I have added three workshops to begin looking at capitalism, starting here. This is my second attempt in this workbook, to apply my high-level systems thinking tools and to establish a structure for the first cut at analysing one.

So far, it has worked reasonably well. My first attempt was on sovereign states, which comes after capitalism in my table of contents but was simpler, so seemed like a better place to practice.

The structure worked well on the second attempt:

1. A workshop to identify some obvious problems as both a motivation to look at the system and as a test of the work to apply later and see if it held any implications for the problem.
2. A workshop on the definition, starting with the dictionary definition and critiquing it in order to arrive at a more useful and expanded definition to use in this workbook
3. An initial look at the system using the tools outlined in my introductory Social Systems Thinking workshop.

So far, the only change I have had to make to the tools is to add to the text describing the External View template to point out that for social systems in particular, the stakeholders may be internal to the system, because people who are part of the system have lives beyond their role within the system.

I’m finding the diagrams are useful. By the time I post them on this web site, I have had to re-draw them several times because my first few attempts didn’t quite work when I tried to describe them in text and found flaws in my thinking. I’m sure there will be more found as I do more workshops. For those who can’t read the diagrams, you are not missing anything as there is nothing in them that is not described in the text, but I find that drawing them is a useful mental exercise; you would probably get the same value from summarising the text in other words.

One problem I have in describing systems thinking is that I have a lot in my head, not yet written down, and that forms the background to my own thinking. I hope that once I get more of that in here, this workbook will be more useful to others. It will also be more useful to me because so far I have found errors and gaps in my thinking. Nothing too radical yet. 🤞

Two major background thoughts that I haven’t yet published but may be useful:

1. My diagrams and descriptions are far from complete. They can’t be because our brains are too limited, so each one represents a particular point of vi[ I haven’t documented and don’t remember many of those interactions, so I haven’t been recording citations for them.
2. They are limited to my points of view. Of course, those have been shaped by countless interactions with other people, either directly or through various media, including social media, books, lectures, podcasts, print, radio and the whole world of human communications¹. I have another workshop coming on how nothing is really my point of view, except in the sense that it is based on my idiosyncratic and often subconscious way of filtering and recalling an extract from that fire-hose of social thinking that I have been immersed in.

While writing this, I listened to an excellent podcast on Marx’s Capital, in the form of an interview with Angela Davis. Although it didn’t have anything particularly surprising, Professor Davis’ point of view gave me a few “aha” moments. I saved the transcript and will be working it into later workshops. Recommended.

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For those that think in pictures and are interested in how I draw them, I use LibreOffice Draw. Not as quite fancy as Microsoft Visio™ but free open source. I use their entire office suite. There are some smarter tools that understand fancier notations for concept maps and Unified Modeling Language (UML) but I expect to make the diagrams prettier and easier to read when they are stable, so as long as the tool supports connection points (aka glue points) so that the connecting lines move when I move the boxes, that’s all I really need, though layers are a bonus for building the diagrams incrementally when they are complex, as shown in the workshop.

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