The Cybernetics of Socialism

Cybernetics - what does the word conjure for you? Until last year, I associated the term vaguely with computers, software and Keanu Reeves films like Johnny Mnemonic (it also stars Ice-T teaming up with a hacker who is a dolphin).

Cybernetics, however, isn’t just about computers but identifiable systems be they machines, animals or whole societies. It’s a cross-disciplinary study of how systems adapt, thrive and survive within broader systems. One branch of which is concerned with social organisations from enterprises, unions, community groups or the state - this branch is known as the cybernetics of organisation. It is this very topic which I will be unpacking in this regular series on the cybernetics of socialist organisation that I’m calling Project Cyberorg.

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Why does the cybernetics of organisation matter?

Capitalism is not fundamentally a relation between individuals. The market is not a fact of nature. Capitalist domination is embedded in a whole series of organisations and institutions. Capitalism describes a set of social relations that require institutional support to continue. We experience capitalism in a mediated form via interactions with specific institutions or discrete systems such as the state or individual corporations.

Organisational cybernetics, therefore, can be a powerful lens through which to examine the workings of the world. A better understanding of the way organisations work assists in identifying points of vulnerability for capitalist domination. Further, it not only helps us to build a better Left within the constraints of capitalism but also can give insight on how to concretely build a new socialist future. For instance, one way of understanding the collapse of the Soviet Union is that its social system was deficient in incorporating feedback so it could adjust through time. Its deficiency in this regard meant the system ended up collapsing through its inability to handle changes in its operating environment. This analysis avoids a lot of frankly unhelpful free market moralism.

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Marxism and cybernetics

There is a consistency between Marxism and cybernetics. The cybernetic framework is inherently relational and dynamic which means it can build on Marxist analysis. In fact, Stafford Beer, perhaps the key intellectual figure in substituting the insights of cybernetics into the study of managing organisations, was deeply influenced by Trotsky’s critique of Soviet bureaucracy. Beer wanted to build organisations and social systems that embedded and nurtured the human experience of freedom (often using the term autonomy as to how people experienced freedom within an institution).1

But let’s go beyond Beer, as an eccentric Englishman, to the material context of cybernetics’ development. Cybernetics itself emerged from scientists across disciplines being thrown together by the Allied effort to win World War II. For me this recalls the Bogdovian method of science beyond capitalism - a method he called substitution. This is the simple idea of substituting the insights from one scientific field into another.

Substitution may have been the method but the social resources thrown at the sciences to win the war created the time and space for scientists across disciplines to come together and problem solve free from the usual constraints of capitalism. Cybernetics emerged in this context in Mexico City in the early 1940s where experts in mathematics, medicine and engineering (amongst other fields) came together. Through their collaboration they realised there was overlap in their fields with how systems regulate and communicate, that is how they are controlled.

Control is central to understanding cybernetics. The term, originating from this time in Mexico City, is derived from the Ancient Greek term kubernetes which roughly translates as a ship’s pilot. Plato, in fact, used this term to signify the art of ruling a people in his Republic. As an aside, the Latin term for a ship’s pilot is a gubernator which is the basis in English for governor and government.

My introduction to cybernetics

I started going down the cybernetic rabbit hole last year listening to the audiobook version of Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine. What stayed with me from the book was the sense that cybernetic solutions represented the path not travelled as a means of resolving the breakdown of the Keynesian settlement in the 1970s. Stafford Beer was an economic advisor to the socialist Allende government in Chile, and he began putting his ideas into practice with Project Cybersyn. This was an effort to bring cybernetic principles and design to the service of transforming a faltering Chilean economy towards a socialist future.

It was, of course, an option put down in blood with the CIA-sponsored military coup in Chile on September 11 1973. This is an event that holds great interest for me as my own country, Australia, has never been the same since our last genuinely social democratic government was also felled by a CIA-rigged constitutional coup just two years later. For an entertaining history of Project Cybersyn, I highly recommend the documentary podcast by Evgeny Morozov, The Santiago Boys.

What cybernetics has to offer

Cybernetics has more to offer than the empanadas-fueled futurism of Project Cyberyn. As a set of principles, a method of analysis and a way of working it can be a way of redesigning existing organisations, and building new organisations for workers to take power over capital.

Even as early as 1949, one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener was attempting to warn the American union movement of the dangers that “automatic machinery” posed to worker power. It was ultimately a warning that the union leaders of the time had no way of comprehending. I don’t blame them. Cybernetics has its own language and concepts that require some effort to unpack. Beer writes of matters such as oscillations, requisite variety, transduction and orthogonal relations in ways that can be confusing for new readers. I personally find the language difficult even as on reflection it makes sense at an intuitive level.

The start of Project Cyberorg

So today I’m announcing the start of a regular series of posts unpacking the concepts of managerial cybernetics and how they link to organising for worker power. I call it Project Cyberorg. The project will start with Stafford Beer’s The Heart of Enterprise. I have chosen it as it was originally published in 1979, and I feel like it represents the synthesis of Beer’s cybernetic practice with his direct experience of working with Chilean socialist government. Each post will focus on a key concept within this work, what I understand of it and (hopefully) how it relates to the present.

Let’s be clear, I am at the beginning of my learning journey here so this is not about me being “the expert”. To the extent that I bring expertise it is perhaps only my “instinctive understanding” of the matter. As Beer wrote in The Heart of Enterprise;

“[i]t has to be remarked that organised labour often appears (to me) to act with an instinctive understanding of cybernetic principles that is lacking in the boardroom”.

So hopefully this instinct helps but if you’re interested in this topic, we will either be on a learning journey together or you have something to teach me.

Project Cyberorg is likely to be a lot more sporadic than the instalments of The Solidarity Wedge (as the latter has already been drafted), so I cannot make a firm promise as to whether it will come out weekly, fortnightly or monthly. I will also put it out under The Solidarity Wedge banner as ultimately they both go to the strategy of organisation with one being more focused on the movement in the field and Project Cyberorg really being about the institutional apparatus necessary to support such work (and adapt ultimately to capitalist backlash).

So, hopefully this helps.

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