WI: Soviet Cybernetic Communism?

What if Cybernetic Computerized Planned Economy had pulled off back in the Soviet Union? Say Kosygin and Glushkov had better luck and Brezhnev worse, then on the course of the next two decades the Soviets completed a crude computerization system of centralized economic bureaucracy. How will it:

1) affect Soviet foreign policy?
2) cushion Soviet decline?
3) interact and compete with Chinese Corporatist model? And thus Sino-American relations and its consequences for China's rise within Capitalist bloc? (Let's assume Deng still rise since I'm very interested in this duality)
 
a computerized planned economy would only work if the people reading the report are following said advise. ** system over flow.. communism does not compute .. please install system installation floppy 3897 to continue **
 
Salvador Allende had some success with computerization in Chile. See Project Cybersen.

I imagine a computerised economy, with better information flow, will at the very least mitigate Soviet economic decline, and perhaps even provide a boost in some sectors. It might also have impacts for American development - if it proves to be a big success, then we could see an earlier development of theory around cybernetic warfare, and sabotage by inserting erroneous data into the system, leading to phantom shortages and surpluses. Guarding against this will be a big concern for the Soviets.
 
Salvador Allende had some success with computerization in Chile. See Project Cybersen.

I imagine a computerised economy, with better information flow, will at the very least mitigate Soviet economic decline, and perhaps even provide a boost in some sectors. It might also have impacts for American development - if it proves to be a big success, then we could see an earlier development of theory around cybernetic warfare, and sabotage by inserting erroneous data into the system, leading to phantom shortages and surpluses. Guarding against this will be a big concern for the Soviets.

The most important thing of cybernetization is that it isn't really an automaton resource manager, but a decision support system that should be replicable or at least the concept applicable elsewhere. And it means its role and application can be anything depending on where it's used, meaning it's very proliferable. The interesting part is who will since some countries will have ideological barriers to it. Like US. I'd like to suspect China as well but seeing how they're in the process of constructing integrated data social credit system as we speak this technology might prove very very useful for them. Yet I have no doubt that with Soviet surviving and moderately functional supported by cybernetization that Sino-American axis of the free market will hold longer. So it will be interesting how all of this will boost their rise to power as well as their African strategy, and after that, how the following alliance realignment will affect geopolitics and ideology in the surely coming post-realist era.
 
Computers could certainly help the planned economy. But
1) real economies are way to complex for any computer simulation,
2) it would require software that actually simulates reality, instead of Marxist theory. Have fun getting that built in a Soviet state
3) Software has errors. Both bugs (errors in coding) and at a higher level - almost no software program fully recreates the theoretical model it's supposed to be recreating.
4) GIGO. If the data flowing into the system is as fictitious as the data traveling on paper in the OTL Soviet system, the results will be nonsensical. How do you get good data into the system?

My guess? Total disaster.
 
One of the problems the Soviets had is that as their economy grew more developed it grew more complex. As it grew more complex, getting all relevant information to decision makers in a clear and clear and concise form grew more difficult.

Dealing with this complexity with a cybernetic system would require enormous amounts of computing power (and good information gathering - GIGO will be a real problem in this system). Keep in mind that the Chilean economy was far simpler than the Soviet economy in the 70s (with copper being the dominant economic activity of Chile) and that the Chileans were trying this in the 70s, when computer technology was far advanced versus the 50s and early 60s when the Soviets were interested in the idea.

To get the Soviets to actually try cybernetics in any major way, the easiest PoD is that they get interested in it later, so the idea isn't utterly discredited in Soviet economic circles by the time computing power is equal to the job. Even so, I find it difficult to see cybernetics working for something as complex as the Soviet economy before the end of the 20th century - for it to be implemented, they probably need to also be less grandiose, and instead go for making a fairly simple part of the economy be cybernetic.

And even that could go wrong for them.

fasquardon
 
I could see cybernetic communism working for some of the smaller communist countries - Hungary under Goulash Communism, for example.

Perhaps the USSR starts off implementing it only for heavy industry, and phases it in elsewhere afterwards.
 
Honestly, as others have stated, soviet economy was riddled with false numbers and numbers for goods not even needed. On a planned scale sure it could work,mbut does that equate to a system that predict innovation, consolidation, outside influence? Demand for goods?

As ridwan states it's a tool to help manage and predict things, to understand the current picture, trends and historical data.
 
If anybody is interested in an more in depth look at the topic I always recommend reading:

InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer
network by Slava Gerovitch

"Towards a New Socialism" by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell

Both are free pdf and deal with internet and its potential for a command economy.
 
Computers could certainly help the planned economy. But
1) real economies are way to complex for any computer simulation,
2) it would require software that actually simulates reality, instead of Marxist theory. Have fun getting that built in a Soviet state
3) Software has errors. Both bugs (errors in coding) and at a higher level - almost no software program fully recreates the theoretical model it's supposed to be recreating.
4) GIGO. If the data flowing into the system is as fictitious as the data traveling on paper in the OTL Soviet system, the results will be nonsensical. How do you get good data into the system?

My guess? Total disaster.
This is why I personally consider the use of cybernetic communism in TLs to be basically a handwave (that, and the fact that it's rarely explained in detail).
 
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