Participant: Ely Dorsey
Affiliation: Division of Mathematics, Science & Engineering, Bristol Community College
Format: Presentation and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm

This paper looks at modern capitalism from a second order cybernetic perspective. It reflects on the Recursion and Paradigms themes of the 2012 ASC Bateson Idea Group Joint Conference.

Modern capitalism is prescribed as a political economic system addressing the allocation and distribution of commodities, services and products linked to the well-being, survival and happiness of a population guided by the following structural characteristics:

• private ownership of land, capital, labor, information and technology;
• profit and utility maximization as the sole economic purposes; and
• evaluation and coordination of any economic activity by markets and prices.

It is hypothesized: While other systems exist with similar characteristics, in modern capitalism, the market, redistribution and reciprocity population-economic wants and goods relations are shifted towards the dominance of the market evaluating its effects excluding social costs. This poses the nature of modern capitalism as amoral.

We examine this hypothesis in eight parts: from Capitalism as System, through Cybernetic Epistemology and the Construction of Objects to Cybernetics as Moral Philosophy. We show that we cannot build an economic governance model from the structural characteristics of modern capitalism that is not free of moral contradictions.

We reflect on the challenges of acquiring money and the act of living. We use tools from radical constructivism, quality management engineering, general systems theory, Marxian epistemology, and the biology of love.