“Democracy, Planning, Big Data” by Kees Van Der Pijl, 4/2020 Monthly Review
If
you’ve run into some old codger leftists who distain computers, this article
might be a shock for them. While citing
Ned Ludd constantly, their understanding is usually based on a deep misunderstanding
of this early 1800s movement. Luddism was not 'anti-technology.’
Machine-breaking was a tactic, not the end in itself. Luddism wanted a
minimum wage; the right to trade unions; against the super-exploitation of
women and children and most pointedly jobs for those put out of work by
machines.
This article reveals what many leftists have
already said about computers and data – they will make planning far easier and
timely than relying on delayed end-point results. Capital already partly uses these methods, in corporate isolation, but for a completely different aim - profits.
As a prior example of the socialist movement
using computers, computer design started in Kiev in the 1940s, when the Ukraine was part of the USSR. A colonel engineer, Anatoliy I. Kitov, wrote Electronic Digital Machines from this work. After Stalin’s death and his
ideological proscriptions against cypernetics, research increased.
Khrushchev proposed factory automation in 1956, not just for use in
weapons’ systems. In 1961 computers were
called ‘machines of communism.’ Victor
Glushkov, director of the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of Soviet
Ukraine was tasked by Alexei Kosygin with creating a digitized planning
system. Leonoid Brezhnev killed the idea and
instead opted for ‘greater enterprise autonomy.’ It seems never to have been revived even under
Gorbachev. As past analyses of the collapse of these workers' states has shown, it was exactly this 'greater enterprise autonomy' that helped lead the majority of the bureaucracy back to privatization, counter-revolution and capitalism.
Marx wrote in the 1857-1861 Grundrisse that the future economy would be “an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.” Pijl thinks the engineer-controllers of these digital systems will replace the capitalists in production, reorienting production strategy from profit to human and environmental needs. Here he makes no mention of democratic input or control … echoing an idea of people like Antionio Negri who promote communist cyber-techies as the key strata.
Pijl claims the Left should demand public control
of the data systems in IT oligopolies.
Which seems like a demand for public control and ownership of Big Tech,
but the way he frames it, it is not, as he sees this as part of ‘democratic
self-regulation’ – whatever that is.
Digital regulation would require these steps, per
Pijl: 1. Understanding the desired
outcome. 2. Real-time measurement. 3. Algorithms that adjust based on new
data. 4.
Periodic analysis of the accuracy of the algorithms. Pijl
thinks a digitally planned economy is no longer a utopian idea. The present digital infrastructure is a “democracy
waiting to be turned into a functioning social order.” Pijl writes that this heralds a new stage of
socialism, rising above “labor socialism.” Digital socialism will transcend the present oligarchic,
repressive and proto-fascistic uses of technology, using what labor, nature,
education and capital have built for human survival and needs, not commodity profits. Pijl makes no mention of China, which would
seem to be an obvious place to look regarding digital planning.
It is quite obvious that much of the corporate
world is already highly planned, using technology, data and a massive
infrastructure. Wal-Mart and Amazon are
obvious examples of that, but it extends to every single large corporation in the
world. The internet has linked the
whole world in a quite direct, immediate way, which echoes the idea of
computers being ‘machines of communism’ – though its present public content is
dominated by commercialism, propaganda, surveillance and much intentional idiocy, in the context of the anarchy of the market. Nevertheless…
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog
search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive of reviews, using
these terms: Monthly Review or "The People’s Republic
of Wal-Mart,” “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” “New Dark Age,” “Zombie Capitalism,” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “In Letters of Fire &
Blood” (Caffentzis); “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Cypherpunks” (Assange); “China – the
Bubble That Never Pops.”
And I got it for free
from our excellent periodicals section, which has many past and present issues
of Monthly Review for sale.
Red Frog
October 31, 2021
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