Francis Spufford: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1950s, 1960s, communism, cybernetics, economy, engineering, history of computing, mathematics, politics, science, soviet union
This book is about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea – central planning via cybernetics – and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed. To give the economics some human depth, Red Plenty generates a miniature Soviet Union on the page, peopled by scientists and politicians, fixers and managers, dreamers and cynics.
Publisher Faber & Faber, 2010
ISBN 0571269478, 9780571269471
356 pages
EPUB (updated on 2019-11-20)
See also:
Red Plenty Platforms, essay by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Culture Machine 14, 2013
Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber, collection of essays inspired by the book, 2012
Leave a Reply