/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18134656]

Does anyone know of any Leninist / Stalinist / cybernetic socialist authors / writers?

I’m trying to expand my mind on this stuff

I’d prefer if they were alive, since I like to usually ask for clarification from authors I read

[Anonymous No.18134686]

bump

[Anonymous No.18134700]

>>18134686
>6 minutes
>bump

[Anonymous No.18134711]

>>18134700
Gib writer names
>bump

[Anonymous No.18134741]

>>18134656
The reigning champion of the genre (living) is Paul Cockshott, a computer scientist and actual longtime Communist Party member. His core text, with Allin Cottrell, is "Towards a New Socialism". He also has many other books, and a YT channel that is very active.

Cockshott's junior collaborator (everyone's junior to Cockshott, he's a billion years old), Ian Wright, is very interesting and you should look up his blog and YT channel. They're coauthors of a book called "Classic Econophysics" which is interesting but it's not exactly cybernetics. Wright's got a lot of other cybernetics stuff.

Stafford Beer was originally a management consultant, so not originally socialist, but his work was implemented (and used until Pinochet fucked it up) in Chile under Allende. What he saw happen to Chile turned him into a kind of libertarian socialist.

The field of linear programming was invented (and actually used) in the USSR, so if you would like to grasp the mathematics front-on you should look into Leonid Kantorovich and Andrey Kolmogorov and collaborators. Alexander Bogdanov was an Old Bolshevik who did some work in a kind of proto-systems theory/ecology theory.

You might also wish to consider this interesting concept: we've lost track of it today, as cybernetics degenerated into businessmode "Information Technology" and lost the wholistic synthetic focus, but a lot of ideas (going back to Marx himself) in ecology were originally fundamentally cybernetic theories, as in, theories of control of scaled systems -- just that the system in question was environmental rather than technological. To that end, a lot of the agroecological thinkers were actually quite deeply entwined, either accidentally or deliberately, with cybernetics. Check out the Permaculture literature, especially Permaculture I and II and/or The Permaculture Designer's manual. A lot of this stuff came out of the eco side of the hippy movement in the early 70s and while we wouldn't recognise it as strictly cybernetic there's huge overlap (and it's more than just permaculture, it's just the agroecology with widest exposure). Bonus round: after the USSR fell and trade stopped, Cuba took up permaculture at large scales in order to feed itself, so there's a distinct socialist connection.

For a fairly entrylvl approach to the idea of planned economies as they exist today, it's a bit light-on but you could go and find a copy of "The People's Republic of Walmart", which makes the case that the internal economies of Amazon and Walmart are actually so big now that they constitute operational planned economies.

Finally: for a bittersweet, novel-format book using science-fiction formal devices but a historical story, read Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.

[Anonymous No.18134768]

Already mentioned but the title of this book gives a misleading impression that it's one of those "hey kids, do you like Amazon? Then you'll love communism!" But that's not the case. It's a pretty interesting look at the question of using computers to plan an economy.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.18134777]

>>18134700
Aw c’mon man. He’s tryin.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.18134802]

>>18134741
Solid post, anon.

[Anonymous No.18134825]

>>18134741
(same anon). There's a distinct strain of cyberneticism - not quantitative, none of them were math or CS guys - running through left ecological thought. So Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology/Libertarian Municipalism ideas - especially as set out in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Towards an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom and The Philosophy of Social Ecology - thought has some very cybernetic themes.

On the same basis, a lot of John Bellamy Foster's work on Marx's ecology goes in that direction, like e.g. how do we create more closed-loop production systems, return manure and compost to the earth, and so on.

At this point depending on the scope of your conception of cybernetics, there's also a big launching-off point into other areas of planning and design, like left urbanism. However, there are a lot of people in this discipline who aren't really political/are just stock standard leftish liberals. Christopher Alexander (of A Pattern Language/The Timeless Way of Building) is a good example of this.

>>18134768
I'm not being snarky here, but
>one of those "hey kids, do you like Amazon? Then you'll love communism!"
are there actually any other books in this category? Is there a wide enough Amazon --> communism literary world that you can call PROW just "one of" the works in this field? Unless you're referring to the FALC crowd like Srnicek and Williams?

[Anonymous No.18135710]

>>18134656
>>18134825
Bumping this thread one time because I gave a good effortpost for OP after he'd already samefag bumped it twice and then I didn't get any (You). I'm just a humble (You)farmer, I've got kids to feed, I can't do it for free.

[Anonymous No.18136983]

Glushkov isn't alive but if you do some digging you can find a bunch of his papers on ASPR and OGAS online which get really into the mathematical nitty gritty of planning.