[foobarian]

You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people? I.e. centrally planned economy? And in practice it didn't work out because of corruption and information bottlenecks and such?

I wonder if a corporation type org could actually make this work by going all in on AI deeply integrated into everything, code commits, tickets, slack, emails.. directing everything. So basically one boss with infinite bandwidth, that foresees and proactively preempts shadow hierarchies that are bound to form. Would be an interesting experiment.

[faidit]

USSR tried to digitize economy (OGAS) under Khrushchev but project was killed by pen and paper bureaucrats scared for their jobs. They barely would have had the resources to set it up though. Chile under Allende tried a similar short-lived socialist computer economy project called Cybersyn before the coup.

Marx apologists often point out he did not believe Russia could bypass capitalism on its own, without help from more advanced socialist countries formed by revolutions in the industrialized West. He also said the cotton gin was the engine of revolution and new technology has to come first before a new social system. The well known failures of command economies aside, arguably it did work with the right policies, especially when compared to other developing countries, it just didn't grow as fast as Western capitalism. The USSR didn't so much collapse as it was shut down by decree bc the leaders looked at the numbers and decided to give up.

Maybe the hypothetical bossless corp will be accidentally created by capitalism as more and more management positions are eliminated to save money.

[vhantz]

Huge corporations like Walmart and Amazon are actually proof that central planning works. And that not planning internally is not viable, as Sears demonstrated.

But this internal planning is not enough and comes up against the limits of capitalism: production for profit and not for need, the market and the nation state. All these contributed to create a system where "too much is produced", that is too much compared to what can be sold for profit, not what is needed.

Ultimately what was missing in the Soviet Union, the democratic aspect of planning, is also what is missing today (on top of the other issues that come with production for profit).

Explained here better than can be done in a HN comment: https://www.marxist.ca/article/the-need-for-a-socialist-plan...

[rexpop]

> You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?

Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."

Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."

Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm

[foobarian]

TBH I don't know where that meme came from, it's something they used to harp on in Yugoslav schools before the breakup. But as a concept it certainly exists and I will beg your forgiveness for mixing it up with the history of socialism ideas salad. The point still doesn't change, can central planning finally succeed with smart enough technology such as new crop of AI seems to be? With fewer greedy/corrupt humans in the loop?