STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 262

As a schoolboy, Beer shared a bedroom with his brother, Ian, who recalled
that Stafford “painted the whole wall . . . with extraordinary apparitions. In
the centre of the wall was the original 'Towering Inferno'—a huge skyscraper
with flames all around the bottom licking their way up the tower.” Vanilla Beer
adds that the picture was called The Collapse of Capitalism . In the late forties,
Stafford fell out with his father, who pressured him into admitting that he had
voted for the Labour Party in the recent election (Ian Beer, letter to Stafford's
family, 25 August 2002). Later in life, Beer sometimes described himself as
“an old-fashioned Leftist” (Medina 2006) or even as “somewhat to the left of
Marx,” though it would be a mistake to think of him within the conventional
frame of British Marxism: “Stafford was fond of telling the story about Marx
that had him saying 'Thank God I'm not a Marxist.' He didn't usually describe
himself in this context but Stafford had a great deal of admiration for Marx,
especially his early writings on alienation. He wasn't much of a fan of Das
Capital mostly on the grounds of dull and repetitive.” 34
Little of this found its way into Beer's early writings. Until 1970, his topics,
essays, and talks were largely couched in a technical idiom and addressed to a
management readership. But in 1969 (Beer 1975, 3)
I had come to the end of the road in my latest job . . . and re-appraised the situ-
ation. What was the use of seeking another such job all safe and sound pensions
all that from which haven to speak and write as I had done for years about the
desperate need for drastic change and how to do it in a sick world? Not even
ethical. How to begin? It was almost 1970. A decade opened its doors for busi-
ness. There were speeches to be made already committed throughout that first
year and I must see them through. What's more these platforms gave me the
opportunity if I could only seize it to collect my thoughts for a new life and to
propound arguments of change .
This series of talks, with assorted explanatory material, was published in 1975
as Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer . In 1973, just before the
Pinochet coup, Beer continued to develop his thinking in public, this time in
the Canadian Massey Lectures on CBC radio, which were published the next
year as Designing Freedom (Beer 1974b). The focus of these works, and many
to follow, was on liberty, freedom, and democracy. Marx is not mentioned in
them, nor any of the classic Marxist concerns such as class struggle. Instead,
Beer attempted a distinctly cybernetic analysis, which is what interests me
most. Here we can explore another dimension of ontology in action: cyber-
netics as politics.