Notices by Voltairine ??? ⚛️ ? (sorceressofmathematics@mastodon.social)

@HistoPol @mina Y'all might also be interested in this similar thread I wrote a few weeks ago. It talks about a similar experiment with cybernetic communism in Socialist Yugoslavia.

https://mastodon.social/@sorceressofmathematics/111564389742685915

Anyway, these reforms were to be wide-sweeping: the entire state, society, and economy were to be re-organized based on cybernetic principles; and everything from the country's economy and managers to its engineers and technicians were to be mathematically modeled. Again, this emphasizes the theme common to all these projects: cybercommunism is not just communism with computers, but involves analyzing and organizing communist society using cybernetic analysis of control and information flow.

Even General Secretary Walter Ulbricht championed these cybernetic reforms, which formed the basis of his reform package called the New Economic System (NES), which was more ambitious than any institutional reform proposed in the Eastern Bloc aside from Yugoslavia's socialist self-management (but, unlike Yugoslavia, this proposal would avoid using market reforms). And so, in 1961, this experiment in cybernetic communism was born.

A complex cybernetic model of the GDR economy was constructed, identifying and cataloging the economic processes, the data-gathering statistics for feedback, and the levers of influence for making corrections (the three components of a cybernetic system). The model also included the goal orientation of the system: instead of maximizing surplus value and rent extraction,

However, the poor state of the computer industry in the GDR (largely due to a lack of resources being devoted) made this difficult. The second way was to reorganize society using cybernetic insights into information and control flows. This involved distributing decision-making throughout the economy where actors could make use of local, specialized knowledge: the center would set targets, but

the cybernetic socialist economy would be designed to optimize for building the transition into communism, the promotion of optimal development, and fulfilling material and cultural needs.

As the NES aimed to improve efficiency without introducing market mechanisms, cybernetic planners sought to overcome the calculation and knowledge problems in two ways. The first way was to build computationally complex cybernetic models of the economy.

enterprises and workers would be relatively autonomous and most decisions would be made on the ground through "production committees."

Hierarchical organization charts that represented social power relations were also replaced with cybernetic diagrams based on function. This way of seeing the economy takes clear inspiration from the organizational cybernetics pioneered by Stafford Beer which would form the basis for Cybersyn.

In the late 1960s, however, there was a backlash. Klaus and other cybernetic philosophers started to be accused of trying to replace Marxism-Leninism with cybernetics. Party elites worried that a cybernetic communism would erode the authority of the party, a theme that was also seen in the USSR's rejection of cybernetic communism. (To be fair, some technocrats joked that their computer for modeling the economy was "the guillotine for functionaries" so that fear was probably justified.)

Ideologically, the GDR is actually a bit of an interesting case in general. They understood, better than any other Eastern Bloc country, the importance of technological development (especially automation and manufacturing) for the transition to communism. There were clear material conditions driving this ideology: prior to the Berlin Wall, it was relatively easy for intellectuals to defect to the west from the GDR.

Thus, a narrative of technological development was used to entice intellectuals to stay, as well as to legitimize the regime in general.

(Also, can we talk about how cool this hammer-and-compass symbol is?)

Thus, after Georg Klaus' work legitimizing cybernetics from an ML perspective, the GDR sought to use this new science to reform the economy into a technologically advanced socialist powerhouse, without introducing market mechanisms. Indeed, much like the USSR, the GDR would grow to see their computers as a precondition for the transition to communism, and would experiment with its own semiconductor industry - but you can follow that story here: https://youtu.be/cxrkC-pMH_s

🧵

All right, y'all asked for it, so here you go. (Actually, nobody asked for it, but you're getting it anyway.) I've talked about experiments with cybernetic communism in the USSR (OGAS), Chile (Cybersyn), and Yugoslavia ("mechanized administration"). So now let's talk about a similar experiment in East Germany (officially known as the GDR).

If you want to follow along, this is my main English-language source: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046 and I will link to other sources as I use them.

Given all the drama that's been happening on the bird site, this is starting to feel more relevant than ever.

Source: https://xkcd.com/743/