In 1949 the Father of Cybernetics Norbert Weiner wrote a letter to the UAW president telling him that a leading industrialist had contacted him to automate production and Weiner declined due to the harm it could cause labor, and instead offered his services to the working class. The relationship between labor, scientific management, and organized production is a fascinating one. The Bolsheviks studied Taylorism and later the Soviets Cybernetics. It’s applications vary which is precisely why socialists ought to take interest in this history.

🧵Here are some, but not all, of the books we read for our Stalin podcast (both parts I and II).
Reviews below: A good overview of the madness of the peasant problem. Lewin can be hard on the Bolsheviks, but it’s well meaning. Lewin is writing as a thinker on the left. This book distills some of what Carr writes about in the first Foundations volume.

This thread is on an important but somewhat underdiscussed aspect of Marxism and revolutionary socialism: the social revolution





How does the social revolution differ from "revolution" in abstract? The social rev implies a deep fundamental change in the relations of people to one another and the means of production. Whereas a revolution can be made in a month, a social rev is the creation of years.

Underrated Bolshevik: Felix Dzerzhinsky.
The Iron Felix often gets a bad wrap as head of the Soviet police state apparatus which would become a defining feature of the USSR, but further consideration reveals this Soviet founding father to be a deeply sensitive humanist. Thread.. Felix was born in Belarus (then Russian Empire) from a Polish family. He would grow to become close friends with fellow Polish revolutionary social-democrat turned communist, Rosa Luxemburg. He kept a portrait of her in his office until he died.