Marxism and Systems Science
* Special Issue: Marxism and Systems Science - The Technosphere: Systems, Things, and Infrastructures From Tektology, Cybernetics and Computational Planning to the Complexity Paradigm and Platform Capitalism. Marxism & Sciences: A Journal of Nature, Culture, Human and Society. Issue 8, Summer 2025. Issue Editor: Sascha Freyberg, Joost Kircz & Örsan Şenalp
URL = https://marxismandsciences.org/call-for-papers/#Issue8
Description
"Marxist thought and practice have always centrally focused on the analysis of systems, things, and (technological) infrastructures—along with the possibilities inherent in alternative systems organized by collective ownership and state planning. These discussions have gained renewed currency in the digital age. To explore these questions today means to elaborate a Marxist epistemology of systems that goes beyond the old dichotomy of historical vs. structural analysis.
In this special issue, we want to investigate the relation of Marxism and systems science, in history, theory and practice. We construe systems science broadly, with a particular emphasis on those conceptions which developed in the Marxist tradition with a dialectical approach. Additionally, we understand there to be a longstanding relationship between systems theory, political economy, organisation, computational means, theories of economic planning, and global social history, represented by traditions such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory.
In recent years, world systems analysis has been recast in light of the debate around the notion of the Anthropocene. Representative is the work of the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, who has argued we should understand the artefacts of human planetary activity as comprising the Technosphere. As Zalasiewicz writes, “The technosphere encompasses all of the technological objects manufactured by humans, but that is only part of it…. [It] comprises not just our machines, but us humans too, and the professional and social systems by which we interact with technology…. A proto-technosphere of some kind has been present throughout human history, but for much of this time, it took the form of isolated, scattered patches that were of little planetary significance. It has now become a globally interconnected system – a new and important development on our planet.”
This debate provides an occasion to revisit Marxist resources for understanding human labour in connection with the “scientific-technological revolution” and the “great acceleration” of the twentieth century. We can consider key moments in history, from the famous Bogdanov-Lenin debate to the anti-technocratic work of Evald Ilyenkov, the systems theory of Blauberg, Sadovsky, and Yudin, and cybernetics in the socialist realm.
In the special issue we would like to address the following questions: Is system science more than a theory of an administered world? Does it go beyond an effort to improve the status quo and transform the system altogether? What role does systems theory play in Marxist thought and the history of socialism more generally? What epistemological changes are presented by the development of technologies such as AI? Are current developments reducible to old questions about statistics and data, or do they contain novel dynamics?
Additionally, we might ask: what were the contexts informing the development of Marxist systems theories? Which problems do we encounter today when pursuing these perspectives, and how successful were syntheses of the Marxian critique of political economy and systems thinking? What are its prospects today, and where are revisions needed?
Also, Is it significant that the first two versions of systems science, developed by prominent Marxist theorists Bogdanov and Bukharin, were suppressed by the Soviet regime and only reemerged in the post-war US context?"
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Bibliography
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Blauberg, I. V., Sadovsky, M. V., & Yudin, E. G. (1977). Systems theory: Philosophical and methodological problems. Progress Publishers.
Bogdanov, A.A. Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia. (1908). Edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites. Indiana University Press 1984.
Bogdanov, A., and Peter Dudley (1996). Bogdanov’s Tektology. Hull: Centre for Systems Studies; and: Bogdanov, A. (1980) Essays in Tektology, George Gorelik(trs), The systems inquiry series.
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Wallerstein, I. (1974-1989) The Modern World-System, 3 vols; and idem. (2004) World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Online: https://archive.org/details/worldsystemsanal0000wall
Zalasiewicz, Jan. “The Unbearable Burden of the Technosphere.” The Unesco Courier. March 27, 2018. Online: https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/unbearable-burden-technosphere