Soviet central planning failed because it could not harness its own technological innovations

Evidence

Our greatest defeat was, of course, not the failure of social democracy in Greece or anywhere else. It was the failure of the Soviet experiment, the only large-scale attempt to take capital under society’s control. It produced significant innovations, in both science and technology. But the Soviet central planning system failed to press these into society’s service. Soviet scientists invented cybernetics with the potential, decades before Google or Amazon, to coordinate people’s preferences and efforts automatically. Except that the Soviet top-down system could not exploit these for the benefit of the society it was meant to serve. And so appalling authoritarianism and daily drudgery led to total defeat in 1991. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 768

Categorization

• XREF: The cybernetics claim connects directly to platform-coordination arguments about today’s algorithms — the Soviet system had the technical seed but not the social form. — connects to: Technical progress may become incompatible with industrialization’s own institutions. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 183; Failure to move from extensive to intensive industrialization doomed state socialism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 45; Totalitarian susceptibility persisted from technological and economic developments — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2029
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how close was Soviet cybernetics to what Google/Amazon algorithms do, and what specific socio-technical conditions blocked its use?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 768

Broader Connections

• Technical progress may become incompatible with industrialization’s own institutions. #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 183
• Failure to move from extensive to intensive industrialization doomed state socialism #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 45
• Totalitarian susceptibility persisted from technological and economic developments #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2029