http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf
Main introduction, http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/intro.html
Other introductions:

1. http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/bettelheim_etc.pdf
2. http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/soviet_planning.pdf, 'Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again' (Review of Political Economy, July 1993) in PDF format: calculation_debate.pdf. Our analysis and response to the historic 'socialist calculation debate' involving Mises, Hayek, Lange and others.
3. http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/hayek_critique.pdf, 'Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek' (Research in Political Economy, 1997) in PDF format: hayek_critique.pdf. Counter-argument to Hayek's influential critique of socialist planning in his article `The Use of Knowledge in Society'.

Background and Context

Description

Heinz Dieterich [1]:
"Apart from many individuals, two schools of thought have independently advanced the reasoning about the “socialism of the XXI century”: the so-called “Scottish School”, with the computational expert, Paul Cockshott and the economist Allin Cottrell; and that denominated the “School of Bremen”, in turn, of the universal genius, Arno Peters, the mathematician Carsten Stahmer, the Cuban physicist, Raimundo Franco, and myself.
The emphasis of analysis of both schools varies. To put it simply. The principal work of Cockshott/Allin, Towards a New Socialism, is a brilliant and profound discussion centered primarily on the technological and economic aspects of a new and viable non-capitalist project. On the other hand, the works of the Bremen School, for example, The end of Global Capitalism, The New Historic Project; Computer Socialism, (Arno Peters), and XXI Century Socialism and Participative Democracy, (Heinz Dieterich), prioritize a more evolutionary and institutional focus which discusses, in addition the problem of the phase of transition towards a new socialism in Latin America.
The amazing result, nevertheless, is that both theories, developed independently and from different angles, arrive at the same general inferences (conclusions) on the principal institutions which will substitute the bourgeois institutions in the new postbourgeois and postcapitalist civilization. These coincidences on the new socialist institutionalism of the XXI century, undoubtedly constitute a relevant methodological indicator of the validity of the results obtained, in an independent manner, by both groups." (http://reality.gn.apc.org/econ/chavez2.html)

What is the theoretical basis for a new socialism?

"The principal bases for a post-Soviet socialism must be radical democracy and efficient planning. The democratic element, it is now clear, is not a luxury, or something that can be postponed until conditions are especially favourable. Without democracy, as we have argued above, the leaders of a socialist society will be driven to coercion in order to ensure the production of a surplus product, and if coercion slackens the system will tend to stagnate. At the same time, the development of an efficient planning system will most likely be impossible in the absence of an open competition of ideas. The failure of Soviet Communists to come up with viable socialist reform proposals over recent years is testimony to the malign effects of a system in which conformity and obedience were at a premium. Capitalist societies can achieve economic progress under conditions of political dictatorship, for even under such dictatorship the realm of private economic activity is relatively unregulated and the normal processes of competition remain operative, while the suppression of working-class organisation may permit a higher rate of exploitation. Under socialism, there can be no such separation of oppressive state from `free' economy; and if criteria of ideological `correctness' dominate in the promotion of managers and even in economic-theoretical debate, the long-run prospects for growth and efficiency are dim indeed.
On the counts of both democratic institutions and efficient planning mechanisms, we have to say that the problems which emerged in the Soviet case reflect certain weaknesses in classical Marxism. Marx, Engels and Lenin were much stronger in their critiques of capitalism than in their positive theorizing concerning socialist society. As regards democratic institutions, the Bolsheviks initially latched onto the soviets of workers' and soldiers' deputies as the favoured form. While this may have been tactically astute, we argue that the soviet form is inherently inadequate and indeed dangerous and that we must look elsewhere for the principles of a socialist democratic constitution. As regards planning mechanisms, Marx and Engels had some interesting suggestions, but these were never developed beyond the level of rather vague generalities. The Soviet planners improvised their own system, which worked for certain purposes in its time, but the development of their thinking about socialist economic mechanisms was limited by what they saw as the need to conform to the canons of Marxism -- to avoid and indeed denounce any theoretical methods, such as marginal analysis, that appeared tainted by `bourgeois' connotations. Western marxists have argued that this tendency was based on a misinterpretation of Marx. Quite likely so, but the fact that Marx did not attempt to spell out the principles of operation of a planned economy at any length made such a misreading possible. At any rate, socialism will never again have any credibility as an economic system unless we can spell out such principles in reasonable detail." (http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/intro.html)

Synopsis of the book

"In the remainder of this introduction we offer a synopsis of the main arguments to come, in the light of the problems and issues identified above. Chapters 1 and 2 tackle issues connected with inequality and inequity. The first gives an overview of the bases of inequality in capitalist society -- bases which, as we have suggested above, social democratic amelioration is unable to eradicate. The second shows how a consistent socialist system of payment could substantially eliminate inequality. The payment system outlined in chapter 2 depends on the idea that the total labour content of each product or service can be calculated. Chapter 3 justifies this claim, while developing the argument that economic calculation in terms of labour time is rational and technically progressive.
Chapters 4 to 9 then develop various aspects of an efficient system of economic planning, a system capable of ensuring that economic development is governed by the democratically constructed needs of the people. Chapter 4 establishes some basic concepts and priorities, and distinguishes a number of different `levels' of planning, namely strategic planning, detailed planning, and macroeconomic planning, which are then examined in detail in chapters 5, 6 and 7 respectively. Chapter 8 outlines a specific mechanism for ensuring that the detailed pattern of production remains in line with consumers' preferences, while avoiding excessive queues and shortages. Chapter 9 examines the information requirements for the type of planning system we envisage, and makes a link between the issue of accurate information and the incentives and sanctions faced by individuals. In the course of these chapters we draw a number of contrasts between the sort of system we are proposing, and the system commonly regarded as having failed in the Soviet Union.
While chapters 4 to 9 deal with the planning of a single economy in isolation, chapters 10 and 11 extend the argument to consider issues arising from trade with other economies, an important practical concern in a world of increasing interdependence.
Chapters 12 to 14 move beyond the economic to further social and political questions. Chapter 12 makes a connection between socialist objectives and the concerns brought to light by feminists. It investigates the possibilities for domestic communes as an alternative to the nuclear family `household', and shows how such communes could function within the broad structure of a planned economy. Chapter 13 considers the political sphere, and proposes a radical form of democratic constitution capable of giving ordinary people real control over their lives. As mentioned earlier, we are critical of the soviet model of democracy. We are equally critical of parliamentary systems, and our own proposals stem from a re-examination of the mechanisms of classical (Athenian) democracy in the modern context. Chapter 14 examines the question of property relations, and elaborates the specific forms of property required as a basis for the preceding economic and social forms.
In a final chapter we tackle some contrary arguments put forward by sceptical socialists in recent years. In this context we reply to arguments in favour of `market socialism' as an alternative to the sort of planning we advocate.
The overall theme which animates the book, through all its various detailed arguments, will, we hope, be clear. That is, we take as our ultimate aim the greatest possible fulfillment of the potential of each human being, as individual and as a member of society. This fulfillment requires dignity, security and substantive equality (though not, of course, uniformity), as well as productive efficiency. It also requires that humans find sustainable ways of living in balance with the overall environment of the planet. We argue that these aims can best be met through a cooperative, planned form of social economy under a radically democratic political constitution -- a post-Soviet socialism." (http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/intro.html)

Discussion

by Gavin Mendel-Gleason [2] :
"Cockshott & Cottrell’s new socialism attempts to use labour time as a basis for optimisation of the economy. The idea is to use sophisticated computers, which are now widely available, to determine the most rational allocation of productive capacity, given social spending power based itself on labour time. That is, the consumer gets to choose from amongst the various products with a purchasing power based on the amount of labour expended towards fulfilment of the plan.
The work is particularly notable in dealing with many issues known to be difficult in planned economies such as dealing with innovation. the proposal is both very thorough and concrete, giving little doubt to those who might want to begin its implementation how one should be guided. It is therefore one of the strongest planning proposals which we have, and seems a useful template. Further useful developments might look at a partial implementation which would be suitable for a cooperative, with a notion of a planned inside/capitalist outside as a transitional model.
Its great fault, however, is that it does not deal systematically with many of the fundamental quality control concerns that led to cascading failure in the USSR, and the rise of a parallel illegal but wholly necessary therefore tolerated bartering system. That is, because parts are sourced by the plan, and not by the individual producers, quality control has to be additionally imposed. Whereas in a market system, substandard parts would simply never sell, in a planned system the fulfilment of the plan is not deemed by the customer of the parts but either by the supplier or some third party.
Further there is no mention of the rushing effects caused by the periodicity of planning (shturmovshchina) or the need for flexibility in changing subsections of the plan or any other issues which are always difficult in global optimisation problems. The first problem of periodicity led to big fluctuations in output near the beginning and end of the planning periods. It is likely that computational power will reduce the size and therefore the damage done by these, but the problem needs to be addressed. Further, there is little discussion on overcoming the tautness of Soviet plans, which was a continual problem that we need to deal with seriously. We need to build in fault tolerance and looseness such that failures do not cascade.” (http://spiritofcontradiction.eu/rowan-duffy/2012/06/28/which-way-the-economic-revolution)

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