Soviet Cybernetics Movement
Description
Jan Philipp Dapprich:
"The idea that computers and computer networks could be used to control a socialist economy is almost as old as the computer itself. In the 1940s American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (1965) and his associates developed the field of cybernetics, which views machines, organisms and social structures as control systems involving complex flows of information. Experts in the Soviet Union quickly came to see this as the right approach to dealing with the increasing complexity of the Soviet economy, giving rise to the Soviet cybernetics movement (Gerovitch 2008, 2002). Long before the development of the internet, they put forward several never-to-be-realised proposals to build a nation-wide computer network that was to be used for both military and economic planning purposes. Actually put into practice was a much more low tech solution in Salvador Allende’s Chile (Medina 2011, 71-72). The project CyberSyn was developed by British Cybernetician Stafford Beer and connected telefax machines in various factories with a central control room in Chile’s presidential palace.
From this control room the transportation of goods and materials could then be adjusted as new information came in.
Back in the Soviet Union, the idea of economic cybernetics was also thought in the context of Soviet research on optimal planning around the mathematician and economist Leonid Kantorovich (1960, 1965). Kantorovich first developed linear programming as an algorithmic method for solving optimisation problems he encountered in the Soviet economy (Kantorovich 1965, xvii-xix). While these problems could not be solved with conventional mathematical analysis, Kantorovich showed that they could be solved through a process of successive adjustments leading to an optimal solution. While linear programming can also be used to maximise profitability, Kantorovich used a non-monetary objective function. Linear programming can thus be applied in non-market settings, as it does not rely on market valuations.