Ah that could be! Maybe a “See how cybernetics shows this kind of system is really stable and effective? Well, that’s how anarchist organizations are arranged.” That would explain entire sections dedicated to explaining very basic things but not so much as a sentence to the effect of “you’re probably thinking of computers, but this isn’t about computers.”

Please use it/its and not you/your. And yeah it was both extremely dense and just really not meant for anarchists. Again, extremely odd because it was apparently about what insights can be brought from cybernetics to anarchism. The first time it read it, it didn’t even know what was being proposed and it thought they were trying to describe how anarchists can use technology to better arrange themselves. That is, after all, what the likes of Stalinists like Paul Cockshott think when they talk about cybernetics-based socialism.

It was only by the third reading that it realized the paper was just talking about principles that cropped up from cybernetics, which usually has to do with humans interfacing with technology interfacing with humans. In this case, it was describing what those systems need to be like to interact with the world. And then, generalizing it to organizations more broadly, as a way to argue that anarchism is more effective.

Some clear thesis statement explaining all of this would not have been unwelcome. It was after that insight was unlocked that it was able to penetrate what the paper was saying on the way home from work.

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:

• An environment and a bunch of niches in that environment. That is, the world that a system interacts with and significant parts of it.
• Units that immediately interact with parts of that world, niches in that environment. These units or groupings of units can be autonomous and still be coordinated and stable provided they have some means of interacting with one another to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
• Some means of interacting with one another to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
• A mechanism that makes sure that all of the units not only align with each other, but that they are overall aligned with the system as a whole.
• A means of collecting all of that information, as well as information from the environment, and how the overall system is changing and interacting to that environment.
• A way of processing all of that information and making long-term decisions based on that information.

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.