As a reformed neo-liberal, I recently came across Cockshott’s Towards a New Socialism, and I have to say I’m absolutely stunned. I never even considered there could be anything other than markets to allocate resource in an at least somewhat efficient manner.
I realize that the field has received very little attention, and I am unable to find much other sophisticated research on the topic of computer-optimized central planning or modern takes on the economic calculation problem.
Here are the few things I did manage to find:
Economic Calculation in Light of Advances in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence
Review of Towards a New Socialism? by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell
Does anyone know any other things I can look into?
Welcome to the fold. How are you finding these rabbit warrens so far?
I’m not sure if this is quite what you’re looking for as it’s a bit different to what you cited in your comment, but Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (Verso, 2019) outlines a Marxist approach to using technology to achieve socialism/communism. I enjoyed the book. It’s short, easy to read, and gives a lot of food for thought. Here’s an extract: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4356-marx-was-a-fully-automated-luxury-communist.
He argues that production and distribution come down to information, and information yearns to be free. With AI, smart and green energy grids, wireless internet, and 3D printing, etc, with some central planning almost all the benefits of living in the most developed parts of the world can be made accessible to everyone (‘if it wasn’t for those meddling
kids[capitalists]’). Shops won’t need cashiers or stockists. Mining space won’t need human miners. Etc, etc. With a socialist mode of production and the right emphasis on tech, humans will be needed just to start processes and keep an eye on them; much of the rest can be automated, leaving humans freer for other things. (This is a rough summary – I only read it once and that was when it came out, so I may be misremembering some of the finer details.)Bastani starts with Marx’s Grundrisse, pp. 690–712. If you search online for ‘Marx fragment on machines’, you’ll find the relevant extracts in a PDF.
IIRC, Salvador Allende of Chile was working on a project to use computers for this kind of thing before he was couped. Searching for ‘project cybersyn’ might lead to some relevant results.
Edit: added link Edit 2: I think Bastani is talking and his book in this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_bastani_a_socialist_perspective_on_the_pursuit_of_happiness/c
There’s a book out of MIT Press which details the history of CyberSyn of the Allende regime. I think the approach taken here will not work. It’s computationally impossible with classical computing. It may be possible with quantum computers, but we don’t have enough accelerated algorithms yet to test, much less there also being no hardware yet either. That’s gonna take decades of pure computer science research.
I think that’s incorrect the problem of implementation isn’t the scale of computing but the economic calculation, price indexs have built-in problems like the crisis of overproduction. Many planning apparatuses are already used in production today it’s a function of how of modern economy works to meet the needs of people you would have to change the economic calculation, in marxist terms it would be changing CMC to CC i.e. commodity exchange for money back to commodity would instead be commodity to commodity.
There’s a dearth of good books on planning, but you’re right, TNS is an incredible book that stands alone, and should be required reading for every modern communist.
There’s a short breakdown of the book here for anyone who wants to know the gist:
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/paul_cockshott_cyber_communism.html
Well there’s scientific works looking back on control systems with control theory and cybernetics, Victor Glushkov is someone notable from the USSR to look into as well as Stafford Beer. Previous examples are OGAS and Cybersyn however they faced issues though in our modern day these types of planning are already in use all that really needs to be done is change the economic calucation from price indexs to material units and that’s a huge chunk already done for us.
Whoever is a reformed neoliberal?
