It's really fun when they get into the computing requirements of planning an economy using the Harmony algorithm/neural network. They keep talking about things in millions of operations per second and how a super computer could solve a large economy in about 10 minutes.
When you take these numbers now and apply them to current consumer grade chips, you could take their exact model and solve an economy with several million inputs/outputs in roughly 1 second. Compared to the 2-10 weeks it would take on a 68020.
It's really sad that the mass adoption of computing has led to things like NFTs and Crypto Currency. Just absolutely wasted operations that do nothing but waste means of production and fractional products. Those trillions of operations could be going towards simulating production goals in central planning. 1, 5, 10, and 15 year plans could be generated in seconds now and presented to all for vibrant democratic input and decision making, instead were using deterministic machines to recreate the chaos of market systems and the runaway crises that come with them.
Reading this book helped me understand Capital a lot better.
But as you point out, it's almost 30 years old. Would really like to see someone come out with a similar text but adopting more up to date computational and mathematical techniques.
Luckily Cockshott is still active and has a YouTube channel where he updates a lot of this. There's also his SourceForge page with his Harmony implementation in Julia that should definitely be forked over to another repo on a less bloated site.
His old implementation is in vector pascal and he has a few videos on why he chose Julia for the newer implementation.
Lmao, it's literally just him sharing his lecture slides. I think one of his students told him to start it because he only started uploading them like 2 years ago
Hadn't heard of this book before and will need to check it out, sounds interesting
:cyber-lenin:
It's really refreshing, some really sober criticism of the USSRs Gosplan system and hire it's implementation as a maximizer of fractional product was eventually what led to it's downfall. Their proposal of using I/O tables and neural networks to essentially run the economy in a similar way to how a car runs cruise control is really interesting and heavily based on Stafford Beer's functional implementation of cybernetic planning on Chile.
The whole idea of each individual factory running simple I/O calculations and using the telecommunications infrastructure to relay that data up the industrial chain of command to some sort of national or global Gosplan/Cybersyn system for calculation of the labor value of industrial products which then is sent back out to the factories for use in their own calculations.
A sort of bootstrapped planning that can be implemented on something as simple as a commodore 64. Though now we'd probably just build it into an app that everyone has immediate access to. And because the calculations can now be done in seconds rather than days, it means everyone will have instantaneous knowledge of productive capacity and how the central planning is allocating resources. This allows for near total elimination of all typical capitalist crises. Leaving only environmental and cosmological crises to deal with. Assuming the central planning system works these crises can be soberly delt with or planned for.
It's a decent read, pretty uplifting.
I'm hesitant to recommend it to people though, as Paul Cockshott carries around plenty of unresolved bigoted baggage that he attempts to justify via cold war leftist trade unionist thought. What it boils down to is that he's very anti-immigrant, anti-sexworker, homophobic, and of course transphobic.
It poses the question, are people like this who oppose intersectional ideas valuable within broader movements? I'm not sure. I'd like to hope so, but I don't want to get backstabbed.
are people like this who oppose intersectional ideas valuable within broader movements?
Maybe the person isn't, but some of the work they've done is.
I never noticed any of that from him, they're pretty big on the importance of the abolition of patriarchy in the book and even use she/her pronouns when referring to the general worker. I know that that's not necessarily proof of them not holding reactionary views on things (e.g. terfs), but I also haven't seen anything explicitly or even implicitly homophobic or transphobic
He was fairly active in blogging and tweeting up until a couple of years ago.
He seems to consider solidarity between marginalized groups as detrimental to getting the bulk of workers on board.
Weird, I wonder if Cottrell kept most of that out of their books because TaNS is definitely not that. I think his ideas on actually managing and running a planned economy are good and for the most part he has good ideas on how to minimize exploitation of surplus, but he probably still suffers from brit brain and some Zizek style reactionary thought.
The book definitely posits that attacking patriarchal systems is one of the more valid paths towards building a revolutionary movement as the bulk of exploitation occurs in the domestic sector (unpaid labor from women maintaining a home).
It's been a while since I last read it, but if memory serves, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but TaNS generally treats the humanity that this socialist system is meant to serve as a homogeneous, faceless mass, which makes sense as it is largely a technical exploration into raw numbers and how computer technology can be used to solve mathematical problems posed in the management of an economy. It's easy to sidestep issues of patriarchy, transphobia, and racism when the humanity your machine is serving is kept somewhat imaginary.
That's not really how it reads at all. They definitely dive pretty deep into planning systems and mathematics, but they also make sure to direct you to other authors who do more criticism of Capitalism. TaNS is meant to be a pretty dry technical exploration of the types of mechanical/information systems needed to maintain a labor voucher system. That being said there's a decent amount of exploration of how planning systems like this would be implemented and what the actual structure of the society that would use them would need to look like (they focus heavily on feminism and abolition of domestic labor/partiarchy with communal family structures).
It's definitely not like most leftist theory that spends a majority of it's time pointing out the flaws and problems with capital and minority exploring how socialist planning would actually be implemented. This is a book written specifically for the future, specifically to be unearthed after a revolution and used to help build a system of central planning that works.