‘Tektology’, VSM and the digital age

In 1903 Bogdanov wrote Red Star, a science fiction fantasy in which he describes his utopian vision for a new society. It was Marxism in its ‘purest form’. To facilitate his dream Bogdanov thought that harnessing the power of emerging technologies would enable the proletariat to control the means of production and free themselves from the capitalist yoke. Bogdanov’s monistic notion of organisation, based upon the harmonization of the natural and social sciences, was the intellectual basis of his thinking. In this paper I consider if modern communications technologies and Beers cybernetic interpretation of the human nervous system could enable Bogdanov ambition to be fulfilled and if such an ambition is practically and socially feasible today.