The Internet and a Planned Economy

So let's say that, by some miracle of good leadership or ASB intervention, all of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR survive into the 21st Century with their planned economies largely intact. At most, there's some limited privatization or worker management a la Yugoslavia.

So, how would the communist world utilize the Internet? Could some of the inefficiencies of the Planned Economy be rectified with it?

-AYC
 
Colossal flamewars ensue in Chat sections everywhere over the proper economic system, as well as the human rights record of the Soviet Union and co.
 
Does China have much of a planned economy anymore, I thought it was Capitalism gone wild.

The quick and accurate transmission of information would certainly help a planned economy.

The problem is accurate, which means things won't change if people continue to lie about production to make themselves look good instead of worrying about the good of the State.
 

d32123

Banned
So let's say that, by some miracle of good leadership or ASB intervention, all of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR survive into the 21st Century with their planned economies largely intact. At most, there's some limited privatization or worker management a la Yugoslavia.

So, how would the communist world utilize the Internet? Could some of the inefficiencies of the Planned Economy be rectified with it?

-AYC

I believe this was discussed a bit in Jello's masterpiece.

In the Eastern Bloc I expect that yeah, it'd probably be like China's situation. I doubt many of them would come to a site like this due to it either being blocked or the fact that most of them wouldn't speak English well enough.
 
The quick and accurate transmission of information would certainly help a planned economy.

The problem is accurate, which means things won't change if people continue to lie about production to make themselves look good instead of worrying about the good of the State.

It goes slightly deeper than this, as any of the workerist critiques will point towards. Better planning will do nothing regarding worker resistance to Soviet Taylorism. And the nomenklatura will not democratise production (ie: remove Taylorism).

Soviet planning was actually rather good.

thanks,
Sam R.
 
Some of Taylorisms problems could be solved by the internet. A faster means of communication means it's easier to propose, test, and adopt a new way to do a prodution step if it's better than the old one.
 
This is a bit different from a planned economy with the internet but under Allende Chile tried something called Project Cybersyn which was essentially a network of computers spread through factories that reported information to a central command center. Supposedly the system enabled the government to supply an entire city with 200 trucks.

here's the wikipedia article on it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

I could see a communist country using the internet to get realtime information on its production and consumption with a system like this. Hell, it would probably cut a lot of inefficiencies out of the system.
 
They'd roll out national intranets with state-censored ISPs. Access to the Internet would be limited to reliable Party officials. It's how North Korea manages it.
 
The best description how a planned economy would work in the age of the internet was written by Paul Cockshott in my opinion. Just read "Towards a new Socialism". The book can be downloaded here for free as a pdf:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/

It is very enlightening and an interesting concept for the modern world.

If you are interested in what went wrong in OTL Soviet Union when it came to the internet I would recommend reading
InterNyet which can be found here:

http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
The same critique of the use of knowledge in a centrally planned economy applies to one with the internet as it does to one without. The one with will do better, but still fail but comparison to an economy with a decentralized planning apparatus.
 
planned economy usually happens in repressive regimes.

using the internet and its free exchange of ideas would warrant you a bullet and a shallow grave.
 
planned economy usually happens in repressive regimes.

Prior to 1918, revolutionary Russia's factories were run by workers' soviets, or councils.

Workers' control was controversially scrapped when it temporarily led to rapid inflation(some workers gave themselves the bosses' salaries after kicking out the factory management) and proved to be inefficient.

The Bolshevik-Left SR coalition government decided to compensate through nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, effectively deviating from orthodox Marxism, a key point of which was to hand over the means of production to the workers in order to create a potentially free and egalitarian society without exploiters or exploitation.

Lenin had argued prior to the October Revolution that soviets would have to appoint managers from amongst the working-class to serve as a form of iron discipline in the workplace in place of workers' control.

He further argued that possessing an educated upper-crust of working-class management was necessary in backwards Russia; at the time that many of his ideas were being formulated, Russia's education system was shoddy, and very few could read or write, let alone manage a whole factory based on democratic decision-making alone, as he argued.

The brief period of workers' control in Russia through the workers' soviets, flawed as it was, more or less proved that it was still *possible* to run a factory through collective, democratic decision-making, which by the way was a form of democratic central planning, in which goods would be distributed in Russia based on societal need, on a scientific basis(IE through a centrally planned economy managed by the working-class, who in theory ran the state along with the peasantry through their soviets).

So no, central-planning is not a unique phenomenon that only occurs in dictatorial societies.

Russia prior to 1918 was certainly not a dictatorial society. It was considered by Russia's radicals to be, in theory, a dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the proletariat and the peasantry(these two classes made up the majority of Russia's population at the time) ran society while repressing the bourgeoisie, to keep them from rising back to power.

This is very basic stuff when it comes to Marxism.


As for the internet and it's role in central-planning, it could very well revolutionize the shop floor.

And with higher rates of education now present in most modern societies, economic problems, if any, would be far less severe under central-planning.

Local communities, through the internet, could easily request what they want the local factory councils to produce, who would produce goods based on societal need, instead of how things work now where things are based on not what we need, but want we want.
 
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