[ICTs-and-Society] Socialist technologies in the service of capitalism

[José María Díaz Nafría]

Dear Mustafa,

Though I agree about the role played by capitalism in the early history of
cybernetics, I think it is important not to oversimplify the history of
cybernetics. Some months ago I was discussing about the origin of
electromagnetism with a professor who intended to sustain its very
beginnings in Maxwell, forgetting that Schelling mentioned 70 years before
the possibility of finding a connection between the two forces as a
different manifestation of a common root. Orstead was follower of
Schelling, Faraday was indirectly encouraged by the project, etc, etc. What
I want to highlight is that the american school of cybernetics is just a
manifestation of the system thinking which roots can be traced back at
least to Spinoza, and particularly passing through Schelling (R. Zimmermann
has a nice book referred to the historical development of this thinking:
"Die Kreativität der Materie"). The same thing could be said for many other
historicist categorisations of scientific production. The social and
historical dimension is often underestimated... But turning back to the
case of system-thinking, Bertalanfy represents a significant figure in this
picture (with his "Kritische Theorie der Formbildung", 1928), as well as
Hermann Schmidt's "Regelungskunde" (1930) -to name but a few-. Segal talks
-in the aforementioned book- about some of this in his book devoted about
the history of the scientific notion of information... Furthermore,
Wiener's letter to the Automotive Unions from 1949 is important to remind
for assessing the real position of cyberneticians. Similarly, it is worth
recalling the event occurred (the over reaction, could be said) when Peter
Fleissner predicted a significant bad development for eastern Germany
people's life after its entrance in the market economy using cybernetic
models -as it actually was the case according to the variables predicted-...

Best regards,
J.

2013/1/24 Mustafa.Ali <Mustafa.Ali at open.ac.uk>

> Greetings, Bob!
>
> I dispute the necessity of a socialist / progressive / radical
> interpretation of cybernetics and that it has been co-opted by capitalism;
> in my view, cybernetics, while not 'neutral' was forged in capitalist
> contexts, irrespective of whether they were private / individual capital or
> public / state capital. In this connection, I would refer you to the work
> of Steve Heims and others who have documented the history of cybernetics,
> both from US-centric and Soviet-centric perspectives.
>
> I should also like to refer you to my recently published tripleC article,
> "Race: The Difference That Makes  Difference" which briefly examines
> cybernetics from a critical race theoretical perspective:
>
> http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/324
>
> Kind regards
>
> (Syed) Mustafa (Ali)
>
> The Open University, UK
> ________________________________________
> From: Bob Hughes [bob at dustormagic.net]
> Sent: 23 January 2013 19:57
> To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] Socialist technologies in the service of
>  capitalism
>
> Dear listmembers,
>
> Linear programming (and other mathematical/cybernetic planning
> techniques) were seen by many people in the 1940s and 1950s as
> heralding the end of markets, as they offered radically more
> efficient means of distribution.
>
> Instead, I get the impression these techniques ended up helping Big
> Capital to push markets to new limits, via Enterprise Resource
> Planning (ERP) apps like SAP.
>
> Certainly, I understand that people trained in cybernetics and OR
> during the 1960s increasingly found they could only get work in
> corporate situations, where it was impossible to work on 'whole
> systems' in the proper, cybernetic sense.
>
> And linear programming seems to be the basis of the 'combinatorial
> auction' systems that have been so very profitably developed for
> handling sell-offs of public assets (UK buses in 1995, followed by
> the auctions for 3G and now 4G bandwidth, and I guess auctions for
> airline routes ... and maybe finding further, similar markets in
> countries that come under IMF privatisation-orders).
>
> If this is the case then there's a ginormously bitter irony here:
> what should have led to an age of low-impact abundance ended up being
> a power-tool for the manufacture of high-impact scarcity.
>
> Has anyone researched this, or can anyone point me in the direction
> of someone who has? Do you think the above is broadly correct?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Bob Hughes
> --
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-- 
Dr. Jose Maria Diaz Nafria

Visiting Professor at the *Hochschule München* (HM, Germany,
http://www.fh-muenchen.de/)
    Postal Adress: Fakultät 13-Studium Generale, Dachauerstr. 100A, 80663
München, GERMANY
*Universidad de León *(ULE, Spain, http://www.unileon.es/)
    Postal address: Esc.de Ingenierías Industrial e Informática, Campus de
Vegazana s/n, 24071 Leon, SPAIN

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Skype: Jose Maria Diaz Nafria, jnafria
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