Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics by Troy Vettese & Drew Pendergrass

Author:Troy Vettese & Drew Pendergrass [Vettese, Troy & Pendergrass, Drew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non-fiction, environment, politics, economics
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2021-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

Hold My Beer

It is at this point that we turn to another planning theorist to help us imagine our scientific utopia – Stafford Beer. Like Wiener, Beer was keenly read by his Soviet peers, but Beer was an unusual cybernetician in his deep commitment to democratic control systems.78 He was not a typical socialist but looked the part of a 1970s business hippie – being a management consultant with a beard of biblical proportions – but he was far more like Neurath and Kantorovich than like Stewart Brand or Ed Bass. Beer believed that controlling ‘exceedingly complex systems … indescribable in detail’ was the central problem of the mid-twentieth century.79 This might sound Hayekian, but Beer distinguished himself from the neoliberals in believing that such systems could be controlled – even something as complicated as the economy – so long as the controller was itself complex enough to fairly represent the system. In cybernetics, this is known as the law of requisite variety.80

Acting on this intuition, Beer developed a management architecture called the viable system model in the early 1970s. The details are complicated, but the basic principle is that planning could be performed by a five-part, loosely hierarchical system.81 As historian Eden Medina describes it, the first level of the system is the ‘sensory level’, similar to the parts of the body in contact with the outside environment.82 Just as lungs breathe without conscious intervention, nodes on the first level usually operate without much input from the rest of the system. Individual groups of workers are capable of managing their own affairs, as the heart, lungs, and liver do. The second level is a support system for level one, which Medina calls the ‘cybernetic spinal cord’, connecting the different nodes on level one together in communication. The main purpose of the second level is to help organize level one’s activity, allowing the different nodes to ‘coordinate their actions and adapt to one another’s behavior’, as well as filtering out important information to send up to level three.83 This third level was likened by Beer to the parts of the brain that regulate basic bodily function, the brainstem and cerebellum, in that it manages the operation of the first two levels. The third level has access to a detailed picture of daily activity and can thus co-ordinate the actions of the nodes on the first level, intervene when necessary, and send important information up to the fourth and fifth levels of the system.

The fourth level is where Gosplant would live, as it is where medium- and long-term plans are devised. As Medina notes, because daily management is affected by plans with a longer horizon, ‘Beer did not see System Four as the boss of System Three but rather as its partner in an ongoing conversation.’84 The highest level unifies the entire system and consciously intervenes in emergencies. Perhaps most importantly for us, Beer’s model exemplifies the promise of using control theory to organize an economy at multiple levels, without relying solely on optimization, and avoiding Soviet cybernetics’ tendency towards rigidity.

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