this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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That's just not true. The economy in general has a need of computing, including for automation of production processes, bookkeeping, communication, probably other stuff that doesn't fall under those.
Yes but the scale of what's needed and why is very different compared to everyday people in hundreds of thousands of jobs finding direct and obvious benefits in their day to day jobs in a capitalist market driven economy.
Not to mention that the capitalist class itself were the ones directly doing calculations that could see the benefit of computerising what they do every day.
I'm not trying to say a socialist economy wouldn't benefit from it. What I'm saying is that the forces driving a socialist economy towards it were smaller than the forces driving the capitalist economy towards it due to the sheer number of people that could see the benefits of computers in the west compared to the significantly smaller number of people that could see the direct benefits in the socialist economy. Many thousands of finance people vs only scientists, r+d, leadership and so on.
This isn't a value judgement against socialist economy either. Just that in this particular instance capitalism's large number of people working with bullshit made up finance numbers gave capitalism a bigger force pushing towards computerisation. Socialism's lack of people doing these bullshit "jobs" worked against them in this one particular instance.
Not sure what you mean there.
The same applies to the calculations done by various economic leadership figures (from local factory managers to the union government figures), so this does not seem to be a factor.
And I don't see how that could be the reason for that.
This explanation especially doesn't seem to work when we consider that most of the capitalist world wasn't any more successful in adopting computers than the USSR.
The much more significant factors seem to be colonial plunder of the world by the imperial core, induction of brain drain in favour of electronics R&D in the imperial core, and the USSR's liberalisation reforms that led to the stifling of industrial innovation.
How were the 'finance people' that were not in leading positions any different from bookkeepers in the USSR in this context?
I do understand that.
I do, however, think that that explanation does not have a good basis, and am pointing that out.