If Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model (VSM) is at the heart of how we might understand organisation from the perspective of an anarchist cybernetics, this has implications for some of the key themes of anarchist and radical left organising. Over the next two chapters, I want to explore these implications in more detail, focusing in this chapter on one possible way of elaborating on the idea of functional hierarchy and what that would then mean for different levels of thinking about anarchist organisation. A sticking point in anarchist theory and practice, at least since the alterglobalisation movement's prominence around the turn of the millennium, has been whether the concept of strategy can be applied to anarchism or whether anarchism is, or ought to be in principle, purely tactical. One of the insights that cybernetics, and specifically the VSM, can provide for us with respect to anarchist organising, I want to argue here, is that the relationship between strategy and tactics can be framed and articulated in such a way as to be wholly consistent with the ideals of self-organisation and participatory democracy that animate anarchism. Moreover, looking at anarchist organisation through the prism of the VSM, we can identify the potential efficacy of considering a further layer over and above tactics and strategy that I refer to in this chapter as ‘grand strategy’. For each of these functionally distinct levels – tactics, strategy and grand strategy – I will show how they both contribute to the effectiveness of organisation and at the same time adhere to what we commonly understand as the underlying principles of anarchist organising. Expanding on the concept of functional hierarchy, this chapter discusses how functionally distinct levels of decision making can operate in anarchist organisation.

System and metasystem in the VSM

In the previous chapter, I characterised Beer's VSM as broadly being constituted of two sections. One the one hand, there is the section of the model concerned with the operational parts of the system or organisation, that each possess a level of autonomy with respect to how they go about their business (Systems One and Two). On the other hand, there is the section that deals with bringing those autonomous parts into an overall coherence, in such a way that they can be considered parts of the same system or organisation (Systems Three, Four and Five).