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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I've seen Beer and management theory in general cited by a number of lefty philosophers, is he worth reading or all nonsense? In particular is he worthwhile if I explicitly don't have an interest in economic rationalization?
Yes! He's well worth reading imo, but be ready for confusion and re-reading parts several times to understand it. Designing Freedom is easy to get ahold of, and an easier read. The Brain of the Firm is difficult to get a copy cheap (ebook versions are all crappy PDFs), and it's a bit of a slog to read through, but it's very interesting. It's organizational theory that's very dense and often difficult to grasp at first, but still worth the trouble of reading and trying to make sense of. I do have a physical copy I had to pay way too much for, and awhile back I tried started a project to make a proper ebook version of it, but abandoned it because I didn't think many people would be interested. I scanned one of the crappy PDF copies and transcribed it with software, but there are a lot of errors so much of what I did was manually reviewing it and fixing issues I find. At some point I'd also need to scan all the figures/charts separately and include those somewhere, and then somehow correctly convert it all to HTML. Might be quicker using chatGPT, but I'd have to go back and look at what is all left. Maybe it's worth revisiting?
This video is potato quality but a good short intro to Cybersyn and his ideas generally, and there's more in the playlist: https://youtu.be/e_bXlEvygHg?list=PLJIs9OvcbZKvyDwr6267Kw9iB3cxitt5U
Also General Intellect Unit podcast has a pretty in depth 45 part series on Brain of the Firm. This is the first episode: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/b01-brain-of-the-firm-chapter-1/
how does paul cockshotts work figure into this? his name was also associated with cybersyn.
appreciate the resources!
No problem! To my knowledge, I don't think Cockshott was associated with the Cybersyn project, but his name is associated with socialist cybernetics generally. I'd say the difference between them is that Beer's work is more concerned with broad ideas of system design and how systems work (especially the Viable System Model), while Cockshott's work is more of a grab bag of ideas to implement in a hypothetical socialist society. I haven't listened to or read everything of Cockshott though so maybe I'm not giving him a fair shake, but that's my impression based on what I have seen of his so far.
Oh also, while it's not as in depth as Beer's stuff and is a little lib in some parts, The People's Republic of Walmart is a great book imo as an introduction to socialist economic planning and how it could work with modern tech. I'd definitely recommend it if you're looking for good intro material about the topic.
Could I ask, how verbose or technical is Beer's stuff? I am more a natural sciences rather than a math/cs kinda person. Do you think for someone with a passing understanding there would be much to get out of it?
It is technical and uses a lot of unfamiliar terminology, but I would think a background in natural sciences would lend itself well to his work considering it’s based around systems and how they interact, and often uses natural systems as a reference. This is also I think where the name “Brain of the Firm” comes from. From the “viable system model” Wikipedia page:
You've given me some calm, ok, I'll definitely try to go through at least some of it :3