From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:ucbesvax!turner
Newsgroups: net.politics
Title: Re: Marxist Computer Science - (nf)
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.741
Posted: Tue Mar  1 02:33:53 1983
Received: Wed Mar  2 06:07:36 1983

#R:unc:-471900:ucbesvax:7100007:000:2225
ucbesvax!turner    Feb 28 21:59:00 1983

	I don't know about \Marxist/ C.S., per se -- although Marx and more
    particularly Engels wrote quite a bit about the Natural Sciences, and
    the dialectic of science.  Marx got quite interested in mathematics in
    his later years, apparently teaching himself calculus in his fifties.
    (This, in itself, is a pretty fair indication to me that he was, at
    LEAST, very intelligent, if not the genius that some claim.)  How this
    all applies to the "Sciences of the Artificial", as Herbert Simon called
    them, is not clear.  The Russian penchant is still more for analog
    control systems, and cybernetics generally.  While this might reflect
    a different (more mathematical?) culture, it has more to do, I think,
    with their underdevelopment in digital electronics and memory technology.

	This technological lag has, as it turns out, some IDEOLOGICAL (if
    not strictly Marxist) roots.  This is pretty obvious from the history
    of computing, where we can see that Eastern Bloc countries (Poland, in
    particular) were at most a couple of years behind the west in their
    development of electronic computers (ca. 1949).

	What followed has yet to go down in history with the Lysenko debacle,
    but it certainly should: the Party line on computers was that they were
    likely to engender an elite technical class, which would (of course!)
    imagine itself to be better than the "proletariat", AND have more material
    control over the workings of society and the economy than the party
    cadres and bureacrats.  An untenable situation, clearly (from the point
    of view of cadres and bureaucrats, anyway.)  This view held throughout the
    50's.  (And, of course, they held up a number of achievements to support
    their view of the dispensability of computers: the H-bomb, Sputnik, manned
    space-flight.  Great proletarian technological feats.)

	Now, of course, they are playing catch-up; and Scharansky, among
    many others, is good evidence for their original thesis.  So they lose
    on both counts, being both wrong AND right.  *sigh*...such is
    dialectical materialism, fellow apparatchiks.  Pass the vodka.

	Catch Ya Later, Fellow Elitists,
		Michael Turner