"Society can only be understood through the study of messages and the means of communication relating to them; in the future development of these messages and means of communication, the messages between man and machines, between machines and man and between machines and machines are destined to play an increasingly important role" (Norbert Wiener, Introduction to cybernetics , 1950).

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Table of Contents

Control and Communication

Excursion into the Impossible

"Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Party"

Cybernetic Scheme of Capitalism

Reduction to the Bone

Cybernetics of the 18th Century

The Cybernetic State

Formal and Real Domination of Capital over Labor

Real Domination of Capital over Labor

Contradiction between Individual and Society

Linear Purpose or Global Action?

Two-Way Connections

Recommended Readings

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Control and Communication

A particular study of the affinities between the revolutionary doctrine of Marx and Engels and recent discoveries in the field of complexity sciences, deterministic chaos, information, catastrophes, networks, and in general a "physics of history" as Mark Buchanan, the American popularizer of science who has attempted a synthesis, calls it - could be interesting. Determinism operates in nature and, therefore, operates on the thinking of the men who are part of it: the results of contemporary science must be analogous to those of nineteenth-century science, since a paradigm shift of the same magnitude as that which occurred at the dawn of the bourgeois revolution has not yet taken place.

Marx and Engels, but also other scientists, could only anticipate some of the results that would later be achieved in more recent times, but the dynamics of knowing cannot but be reflected in their work. Dynamic, and therefore a continuous tension toward the future. Thus, for example, Marx anticipates what will be the foundation of modern research on complexity: developing the Galilean method on the need for abstract models, science tends to unify phenomena that were previously considered to be of a different nature. So much so that not only interdiscipline but also the attempt to embrace nature with a single science that we can tentatively call "complexity" is gaining ground. It is well known that Marx, against philosophy, defined as the onanism of knowledge, hopes for, indeed foresees, the confluence of all knowledge into a single science. We do not know if or when this will be possible, but it is certain that for the moment it seems that the obstacles are insurmountable due mainly to the dominant ideology. Which is not an abstraction but a real necessity of every ruling class. Engels rejected the second principle of thermodynamics by criticizing Clausius who was its discoverer and popularizer. In the universe, he said, energy is neither created nor destroyed, but passes from one state to another irreversibly: from hot to cold, from order to disorder, from information to disturbance, from least probable to most probable. Clausius was right, but Engels was not wrong: the world existed in two modes: entropic and neg-entropic. The cold, disorderly, and most probable had the possibility of breaking the constraints on their conditions of existence through the openness of systems. Thus, disorder could become order again with the input of energy from outside. So there was a substantial difference between closed or open systems: closed ones had no possibility of avoiding the extinguishing of energy, open ones could take on energy, or information, which is not a form of energy but a precondition for order. After all, even the energy input from outside had to come from somewhere. Therefore, we can only assume an inherent capacity of matter to self-organize, to assume ordered conformations from disordered ones.

We want to dwell here on cybernetics, a discipline concerned with anything that allows information to be transmitted and used for some purpose. And which, as far as we are concerned, represents the main difference between the mineral and living worlds.

Obviously Marx and Engels did not know it as a discipline since, as such, it has only been systematized for some seventy years. But they talked about it extensively while not defining it by its modern name.

They could not do without it, because the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production embraces all phenomena based on information that, detected in a given context, returns as feedback from where it had started, changing the entire dynamics of the system. Capitalism is nothing more than a large system capable of gathering information from its cycles of production and using it as feedback to modify the next cycle. Cybernetics means "art of the helmsman." Were it not for the danger of confusion, it might also say "art of steering," but we had better stop at the helmsman. The latter looks at the compass and with the rudder corrects all deviations from the set course. All living organisms, without exception, can exist only because there is something within them that functions according to the principles of cybernetics. Our five senses are cybernetic detectors; all successive societies from prehistory to the present have functioned according to cybernetic principles. Recall that the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, titled his most famous book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

Excursion into the Impossible

Control and communication: if the information contained in a given configuration of matter can produce by autocatalysis another form of matter (Kauffman), it is clear that the principle "nothing is created and nothing is destroyed" is invalidated. In fact, assuming the premise is correct, the variety of information taken from one part and destined for the other causes the nature of matter to change without the need for additional energy. This we can safely assume, because information is neither energy nor matter. Autocatalytic processes underlie the theory of increasing returns (Brian Arthur). Locally, the second principle can be contradicted by information theory. But if it can be found that ordered systems have increasing returns, why does capitalism, which is an "informed" system, mature with decreasing returns?

Nicholas Negroponte, of MIT is the author of a book that was successful in the 1990s, Being Digital. In an interview at the time, to emphasize the fact that there are organized systems without "governments," and therefore without "policies," he gave the example of a flock of migrating ducks arranged by instinct of the individual birds to form a "V." The first duck is not the "president" of the flock, but rather the one that was closest to the place where the tip of the "V" was forming. If a hunter shoots it down, its place is not taken by the "vice-president" who moves up, but by the one closest to the vacant place. There is no flock "policy," there is an instinct based on a few elementary parameters, each one seemingly insignificant but capable of developing a form of intelligence when considered as a whole. Cybernetics is also this kind of communication: if the leading duck is missing, "something" (in this case an instinct) detects it and remedies it.

Larger flocks composed of thousands of individuals are able, with the same parameters, to compose amazing iridescent figures. The demonstration can be done by computer: by assigning such parameters to randomly arranged dots on the screen, moving figures can be reproduced that are no less striking than real ones. At the Santa Fe Institute, where complex phenomena are studied, they have called them "flocks of birdies."

Today we can take up Marx's writings on alienation and human community by treating individualism as deviance, which, on the contrary, is generally taken as normality. No society could function without those few parameters that allow individuals to interact with each other according to cybernetic principles. After all, there is cybernetics wherever one posits the sequence, "If this happens, then I make this happen. If I am hungry, I eat. By elementary skills, today artificial systems are able to replace human intelligence. The thermostat is told: if the temperature reaches 23° C then turn off the boiler and repeat until further notice by memorizing this prescription. When a button on an elevator is pressed, it activates a mechanism that waits for a prearranged signal to stop the car at the desired floor. If several mechanisms corresponding to floors are activated with the various buttons, an elementary memory is realized that can stop the car without the need to press buttons every time. In a factory, the cybernetic mechanism is much more complex, but if we reduce it to the bone, it is analogous to that of the elevator: one presses the button of a certain productive activity and it starts proceeding until a signal intervenes indicating the end of that partial path. The goods take shape finally converging to "the top floor," finished, tested and packed, sometimes directly on the truck loading floor. From there, a driver, picking up with his senses the conditions of the route, imparts the necessary commands to the truck to get to its destination. For example, when he stops at a red light, all he does is merge the individual cyber plane with the collective infrastructure plane. If the truck driver does it we pay no attention, if a driverless computerized truck does it we talk about cybernetics. When the movie RoboCop was released in 1987, the neologism cyborg, coined in the 1960s to denote the union of cybernetics and organism, became commonly used. There is actually a mistake in the use of the new term: you don't need a robot to have a cybernetic organism, just a human being. Or rather, any living being. A bacterium, for example. The behavior of a microscopic amoeba is perfectly cybernetic: it has the sensors necessary to interact with the environment and the actuators to take advantage of this interaction: it chemically senses the presence or absence of food, it has organs of motion to move closer or farther away, and organs of "digestion" to transform food into useful energy.

But does cybernetics really have anything to do with capitalism and revolution? And once we have ascertained that it has something to do with it, what good does it do to know? That it has something to do with it we see in our everyday lives: we are literally immersed in a cybernetic universe. Why we need to know this we get to perhaps, by beginning to ask ourselves: what was the point of Marx's entire existence devoted to the study of classes, capital and future society?

"Nature, Function and Tactics of the Revolutionary Party"

This is the title of an important text of our current (1945). A current that, struggling against individualism, related the party to the ancient human community, what Marx called Gemeinwesen, Social Being. Ancient not in the sense of a return to the origins, but in the sense of a community that, in the age of the maximum socialization of labor, meets the criteria of "double direction," what today would be called feedback. Through the successful evolution of a society that has now, since well before the time of Marx, triggered millions of sensors that say over and over again, "If... then...." And long before the need arose to simulate organic systems, our current claimed, for our organization, the adjective "organic" (Rome Theses, 1922). It declared this openly so that all affiliates would understand it well: organic in the biological sense of the term; organic because otherwise our actions would respond not to the deterministic "if... then..." but to the free will of each individual. The aforementioned Rome Theses begins precisely with a chapter entitled "Organic Nature of the Communist Party."

The long-standing problem of community, that is, the nature of the revolutionary party, takes on special importance in light of the fact, that the historical cycle of capitalism's growth is nearing its conclusion. This leads to the repetition of that whole series of "questions" related to the transitional phase: the relationship between the individual and the community, between the party and the class, in relation to the invariants and social transformations produced by technology and industry more generally.

Man is a social being. There can be no dichotomy between the individual and the society he or she helps to form (other than that historically determined by exchange value), because the individual, especially in a developed society such as this, is immersed in a very rich set of relationships, which are no longer as simple as in previous eras, even if they seem to be homologated to a few models suitable for the production of surplus value. The individual is a subsystem and, as such, is part of ever larger and more global systems, which he will not be slow to perceive as his extensions. The very reality of capitalism takes on the task of rendering obsolete the claims of the individual who feels himself at the center of history. No commodity can any longer spring from individual labor: since the end of mercantilism the social cycle of production and consumption has been condensed in it. The fact that private appropriation survives is a contradiction that shows that capitalism is a transitional society, like all those that preceded it.

Cybernetic Scheme of Capitalism

The objective unity between global and local, is one of the fundamental features of our age. Speed in the propagation and reception of information, and at the same time the possibility of contacts and relationships, circle the globe reducing space and time. This directly affects not only production and those connected with it, but also language, scientific research, art, and communication more generally. Said integration, to which the attribute "glocal" has been affixed, cannot fail to be the object of attention by those who feel attuned to the ongoing revolution. This unity of interconnected "things" and "events" has to do with cybernetics.

Marx threw his sensors into the heart of the capitalist society of his own era, and derived indications that set the world on fire. It meant that the world was ripe to take up the signal. Unfortunately, it was not as mature to discipline itself to it and complete what it had begun. Yet, if it was just a matter of understanding the model proposed by Marx to bring down capitalism, it was disarmingly simple. Complexity cannot be removed from a complex system, but that is precisely why man invented abstract models, "without which there would be no science."

The revolution was not defeated because of "someone", but by circumstances that closely resemble the workings of capitalism: a system that in order not to explode mortifies itself by self-limiting. Only that for capitalism self-limitation represents salvation, albeit mutilated in performance, harnessed in rules that capital, contradictorily, cannot suffer; for revolution, self-limitation means dying, turning into counterrevolution. We published detailed works on the inadequacy of the bodies directing the revolution, just as our current had published in the 1920s, as the tragedy unfolded. A cybernetic schema of capitalist society can help us understand how capitalism works and how the party of revolution should not work.

The scheme is useful for isolating from a chaotic and confusing situation, the essential elements that help us avoid repeating mistakes. It provides for an extreme simplification of society: one area for production, one for consumption (market), and one for inward and outward movements between market and production. In the unpublished Chapter VI of Capital, the scheme is barely sketched but it works: there is a global worker producing a global commodity for a global capitalist. For that matter, even for a discussion of rent Marx takes a landowner, an agrarian capitalist and an agricultural wage earner and merges them into one peasant (it is also valid to divide one peasant into three). Mind you: it is necessary for the worker to be a wage earner and not a craftsman selling his products to the capitalist, as it was for the Silesian weavers sung by Gerhardt Hauptmann. So the pattern is all the more valid the more historically mature the capitalist model is.

The scheme depicted above, assuming that its purpose is to allow the expanded reproduction of capital, is a typical example of a positive feedback input-output model. By its nature, it leads to exponential growth as an output. If its purpose were to achieve a stabilization of the system, instead of "turning on" an enlargement of production, it would "turn off" the return signal by realizing a negative feedback model. Capitalism is a system that simultaneously and contradictorily combines the two models.

The model is universal, lending itself to representing a wide variety of situations. If instead of the "market" area we place a "society" area, and instead of the "production" area we place a "party" area, and we interpret the inflows and outflows as the "influence" of society on the party or vice versa (as in our reversal of praxis scheme), we can make an experiment. We have seen that in the functional model of capitalism, in the "production" area the partial worker does not produce any commodity. Thus there exists for Marx, in society as it is, a powerful anticipation of communism. In the "society" version, the model presents, instead of the "production" area, a "party" area which, in the field of social theory, will have the same anticipatory power. If in the production model the market enters the production area, whereby the partial worker exchanges semi-finished goods through money, we would have no anticipation of future society. Thus, if in the social model the "party" area were invaded by the surrounding society we would have no anticipation of communist relations. It is to reiterate the attitude of our current since its inception: in the party program there must be a non-formal, not merely statutory, adherence to the principle of organicity: the party is the environment that anticipates future human relations. If it is open to negative feedback (bourgeois influence) the revolution is defeated.

Reduction to the Bone

We cut our patterns down to the bone. In fact, the more abstract the patterns, the more powerful they are. But they must retain invariance to the original. As Wiener says, the best model of a cat is another cat, but what good is that to me if I already have a cat?

The system works, it is not maturing from an inferior condition, so it is not like we have to wait for some fruit to ripen. It doesn't matter at all who started doing what, the chicken and egg story doesn't apply here. The dynamics of the abstract model is also simple because the dynamics of the material model is also simple. We are not making it up, the observation: the partial worker does not produce goods, is in Marx, The Capital, Book I, Chapter XII.

The whole system works with a series of sensors and actuators that at the nerve points trigger an action: if a warehouse becomes empty, the order to suppliers to fill it starts. Sort of like the bathtub in the bathroom: the water level drops, the float opens the valve that allows the water to flow; out comes the water, another float stops the outlet, and the bathtub can fill again until pressure is exerted on the button that controls the first float...etc. You don't need the Alexa robot to have some everyday household cybernetics.

What is schematized looks like a perfect system like the mechanism of a clock, an almost perpetual motion that needs little energy to run. But it is by no means perfect. We find the first snag in the comparison between production and the market: the former is regulated by acquired experience, science, method, and design. The second is anarchic, unpredictable, dependent on the behavior of consumers who follow at one time fashions, at another time needs, at another time fluctuations in values. The market is predictable to a very limited extent and only through the observation of past series on which to apply the statistical criterion.

"Orderly" production feeds the "chaotic" market. The former fails to predict precisely what the latter will require, the latter fails to go along with the former. It is as if someone hangs his jacket not on the coat rack but on the thermostat sensor: the data are detected with too many errors and the system breaks down. Actually, it is even worse: while the system/thermostat works but is misled by misuse of the sensor, the system/market does not work at all nor can it work.

A system that acts on itself with feedback of this nature (from "out market" to "in production," from disorder to order) is very likely to be a nonlinear system, that is, one that is difficult, if not impossible, to treat with computation. Now, in nature most physical systems are of the nonlinear type, which, however, can usually be turned into linear, that is, approximated within acceptable margins. Marx notes that such contradictions coexist in capitalism that any harmonization is impossible (it cannot be linearized), so it must fall into periodic crises, which require interventions to normalize the situation: interventions that are very reminiscent of the jacket hanging on the thermostat sensor. This time hung on purpose, to try to influence a system in drug overdose, which no longer reacts to sensory stimuli.

Cybernetics of the 18th Century

There is a cybernetic detail in the scheme: a quantity of outgoing goods is directed in to increase the outgoing goods; we therefore have a part of the system that works according to a positive feedback scheme. It's as if in a steam locomotive, the engineer increased the coal in the boiler to increase the speed: it's clear that at a certain point you have to stop. In an almost linear system like home heating, the thermostat is enough, but a primitive machine like the steam engine with all its carriages is a much more complex thing and looks a lot like a tough non-linear system. In fact, a coal stove can be loaded and forgotten for a few hours, but a locomotive cannot, it must be fed constantly to have a regularity of temperature and pressure. Furthermore, it must self-adjust to deal with slopes or variations in the load of the wagons. It seemed impossible to solve the problem with the mechanics of the time, until Watt, in 1787, invented the mechanism that still bears his name. He called it governor, a term that has some analogy with cybernetic .

The device allowed the quantity of steam to be adjusted depending on the conditions of the journey. If the speed varied due to a climb, a descent, a more or less heavy load or more or less coal in the boiler, the device sent more or less steam into the cylinders. Watt's regulator is perhaps the first automatic cybernetic device in history. It is the predecessor of all regulators to this day, including those fitted to driverless cars.

It stabilizes the train/environment system allowing a huge improvement in performance. As a local microsystem it works very well because there are few parameters to control. The capitalist system works in the same way, only on a larger scale, but no governor would be able to stabilize it, avoiding crises and ultimately its death. Not because the parameters are much more numerous (there are very powerful computers and programs that could govern not only a train but the planet), but because it is not possible to normalize a system that is based on social production and private appropriation, on value and not on physical quantities, on commodity fetishism and not on energy exchanges in an organic body with its metabolism and harmonization of all organs. Millions of owners of micro-capitals, although regulated by large capitalists (or anonymous entities such as pension funds, etc.) cannot be governed any more than the drafts that produce hurricanes in meteorology can be controlled. The capitalists divide the capital among themselves in an anarchic whole, and moreover they are also part of national bourgeoisies, so we just can't imagine a Watt regulator who has a planetary power over the chaotic swarm of small capitalists who march to the music played by the big ones, it would be science fiction super-fascism. The bourgeoisie tried, but remained strictly within the national framework.

For limited, local systems, 18th-century mechanics work better than 21st-century electronics; but as soon as it moves away from Newtonian simplicity it is no longer able to harmonize the actuators with the stresses detected by the sensors. When the state controlled capital, as in the times of the maritime republics, a not too obtuse oligarchy was enough to make decisions consistent with the goals of mercantile society.

With the industrial revolution this was no longer possible: wealth began to free itself from the decisions of individuals, even very rich and/or powerful ones, so the system began to be subsumed by what was on its way to being true capital. At this stage, goodbye to control. With Adam Smith the function of governor was no longer attributed by men to other men but to a mysterious "hidden hand". It was an observation rather than a theory: capital's way of being self-produced corrections that allowed it to neutralize the catastrophic forces due to positive feedback. A kind of ecology of accumulation. Instead of regretting this return to the ferocious Darwinian jungle which nullified the great planning capacity achieved, Homo Economicus was proud of it and treated this wild side of capital as if the economy were something different from the substrate of science, of project, of machines that formed its basis. Something different and fit into one pseudo-theory which was given the very significant name of laissez-faire . It was the triumph of bad cybernetics: Darwinian adjustments produce an evolution of species, but at the expense of the least fit, who are ruthlessly eliminated. Later, capital, brazenly becoming autonomous, led the entire society, through the state, to be its slave.

The Cybernetic State

In his early works, Marx addresses the revolutionary transition from feudal society to bourgeois society, analyzing the formation of the first markets and then their unification within the states. The State is the unifying center of the movements of competition (the regulator of the anarchy of the market), and the parallel is evident with the movement of circulation: as the exchange value objectified in money is the general equivalent of all particular commodities, thus the State presents itself as the social unity of accidental relationships between citizens, as the regulator of the multiple exchanges between owners and buyers of goods and money. But with the increase in production and the expansion of a circulation suitable for the large-scale formation of exchange value, capital will act as the only community to which men will have to refer, reducing the State to its simple appendage. .

The process of formation of the modern state is understandable only through the analysis of the movement of value towards the total organization of production and society for the purposes of its valorization. The original accumulation described in the first book of Capital is the description of the violence to which society was subjected in order to break down the barriers that prevented capital from forming into a material community. Today we are facing the end of its propulsive movement and the realization of the immediate program of the revolution is therefore increasingly evident and within reach. Having exhausted all the intermediate phenomena that the proletariat had to take charge of in order to accelerate the process (national question, peasant question, etc.), what remains is the final and definitive reappropriation of the human being, the reappropriation of everything that the species has externalized as industry and as science, that is, as an inorganic objective body.

The overall value generated by society is produced by more and more people, but fewer and fewer productive workers. The contradiction that runs through society is clear: general poverty is not due to a shortage of means of production, but rather to an overproduction of goods and capital. Poverty is directly proportional to the wealth produced by society. Therefore, for capital, in addition to tightening control of the economy, it is necessary to have increasingly perfected, widespread and capillary control of all aspects of the system: so much so that even a temporary interruption in information flows can disorganize the production systems and set in motion a chain of chaotic reactions.

As the economy takes on monopolistic aspects, the productive, economic and political structure of states and relations between states takes on an imperialistic character (Lenin). With this, the capitalist organization totally invades the social fabric: trade unions, parties, mass media, operate as devices for its homeostatic regulation. The old separation of functions which saw individual capitalists dealing with production processes and the state governing the functioning of the whole society, tends to fade away to make way for branched structures which intertwine the business aspect with the political and repressive one.

The study of networks and complex systems fits very well into the discussion we are having. In fact, our society increasingly resembles a huge production plan created by individual companies. Cybernetics is a discipline that analyzes the communication and nature of information between the parts that make up complex systems and between complex systems. It is thus very useful for analyzing the characteristics of the advanced capitalist system, which has arrived on the eve of a phase transition.

This discipline arises from the observation of living beings and the equipment that simulates them. To the extent that biological organisms are confused with inanimate ones, they interact producing new results. Cybernetics allows phenomena to be traced back to highly abstract and therefore extremely powerful models. Once the modality of this interaction is understood, it becomes relatively simple to understand the functioning of complex entities such as the state, capital, the entire society: through the study of messages - and the means of communication relating to them - the development of communication between man and machines, between machines and man and between machines and machines, is destined to play an increasingly important part in the evolution of society. Naturally, the scientists who deal with this matter do not use our language, but they arrive at very interesting conclusions. And they unequivocally capitulate to Marxist theory when they too go so far as to maintain that man cannot understand the complex nature of which he is a part if he does not first know what he himself is, what his own society is, how it functions. , what his own way of producing and communicating is, if in short he doesn't know what the real processes are that have led him and will lead him to know.

Formal and Real Domination of Capital over Labor

The capitalist accumulation process is grafted onto simple circulation, typical of the mercantilist phase, as the basis for its growth. In fact it is grafted onto a base that is not fully adequate for its purposes: the working process is not yet modeled on its need for valorisation, and the needs of the human being are still the central aspect of production. The bourgeoisie, while operating on this narrow basis, takes care to prolong the labor process as much as possible, so that the surplus value produced increases, thereby increasing its power over society. An element of acceleration in the subordination of the work process to the needs of capital is the continuity of work: the gathering of many workers in the same place, the introduction of work phases which eliminates the figure of the worker-artisan forever, the subdivision of movements in regular succession and finally payment by the hour for undifferentiated work transform the entire society, not just the factory.

As markets expand, the needs and requirements for goods and capital intensify, hence the continuity and stabilization of production and the growing organization of the work process. All these changes do not immediately lead to a definitive arrangement of the way of being of the general working process: its submission is imposed by force and by control of the capitalist and not yet by the scientific organization of production . The fundamental fact that characterizes the first moment of capital's domination over work is on the one hand the quantity of the means of production set in motion, and on the other the increase in the number of workers subjected to its command. The next step is full modern capitalism.

Real Domination of Capital over Labor

The formal submission of labor to capital, that is, the expansion of production through the increase in the number of workers, was the legacy of the previous mode of production. Real domination, that is, the expansion of production through increased productivity, is a movement of internal maturation within capitalism. As a technologically specific mode of production takes shape, a structural modification of the working process occurs, making it increasingly suitable for the valorization process. In the modern factory the social character of working conditions appears to be absolutely autonomous from the worker; the way of being of capital is presented as organized by capitalists independently of workers. The knowledge and skills of the individual workers are gradually transferred to the machinery and the worker is reduced to being a simple appendage of the process. The social character assumed by the conditions of production, as collective work, appears as capitalist, that is, as a production independent of the workers and their needs. And we have arrived at mature capitalism. This is where the change that anticipates future society occurs.

Workers can no longer produce unless in symbiosis with the system of machines, with the general automaton, and this combined production only increases the power of the automaton over them:

"The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense that labor dominates it as the unit that dominates it. Rather, labor presents itself only as a conscious organ, at various points in the machine system, in the form of individual workers alive; shattered, subsumed under the overall process of the machines, itself only a member of the system, whose unity does not exist in the living workers, but in the living (active) machinery, which in front of the worker presents itself as a powerful opposing organism to its single and insignificant activity." (Marx, Grundrisse , Fragment on machines)

It is the triumph of cybernetics already in Marx. The automaton (the term is his) still makes use of living tools but is acquiring autonomy: in the second part of the quote the unity of the system is achieved through the "living machinery". Development of a machine system means development of an information system. The machine does not inform itself (for now), it needs to be informed about the operations to be carried out. Once it is informed and fed, however, it can theoretically work endlessly, sending its signals to the worker only to ask for maintenance or to be refilled with raw materials. At this point machine and worker talk to each other, one signals to the other, they interact. A language is born and everything seems to be the fruit of a natural evolution. The dialogue between men and machines is cybernetics. The dialogue between systems of men and systems of machines is cybernetics. The language spoken by humans and machines is cybernetics. In a cybernetic social system the interaction between party and class is cybernetic.

The real subjugation of living labor to dead labor increases in step with the development of the productive forces, which, thanks to large-scale work and the application of science to production, determines an enhancement of productivity. The capitalist, due to competition, must set in motion ever larger production, increasing on the one hand the number of workers and on the other their exploitation. This is a deadly contradiction: the increase in the number of workers cannot be generalized at the same time as their exploitation is generalized. It is true that it happened at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but it is an unrepeatable phenomenon, it would be like returning to manual machines, to factories teeming with workers, to the increase in production through the extension of the working day. Historically, such a backward step by industry is not possible: it would involve such state intervention that capitalism would no longer be itself: we are already beyond state capitalism. Even if an attempt in this direction is made spontaneously, as with the recourse to delocalisation in backward countries, the ultimate result is always an advance in the scientific mechanization of the production process. In ten years, China has become automated thanks to the relocation of overly industrialized countries to its territory.

This process produces an enormous use of technologies and information science in any sector, from factories to private homes, from infrastructures to games, from armies to intelligence activities, from speculation to scientific research.

The contradiction between social production and private appropriation (the more one produces, the less one consumes in proportion) leads to a growth of dead labor no longer capable of vampirizing living labor, a phenomenon whose tip of the iceberg is the concentration of world wealth in hands of a few thousand individuals. Growth, in signs of value, has taken on planetary dimensions, paradoxically losing any individual connotation. The fictitious capital thus accumulated has reached figures that the human mind cannot rationally assimilate (hundreds of millions of billions of dollars) and that no one knows what impact they could have if they moved from their current uses. But they will move, and this will happen when the machines that currently manage a minimal part of them in motion receive a command from humans, which is already stored in the software awaiting the call.

Contradiction between Individual and Society

In the cybernetic society (remember that it is like saying "loaf of bread") the individual is crushed between his (illusory) being a private person and at the same time an agent or user of impersonal entities but with a strong social impact. These impersonal bodies, such as the state, large multinational companies, schools, parties, railways, unions, are all-encompassing by nature, but when they address the individual they force him with a persuasive or threatening tone to relate to him as a person. Whether this individual is a worker or a manager, when he relates to the organization he must stop being an individual and limit himself to the behavior suited to said relationship. Thus, in addition to a cybernetic society regulated by its thermostats and regulatory gadgets, we have a humanity alien to itself, subservient to an automatic system, not only a consumer that responds to various influencers but used as a sensor that without realizing it gives billions of information every year. In a society like this one, the relationship with entities becomes autonomous and, since the system is dynamic but cannot escape the relationship of identification, everyone must respect the rules of the game if they want to play. The fact is that playing is mandatory. Digression: if you force a child to play, it is very likely that he will become schizophrenic, since the obligation to do something that should be joyfully chosen is a logical loop that produces pathology.

So, rules of the game. An opposition party that wins the elections after promising certain changes will realize that the rules of the game cannot be changed, and will behave exactly as the previous rulers had behaved. A trade unionist who had "revolutionary" intentions in his program, once recognized by the "counterpart" and brought to the negotiating table, will do exactly like politicians and obviously like those who until a moment earlier he had called "bonzes". The rules of the game cannot be changed by playing. They change when another game is imposed. But that's another story.

Any movement that concerns the proletariat and is not the integral implementation of the revolutionary program will not result in breaking the rules of the game, because the mode of conflict has already been sanctioned by the players. Instead, it will have the effect of tightening the ties that immobilize the workers' movement. Non-classist policies make it possible to hide the totalitarian dimension achieved by capital, deceiving men about the possibility of modifying the system by operating within its categories. The result, however, is a system in which the rules of interaction between classes and nations become increasingly rigid and in which the initiative of states is increasingly dominated by the automatisms produced by an interdependent world market. To beat the automatisms it is necessary to destroy them and impose others favorable to the reference player (the class).

About forty years ago a large book on the Third World War was released which was said to have been written according to the scenarios of an Anglo-American computerized wargame. Maybe. However, the Warsaw Pact wargame would have responded to the Atlantic Pact's moves and vice versa with the same rules, because there is no game in which players follow different rules; on the other hand, continents, oceans, mountains and rivers are a given scenario, geopolitics is a deterministic science (the world is small…?). And armaments also reflect the state of technology, the position on the planet, history, factors that will require more or fewer men, more or fewer machines... Well, a wargame between two computers that use the same rules will be played by human operators before all by obeying the rules, that is, confirming them. This, in wars, is precisely what should not be done: the enemy fights above all by making his own moves unpredictable.

Capital, anonymous, impersonal, global, is sweeping away the old categories of nation and even of national bourgeoisie. If the engine of American political warfare is no longer in Washington but in the desperate need of capital to use every means to save itself, then the worker becomes a global worker who produces a single commodity as the sum of all commodities. Then capital will increasingly force us to consider every problem not so much from the point of view of economics and politics, however "revolutionary", but immediately from the point of view of the future human community: total antithesis to current society. Ultimately, this is what is stated in our Setting Outline , which is not leaves more space for reformism and conformism. This is what is stated in Origin and function of the party form , where the human community superimposes the organization as a prefiguration of the future society. And in a thousand steps the organic character of our organizational concept is remembered. But let's quote Marx directly:

"A social revolution is found from the point of view of the totality because - even if it takes place only in an industrial district - it is a protest by man against dehumanized life, because it moves from the point of view of the single real individual, because the community , against whose separation from himself the individual reacts, is the true community of man, human nature. The political soul of a revolution consists on the contrary in the tendency of politically deprived classes to eliminate their isolation from the State and from power.His point of view is that of the State, of an abstract totality, which exists only through separation from real life, which is unthinkable without the organized antagonism between the general idea and the individual existence of man. A revolution of the political soul therefore also organizes, in accordance with the limited and discordant nature of this soul, a ruling circle in society at the expense of society." (Marx, Marginal Glosses , 1844).

Today it is no longer possible to talk about a revolution with a political soul . The historical process is completed, the political soul belongs to the ruined middle classes and the bourgeoisie. In the past, revolutions with a political soul were carried out by a part of society at the expense of the whole society. Now the proletariat will have to carry out a revolution on a human basis, no longer appealing to one part of society against the remaining part. That of the proletariat will no longer be a political revolution because its objective will be directly the rediscovered social being (Gemeinwesen). In short, it will be a fight against the separation of the individual from himself through the recomposition of the individual-society combination.

Everything has been expropriated to be colonized by capital, therefore the ultimate "claim" is the complete and definitive reappropriation of the human community through the power of proletarian humanity and the dialectical abolition of proletarian humanity and, consequently, of the state and classes.

The passage cited, alone, destroys any politicized conception of the organization. Since industry is the true essence of man, it is in the reality of facts and not in politics that the ultimate antagonism is realized. And the reality of the facts dictates that the prefigured future society is no longer, in the historical order, a herd, a tribe, a people, a representative assembly or even a political party in the current meaning of the term. Clarity on organizational issues is the condition for the universal soul of the class struggle to be liberated and for the colossal scam of narrow-minded political revolt to disappear, which only serves to strengthen the rules of the game.

Linear Purpose or Global Action?

We have attempted to analyze society as a complex system, and we have found that the science of cybernetics induces important capitulations in the bourgeoisie in the face of our theory. All biological and evolutionary systems consist of complex networks of relationships with common characteristics, we can therefore examine human society with the same methods and research programs with which we examine an individual biological organism and vice versa. We have seen that any human organization is a self-correcting system, that capitalist society is the most complex society and therefore the one that requires the most organization among all those that have followed one another in history. But it is precisely the exasperated finality due to its process of self-enhancement, which has subordinated and shaped everything, which is the disarticulating factor of the system. The countertendencies implemented by capitalists to counteract the fall in the rate of profit solve the problem locally and temporarily, but only to move it to a higher and more serious level. The adoption of automatic machines to increase productivity increases the per capita production of the workers, but for the increased production a buyer must be found, while there are passive expenses for the use of credit which allowed the adoption of the machines, prices must be lowered due to competition and so on.

Nature is not a linear structure but a complex network structure whose components enter into relationships with themselves, just think of the law of value denied by the value formation system itself. By forcibly interpreting it as a linear structure we prevent ourselves from seeing its cybernetic particularities: in its process of accumulation capitalism constantly undermines the foundations of future valorization cycles, increasing the part of dead labor in relation to that of living labor. But capitalism is based on living work, not dead work. Despite this, the system has acquired considerable adaptability to own crises precisely according to the principles of cybernetics: the invisible hand and lassez faire work, brutally but they work, precisely because the entire system is like an ecological whole in which each component depends on all the others, in which everyone sends signals capable to be captured and transformed.

Man interacts with nature with five main sensors and a series of actuators (hands, feet, mouth, stomach, etc.) controlled by a central unit which is the brain. By artificially adding a large quantity of sensors and actuators to nature, man has supported nature itself, but forced it to function automatically. We have transferred our faculties to the Planet, only that the Planet does not have a central unit to direct the mass of information we produce. Instead of one centrally regulated organic metabolism we have two hundred nation-states; instead of a harmonious relationship between the parties we have police and armies; instead of the pursuit of balance through a biological process (bio = life) we are complacent in our antibiotic repressive efficiency.

Today's network is not "intelligent", it is not capable of expressing a "consciousness" (in the sense of conscious action), it simply simulates an elementary skill, that of a washing machine, a computer, a refrigerator, an elevator, a driverless car, etc. However, it is clear that a society based on "intelligent" cybernetics, that is, one that does not theorize hidden hands and economic laxity, will be able to develop to the maximum that global brain that is so unused today. A driverless car is certainly equipped with non-elementary technical expertise, but the real problem is: do we really need a car that takes us to work while we read the newspaper instead of driving? In this remarkable performance there are at least three things that can be eliminated: the technological intelligence which is completely wasted here, the car and work.

Current society really has too much of everything and doesn't know what to do with intelligence, it just wastes just to keep the law of value valid. But despite this, it is transforming into an enormous access society, in which the car, electricity, gas, house, telephone, television, everything is becoming a fee-based service (the installment payment of a durable good becomes like a perpetual fee). Let's think about it: the worker receives the month's salary and little by little transfers it in full to the aforementioned bodies. They could withhold a fee equal to his salary and nothing would change. We are outlining a model and therefore we are not interested in the differences, if one smokes, the other drinks and the other spends time with cheerful ladies. If the rich bourgeois who receives the worker's salary in exchange for goods were to enter the circuit and pay for his luxury in the form of a "fee", the entire society would have what it needs in exchange for a fee. Capitalism is still the same, even if we have eliminated physical money and replaced it with accounting money. Yes it can. In Northern Europe, access to goods through a fee is widely used. In the world of production the leasing is common. Everywhere physical money is almost eliminated by electronic money.

With the very powerful cybernetic systems we have at our disposal, it would be a joke to control the flows of goods and services in a social model like the one we have just seen. Respecting fairness. But this cannot be done as long as the law of value dictates. And of course until the question of power is resolved. No reformism could undermine the value-power duo. The obstacle to unfolding socialism, apart from the forms, is therefore value which, like capital, is not a "thing", but a "relationship". Precisely a class relationship (a power relationship).

When we talk about participation in capital and the access society we talk about our being part of the overall process of capital production. The proletariat is either revolutionary or it is capital, therefore we said that the struggle which has as its objectives the effects produced by capitalism without highlighting the causes produces a strengthening of the system itself, because it postpones the global dimension of the attack on the foundations of capitalism. The same theories of complexity say that a global system cannot be understood without a clear vision of the tools that allow this globality to reproduce itself. It is therefore not a question of organizing ourselves to claim "particular" rights, because no "particular" injustice is exercised against the proletariat, but rather injustice without a doubt. In an article dated 1 June 1913 with the significant title "A programme: the environment", the young socialists gathered around the newspaper L'avantanzante expressed themselves thus:

"Our socialist, anti-bourgeois struggle, our revolutionary preparation must be directed towards laying the foundations of the new environment."

We must force ourselves to live, they said, as if the revolution had already happened. Today we learned that this important statement is relevant to the confirmations that complexity theories give us regarding the relationship between means and ends in achieving any objective. These theories tell us that the presence of feedback in an open system makes the system increasingly stable and suitable for the purpose to be achieved, and this is on the other hand the position of our current with respect to the organic functioning of the party: the material conditions push the proletariat to fight; the party, by centralizing this push, lays the foundations of the new environment, and these foundations act on the party making it increasingly suitable for its future tasks; in this double direction the party learns to learn. Norbert Wiener in his book on cybernetics says the same thing explaining the principle of feedback:

"In its simplest form, the principle of feedback means that behavior is periodically compared with the outcome to be achieved, and that the success or failure of this outcome modifies future behavior." (Norbert Wiener, Introduction to Cybernetics , page 84).

Two-Way Connections

The future society is now increasingly less distant and the death of capitalism is a fact that we take as established. The study of the transition phases that have occurred in history teaches us that the means and ways to complete the revolution can only be the elements that most coincide with the future social form. In fact, we talk about the party by describing the future society, which describes itself through its achievements in the present one.

Cybernetics is of interest to the revolutionary movement as it modifies its attitude towards the world, changing the very idea of ​​what an attitude is: it highlights the infinite chain of determinations that link causes and effects apparently unrelated to each other, outlining their structures and showing the relationships. So, if one claims, and proves it, that capitalism is dead, one must understand the current relationship between this statement and the attitude towards immediate tasks. If this is truly the borderland between two modes of production, it is also the borderland between old and new attitudes towards political work. The attitude of a revolutionary movement can only be modified by technology. For example, from the interactive relationship with the network. The Internet is a sort of enhancement of the species brain, a sort of nervous system that connects a new bio-technological unit. In the future, the work of the historic party, in its journey to give itself a formal instrument, will be increasingly linked to this dimension of interactivity, gradually overcoming the boundary between what is global and what is local. Demonstrating how much the bourgeoisie absorbs from the material world by capitulating to the revolutionary doctrine, Marshall Mc Luhan expresses himself thus regarding the social potential of the new means of communication:

"We live today in the age of information and communication because the electrical media instantly create a total field of interdependent events in which all men participate. Now this world of mutual public actions has the same all-encompassing and integral interdependence that has hitherto characterized only our individual nervous systems. This is because electricity has an organic character and strengthens the organic social bond through its technological use in the telegraph, telephone, radio and other forms."

Our current summarized: the steam engine was a local, Proudhonian source of energy; the electricity grid is a communist source. This progressive spatio-temporal integration of individual brains into the global network is the breeding ground in which new social bonds develop. It is the structure itself that predisposes the individual to a different attitude towards communication and towards others:

"We therefore obtain a picture of the mind as synonymous with a cybernetic system: the total system that processes information and completes the process by trial and error. And we know that within the mind in the broadest sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, each of which we may call individual mind." (Bateson, Form, Substance and Difference ).

We know that third-internationalist conformism criticizes the fact that bourgeois capitulations are used to demonstrate the advance of the revolution even when the persistence of the counter-revolution is evident (if there is a counter-revolution it means that the revolution is working). This criticism will only make sense when a revolutionary movement manages to say something more important, for the purposes of revolutionary maturation, than what the bourgeois are able to say. It is a deterministic axiom: it is impossible for a revolution to give up spreading its theoretical results just because the counter-revolution tries to prevent it.

Recommended Readings

- Bateson Gregory, For an ecology of mind - Buchanan Mark, Nexus - Buchanan Mark, Ubiquity - Buchanan Mark, The Social Atom - Demozzi Silvia, Form Substance Difference Brief notes on Batesonian epistemology - Engels Friedrich, Dialectics of nature - Gleick James, Chaos - Hackett John, The Third World War - Marx Karl, Capital , book I - Marx Karl, Grundrisse - McLuhan Marshall, Understanding media - Waldrop Mitchell, Complexity - Wiener Norbert, Introduction to cybernetics