General Intellect Unit 038 - The Viable System Model

Some notes I took as I was listening:

Stafford Beer got to some of his ideas via influence from his time in India
You could probably get to the ideas via multiple routes though, e.g. via Deleuze & Guattari.
VSM can gives you both autonomy AND cohesion
- And help avoid the tyranny of structurelessnes
- Jon Walker who writes The VSM Guide was applying VSM to coops in the UK in the 80s (including Suma)
VSM provides a framework for how organisation in communism might work, once the state has withered away
VSM can help identity what is the ACTUAL purpose of an organisation, often different to what the STATED purpose of the organisation might be. (Example: e.g. a group states their purpose is to overthrow capitalism, but empirically their actual purpose is to sit around drinking coffee.)
In VSM management becomes a function of the overall system, not an individual role attainable only by those with a class privelege.
We should think of VSM as an explicitly socialist technology.

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