6 ms·

Yes, there were computer builders all over eastern europe, then it was decided cybernetics is "bourgeois pseudoscience" and most of them emigrated. They usually

by rini17 5y ago

Yes, there were computer builders all over eastern europe, then it was decided cybernetics is "bourgeois pseudoscience" and most of them emigrated. They usually ended up in California.

_vbnz 5y ago
It's a shame things ended up this way. Were it not for the May 1947 crises, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely (though perhaps not, as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent, and Operation Sunrise on the US side was already treating the USSR as hostile). France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, Yugoslavia would have had closer allies against the more authoritarian USSR. Czechoslovakia and Hungary could have remained more independent, etc. - no Vietnam war, no Prague Spring clampdown, no Cuban missile crisis. May 1947 crises - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises Operation Sunrise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I...
- gruturo 5y ago
  > France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?
  - eecc 5y ago
    Why? Has the “partitocrazia” first and the ‘80s cleptocracy, Berlusconi’s downward spiral, and the last attempts an installing neoliberal proxy governments done any good to the country? I guess there’s no point discussing impossible alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting country to live in.
    - fsloth 5y ago
      "Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise" Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social democratic parties with actual communists. The Scandinavian liberal and egalitarian political outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for example Anders Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as "socialism" which is a later construct. Wellfare state itself of course was born after second world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set in an earlier egalitarian view of man.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        Yet strangely, if anyone suggests similar goals for the US they're invariably attacked as socialist or communist. It's more accurate to say that socialism is a later expression of the same ideals - which actually date back to the late 18th century, when they appeared around Europe during a period of revolutions and enlightenment-inspired liberalism.
        kragen 5y ago
        Socialism by that name predates Marx, but (unlike, I think, liberalism) you can find recognizable socialist thinking in the classics. The impulse toward egalitarianism is omnipresent throughout history, because equality is such an appealing Schelling point. Marx's genius was finding a justification for extremist Digger-style egalitarian ideology in the face of such dramatic manifestations of the positive-sum potential of voluntary exchange; in an earlier era where the gain of one feudal lord was inevitably the loss of another, the Digger approach is almost inevitable, but in the face of the explosive prosperity of the Industrial Revolution, Marx had to do quite a bit of work to explain how voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class. To a great extent he was correct in his analysis of existing conditions, but, as it turned out, not about their inevitability or about how to improve them.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no communist government has succeeded in any industrialized nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an authoritarian command economy without massive repression. There are too many people who own property and land who won't agree to be dispossessed. There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are liquidated.
  - Yoric 5y ago
    > There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      > As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance. I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want. Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz. Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz. But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time. BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.
- Kafkish 5y ago
  > as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to be regime-changed and those leaders killed.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    > that run _contra_ to what we want I CIA what you did there.
- kapuasuite 5y ago
  The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the local communist party, parties which largely took direction from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing. The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable. Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.
jhbadger 5y ago
That was in the 1950s when cybernetics was condemned. At the time computers hardly existed. Afterwords, the USSR embraced cybernetics -- the former Institute of Cybernetics in Soviet Estonia (founded in 1960) is why that country is a star in computing among Eastern European countries to this day.
orbital-decay 5y ago
This comment is entirely misguided. I recommend at least reading Wikipedia before commenting. [0] Cybernetics has little to do with computing. It's just a subset of control theory applied to non-technical areas. In particular, politics - which of course was considered by Stalin/the party as an attack on their authority. So they declared cybernetics as bourgeois pseudoscience, after Wiener's book got popular. Communist party's condemnation of cybernetics, which lasted whopping 4-5 years in 50s, got absolutely nothing to do with either computers, computer science, electronics, or control theory as an engineering discipline. In fact it had zero effect on anything, it was simply a moral panic in the media. Nobody "emigrated to California" (how on Earth?..) as a result of that propaganda stunt, in particular because they couldn't. Actually, USSR developed their native computers in that period and after that. It was long before they decided to copy IBM. I have no idea why cybernetics in USSR became such a meme. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
- rini17 5y ago
  Might be that the cybernetics was only a meme (even so it certainly was misapplied to computers by communists, there is plenty of evidence), but for example in the case of Prof. Svoboda the environment was so problematic and for so long time that it led to emigration. https://www.root.cz/clanky/prichod-hackeru-pribeh-profesora-svobody-popate/ https://www.root.cz/clanky/prichod-hackeru-pribeh-profesora-... https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonín_Svoboda https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonín_Svoboda

by rini17 5y ago

Yes, there were computer builders all over eastern europe, then it was decided cybernetics is "bourgeois pseudoscience" and most of them emigrated. They usually ended up in California.

_vbnz 5y ago

It's a shame things ended up this way. Were it not for the May 1947 crises, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely (though perhaps not, as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent, and Operation Sunrise on the US side was already treating the USSR as hostile). France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, Yugoslavia would have had closer allies against the more authoritarian USSR. Czechoslovakia and Hungary could have remained more independent, etc. - no Vietnam war, no Prague Spring clampdown, no Cuban missile crisis. May 1947 crises - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1947_crises Operation Sunrise - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_II) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sunrise_(World_War_I...

gruturo 5y ago
> France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?
- eecc 5y ago
  Why? Has the “partitocrazia” first and the ‘80s cleptocracy, Berlusconi’s downward spiral, and the last attempts an installing neoliberal proxy governments done any good to the country? I guess there’s no point discussing impossible alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting country to live in.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    "Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise" Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social democratic parties with actual communists. The Scandinavian liberal and egalitarian political outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for example Anders Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as "socialism" which is a later construct. Wellfare state itself of course was born after second world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set in an earlier egalitarian view of man.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Yet strangely, if anyone suggests similar goals for the US they're invariably attacked as socialist or communist. It's more accurate to say that socialism is a later expression of the same ideals - which actually date back to the late 18th century, when they appeared around Europe during a period of revolutions and enlightenment-inspired liberalism.
      - kragen 5y ago
        Socialism by that name predates Marx, but (unlike, I think, liberalism) you can find recognizable socialist thinking in the classics. The impulse toward egalitarianism is omnipresent throughout history, because equality is such an appealing Schelling point. Marx's genius was finding a justification for extremist Digger-style egalitarian ideology in the face of such dramatic manifestations of the positive-sum potential of voluntary exchange; in an earlier era where the gain of one feudal lord was inevitably the loss of another, the Digger approach is almost inevitable, but in the face of the explosive prosperity of the Industrial Revolution, Marx had to do quite a bit of work to explain how voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class. To a great extent he was correct in his analysis of existing conditions, but, as it turned out, not about their inevitability or about how to improve them.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no communist government has succeeded in any industrialized nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an authoritarian command economy without massive repression. There are too many people who own property and land who won't agree to be dispossessed. There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are liquidated.
- Yoric 5y ago
  > There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance. I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want. Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz. Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz. But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time. BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.
Kafkish 5y ago
> as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to be regime-changed and those leaders killed.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  > that run _contra_ to what we want I CIA what you did there.
kapuasuite 5y ago
The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the local communist party, parties which largely took direction from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing. The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable. Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.

jhbadger 5y ago

That was in the 1950s when cybernetics was condemned. At the time computers hardly existed. Afterwords, the USSR embraced cybernetics -- the former Institute of Cybernetics in Soviet Estonia (founded in 1960) is why that country is a star in computing among Eastern European countries to this day.

orbital-decay 5y ago

This comment is entirely misguided. I recommend at least reading Wikipedia before commenting. [0] Cybernetics has little to do with computing. It's just a subset of control theory applied to non-technical areas. In particular, politics - which of course was considered by Stalin/the party as an attack on their authority. So they declared cybernetics as bourgeois pseudoscience, after Wiener's book got popular. Communist party's condemnation of cybernetics, which lasted whopping 4-5 years in 50s, got absolutely nothing to do with either computers, computer science, electronics, or control theory as an engineering discipline. In fact it had zero effect on anything, it was simply a moral panic in the media. Nobody "emigrated to California" (how on Earth?..) as a result of that propaganda stunt, in particular because they couldn't. Actually, USSR developed their native computers in that period and after that. It was long before they decided to copy IBM. I have no idea why cybernetics in USSR became such a meme. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...

rini17 5y ago
Might be that the cybernetics was only a meme (even so it certainly was misapplied to computers by communists, there is plenty of evidence), but for example in the case of Prof. Svoboda the environment was so problematic and for so long time that it led to emigration. https://www.root.cz/clanky/prichod-hackeru-pribeh-profesora-svobody-popate/ https://www.root.cz/clanky/prichod-hackeru-pribeh-profesora-... https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonín_Svoboda https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonín_Svoboda