Abstract:
In the early 1960s, a number of anarchist writers showed an interest in cybernetics, in which they saw the tools for better articulating radical forms of self-organisation. Discussions on the connections between anarchism and cybernetics did not advance very far, however, and by the 1970s the topic seems to have fallen off the anarchist radar. With an increase in interest in cybernetics over the last few years, this paper picks up where these debates left off and highlights some key points of contact between cybernetics and anarchism that have the potential to advance radical accounts of self-organisation. Based on a theoretical appraisal of the core texts and arguments in the debate around anarchism and cybernetics, the paper shows that the way in which hierarchy is formulated in cybernetic thought has a crucial impact on anarchist theory and practice and aids both academic approaches to social movements and, importantly, anarchist and radical left praxis. In addition, it provides a response to the critique of cybernetics in critical management studies that stands as a barrier to taking cybernetics seriously as a contribution to radical understandings of organization.
This is not very accessible as a great deal is simply left unexplained (and instead, very basic things like “ELI5 anarchism” get a whole section), but after a few reads, here’s what it seems to be saying.
There’s a field called management cybernetics, closely related to organizational cybernetics. This field was introduced by Stafford Beer. The field takes important cybernetic principles and uses them as inspiration for how to think about organizations. The fact that these principles are important in cybernetics seems to be where the relationship to cybernetics begins and ends. From there you can just ignore cybernetics and focus on these principles and the model that was formed out of them.
For a system to remain internally stable and adaptive to a changing context, it must be flexible, autonomous.
Such a principle apparently leads to a particular model, which describes systems that are internally stable and adaptive. It’s known as the Viable System Model. In the VSM, you have:
The environment is just called the environment. The rest of these bulletpoints are subsystems of the overall system (they’re just numbered in the paper, system one, system two, etc.). This understanding of systems can also be applied to organizations, which are systems. And for organizational anarchists, this is important. That is the thesis of the paper.
Then the paper talks about how one criticism is that this appears to be anti-anarchist because it proposes a description of a system at the top of the organization that decides strategy, and a bunch of systems at the bottom who have to follow that strategy, that sorta thing. This criticism can be defanged, so says the paper, because this model doesn’t describe the structure of the organization. Instead, it describes a hierarchy of plans and actions. So rather than a group of individuals at the top of an organization dominating groups of individuals at the bottom, you instead have high-level decisions which constrain and control low-level decisions. You can still have a totally horizontal organization do this.
The paper only notes that for an organization to be viable–that is, be flexible enough to adapt while being stable enough to stay true to its ends–decisions and actions must follow this structure.
it’s gotta say, as a thing that is sympathetic to especifismo strategies, it’s pretty ambivalent about this. There are, on the one hand, a lot of connections between the VSM and especifismo. The VSM is largely just a description of a unity of strategies and tactics. If you take a look at the VSM diagram in this paper and the diagram for Rosa Negra’s program in “Turning the Tide,” you’ll find they’re easy to map onto each other.
But really only if you take some liberties and are looking for it. There are some huge differences, and the differences basically inform all of its criticisms of what this paper is proposing. For instance, the sub-system dedicated to processing all of the information and making huge decisions is not really broken down further. So, the ultimate objective, the general strategy, and the structural analysis are all rolled into one sub-system, which can be influenced by every other sub-system. How are we preventing instability then? For especifismo, what cybernetics calls ‘stability’ is obtained through having ultimate ends that can’t be interacted with, and a structural analysis that can’t be interacted with (something it has critiqued elsewhere in its post history, but ignore that for now).
How does the VSM solve the problems it purports to solve? This paper doesn’t make it clear, even though that is, like, the main thesis of the paper. If there’s a mechanism by which the units interacting with niches can influence the very highest level of decision-making, can’t the organization be influenced by the niches to become liberalized?
This could honestly be elaborated on in a whole post unto itself. So it’ll cut itself short there and resign to having explained the paper. But yeah, not sure if this paper is teaching us something useful. Though it is interesting (if rather inaccessible and overwhelmingly inter-disciplinary with little contextualization), and interesting things often lead to useful things down the line.