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com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Received: 25 May 2022 Revised: 18 September 2022 Accepted: 21 September 2022
DOI: 10.1002/sres.2911

RESEARCH PAPER

Alexander Bogdanov, Stafford Beer and intimations of a

post-capitalist future

Michael C. Jackson

Centre for Systems Studies, University of

Hull, Hull, UK Abstract
Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was a Russian social theorist and revolution-
Correspondence
ary activist whose ‘universal organizational science’, or Tektology, is increas-
Michael C. Jackson, Centre for Systems
Studies, University of Hull, Hull HU6 ingly being recognized as offering stronger foundations for the systems
7RX, UK. approach than the later ‘general system theory’ of Ludwig von Bertalanffy.
Email: m.c.jackson@hull.ac.uk
Had his thinking not been suppressed by Stalin, the course of Soviet history
might have been different. Stafford Beer (1926–2002) was a British manage-
ment scientist and consultant who was a pioneer in the development of ‘orga-
nizational cybernetics’. His best-known engagement was with the government
of Salvador Allende, in Chile, seeking to use his ‘viable system model’ to cre-
ate a socialist society that did not rest on a command economy. This experi-
ment was cut short by the Pinochet coup d'etat. I have found no evidence that
Beer was familiar with the work of Bogdanov, and this makes the similarities
in their thinking particularly striking. This paper explores the ideas they
shared in common. The work of other writers who have drawn on the work of
Bogdanov and Beer, in formulating contemporary visions of post-capitalism, is
highlighted.

KEYWORDS
Beer, Bogdanov, cybernetics, post-capitalism, Tektology

1 | INTRODUCTION capitalism, and I draw them directly from my reading of

Slava Maracha (2019) suggested connecting Bogdanov's
and Beer's ideas on organization, viability and national
economic planning with a view to developing a ‘third-
order’ cybernetics that could address the social and
humanitarian issues faced in ‘polysubject socio-economic
and socio-cultural systems’. I have (Jackson, 2021) been
seeking to develop Maracha's agenda by identifying and
fleshing out the close similarities in their work. This
paper is the culmination of that endeavour. I believe that
each of the similarities is worthy of more research and
development, and my hope is that other scholars will
explore further and go deeper. The similarities I concen-
trate on are those most relevant to the concept of post-
what is important in the work of Bogdanov and Beer. No
other methodological tool has been used to unearth
them. The next section considers commonalities in the
underlying philosophies embraced by Bogdanov and
Beer. This is followed by sections on their understanding
of the relationship between science and socialism; on
their conceptions of Tektology and organizational cyber-
netics; on their visions of an alternative type of socialist
society; and on the importance they attached to cultural
as well as economic and political development in such a
society. Another section pursues the argument by looking
at criticisms of the work of Bogdanov and Beer. A final
section briefly considers how others have taken forward
their ideas as an inspiration when considering what a

Syst Res Behav Sci. 2022;1–15. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sres © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1

2 JACKSON
post-capitalist society might be like. A short conclusion
follows and poses a serious question to the reader.
2 | U N D E R LY IN G P H I LO S O P H I E S
Bogdanov1 was a Marxist committed to revolutionary
change in Russia through the action of the proletariat.
He was convinced, however, that Marxism had to learn
from and continually develop itself in the light of other
philosophies and new scientific discoveries. He was
heavily influenced by the philosophy of ‘empiriocriti-
cism’ advanced by Ernst Mach, an Austrian ‘natural sci-
entist turned philosopher’ (Passmore, 1968). Bogdanov
inherited from Mach a greater appreciation of the role of
ideas in social development than was common in the
orthodox Marxism of the time. Plekhanov and Lenin, the
guardians of ‘true Marxism’ in Russia, saw Bogdanov as
an apostate. For them, Marxism was an objective science
providing access to immutable laws. One of the most
important of these laws assigned primacy to the ‘material
basis’ of society in driving historical change. Bogdanov's
embrace of ‘Machism’ was seen as an abandonment of
Marxist materialism in favour of idealism. Lenin eventu-
ally succeeded in sidelining Bogdanov in the Bolshevik
party and Stalin completed the job by writing him out of
history entirely. In retrospect, we can view Bogdanov as a
champion of the more humanistic and pragmatic form of
Marxism advocated by Marx himself in his early work—
unknown at the time—and as a forerunner of the ‘critical
theory’ of the Frankfurt School. Bogdanov's perspective
on socialism is well captured in this quotation:
Thus the general characteristics of the social-
ist system, the highest stage of society we can
conceive are: power over nature, organisation,
socialness, freedom, and progress.
(Bogdanov, 1919, Chapter X, italics in the
original)
It was a system that would allow people to realize
their potential through labour at the same time as con-
sciously contributing to the fullness and harmony of
social life.
Turning to the work of Beer, although his best-known
consultancy assignment was for Salvador Allende, the
Marxist President of Chile, he was not himself a Marxist.
For example, while he supported the role of government
as regulator of the economy, he did not necessarily feel
that it had to nationalize the whole of industry (Beer,
1
White's (2018) biography provides an excellent introduction to
Bogdanov's life and thought.
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1974a, p. 45). However, Beer's own reference point for a
better society, Aristotle's concept of Eudaimonia, led him
to many radical conclusions similar to those endorsed by
Marxists of Bogdanov's ilk. He invokes the idea of ‘eude-
mony’ in a number of his publications (e.g., Beer, 1974b,
1975, 1981, 1989a), meaning by it the capacity of individ-
uals to achieve well-being, flourish, attain satisfaction
and fulfil their potential. It is the highest human good,
the kind of happiness obtained by undertaking virtuous
activity freely for its own sake, and as an integral part of
a good life. It does not include, for example, the pursuit
of money, even if that then opens up opportunities to do
other things. As Beer puts it:
Money is terribly important, both to those
paying and to those paid. But money is none-
theless an epiphenomenon of a system which
actually runs on eudemony. It is for this rea-
son that I have come to see money as a con-
straint on the behaviour of eudemonic
systems, rather than to see eudemony as a
by-product of monetary systems. (Beer, 1975,
p. 170)
It has been noted (Gross, 2020) that eudemony, on
Beer's understanding, is the opposite of the ‘alienation’
Marx condemned in capitalist society. Eudemony
demands that alienation is abolished. For the maximum
number of people to achieve happiness, society must be
organized so that individuals can fulfil their potential
while, at the same time, contributing to the common
good. Clearly, eudemony is difficult to achieve where
hierarchy and bureaucracy are the norm. Hence, Beer's
warm embrace of Allende's insistence that his work be
‘decentralizing, worker-participative, and antibureau-
cratic’ (Beer, 1981, p.257). As he wrote,
In Chile, I know that I am making the maxi-
mum effort towards the devolution of power.
The government made their revolution about
it; I find it good cybernetics. (Beer, 1975,
p. 428)
He believed that cybernetic arrangements could be
put in place that would enable individuals to feel in con-
trol of and fulfilled in their working lives, at whatever
level they were operating. ‘Algedonic’ (pain/pleasure)
signalling devices could be devised through which the
population could continuously call government to
account in terms of whether its decisions were increasing
or decreasing eudemony. Eudemony also demands that
workers material needs are met and that they benefit
fairly from their labour. This is obviously impossible,

JACKSON
Beer (1974a) argues, if large disparities of wealth exist at
the national and global levels. Excessive consumerism is
another block on the achievement of eudemony in a
society.
A shared pragmatist orientation explains further simi-
larities in the work of Bogdanov and Beer. Bogdanov was
a near contemporary of the three founding fathers of
American Pragmatism—Peirce, James and Dewey. Like
Bogdanov, the pragmatists, through James, were heavily
influenced by Mach. I have written elsewhere, in this
issue (Jackson, 2023), about the many commonalities in
the work of Bogdanov and the pragmatist philosophers.
Fundamentally, they see ‘truth’ not as some search for
‘eternal wisdom’ but as something that successfully
serves human activity in a particular historical context.
Bogdanov puts it like this:
Thus, philosophical truth is a tool for living,
as are all other truths. It is a tool for the gen-
eral guidance of human practice, just as a
compass and geographical chart are tools for
guidance on journeys. (Bogdanov, 2016,
p. 13; italics in the original)
Beer did not explicitly endorse pragmatism. He saw
himself (Beer, 1966) as constructing rigorous scientific
models which were capable of being verified or falsified
according to traditional scientific procedures. Most advo-
cates of his ‘viable system model’ (VSM) follow Beer's
interpretation. Schwaninger and Scheef (2016), for exam-
ple, derive eight hypotheses from VSM theory and seek
to verify them using questionnaire findings from a large
sample of firms. Pickering (2010), however, provides an
alternative and, for me, more convincing reading. His
study of British cybernetics highlights pragmatist themes
in the writings of Walter, Ashby, Pask, Beer, Bateson and
Laing. He argues that they developed their work on the
basis of a distinctive philosophy which has particular
resemblances to the pragmatism of James. They
embraced what Pickering calls a ‘performative idiom’.
They viewed the human brain not as a cognitive organ
seeking true representations of reality but as an ‘embod-
ied organ’ that has evolved to help human beings find
their way in a world they can never fully know. It follows
that knowledge is not something fixed but always in the
making, emerging from interactions between systems
and forever leaving new things to be discovered. Focusing
on Beer's thinking, designing an organization according
to the VSM serves the purpose of allowing it to co-evolve
with its environment and explore the possibilities that
become available to it. The organization becomes capable
of continuous learning as the context evolves. This, as we
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3
will see, seems more in keeping with the way Beer thinks
about and uses the VSM in his later work.
Another feature of pragmatism is a willingness to
take epistemological shortcuts. In developing his Tektol-
ogy, Bogdanov did not feel he had to start from scratch.
There was much to learn from organizational forms in
the physical and biological domains:
Nature is the first and the greatest organizer;
and a human being is only one of its orga-
nized creations. The simplest living cell,
observable only when magnified a thousand
times by a microscope, far exceeds every-
thing that man is able to organize in terms of
the complexity and perfection of its organiza-
tion. Man is just the student of nature, and
so far a poor one. (Bogdanov, 1989, p. 5)
Beer (1966, Chapter 2) was not an avowed pragmatist,
but he did follow Peirce's account of the scientific method
and, in particular, agreed on the importance of ‘abduc-
tive reasoning’. On Beer's interpretation, this refers to
the process of framing imaginative hypotheses when
there is incomplete information available at the begin-
ning of a scientific investigation. Beer's creativity in this
respect was remarkable. He saw that he could shortcut
the task of building a representational model of a firm
by borrowing one from another domain—the rigorous
model, developed in neurophysiology, to explain the
workings of the human body and nervous system
(Beer, 1972). In creating ‘team syntegrity’, Beer (1994)
employed the geometrical form of the icosahedron as a
model for the arrangements necessary to promote dem-
ocratic, participatory decision-making in the social
domain. Here again, Bogdanov and Beer are on the
same page.
3 | SC IENCE A ND S OC I ALISM
The ‘first Bolshevik utopia’, envisaged by Bogdanov
(1984a) in his science fiction novel Red Mars, is made
possible through ‘the dual victory of the scientific-
technical revolution and the social revolution’
(Stites, 1984). The changes necessary for the scientific-
technical revolution to serve the social revolution are
described in his other science fiction novel Engineer
Menni (Bogdanov, 1984b). Netti, an engineer, is forced to
explain how workers can come to understand science
and technology sufficiently so that they can escape the
tutelage of experts and take their destiny into their own
hands. He answers:

4 JACKSON
Brother, you have touched a sore spot. Thus
far science is the weapon of our enemies. We
will triumph when we have made it our
weapon …. Modern science is just like the
society that has created it: powerful but
splintered …. Each branch has its special lan-
guage which is the privilege of the initiated
and serves to exclude everyone else …. Such
as it is today it is worthless to the working
class, both because it is too difficult and
because it is inadequate. The proletariat
must master it by changing it. In the hands
of the workers it must become simpler, more
harmonious and vital. Its fragmentation
must be overcome, it must be brought closer
to the labor that is its primary source.
(Bogdanov, 1984b, pp. 186–187)
By the end of the novel, through an encyclopedic
study of the specialist sciences, Netti has made his ‘great-
est discovery’—‘Universal Organizational Science’,
essentially Bogdanov's Tektology. As the narrator puts it,
Finally he arrived at the following conclu-
sion: no matter how different the various ele-
ments of the Universe—electrons, atoms,
things, people, ideas, planets, stars—and
regardless of the considerable differences in
their combinations, it is possible to establish
a small number of general methods by which
any of these elements joins with another,
both in spontaneous natural processes and in
human activity …. Thanks to this, when the
time came for the radical reformation of the
entire social order, even the most serious dif-
ficulties of the new organization could be
overcome relatively easily and quite system-
atically … now Universal Science became a
tool in the scientific construction of social
life as a whole. (Bogdanov, 1984b, p. 232)
Bogdanov believed that an educated proletariat could
free itself from dependence on an unreliable intelligentsia
and develop the organizational skills necessary to usher
in and run a socialist society. He wrote books seeking to
make Marxist economics accessible (Bogdanov, 1919),
engaged in collaborative study circles with workers and
organized Bolshevik Part schools (Tompsett, 2019;
White, 2018). In his conception, technical developments
meant that workers were increasingly becoming over-
seers of machines rather than simple manual labourers.
Tektology sought to provide them with simplified scien-
tific tools, based on the entire organizational experience
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of humankind, so that they could extend that experience
to whole factories and to society at large. They could
become ‘world-builders’.
Beer believed that, if the revolution in Chile was to be
as ‘decentralizing, worker-participative, and antibureau-
cratic’ as Allende and he envisaged, then the societary
use of science and technology had to stop being oppres-
sive and alienating and become a liberation: It had to
become ‘science in the service of man’ (Beer, 1974a,
Chapter IV). For this to happen, science and technology
had to be removed from the control of those who alone
could afford to finance its development and vested in the
people through their democratic processes:
Hence if science has been sequestered, it
must be wrenched back and used by the peo-
ple whose heritage it is, not simply surren-
dered to oppressors who blatantly use it to
fabricate tools of further oppression (whether
bellicose or economic). (Beer, 1981, p. 287)
Beer suggests that ordinary citizens would do well to
contemplate and discuss this proposition:
For the first time in the history of man sci-
ence can do whatever can be exactly speci-
fied. Then, also for the first time, we do not
have to be scientists to understand what can
be done. It follows that we are no longer at
the mercy of a technocracy which alone can
tell us what to do. Our job is to start specify-
ing. (Beer, 1974a, p. 56)
Looking back at the work in Chile, Beer cannot recol-
lect any core group discussion that did not focus on the
needs of the people and, whenever relevant, seek to
ensure that ‘the potency of science, and skills of technol-
ogy, were to be aligned in their service’ (Beer, 1981,
p. 260). As the project moved on, from purely economic
to broader societary concerns, it became even more
important to debunk the mystery surrounding scientific
work. Beer and his team felt that they were beginning to
understand the cybernetics of government and were able
to capture them in a manual of five principles,
… but now it needed translating into simple
statements that could be distributed to the
people through booklets, leaflets, posters,
and (I hoped) songs. (Beer, 1981, p. 289)
He produced a booklet called ‘Five Principles for the
People, towards Good Government’ (Beer, 1981, pp. 291–
305). It begins with the statement that ‘IT IS TIME for

JACKSON
the revolution of government to begin’ and ends with the
injunction that ‘IF THE GOVERNMENT IS THE PEO-
PLE THE REVOLUTION OF GOVERNMENT STARTS
WITH YOU’ (capitals and emphases in the original).
4 | TEKTOLOGY AND
ORGANIZATIONAL C YBERNETIC S
Both Bogdanov and Beer sought to make a decisive break
from mechanistic thinking by developing an organiza-
tional understanding of the world. In doing so, they drew
heavily upon biology. For Bogdanov,
Society constitutes not a mechanical group-
ing of elements but a living system whose
parts are situated in an organic interconnec-
tedness among themselves. Each social form
that appears as one of these parts is, in its
turn, made up of large number of elements
that are organically interconnected among
themselves but also possess a certain living
independence (Bogdanov, 2020, p. 306).
White (2018, pp. 446-447) points to a late work of
Bogdanov's, The Struggle for Viability, published in 1927,
in which he describes how the human body functions in
terms which echo his writings on the planned economy.
Similarly, Beer states that
The vision I am trying to create for you is of
an economy that works like our own bodies.
There are nerves extending from the govern-
mental brain throughout the country, accept-
ing information continuously (Beer, 1974a,
p. 43).
We have already noted how Beer (1972) drew upon
neurophysiology to develop an analogy between the man-
ner in which the human brain and body function and the
way a firm works. Sharing this biological orientation,
Bogdanov and Beer inevitably have in common a concern
with how the ‘complexes’ or ‘systems’ they study interact
with their environments and how environmental change
forces systems to adapt or die.
Bogdanov took the word tektology from the German
naturalist Ernst Haeckel but extended its use beyond the
biological realm. He saw the universe in terms of ‘an
endless flow of organising activity’, stretching from ‘a
chaotic mass of elements of an infinitely low degree of
organisation’, through primitively organized inorganic
matter, through different forms of life displaying various
levels of organization, to the human collective that is
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5
potentially capable of ‘world-building’ (Bogdanov, 2016,
pp. 232–233). In summary,
This picture presents the universe to us as an
uninterrupted chain of development of forms
that proceed along a path of struggle and
reciprocal action from the lowest levels of
organisation to the highest. (Bogdanov, 2016,
p. 235)
For Bogdanov, Tektology was the universal science of
organization, embracing all the methods of organization
that nature has worked out, systematizing them and per-
fecting those necessary for humans to assume mastery
over the forces of nature and ‘the socially organized ele-
ments of the universe’ (Bogdanov, 2016, p. 233). He had
no doubt, on the basis of the countless analogies he found
between the systems investigated by the specialist sci-
ences, that the development of a monistic science was
possible. Nor did he doubt that it would be life changing
for the human species:
There exist general methods and natural regu-
larities according to which the most varied ele-
ments of the universe are organized into
complexes. This proposition provides the
basis for the great new science …. With the
help of this new science, humanity will be
able systematically and comprehensively to
organize its creative powers, its life ….
(Bogdanov, 2016, p. 247, italics in the
original).
Bogdanov called the basic unit of organization a
‘complex’. A complex is made up of ‘elements’ which,
from a narrower perspective, can themselves be viewed
as complexes. If the ‘resistance’ of these elements can be
overcome, and they are appropriately organized, the com-
plex becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No two
complexes are exactly the same but, whether natural,
technical, social, cognitive or aesthetic, they all follow
identical laws of organization and disorganization
(Bogdanov, 1989, p. 1). Complexes can join together
through a process of ‘conjugation’ in which linkages are
established between them and a ‘chain connection’ of
complexes is formed. However, there will always be ten-
sions that can lead to the disintegration of complexes and
the formation of ‘tectological boundaries’ between them.
All complexes exist in a dynamic interplay with an envi-
ronment of other complexes.
The practical pay-off from Tektology is that it pro-
vides humans with the knowledge necessary to organize
complexes better. The key regulative mechanism for

6 JACKSON
Bogdanov, determining whether complexes survive or
dissipate, is ‘selection’. He extends this biological notion,
derived from Darwin and Spencer, to refer to the ability
of all complexes to maintain productive interchanges
with their environments by adapting to changing circum-
stances. Successful complexes are able to establish an
active, moving ‘dynamic equilibrium’ with their
environments:
Now we approach a new understanding of
selection, based on the idea of dynamic equi-
librium and deviations from it. This scheme
is broader and deeper; it covers both the pro-
gressive development of complexes and their
relative downfall; it decomposes the pro-
cesses of conservation and destruction into
their elements. (Bogdanov, 1989, p. 194)
To achieve a state of dynamic equilibrium, it is impor-
tant for complexes to exhibit the degree of organizational
‘plasticity’ appropriate to the environment in which they
find themselves. In general terms, ‘favourable conditions
of life’ call for a ‘federalist structure which maximizes
opportunities for growth and diversification’. This
requires flexible rules and regulations and looser connec-
tions between elements so that they can be quickly
regrouped. This enables transition to a new equilibrium
as required. On the other hand, such flexibility is danger-
ous in unfavourable situations. Here, a ‘centralistic’
structure is more appropriate (Bogdanov, 1989, pp. 255–
256). Additional forms of ‘regulation’ are also necessary
to ensure the ‘stability of forms’. External regulation is
required to ensure that processes operate at the level nec-
essary to serve other elements and the whole
(Medvedeva, 2020, p. 2146). ‘Bi-regulators’ can be
designed for some processes so that ‘there is no need of
an external regulator because the system regulates itself’
(Bogdanov, quoted in Gorelik, 1983, p. 43). This idea, of
course, anticipates Wiener's concept of negative feedback.
Bogdanov provides the self-steering mechanism of a tor-
pedo as an example (see White, 2018, p. 304).
Numerous factors threaten the capacity of a complex
to maintain dynamic equilibrium. Complexes show a nat-
ural tendency to grow and become differentiated. How-
ever, any process of growth through conjugation is
fraught with difficulties because of the counteracting
forces that inevitably ensue. Differentiation makes it dif-
ficult to co-ordinate the interrelationships between ele-
ments with different functions and can lead to
contradictions, instability and particular elements break-
ing away. Of particular importance, in Bogdanov's
scheme, is his ‘law of the leasts’. Because of the chain
connections between elements, the ability of a complex
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to survive and change depends on the stability of its
weakest link. Too much pressure imposed on a chain will
cause it to break at its weakest link.
Beer's preferred definition of cybernetics is ‘the sci-
ence of effective organization’ (Beer, 1974a, p. 13). This
science, he thought, is neglected by those who run orga-
nizations because they believe their own organizations
are unique. The results are bizarre:
Our institutions are failing because they are
disobeying laws of effective organization
which their administrators do not know
about, to which indeed their cultural mind is
closed, because they contend that there exists
and can exist no science competent to dis-
cover those laws. (Beer, 1974a, p. 19)
Beer echoes Bogdanov, and his Tektology, in regard-
ing organizational cybernetics—and the laws of feedback
control, information flow and variety which are part of
it—as being of perfect generality. It is applicable to
mechanical and biological systems, organizations of all
types and sizes, governments and transnational arrange-
ments. The richest expression of organizational cybernet-
ics is Beer's ‘viable system model’ (VSM).2 Beer initially
developed this model using a biological analogy
(Beer, 1972). Later (Beer, 1979), he derived it fully from
cybernetic first principles, demonstrating that it is equally
relevant to all kinds of system, including social organiza-
tions. The VSM is a highly practical model (Beer, 1985)
which is designed to enable managers to diagnose faults
in existing organizations and design new ones that will
prove viable and effective.
As with Bogdanov's ‘complexes’, Beer sees the viabil-
ity of systems as depending on their establishing appro-
priate relationships with their environments and on the
proper functioning of their parts. An organization must
learn to co-evolve with its environment, exploring the
possibilities offered and adapting itself as necessary. To
do this, it needs to match the ‘variety’ of the
environment—a difficult task given the environment's
huge complexity. The organization will have to engage in
‘variety engineering’. For example, determining its iden-
tity reduces environmental variety by suggesting what
aspects of the environment it needs to pay attention
to. An important way of increasing its own variety is by
delegating responsibility, permitting operational prob-
lems to be addressed as closely as possible to the point
where they manifest themselves. This leaves senior
2
For the differences between ‘management’ and ‘organizational’
cybernetics, and the St. Gallen variant of organizational cybernetics, see
Jackson, 2019.

JACKSON
management free to concentrate on strategic matters.
Appropriate delegation is facilitated by the ‘recursive’
nature of the VSM. Complex systems are seen as consist-
ing of viable systems nested in viable systems nested in
viable systems. As with a series of Russian dolls, they
retain the same basic organizational form even though
they may differ a little in the detail. The VSM can, there-
fore, be used to model the subsystems of an organization
and the sub-subsystems, ensuring that they too are viable
and capable of autonomous action.
Providing the operational parts of an organization
with the autonomy to respond to environmental variety
solves one problem for senior managers but creates
another. There is a danger that the organization will fall
apart. The VSM claims to provide a solution that grants
the maximum autonomy possible to the operations that
is consistent with overall systemic cohesion. The model
does this through its arrangement of five functional ele-
ments, Systems 1–5, linked by carefully designed infor-
mation flows. These are shown in Figure 1. System
1 consists of the various parts of the organization (A–D)
concerned with implementation. Each part is designed
F I G U R E 1 The five functional elements in
Beer's VSM and the linkages between them
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7
according to the VSM, with its own localized manage-
ment (1A–1D), to ensure that it is viable in its own right.
Systems 2–5 serve System 1. System 2, co-ordination,
ensures that the parts of System 1 do not tread on each
other's toes. System 3, operational control, ensures syn-
ergy by agreeing targets with the parts of System 1 that
are compatible with the overall purpose of the organiza-
tion and negotiating the resources to achieve those tar-
gets. Once this ‘resource bargain’ is struck, System
3 steps back, auditing System 1 just to ensure that the tar-
gets are being realized and agreed procedures followed
(System 3*). It only intervenes directly in the case of
emergencies, taking corrective action itself or letting
senior management know of urgent problems through an
accelerated information link called, by Beer, an ‘algedo-
nic’ (pain/pleasure) channel (not shown in Figure 1).
While Systems 1–3 concentrate on the ‘inside and now’,
maximizing the performance of the organization as cur-
rently constituted, System 4, development, focuses on the
‘outside and future’, making the case for innovation and
change in response to what is happening externally. It
serves System I by ensuring the continued relevance of

8 JACKSON
System 1 activities. System 5, policy, is responsible for rec-
onciling the potentially antagonistic demands made by
Systems 3 and 4, and articulating the identity of the
whole system to the wider system of which it is part.
As does Bogdanov, Beer (1989b) pays particular atten-
tion to the ‘pathologies’ that can impact system viability.
An organization is in trouble if System 5 does not
embody the purposes of the whole system. A system can
die if any of the five necessary functions is missing
and/or the appropriate information flows are not well
designed. The necessary functions have to be balanced.
For example, an organization that does not allow suffi-
cient autonomy to System 1 will lack the capacity to
manage environmental variety. One that grants too much
will lack overall coherence, drift and splinter. An organi-
zation that is System 4 dominated will be subject to
‘flights of imagination’. An organization that is System
3 dominated will suffer from ‘narrow tunnel’ syndrome
and be incapable of recognizing and adapting to changes
in the environment. Further, an organization that allows
any of Systems 2–4 to develop a life of its own, at the
expense of serving the needs of System 1, will be threat-
ened by the dead hand of bureaucracy.
5 | V I S I O N S O F SO C I A L I S T
SOCIETY
Bogdanov outlined his vision for the organization of the
economy under socialism in two lectures delivered in
1921, reported by Dzarasov (1998), White (2018) and
Stokes (2015), and in the ‘addenda’ to his Tektology, Book
1 (Bogdanov, 1989). It is a planned economy governed by
the scientific principles of Tektology:
But it is evident that the task on the whole,
its complexity and difficulty, is completely
solvable tektologically. Apparently it is solv-
able only tektologically. (Bogdanov, 1989,
p. 307)
The overall purpose of the social economy is to satisfy
the existing and future human requirements of the popu-
lation. All the sectors of the economy are seen as interde-
pendent and must be linked in a causal chain to attain
this end. As ever with Tektology, maintaining the equi-
librium of the social economy is seen as essential. This
can be ensured if each of its elements gets, by distribu-
tion, what is necessary for it to fulfil the productive func-
tion demanded of it. Enterprises must receive the means
to meet current production targets and to further develop
their capacities. Workers should get what is necessary for
them to deliver their manpower and additional consumer
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goods as the economy allows. Those who cannot work,
such as the disabled, also have to be catered for. A statis-
tical calculation is initially made of what is required from
all the different sectors of the economy—energy, iron,
fuel, food, and so forth—to produce that equilibrium.
The current capacity of the economy to deliver is simi-
larly calculated. The nature of the feedback information,
positive or negative, is used to plan appropriate action. If
the economy can achieve more than the norm established
at the beginning of the planning process, resources will
be set aside for further investment. If the economy is fail-
ing to deliver, then production must be regenerated
according to the ‘law of the leasts’. Those sectors of the
economy lagging behind, and constraining further devel-
opment, must receive priority attention so that the whole
economy can move forward in harmony. While Bogda-
nov's scheme requires centralized direction, he was clear
that the management of the means for its achievement
should rest at the sector and enterprise levels.
Beer's vision for a society promoting eudemony is out-
lined in Designing Freedom (1974). In his view, the job of
a government is to operate a country as a machine in the
service of individual freedom. Designing a ‘Liberty
Machine’ of this type requires a model that maintains
overall cohesion while encouraging localized initiative. It
must dispense with centralization, bureaucracy and lags
in information transmission. The VSM, Beer insists, is
just such a model. It makes it possible to design govern-
ment as a system that has liberty as its output. Looking
specifically at the economy, it should be designed as a
dynamic system of dynamic systems at different levels of
recursion—ministry, sectors, enterprises and so on. All
these nested systems themselves need to meet the
requirements specified by the VSM to ensure they are
capable of independent action. Each level needs a ‘brain’
equipped with a control room receiving real-time infor-
mation, internal and external, relevant to its domain of
activity. To prevent information overload, computer pro-
grams are employed to analyse data and extract vital
information for the different levels. Lower levels are
expected to act on the information they receive, for exam-
ple, to take corrective action if things are not going to
plan, and higher levels only become involved in cases of
persistent failure to act or in emergencies immediately
impacting their own functioning. The normal operation
of Systems 2–5, at each level of recursion, ensures cohe-
sion throughout the whole system. It is worth noting
that, while the concept of recursion is implicit in Bogda-
nov's work, it is not developed as fully as in Beer's.
Bogdanov was unable to directly oversee his vision
being put into practice, but his ideas were influential, fol-
lowing the 1917 revolution, simply because there were no
other established model of how to manage a socialist

JACKSON
economy. Bukharin, the leading Marxist theoretician at
the time, accepted Bogdanov's argument that the econ-
omy should be developed as a system in equilibrium with
particular attention given to its most backward parts.
Belykh notes that
The conception of a balanced development
of the economy was reflected in the direc-
tives of the Fifteenth Congress of the Com-
munist Party in 1927. (Belykh, 1998, p. 150)
Such thinking was finally eclipsed with Stalin's deter-
mination to rapidly increase industrial production at
whatever cost to the peasantry. In 1929, he stated,
You know, of course, that the so-called the-
ory of ‘equilibrium’ between the sectors of
our national economy is still current among
communists. This theory, of course, has
nothing in common with Marxism. (Stalin,
quoted in White, 2018, p. 458)
Stalin used Lenin's antipathy to Bogdanov to help dis-
credit Bukharin and other ‘rightists’ in the party sympa-
thetic to his thinking. Bogdanov's theories were
suppressed. Under Khrushchev and Kosygin, in the
1960s, there was a brief flowering of related ideas encour-
aged by the development of computers. Soviet cybernetics
and linear programming offered a fleeting hope that the
Soviet Union might move in a different direction but
failed to overcome the many obstacles (Gerovitch, 2004;
Spufford, 2010).
Perhaps things could have been different. In his sci-
ence fiction novel Red Star, Bogdanov (1984a) makes it
clear how he saw the future of a society organized
according to the principles of Tektology. On communist
Mars, there is no state, and no markets, money or author-
ity relations. The ‘universal science of organisation’ is
used to ensure that society is maintained in a state of
‘moving equilibrium’ providing more than enough for all
and guaranteeing social justice. Authority rests with
those with the appropriate knowledge and job rotation is
encouraged. Once the needs of the population and their
requirements for consumer goods are calculated, produc-
tion and distribution are organized through a ‘Central
Institute of Statistics’. This Institute collects data on pro-
duction rates, inventories, labour needs, and so forth and
feeds relevant information back to the workers in the
enterprises. When divergencies from the plan are indi-
cated, workers willingly transfer their labour power, for
example, to increase steel production. Work is voluntary
and unpaid because consumption is unlimited. There is
no rigidity in these cyber-communist arrangements. The
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9
information relayed by the Institute changes every hour
to accommodate environmental shocks, new inventions
and the improvement of existing processes.
Beer did get the opportunity to put his thinking into
practice. In 1971, he met Salvador Allende, the democrat-
ically elected Marxist president of Chile and convinced
him that the VSM could help with the effective and effi-
cient organization of a socialist economy. First, the indus-
trial economy and its sub-systems—branches, sectors,
enterprises, plants, and so forth—were mapped according
to the recursive logic of the VSM. There were four further
components to what was called Project Cybersyn. The
first, Cybernet, was a communications network required
to collect and transmit real-time data on vital perfor-
mance indicators to decision-makers at all levels of the
industrial economy. As early as July 1972, Cybernet had
connected the State Development Corporation with vari-
ous branch agencies, eight sector committees and
49 plants (Medina, 2014, p. 135). Cyberstride was a predic-
tive computer program that, from the inputs it received,
was capable of recognizing when an unexpected change
was about to occur in the elements of performance mea-
sured. It could trigger alerting signals to higher levels if
this information was not acted upon in an agreed time-
scale. The Checo programs were designed to ensure that
all the viable systems identified at various levels in the
economy could understand what was happening in their
particular environments and be responsive to opportuni-
ties and threats. Finally, an Operations Room was con-
structed for senior decision-makers where the VSM
model of the economy was displayed, and all the infor-
mation collected by the other components of Cybersyn
was brought together. It was an ‘environment for deci-
sion’ in which different policy options could be debated
and experiments on their impact carried out. Although
Project Cybersyn was never completed, and so its overall
success is not easy to evaluate, it was able to demonstrate
its worth in an unexpected way. During a strike of gre-
mios, business associations of lorry-owners, retailers,
local shops and small distribution centres, in August
1973, Raul Espejo, Operations Director of Cybersyn, cal-
culated that the information provided by the system
enabled supplies of fuel and essential foods to be main-
tained at normal levels despite there being only between
10% and 30% of the lorry fleet in operation (Beer, 1981,
p. 346). It was a military coup d'etat, on 11 September
1973, that finally put an end to the experiment. Beer
comments,
As I see it, the rich world would not allow a
poor country to use its freedom to design its
freedom. The rich world cut off vital
supplies—except for the armaments that

10
eventually reduced La Moneda [the Presi-
dential palace] to a smoking shell (Beer,
1974a, p. 99).
Beer continued to use the VSM in consultancy pro-
jects until his death in 2002. Particularly significant were
commissions for the Presidential Offices of Mexico,
Uruguay and Venezuela. Medina (2014, pp. 225-226)
details how the bureaucracy in Mexico, financial difficul-
ties and lack of a powerful local champion in Uruguay,
and political unrest in Venezuela contributed to the lack
of success of these endeavours.
6 | THE I MPORTANCE O F
CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Bogdanov and Beer both argued for the importance of a
cultural revolution as part of any societal transformation.
Bogdanov wrote that
‘Ideology’ is one of the constitutive parts—
and a very important part—of the social
environment on which the fate of a new
technological or ideological form depends.
The conservative and retarding influence of
ideology can be huge. History knows exam-
ples where a whole culture has become inca-
pable of developing because it developed an
ideology that ruled out social progress
(Bogdanov, 2020, p. 348).
The failure of the 1905 revolution confirmed Bogda-
nov's view that the proletariat was culturally and organi-
zationally unprepared to take on the leadership role in
society. For the same reason, he had severe reservations
about the 1917 revolution and whether it would succeed
in building a truly socialist society. He became a leader in
the Proletkult movement, promoting the education of
workers, a workers' university and a workers' encyclope-
dia. The development of a proletarian culture was, in his
eyes, just as important to the achievement of socialism as
changes in politics and economics. Indeed, the Proletkult
initially conceived itself as ‘the “third” wing of the labour
movement, on a par with the party-political and trade
union wings’ (Biggart & Bulgakowa, 2021, p. 73). This
was another point on which Bogdanov disagreed
fundamentally with Lenin.
In his science fiction novel Red Star, Bogdanov
(1984a) emphasizes that communism can only succeed if
it builds on and enhances the ‘comradely co-operation’
that naturally develops in the course of unified labour. A
‘proletarian culture’ values equality and collectivism. On
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JACKSON
Mars, people lived in planned complexes of industry and
residences, set in parkland and with an adjacent meeting
hall, department store and communication centre con-
necting the settlement to the rest of the planet. All gender
discrimination is eliminated, including in names and
clothing. Children are raised and educated collectively
with parents visiting when and for as long as they wish.
There are Scientific Research Institutes and Museums
celebrating the dignity of labour. Monuments celebrate
collective achievements rather than heroes. Red Star was
much studied by members of the Proletkult. Poustilnik
traces its influence, and that of Tektology, on the ‘Con-
structivists’ who sought to create art objects that ‘would
organize the new Soviet man in a collective direction
towards socialism’ (Poustilnik, 2021, p. 148). Biggart and
Bulgakowa (2021) discern ‘conceptual affinities’ between
Bogdanov's thinking and the work of the famous film
director, Eisenstein, also a member of the Proletkult.
To support Project Cybersyn, concerned with the reg-
ulation of the social economy, Beer conceived Project
Cyberfolk, to address wider societary issues in Chile. A
key element of this was providing cybernetic support to
‘the interactions of the people and policy makers’
(Espejo, 2017, p.42). Project Cyberfolk proposed ‘algedo-
nic participation’ whereby people could express their
satisfaction or otherwise with policies discussed on
TV. They were to do this through individual electrical
meters, which they could manipulate by turning a knob
to register happiness or unhappiness with the proposals
being suggested:
This is at last an attempt to provide a metric
for Aristotle's eudemony, or ‘state of general
well being’ …. Now: when a broadcast is tak-
ing place, the people's eudemony is indicated
on a meter in the TV studio—which every-
one (those in the studio and the public) can
see. The studio meter is driven by the sum of
the people's meters (Beer, 1981, p. 283).
One of the walls of the Operations Room was avail-
able for displaying the sum of public reaction to policy
proposals. Beer also encouraged art, poetry and music to
act as powerful expressions of the people's will and major
amplifiers of the necessary cultural revolution. The
famous folk singer, Angel Parra, wrote a song called, in
English, ‘Litany for a Computer and a Baby about to be
Born’. Its chorus runs (it must sound better in Spanish):
Then let us STOP
who do not want
the people to win this fight –
And let us HEAP

JACKSON
all science together
before we reach the end of our tether.
In Beer's (1981, p. 290) view, this neatly captures the
two basic messages of the booklet ‘Five Principles for the
People, towards Good Government’.
As the crisis in Chile escalated, Beer (1981,
pp. 322-329) set out the need for a ‘People Project’
(an enhanced Project Cyberfolk) and an ‘Allocation Pro-
ject’ to run alongside Project Cybersyn under the Minis-
ter of Economics. This was a response to the apparent
failure to give sufficient attention to the organisation of
the ‘community’ and of ‘commerce’ (as revealed by the
gremios' strike). It required an additional level of recur-
sion in the model of the social economy in which the
public sector of industry, managed through Project
Cybersyn, was now only one element of System 1. This
might be seen as Beer intuitively grasping the importance
of Bogdanov's ‘law of the leasts’.
7 | C R I T I C S O F BO G D A N O V AN D
BEER'S VISIONS
Critics of the thinking of Bogdanov and Beer raise similar
objections to their work. This reinforces, to my mind, the
argument that their thinking shares much in common.
The main criticisms of the work are that it is overly sche-
matic and that it is technocratic, lending itself potentially
to authoritarian usage.
Lenin regarded Bogdanov's work as ‘organizational
gibberish’ (Lenin, quoted in Belykh, 1998, p. 148), as
‘unspeakable nonsense … sterile, lifeless and scholastic’
(Lenin, quoted in Stokes, 2015, p. 177). He saw it as fail-
ing to recognize the dynamics of the class struggle and
having nothing to say about the real-world task of build-
ing the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Bukharin, in his
otherwise favourable eulogy at Bogdanov's funeral, still
draws attention to ‘the non-dialectical nature and
abstract schematism of his ideas’ (quoted in White, 2018,
p. 454). Bazarov, one of Bogdanov's followers, received
this rebuke:
What can we say about a naturalist who, on
the grounds that a table has four ‘legs’, like a
cow, would declare that a table is the model
of a cow? (Sobol, quoted in Poustilnik, 2021,
p. 147)
Outside the Soviet Union, the same criticism was
voiced. Plenge, a German professor, in a 1927 review of
the first edition of the German translation of Tektology,
regarded Bogdanov's work as underestimating the
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11
complexity of particular system types and ignoring the
vast differences between them (Şenalp, 2019, p. 1). Flores
makes a related point in reflecting back on Project
Cybersyn in which he was a central player. The VSM and
the laws that it embodies were too general to help in the
context of the day-to-day political ‘mess’ that he
encountered:
My problem [in Allende's cabinet] was not
variety; my problem was the configuration of
reality, persuading other people. (Flores,
quoted in Medina, 2014, p. 229)
The attempt to fit Project Cybersyn to the realities of
the Chilean political landscape, in order that it could
become more relevant to what was really needed, is a
constant theme of Medina's study of Beer's Chilean pro-
ject. She summarizes the issues:
But perhaps the most important shortcoming
of the project, and why it was not adopted
more broadly, was that it did not connect to
the political, economic, and social processes
that consumed the country …. Such problems
as runaway inflation, lack of foreign credit,
falling copper prices, and black-market
hoarding. The system also did not connect to
the changes that were taking place on the
factory floor …. (Medina, 2014, p.216)
Schematic models, intended by their designers to pro-
vide a handle on the complexity of society, can appear to
others to provide access to truths which encourage social
engineering from a single centre. Biggart (2018) docu-
ments how, after the denunciation of Stalin, certain
Soviet theoreticians, eager to maintain allegiance to
Lenin, sought to blame Bogdanov's work for Stalin's
excesses. A theme was developed showing a continuity
between Bogdanovism and Stalinism, and Bogdanov was
painted as the ‘principal draughtsman’ of Stalin's social
experiments:
It was not Bogdanov who constructed this
Devil's kitchen …. But he was one of its
architects. (Arapov, quoted in Biggart, 2018,
p. 29)
The internal opposition in Chile, and external com-
mentators opposed to the government, found it easy to
represent Project Cybersyn as an instrument of authori-
tarian control. Beer pointed to its decentralizing intent,
and the mechanisms embodied in the technology to pre-
vent central interference unless it was clear that lower

12
levels of recursion could not cope on their own. This was
to no avail. In January 1973, The Observer, the UK's old-
est Sunday newspaper, ran a story under the headline
‘Chile Run by Computer’. In February, the New Scientist
published an editorial and article presenting Beer as a
super-technocrat running a project that would create a
more centralized state and benefit technocrats rather
than managers and workers. In April, Science for People,
an organ representing left-wing opinion in the scientific
community in the UK, published a piece under the head-
line ‘Chile: Everything under Control’, portraying Cyber-
syn as a device to increase government control and turn
workers into cogs in a well-oiled machine (Adams, 1973).
Medina concludes:
Because Cybersyn never reached completion,
I cannot say with absolute certainty whether
the system would have empowered Chilean
workers or whether it would have increased
the influence of a small group of government
technologists (Medina, 2014, p. 184).
It may seem easy to absolve theorists such as Bog-
danov and Beer from the use to which others might
put their schematic models. But we need to think more
deeply and be wary of what Pouvreau (2009), outlining
the implications of von Bertalanffy's thought, calls ‘the
dialectical tragedy of the concept of wholeness’.
Pouvreau alerts us to von Bertalanffy's brief flirtation
with Nazism. A 1941 article, written when he was at
the University of Vienna, presents his ‘organismic’
biology ‘both as an expression and as a scientific
justification of the National - Socialist vision of the
world’ (Pouvreau, 2009, p. 73). Models emphasizing
wholeness and order readily lend themselves to
authoritarian interpretation.
8 | INTIMATIONS OF A POST-
CA PITA LIST FU TU R E
The work of Bogdanov and of Beer provides intimations
of what a post-capitalist society might look like and
how it could be organized. There is not space in this
article to detail how other thinkers have built upon that
work. Nevertheless, a few hints may be helpful to
researchers.
Rovelli (2020), reviewing Bogdanov's work in the
context of the development of quantum mechanics, and
seeing ideas such as relationships, interaction, indetermi-
nacy and emergence as central to both, suggests that
systemic concepts can teach us something important
about the world:
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JACKSON
Bogdanov is said to have put it in political
terms: ‘The individual is a bourgeois fetish’
…. The actor … Is not a subject distinct from
phenomenal reality, outside it, nor any tran-
scendent point of view; it is a portion of that
reality itself …. Our discourse on reality is
itself part of that reality. Relations make up
our ‘I’, as our society, our cultural, spiritual
and political life. It is for this reason, I think,
that everything we have been able to accom-
plish over the centuries has been achieved in
a network of exchanges, collaborating. This
is why the politics of collaboration is so
much more sensible and effective than the
politics of competition …. (Rovelli, 2020,
pp. 154 & 166, italics in the original)
Mason (2016) draws upon the work of Bogdanov to
buttress his critique of contemporary capitalism noting,
particularly, the emphasis on the importance of technol-
ogy and information processing. With accurate informa-
tion, conveyed speedily to where it is needed, perhaps a
socialist state can match the efficiency and effectiveness
of the market under capitalism. Mason also notes Bogda-
nov's prescience in insisting that post-capitalist society
has to be sustainable for the planet. Wark (2016) argues
that the threat of climate change represents a ‘world-
historical moment’ that should make us, as ‘collective
labourers’, reimagine what we can make of the world.
Bogdanov's thinking is crucial because:
He took the core of Marxism to be the labor
point of view. He thought that if labor was
to organize the world, it needed to
develop its own organization of knowledge,
which he called tektology, and its own
means of cultural development, or proletkult.
(Wark, 2016, p.xvii; italics in the original)
Wark goes on to describe what she feels Bogdanov
has to teach us about the possibilities of ‘cyber-commu-
nism’ and the development of a new kind of knowledge.
She (as does Rovelli) also draws our attention to the rele-
vance of Kim Stanley Robinson's (2015) ‘Mars Trilogy’, a
science fiction epic which she sees as an updating of
Alexander Bogdanov's thinking—as, in a sense, a work
about Tektology. After a long-running struggle for inde-
pendence from Earth, conflict on Mars between factions
of ‘reds’, ‘greens’, Bogdanovists and others, and three
revolutions, a co-operative and ecologically aware society
is fashioned. Two-hundred years following first coloniza-
tion, things are peaceful and egalitarian, there is no patri-
archy and the essentials of life are freely available to all.

JACKSON
Mars is even willing and able to extend the hand of
friendship to Earth to assist with its many problems,
especially over-population. One of the main characters is
Arkady Bogdanov, a fictional descendent of the real-
world Alexander Bogdanov. Arkady is heavily involved
in discussions about the kind of society that should be
established on Mars and, although he is killed in the first
revolution, his ideas continue to be influential. Here, is a
quotation from the trilogy:
Thus people hypothesized a system of
governance, lived under it, examined how
they felt about it, then changed the system
and tried again. Certain constants or
principles seemed to have emerged over cen-
turies, as they ran through their experience
and paradigms, trying closer approximations
of systems that promoted qualities like
physical welfare, individual freedom,
equality, stewardship of the land, guided
markets, rule of law, compassion to all.
(Robinson, 2015, loc. 1670)
Beer insists that one of the main pathologies that the
VSM can reveal is System 5 failing to represent ‘the
essential qualities of the whole system’ (Beer, 1989b,
p. 28). To fulfil the liberating role that Beer intended, the
model actually requires a democratic and participatory
milieu:
That means that people must endorse the regulatory
model at the heart of the viable system in which they par-
take, at every level of recursion (Beer, 1974a, p. 88).
If the stakeholders of a system are agreed on its pur-
poses, and those purposes are embodied in System 5 and
the regulatory model, then the VSM can deliver on what
it promises and provide the means for pursuing those
shared purposes effectively and efficiently, and with only
those constraints on individual autonomy necessary for
overall cohesion. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
VSM has been inspirational to those promoting com-
munes and workers' co-operatives. These organizations
are committed to democratic values and structures. How-
ever, if they also want high performance, there can seem
little choice but to introduce more hierarchical arrange-
ments. The VSM provides a choice that allows them to
combine liberty with operational effectiveness. Seymour
and Gunton (see Coates, 2013) suggest that the VSM
offers communes a means of allowing freedom to the
individual without dissolving into chaos. Walker (2018)
has produced a guide to the VSM for co-operatives and
federations designed to allow them ‘to function with
increased efficiency without compromising democratic
principles’. His own extensive work aiming to achieve
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13
this at the SUMA co-operative is described in Espinosa
and Walker, who conclude from the experience that
A co-operative provides the perfect environ-
ment to apply the [VSM] principles described
in this book. SUMA survived its crisis,
restructured, avoided command-and-control
and created a structure which enabled it to
compete successfully, and to create a more
rewarding working environment. Depart-
mental autonomy has ensured that every
part of SUMA has found the most environ-
mentally appropriate way to go about its
business (Espinosa & Walker, 2011, p. 100).
This compatibility between the VSM and democratic
values and structures is what led me to argue
(Jackson, 1990) that it has a ‘critical kernel’ at its heart.
It demands a democratic environment in order to func-
tion as well as it can.
9 | CONCLUSION
Many commentators (e.g., Dudley, 1998; White, 2018)
emphasize the similarities between von Bertalanffy's
(1971) ‘general system theory’ and Bogdanov's Tektology.
While there is justification for this, my claim is that there
are even closer resemblances between Beer's organiza-
tional cybernetics and Tektology. The case has been
made on the basis of underlying philosophies, conception
of the role of science, organizational models, visions of
the good society, recognition of the importance of
cultural development in social change and the response
of critics to their work. Of course, if White's (2018,
pp. 316-317) suggestion is correct, and Western systems
theory has seen different people developing various
aspects of what is already present in Tektology, then we
should be able to find at least some commonalities
between Bogdanov's thinking and the work of most of
the later systems theorists. And, perhaps Bogdanov's
Tektology, being more ‘comprehensive’, ‘coherent and
integrated’ (White, 2018, p. 317), can provide a means for
reuniting the currently scattered and fragmented
branches of the systems movement. I have
(Jackson, 2023) explored this possibility in another paper
in this issue.
Bogdanov and Beer provide intimations of what a
post-capitalist society might look like and how it might
be organized. In my view, all the commonalities identi-
fied in their thinking have much to offer in this respect.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, only a few hints have
been taken up by other radical thinkers. I hope future

14
researchers and practitioners will make greater efforts to
capitalize on their work.
I will finish with a pertinent question posed in
another science fiction novel portraying a possible post-
capitalist future. In Another Now (2020), written by
Varoufakis, the ex-Minister of Finance for Greece, three
contrasting characters gain access, via a computer pro-
gram, to a parallel universe in which they live in a demo-
cratic socialist society. This universe diverged from their
own after a revolution following the 2008 financial crisis.
Like Bogdanov's Red Star, which Varoufakis does not
seem to have read, the novel is powerful because it
addresses the big issues of how a post-capitalist society
might emerge, how exactly it would operate and what
problems might be encountered. Towards the end of the
book, the three characters get a one-off opportunity to
leave their current world and cross over permanently to
the reality of the democratic socialist society that they
have been observing. No spoilers. But we can all ask our-
selves ‘what would I do?’. In my youth, I would have
jumped at the opportunity. Approaching old age, with a
comfortable living guaranteed by capitalism, and social-
ized into its ways of behaving and acting, probably not.
But it is not me, or indeed you, who should answer the
question—that should be the prerogative of the 50%+ of
the world's population under 30 and the 90%+ of the
world's population who share only 14% of the world's
wealth.
ORCID
Michael C. Jackson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6837-
7857
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How to cite this article: Jackson, M. C. (2022).
Alexander Bogdanov, Stafford Beer and
intimations of a post-capitalist future. Systems
Research and Behavioral Science, 1–15. https://doi.
org/10.1002/sres.2911