You’re probably wondering what on earth a cybernetic cooperative is. Are we talking about workers’ coops in the tech sector, or maybe automation or AI in the cooperative movement? Are we on the even more fantastical ground of high-tech transhumanism and cooperatives producing science fiction-like implants? The truth of the matter is both more mundane and more revolutionary.
It is mundane, because cybernetics actually refers to the ways systems of all kinds use feedback and information to regulate themselves, from biological systems like our bodies, to social systems like how we govern our communities, and everything in between. If something takes in information about what is going on around it and within itself, and uses that information to regulate its behaviour, then it is a cybernetic system.
It may not sound it, but this is a revolutionary idea. It allows us to look at how the social systems we use to govern ourselves can be designed with self-regulation in mind. Cybernetics helps us see how radically democratic decision-making processes are vital to an organisation that can remain stable in a changing and complex world, without the need for top-down control.
International Day of Cooperatives
You might now be starting to see how cybernetics and cooperatives are connected. Cooperatives (coops for short) are ultimately a way of organising economic activity like production and the provision of services through the democratic involvement of their members. While consumer coops like the Co-op supermarket offer customers a limited say in how they are governed, worker-owned coops entail a much more direct form of collective management. The way this happens will differ from coop to coop (in the UK alone there are over 7,000 independent coops employing over 250,000 people), but at its heart this means that the people who work in an organisation will get together to decide on how it is run.
From the earliest days of the Rochdale Pioneers to the diverse coop economy today, coops have put people and communities in charge of their destinies, by giving them collective, democratic control over key parts of their lives. If we spend so much of our time at work, why shouldn’t the basic tenets of democracy that we take for granted in how society is governed apply there as well?
2 July this year was the 100th International Day of Cooperatives, and coops and the core cooperative principles are more important than ever, being recognised as integral to fairer and healthier work as well as sustainable relationships with the environment.
Cybernetics and coops
Although cybernetics, when applied to social systems and organisations, has often been put into practice by management consultants, there is a strong tradition that links together cybernetic concerns with self-regulation and alternative and radical forms of organisation.
In no small part, this is thanks to the work of Stafford Beer. From a background in the steel industry and corporate consulting, in the early 1970s Beer was recruited to advise Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, to help them redesigning the economy to make it more effective but also more democratic. Project Cybersyn, as this endeavour was called, was never to be fully realised. In September 1973, Allende’s government was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup that installed a brutal military dictatorship.
In Beer’s work in Chile, however, the seeds were sown for a radical reimagining of what cybernetics might mean for how workplaces and economic activity are organised. There were already some indications of this in anarchist engagements with cybernetics in the 1960s, but Jon Walker’s work on coops and his subsequent collaborations with Angela Espinosa and others have done the most to explore in detail what a cybernetic approach to coops might look like.
The viable system model
Inspired by Beer, Walker applied cybernetic thinking in a number of coops, emphasising the non-hierarchical and democratic potential in its understanding of self-regulation. One of the most influential examples of this is the wholefood coop Suma, the largest coop in Europe that adheres to a flat pay structure: everyone, no matter what job they are doing, earns the same.
The part of Beer’s cybernetics that Walker took into his work in helping Suma develop an organisational structure is the Viable System Model (VSM). The name might sound daunting, the technical diagrams and obscure jargon that are common to discussions of the VSM even more so. But the VSM is useful in revealing some of the fundamental building blocks of successful democratic organisation.
What Beer, and in turn Walker, did was to identify the essential functions of effective organisation. Whatever the surface appearance a system or organisation has, if it is successful in achieving its goals in a complex environment then it will have different parts that perform these essential functions. Regrettably there isn’t the space here to expand on this, but the aim of Walker’s work was to show how a coop, with a non-hierarchical and democratic system of decision making, could still perform all of these functions. With others at Suma, he helped refine how the different parts of the coop operated so that the effectiveness of these functions and the communication between them were at the fore.
The future of cybernetics
In the three decades since Walker’s work at Suma, the coop may have moved away from the explicit cybernetic approach developed by Beer, but it is still committed to democratic and non-hierarchical forms of decision making. Cybernetics and Beer’s VSM should not be read in isolation from other approaches such as sociocracy and the work of scholars such as Elinor Ostrom and Frederic Laloux. Together they form a toolkit for how organisations like worker-owned-and-managed coops best function.
Coops are incredibly well positioned to help us respond to the multiple interconnected crises we currently face. What would the cost-of-living crisis look like if wages and prices were regulated by everyone in society, not just by the bosses of energy companies and leaders of government? Would the mental health crisis exist in the way it does today if our working conditions were something we had genuine control over, and if health and social care was not only properly funded but also designed to truly benefit us rather than as a quick fix to return us to productivity in jobs we hate? Could structural racism be tackled better if we swapped out police for collaborative, consensual and community-based ways of looking after one another and guaranteeing our safety?
To meet these challenges, the coop movement not only needs more support, it also needs to be able to change and adapt to new circumstances. Cybernetics gives us a lot of the tools we need to help individual coops and the movement as a whole thrive. In its attention to effective democratic and non-hierarchical regulation, it shows us how we can collectively manage change in the face of adversity and develop the solutions we need.
Thomas Swann is a Lecturer in Political Theory at Loughborough University. He is the author of Anarchist Cybernetics: Control and Communication in Radical Politics, published by Bristol University Press, and co-author of the forthcoming Anarchic Agreements: A Field Guide to Collective Organizing, published by PM Press.
Anarchist Cybernetics: Control and Communication in Radical Politics by Thomas Swann is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £26.99.
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