A socialist computer: Chile, 1970-1973
The overthrow of Salvador Allende’s elected socialist government in Chile in September 1973 was the first act of a global neoliberal onslaught on egalitarian policies, and on the environment. Cybersyn, the Allende government’s innovative, cybernetic planning project, also fell casualty to the putsch – but not before it had shown the possibility of a radically different, democratic, much lower-impact kind of technological development.
In 1979 the popular science writer Christopher Evans predicted that:
By the end of the next decade… another phase of the emancipation of Man from the need to work for his living will have been achieved… the seven-hour day will become a five- and perhaps even a four-hour day. And as we hand over the job of providing wealth to the computers we have created to help us, it will be further reduced and eventually the nil-hour day will arrive. The trend may have its ups and downs but its direction is inevitable.1
Evans’s expectations seemed reasonable at the time. He could look back on a lifetime characterized by steady progress: big reductions in working hours and improvements in working conditions; even coalminers enjoyed ‘a standard of living which even the affluent middle class of Victorian times might envy’. And this improvement was echoed all over the world, including in much of ex-colonial Africa and South Asia.
Evans does not seem to have realized that the world’s political direction, which for nearly 40 years had been towards greater and greater equality and autonomy, had already begun to slide into reverse.
FROM POST-WAR CONSENSUS TO SHOCK DOCTRINE
In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein dates the start of the global shift away from Utopia as 11 September 1973, in Santiago de Chile.2 A military putsch led by General Augusto Pinochet, financed by President Richard Nixon’s US State Department and by big business, overthrew the elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende, opening the way for Chile to be turned, two years later, into a test-bed for the ‘Chicago school’ of monetarist, free-market economics associated with Milton Friedman. Friedman believed in controlling the money supply, whatever the consequences in terms of mass unemployment, and in introducing these changes as ‘shock treatment’. In the early days of the coup, Friedman even gave pep-talks to a wavering Pinochet who, although already ordering massacres and torture, was concerned about the distress that the cuts in public spending Friedman was urging would cause.3
The 1973 putsch in Chile, its ferocity, and the deafening silence from the ‘international community’ on the abuses carried out by the incoming regime, certainly sent a shockwave across the world – especially as this was quite manifestly a putsch against a democratically elected government. For the small clique around President Richard Nixon and his security adviser Henry Kissinger, the very fact that it was democratically elected made it more alarming, because this might give other electorates similar ideas, thrusting them (as the clique saw it) into the arms of the Communist bloc.4 As Kissinger said: ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people’.5 Violent measures began even before Allende took office, as soon as it became apparent that a majority of Chileans wanted serious redistribution of wealth.
The Vietnam War, which would drag on until 1975, had caused massive US government debt. In 1971 the US attempted to resolve this by abandoning the post-War Bretton Woods agreement (which had maintained a degree of international financial stability) and allowing the dollar to ‘float’ on the international currency market.
Significant events followed one after another. Oil exporters in the Middle East raised their prices to compensate for the dollar’s devaluation, then hiked them dramatically in response to US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 (the month after the Pinochet putsch), raising the price of a barrel of oil from $3 to $12 in less than a year. Banks recycled the ensuing glut of petro-dollar deposits as loans to ‘Third World’ governments. But in the early 1980s the US, under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, dramatically raised interest rates as a monetarist response to inflation. Banks, threatened with default on their Third World loans, ran to their governments. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to the banks’ rescue, imposing ‘structural adjustment’ agreements: drastic cuts to public-sector spending and the sell-off of public-sector assets to fund debt-servicing. The burden of the crisis was borne not by the banks or even by the Third World elites who had arranged the original deals, but by the poor.
The trend intensified after the Soviet Union’s breakup in 1989-90, and its subjection to what even mainstream economists now condemn as excessive shock therapy.6 Friedmanite principles were formalized internationally in treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994) and by the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO, 1995) which, among other things, devastated the agricultural economies of many countries by exposing them to aggressive price competition from foreign agribusiness.
Friedman himself seems to have been ambivalent about overt physical violence (he subsequently opposed US military intervention in Iraq) but his theories played well with people who had no time for equality and who had never accepted the post-War consensus, such as it was – notably Margaret Thatcher, who became UK Prime Minister in 1979, and Ronald Reagan, who became US President in 1981 (and who famously dismissed concerns about reductions in welfare support with the quip: ‘some folks like to be poor’).
Inequality rose all over the world. Sri Lanka, for example, had had good public-health services in 1970, and a Gini coefficient of 0.33 (where 0 is perfect equality and 1 perfect inequality), but this had risen to 0.51 by 1990 after IMF-imposed reforms. China’s Gini coefficient was 0.33 in 1979 (on the eve of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms) and had reached 0.57 by 1990.7 For comparison, inequality in the UK also rose, from 0.25 in 1979 (just after Margaret Thatcher came to power) to 0.34 in 1991, reaching 0.36 by 20088, and was increasingly recognized as destabilizing even at this level.
Chile started the 1970s with far greater inequality than any of these examples. Chile is regarded as one of Latin America’s more ‘European’ countries, but its Gini coefficient of 0.45 was much greater in 1970 than either Sri Lanka’s or China’s. After the 1973 putsch this would rise again, to match China’s post-reform level of 0.57 in 1990.9 Chile’s inequality was due to two things: highly concentrated ownership of land, and control of its most profitable assets by foreign firms, so that most of the proceeds flowed overseas.
Inequality not only created the need and fed enthusiasm for Allende’s program of reforms; it also fed the dynamic that drove opposition to the reforms, reflecting the complete disconnect between the worldviews of Chile’s military and business elites, with their huge estates and global lifestyles, and its poor, who included thousands of landless and a large, disenfranchised indigenous (mainly Mapuche) population.
THE UNIDAD POPULAR: A MODERATELY EGALITARIAN PROGRAM
Allende’s leftwing Popular Unity coalition (Unidad Popular – UP) came to power in November 1970 with what was seen as a radically egalitarian program. The actual proposals might not have seemed wildly extreme in western Europe in the immediate post-War period, but seemed thoroughly revolutionary at the time and in that place. These are the main points from the UP’s 1969 manifesto:
Basic points of government action will be: a)… to establish a system of equal minimum wages and salaries for equal work, in whatever enterprise…; b) to unify, improve and extend the system of social security… to workers who do not yet have it…; c) to assure medical and dental preventive care and treatment to all Chileans…; d) to carry out an ambitious plan of housing construction… limiting the profits of private and mixed enterprises operating in this sector…; remodelling cities and neighborhoods so as not to cast low-income people out to the outskirts…; e) There will be full civil authority [capacidad civil] for married women and equal legal status for all children whether born in or out of wedlock, as well as adequate divorce laws… with full regard for the rights of the mother and the children; f) The legal distinction between blue-collar workers [obreros] and white-collar workers [empleados] will be abolished, establishing for all the status of workers [trabajadores] and extending the right to organize to all those who do not already have it.10
The UP lacked an outright majority, but had ample support from other parties for a radical agenda for eliminating poverty and unemployment, designed to switch Chile from dependence on exports of basic commodities (especially copper) to self-sufficiency, manufacturing its own consumer and capital goods; from a colonial ‘dependency’ economy to an independent, modern one. This was a flat, public rejection of the official international development orthodoxy of the time: the theory of ‘comparative advantage’ favored by the World Bank, which, not incidentally, served the purposes of the corporations and banks of the rich countries. This maintained that poorer countries should concentrate on the things they allegedly did best, such as extracting and exporting basic commodities like copper ore, and let the more advanced countries do the more complicated, more profitable things like making cars, planes, computers and Pepsi Cola.
The UP’s program depended on winning what was called ‘the battle of production’: the exact opposite of monetarist policy. Inflation was to be tackled, not by reducing the money supply but by increasing the supply of the goods people wanted. If this meant producing goods at a loss, so be it: effort would be concentrated on making the goods more efficiently or finding acceptable alternatives. Wages were to be increased unconditionally, and effort would be poured into identifying and then manufacturing the things people wanted, adjusting production as demand evolved.
First steps included nationalization of key industries; as Allende put it: to ‘abolish the pillars propping up that minority that has always condemned our country to underdevelopment’.11 The minimum wage was doubled immediately, and working hours cut. Results were promising: by the end of 1971 GDP was up by 7.7 per cent, factory workers’ wages by 30 per cent, industrial production by 13.7 per cent, and consumption levels by 11.6 per cent.12
The major nationalizations were by buy-out; some were compulsory purchases under legislation inherited from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many smaller ones, however, were unplanned: peasants and industrial workers took matters into their own hands, so that the government ended up with four times as many enterprises to manage as it had planned for.13
Raul Espejo, who played a central role in building the system that would attempt to transform these disparate businesses into a cybernetically co-ordinated socialist economy, wrote:
In a very short time the government took control of more than 300 firms. This was known as the Industrial Social Area. They were the biggest firms; they represented almost 60 per cent of the country’s industrial production. It was also clear that this Social Area was created to be socially responsible. There could be no question of using the laws of the market as production regulators.14
By the end of 1971, 68 industries, including the entire mining sector and most of the country’s 23 banks, had been nationalized. To manage all of this, Chile had a well-established but small planning and development agency, CORFO (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción) – another legacy of the progressive reforms of the 1930s. This was expanded rapidly from just 600 employees to 8,000, to cope with its new role. Not all of these new employees were in total agreement with the government’s aims, but a core group of CORFO employees were well aware of the international cybernetics and Operational Research movements, and an enthusiastic handful of them knew of the British cyberneticist Stafford Beer’s work. In 1971, CORFO’s 28-year-old technical manager, Fernando Flores, invited Beer to come to Chile and help.
The project that emerged demonstrated, in the most demanding circumstances imaginable, a radically different way of using computers from the one that subsequently came to dominate. It was called Cybersyn in English, and Syncho in Spanish, and represented the distillation of Beer’s thinking over the previous 30 years.15
STAFFORD BEER AND ‘CYBERNETIC SOCIALISM’
By 1971 Stafford Beer was a major figure in the international cybernetics movement. He had discovered cybernetics and Operational Research while he was in the British army in India immediately after the Second World War. He read Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in 1950, went immediately to visit Wiener in the US, and then launched himself on a meteoric career, setting up cybernetics departments in the British steel industry (which had just been nationalized), then an international management consultancy firm, SIGMA, and taking up a string of visiting professorships – all without the benefit of a first degree.
Beer detested the practice, already entrenched in the 1970s, of accumulating ‘giant data-banks of dead information’, which he called ‘the biggest waste of a magnificent invention that mankind has ever perpetrated’.16 He likened that approach to steering a car using only the rear-view mirror.
His own approach increasingly emphasized the problems created by top-down hierarchies and the need to develop the autonomous capabilities of peer groups. Like Wiener, Beer was inspired by biological systems, especially the new understanding (developed by the likes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) of the relationship between mind and body. In this new understanding, the body is no longer the mere physical appendage of the mind, but an active and essential part of it, handling all manner of complex decisions, with barely any reference to the conscious mind. Important work on understanding the ‘embodied mind’ was, as it happened, being done by two Chilean neuroscientists, Humberto Maturana and his student Francisco Varela, while Beer was in Chile, and their ideas cross-fertilized with his own.
Beer’s approach sought to achieve within organizations the same kind of autonomy and easy co-ordination that a healthy body enjoys. He modelled the dynamics of an organization in such a way that only small amounts of significant data needed to be gathered, and represented graphically rather than numerically, so that important relationships could be seen at a glance (for example, the gap between a factory’s actual and its possible output). In an early work, he writes:
Very much more is learned… by inference from the system’s cybernetics than from analysis of enormous masses of data… The importance of this conclusion cannot be over-emphasized. Almost the whole of government research is quite typically devoted to the collection and analysis of information about what has happened [but this is] so much flotsam on the entropic tides created by the systemic structures below the surface. Given a full understanding of those submarine structures and of the currents at depth… it becomes possible to predict effects on the surface using very little data of the former kind.17
Beer was becoming more and more interested in what cybernetics could offer society, and less and less hopeful about the possibilities of doing cybernetics under capitalism. In principle, cybernetics deals with ‘whole systems’. Everything that is impacted by, or which affects, the activity under consideration, in any way, needs to be brought into the model, but capitalist firms and economies think of themselves and expect to be seen as entirely self-sufficient entities, connected to the outside world only via the famous ‘bottom line’. They are not happy about their other connections with the outside world being dragged into the cybernetic model, such as the ones that affect local air pollution, transport, employment, property prices, unrest in foreign places, and so on. Any attempt to consider the ‘whole system’ within which a capitalist firm or economy sits threatens to bring all manner of people into the equation who are not normally there, who the capitalist strongly believes have no right to be there, and whose equal presence would make it impossible to go on doing capitalism.
Eden Medina, a researcher and writer who knows Chile well, published the first book-length account of the Cybersyn project in 2011, and was able to interview many of the people involved in it at length, including Stafford Beer himself before he died in 2002. Beer told her that the timing of Flores’s request was perfect. In 1971 he was just beginning his metamorphosis from Rolls Royce-driving international management consultant into a revolutionary. In late 1970 he had even delivered a lecture (to the Teilhard de Chardin Society) calling for revolution:
Nothing else will do… We do not need to embark on the revolutionary process with bombs and fire. But we must start with a genuinely revolutionary intention: to devise wholly new methods for handling our problems.18
Just a few months later he received Flores’s letter, inviting him to do just that. When Medina asked him, in 2001, how he felt when the invitation arrived, he replied, ‘I had an orgasm!’
In contrast, the US’s newly elected President, Richard Nixon, was reported to be ‘beside himself’ when Allende won the 1970 election, and immediately allocated $10 million to fund a coup (which failed) and ‘make the economy scream’.19 US corporations with interests in Chile were brought into the discussion – in particular, Pepsi Cola and ITT – and the owner of Chile’s leading rightwing newspaper, El Mercurio.
As the ‘crisis’ of Chile’s increasingly independent course developed, the destabilization effort escalated, by overt and covert means. Overt counter-measures included cutting off US aid (reduced from $80.0 million in 1969 to $3.8 million in 1973); cutting Chile’s credit rating to the lowest possible level immediately, and cutting off US bank credit altogether in 1971, so that cash had to be used for foreign transactions.
Even more severe damage was done clandestinely. An ‘invisible blockade’ meant greater and greater difficulties and delays in sourcing essential supplies, and in marketing Chilean goods in return for urgently needed foreign exchange. At one point Beer himself tried to help by promoting Chilean wine – at that time unknown in Europe. Firms owned by the Right were paid to go ‘on strike’. Beer became engrossed in trying to fathom the cybernetics of the total situation, including the role of popular culture and song in sustaining resistance. Everything seemed to be summed up in an incident that he described later on:
When Angel Parra wrote a haunting song called ‘El Barque Phantasmo’ about the ghost ship carrying copper which no-one would unload, and when Allende approved it to the extent that he wished to take disc pressings as gifts to the members of the United Nations he was shortly to address, the President was thwarted. The record-pressing company was on strike.20
Over the next three years US government and corporate agencies funneled lavish funds to Chile’s rightwing media, to far-right terror groups, to finance murders and sabotage, and even to pay people to exacerbate shortages by buying up sugar and dumping it in rivers.21 None of this succeeded in bringing down the Allende government – which instead won greatly increased electoral support in the elections of May 1973. The Cybersyn project played a small but important role in Chile’s annoying failure to succumb.
Cybersyn was designed to help manage the economy in real time and identify problems ahead of time. It would give a complete and up-to-date picture of what was happening in the economy, in as much detail as necessary for ensuring supplies of what was needed, but no more than that: how much capacity was being used, how much was available, of what kinds, and where. This fitted naturally with the ‘battle of production’ approach to managing the economy, and although the underlying cybernetic principles were challenging, the physical implementation did not need to be complicated.
As Eden Medina says, ‘it is important to note that Cybersyn engineers were not interested in financial information: [they were] focused exclusively on industrial production’. New but simpler criteria could therefore be used (such as current, potential and theoretically achievable output levels) which could, moreover, be expressed as ‘unitless percentages’ or ‘quantified flow-charts’.22
The intention was to support the autonomy of workers and work groups, and to strip away the kind of ‘dead data’ that accumulate in typical computer systems. In his report to the Chilean government in January 1972, Beer wrote:
It is a primary aim to avoid creating a vast bureaucratic machine, and the true intention… is simply to discard all the data once they have been wrung dry by this powerful online system.23
HOW MUCH COMPUTER HARDWARE DOES A VIABLE SOCIETY NEED?
Insofar as Cybersyn has attracted public interest, it has tended to focus on the physical computer that was used in the project. At the time, this even took the form of scare stories that Chile was being managed by a sinister ‘electronic brain’ – including a very unhelpful article that was published in Britain, in The Observer.24 In fact, the computer itself played very little part in the project’s very impressive achievements because it could not be fully deployed in time. It was in any case a very modest computer, although its software was advanced, involving a new and sophisticated system of statistical filtering (Bayesian filtering, used nowadays in email spam-filters, among other places) to distinguish significant trends that might otherwise escape notice and discard insignificant information, yielding a sparse stream of highly relevant, useful and above all timely information.25
It was just as well that Cybersyn wasn’t planned as a massive data-capture, data-mining exercise: there was not enough computing capacity in all of Chile even to contemplate such a thing. Ideally, the system would have provided a computer for each factory, shop and depot, to give its staff a full picture of their own outstanding orders and available resources, in real time, and warn them of possible problems without reference to any higher authority – an ideal task for the cheap, personal and home computers that were becoming plentiful 10 years later.
The government had only four mainframe computers – none of which worked in real time (as a modern computer does, allowing you to enter your data and see the results immediately). Cybersyn was given full use of one of them, a Burroughs 3500: a somewhat eccentric 1966 design with 500k of main memory. This somehow had to be made to simulate a computer network consisting of hundreds and potentially thousands of nodes (in the factories and utilities). It looked, and physically was, a top-down affair, and this (and the exciting-looking command-center, the Opsroom, unveiled later) helped to foster the perception of a ‘big brother’ system, running the economy by remote control – something that Cybersyn had nowhere near the capacity to do.
In lieu of real-time processing, information had to be gathered from the workplaces each day, run through the machine in ‘batch mode’, and the results passed back to the workplaces the next day.
There was also the problem of how physically to connect the workplaces to the machine. A cheap but effective method was hit upon: to connect the enterprises by telex machines, which could operate over telephone lines and a network of microwave links that had been installed in the 1960s for satellite tracking. Even this was not straightforward: there were not enough telex machines and more could not be bought because Chile was now under unofficial but very effective blockade. But then a CORFO employee discovered a forgotten hoard of 400 brand-new machines, ordered in the 1960s but never used, sitting in a store-room at ENTEL, the National Telecommunications Enterprise.
The telex machines weren’t even directly connected to the computer at first – all data had to be re-entered in Santiago – but this was never a major problem as there wasn’t too much of it.
The revolutionary aspect of the network wasn’t the technology but the type of data being captured, and its form: essentially just three figures for each of the key parameters affecting any given business (parameters which might include machine availability, stock-levels or staff availability). These three figures were ‘actuality’, ‘capability’ and ‘potentiality’, of which the first two might represent current output and spare capacity, and the third, ‘potentiality’, a calculation of what might be achieved under ideal circumstances. Calculating and checking these figures, and teaching factory staff how to use them, took a large part of the project’s effort, but, once defined, the system could derive a surprising amount of useful information from them, and they could ultimately be represented iconically, like the ‘levels’ display on a hi-fi system. Beer had developed the principle in his book, Brain of the Firm, which he had just finished before he went to Chile, and which became the project’s ‘bible’.26
Cybersyn’s most famous feature was a prototype ‘Opsroom’, which looked like something from a James Bond movie or the TV series Star Trek. Again, there should ideally have been hundreds of these, in workplaces up and down the country. Planners, political and labor representatives, seated in big, comfortable swivel-chairs with control panels in the armrests, could summon up graphic displays on the surrounding walls illustrating every aspect of the country’s economic life, using data no more than a few hours old. Using the armrest controls, they could explore the data ‘as if using a hypertext’, according to one of Medina’s interviewees – a full 20 years before that kind of experience became commonly available with the World Wide Web.
These displays did sophisticated things, yet used what might sound like unsophisticated means: a system of slide-projectors, controlled by skilled assistants who assembled each screen as it was requested from a ‘vocabulary’ of specially designed iconic images on slides. This was intended to be a complete graphic vocabulary covering all foreseeable possibilities, and there seem not to have been any plans or desire to automate the displays. This was intended to be a social system, not just a technical one.
Two temporary control rooms were built and brought into service in 1973, not as sophisticated as the prototype Opsroom, but with much the same functionality, which was conclusively demonstrated, however; so much so that Allende considered having the main Opsroom moved into the presidential palace in the days preceding the final coup.
THE OCTOBER ‘STRIKE’ EXPOSES THE REDUNDANCY OF CAPITAL
Even before it approached completion, the system helped to frustrate two waves of ‘capital strikes’ organized by rightwing groups and the small business organizations known in Chile as ‘gremios’ – often mistranslated at the time as ‘unions’ by the foreign press.
The October ‘strike’ was not a strike in the normal sense but more like a lockout. It started as a protest by private truck owners against the creation of a state trucking service in the Aysén region of southern Chile; it spread with enormous rapidity and it became clear that there had been widespread preparation for it. There were road-blocks; stores closed, and ‘enforcement squads’ attacked stores and vehicles that refused to join the strike. The National Manufacturers’ Association locked out their employees, in some cases paying them to stay at home. Medina describes it as ‘a public demonstration of class power by the bourgeoisie’. It later emerged that the strike was lavishly funded by the US State Department and business.27
This very determined and well-financed effort to overthrow the government was defeated by the end of October; partly by the sheer energy of Chilean workers and community organizations, who occupied factories and shops, defended them, and organized food distribution direct to people who needed it; and partly by Cybersyn. Very few people were aware of the project at that time, and many of those who did witness its work in beating the strike did not realize what they were seeing: all they saw was a roomful of telex machines thundering away. (‘The noise was deafening’, Beer wrote.)
The attempt to shut down the economy in October 1972 not only failed; it also shone a floodlight on the sheer scale of the redundancy (in terms of unnecessary equipment and so on) a supposedly ‘efficient’, competition-based economy needs, just so that its players can compete with each other.
Normally, servicing Chile’s economy required 40,000 independently operated trucks; during the ‘strike’, no more than a third of that number did the same job, and often just a tenth or even fewer. According to Gustavo Silva, one of the civil servants involved, the network made it possible for just 200 trucks to do enough of the work normally done by the national fleet of 40,000 to keep the economy moving.28
He told Medina: ‘We knew exactly how many trucks we needed, so each time we lost one we were able to requisition another’… ‘Two concepts stayed in our minds: that information helps you make decisions and, above all, that it helps you keep a record of this information… correct your mistakes and see why things happened.’ For example, they might get a call saying that there was no kerosene in such-and-such an area. ‘But why? We sent a truck there!’ In minutes, they could find out what had happened. In this way, says Medina, the network connected the ‘revolution from above’ with the one from below.
In his own account, Beer explains the deeper implication of the victory: redundancy of vehicles and physical resources had been replaced by ‘redundancy of control’.
The huge surge of information into [the network] operated as a negentropy pump: instant communication loops sprang into being, and instant decisions were available… [this] redundancy of potential command is decentralizing, and it is robust.29
In other words, the country’s normal ‘knowledge economy’ was turned upside down: instead of the owners of resources hoarding knowledge for their own purposes, all of the significant knowledge was suddenly in the hands of the planners. They could see what needed to be done and could generally choose from a variety of responses, even with drastically fewer resources. For once, it was the owners of capital who were in the dark.
Raul Espejo, who worked as project manager throughout, wrote a brief account of it in November 1973, after his arrival in England. In this he was at pains to emphasize the human aspect of the system; many people, he wrote, got very excited about the technology – but this was not the main thing. The computer system was not complete and could not, in any case, have provided the real-time analysis the situation demanded. In October 1972 it was the telex network, and the people using it, that saved the day: the computer’s sophisticated Bayesian filters played no part. Espejo wrote:
The organizational model which we were building scientifically, by now existed unconsciously in the minds of managers; and now the new information routines we had been instituting suddenly acquired a meaning and the communication network a physical reality. The correlation between information and decision, which was missing in stage 2, suddenly became easy… People immediately found that they got instant answers or decisions as soon as their problems were raised.
The comprehension of this fact exploded like a bomb on the minds of all concerned.30
The experience of defeating this attempted counter-revolution gave a great boost to the radicalization and self-organization on the streets and in the factories. Fifty more factories had been taken over by their workers by the end of the strike; only 15 of them were returned to their owners afterwards.
Work on Cybersyn was galvanized, and momentum gathered through the remaining 11 months of Chile’s democracy. In November 1972, the software for the national planning system started producing its first daily printouts, checking a growing range of production indicators for anomalies. The Opsroom was functioning by the following January,31 and it worked – although sometimes in ways that showed up frustrating shortcomings in the reporting system. Medina records an occasion when it correctly predicted a coal shortage at a cement works, several days after the crisis had passed: the plant managers had delayed sending in their daily capability figures, having not understood their significance.32
A second strike, in August 1973, was defeated with even greater ease. Espejo recorded from notes made at the time that although ‘no more than 10 per cent of the truck fleet was working’ at the beginning of the strike, and no more than 30 per cent by its end, fuel supplies remained ‘virtually normal’, as did the flow of raw materials to the strategic productive sector, and food supplies remained ‘perfectly adequate’ throughout the country.
Beer became increasingly radicalized and expanded his vision for the system. He looked for ways to apply cybernetic thinking to counteract the power of the Chilean media, which were nearly all owned by the Right, and to bring workers more into the decision process.
One initiative led Beer to make contact with popular musicians and singers in the Nueva Canción movement – of which Victor Jara was a leading figure: the famous political singer subsequently tortured and murdered by police in the National Stadium after the September putsch. Beer evaluated their contribution to the revolution in engineering terms – as an information channel that might counteract the flood of anti-government rhetoric coming from the mainstream media.
Another project, known as ‘Cyberfolk’, included a simple system that could be used, for example, at meetings, where employees might feel inhibited about expressing their candid opinions. It was built in England by Beer’s son Simon, an electronics engineer, and consisted essentially of ‘no more than one loop of low-tension wire’.33 Unlike the voting machines that appeared subsequently in Western TV programs, where the audience is asked to vote on specific questions at specific times, this one allowed for continuous and variable-strength feedback throughout the discussion. Dials, connected by the wire, allowed employees discreetly to register their levels of enthusiasm for proposals, as the discussion progressed, the collective level of approval being displayed on a ‘summation meter’, visible to everyone. Since the boss, or speaker, could only see ‘the feeling of the meeting’, no individual need fear reprisals for lack of enthusiasm.
The Cybersyn team tested the prototype in meetings at the Catholic University in Santiago and it ‘worked very well’, according to Raul Espejo.34 According to a recently created Chilean web archive about Cybersyn, the system was tested with cable TV in two cities, Tome and Mejillones.35 The ultimate idea was to use this as part of a ‘people’s TV channel’ to mediate a live, national policy dialog with the electorate but, as the archive’s authors point out:
This system required total commitment and honesty from both parties, a situation that was impossible in those times owing to the socio-economic instability that characterized the country. Those groups that opposed the Allende Government wrongly accused this experiment as a tool to control people, when in all truth it would be the people who would finally have the chance to take part in the civic decisions of the State.
All of this was unbearable provocation to the Right. Their violence increased and became more and more overt. Allende refused to distribute arms to the workers, despite being urged to do so by Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro, the minister for the economy Pedro Vuskovic, and many others; some workers’ groups armed themselves anyway, but when the putsch came, resistance was essentially non-existent, and the Right had to use their imaginations when identifying targets for attack.
On 11 September 1973, Pinochet sent jet fighters and tanks against the undefended Moneda presidential palace. Allende carried through his promise to leave office only ‘in wooden pajamas’: his coffin. He shot himself, probably with the gold-plated Kalashnikov rifle that Castro had given him, to avoid being paraded as a trophy by the junta. Pinochet and his backers replaced the elected government with a system of murder, torture and ‘disappearance’, whose thousands of victims are still not all accounted for more than 40 years later.
The economy slumped in 1975, was subjected to full monetarist discipline, and collapsed completely in 1982. It then recovered – partly thanks to decisions to retain the lucrative copper industry in the public sector (source of around 30 per cent of government income) and to sell large areas of land to foreign agribusiness. Foreign aid was resumed, including World Bank loans, and Chile became, officially, a success story, to the extent that people of distant lands can now buy Chilean apples instead of locally grown ones, from Dole, Del Monte and Fyffes.36 It still has the highest inequality of any OECD country (with a Gini coefficient of 0.52) and 38 per cent of its citizens find it ‘difficult or very difficult to live on their present income’, but at least they have been promised that Chile will become a ‘developed country’ by 2018.37
The Chilean intervention was intended to tell the people of the world what would happen to them should they take ideas of freedom, democracy and equality too seriously. But it was also an admission that social justice was not pie in the sky but a practical possibility that, in the end, could only be prevented by brute force – an admission that so violated even the moral sensibilities of Pinochet and his forces, that they flung themselves heart and soul into delusion, attacking empty streets with real tanks, jet fighters and rockets. Till his dying day, Pinochet referred to his putsch as a ‘war’.
Chile’s ‘first 9/11’ may have inaugurated the era of ‘disaster capitalism’ but the final resort to undisguised lethal force also revealed to the world that the polite doctrines that for centuries had given a veil of legitimacy to the domination of the weak by the powerful were bankrupt. The wheels had fallen off all their trusty old rationales one after another: the superior wisdom of markets; the stupidity of the working class; eugenics; the ‘civilizing mission’ of the better-armed nations… all that remained was brute force wrapped up in self-delusional histrionics.
Some months later, in a radio lecture in Canada, Beer said: ‘I tell you solemnly that in Chile the whole of humanity has taken a beating’.38 He added a substantial account of the project to the 1981 second edition of his book Brain of the Firm and, in this, he wrote:
I have often been asked why we were not able to stipulate a behavior which would accommodate that threat [of external intervention]. It is like complaining that man, who is supposed to be an adaptive biological system, cannot adapt to a bullet through the heart.39
The environment also took a beating as a result of the Pinochet putsch. Allende’s programs for land redistribution and development of the rural economy were of course scrapped, replaced by an unchallenged handover of natural resources to the extractive industries. Chile lost two million hectares of its unique native forests in the single decade from 1985 to 1995; 80 per cent of what’s left is now in private hands. In 1999, when Miguel Altieri and Alejandro Rojas surveyed Chile’s ecological situation in a journal article, central Chile had lost all of its native forest and the fragile cloud-forests of Tierra del Fuego were being targeted by the wood-pulp industry. Fisheries were also suffering extreme and probably irreversible over-exploitation; agricultural land was suffering some of the world’s worst levels of soil-loss, the damage being compounded by escalating use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Altieri and Rojas wrote: ‘It could be argued that throughout the authoritarian regime (1973-89), not only was there no environmental policy, but its absence was also considered an advantage in attracting foreign capital to Chile’.40
This was not just Chile’s tragedy. The myth of Chile’s economic success was used to promote and enforce neoliberal policies worldwide during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, adding major impetus to what the ecologist Barry Commoner called the ‘Great Acceleration’ of global ecological impacts.41
The word ‘inevitable’ has often been applied to the fall of Chile’s socialist government in 1973. Jonathan Haslam’s account, which is generally sympathetic to Allende, is subtitled ‘A case of assisted suicide’. Alec Nove (the socialist economist whose downbeat views on wealth redistribution are mentioned in Chapter 4) was in Chile during the Allende period and argued afterwards that the project had been doomed because it ‘alienated the petit-bourgeoisie’. He heard with his own ears ‘housewives banging saucepan lids nightly in protest at food shortages’.42 But these vociferous protests, by better-off minorities, played very little part in the government’s overthrow, which, unknown to Nove, was being plotted by much bigger forces.
Allende’s overthrow was no more inevitable than the somewhat freakish combination of factors that made it possible. It was not inevitable that an informal clique would be controlling US foreign policy in 1970, occasionally sidelining even the CIA. Or that Nixon would survive the revelations about his other criminal activities until 1974; or that he would even have become US President. Nor was it inevitable that the Vietnam War would still be distorting US politics in 1973, in the teeth of a decade of escalating opposition, and especially after Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 exposure (in the ‘Pentagon Papers’) of the criminality behind it. Or even that such a thing as a ‘Vietnam War’ would have been conceivable after 1945, let alone one involving the US, when it seemed that the people of Vietnam had already earned their independence from France during the Second World War, in their successful campaigns against Japanese occupation.
These defeats of democratic process were certainly possible, or somewhat likely, or perhaps even highly probable, but none of them was pre-ordained by fate. Every single step on the road to September 1973 was contested – and events could have taken a completely different course. The same is equally true of campaigns for equality and justice, many of which turned out to be possible after all, despite loud insistence from all quarters that they were not: the battles against the Atlantic slave trade; for women’s emancipation; against capital punishment in many countries; for gay rights; and a succession of dictators, tyrants and crooked politicians have been overthrown, exposed, ejected from office, and sometimes even jailed or executed. There is clearly no fundamental law that says brutality rather than humanity will prevail.
Progressive initiatives are always doomed to fail, until they don’t, and the same is true of oppressive ones.
1 Christopher Riche Evans, The Mighty Micro, Gollancz, 1979, pp 150-1.
2 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007.
3 Ibid, pp 80-81.
4 Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile, Verso, 2005, pp 55-58.
5 William Blum, Killing Hope, Zed Books, 2003, p 209.
6 Joseph E Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, WW Norton, 2002.
7 Donald Lamberton, Managing the Global, IBTauris, 2002, p 182.
8 Jonathan Cribb, Income inequality in the UK, Institute for Fiscal Studies, Feb 2013.
9 Lamberton, op cit, p 182.
10 From the Programa UP, 1969, quoted in V Wallace (translator), ‘The Notion of Equality in Chile’s Communist and Socialist Left, 1960-1973’, Socialism and Democracy, 27(2), 2014, nin.tl/equalityChile
11 Allende, quoted in Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, MIT Press, 2011, p 15.
12 Medina, 2011, op cit, pp 50-52.
13 Ibid, p 52.
14 Raul Espejo, ‘Cybernetic Praxis In Government: The Role Of The Communication Network’, unpublished MS, Nov 1973.
15 Stafford Beer added a very full account of the episode to the second edition of his book Brain of the Firm, Wiley, 1981. Eden Medina has produced the current, definitive account in Cybernetic Revolutionaries, op cit.
16 Stafford Beer, Platform for change: a message from Stafford Beer, Wiley, 1975, p 431.
17 Stafford Beer, Decision and control: the meaning of operational research and management, Wiley, 1966, p 479.
18 Platform for Change, op cit, p 36.
19 Haslam, op cit, 2005, p 67.
20 Beer, Brain of the Firm, op cit, p 308.
21 Reported to Eden Medina by Gustavo Silva; Medina, op cit, p 164.
22 Medina, 2011, op cit, p 129.
23 Beer, Brain of the Firm, op cit, p 263.
24 Medina, 2011, op cit, p 173.
25 Beer, Brain of the Firm, 1981 op cit, pp 262-3.
26 Beer, Brain of the Firm, 1981 op cit, p 164.
27 Medina, 2011, op cit, p 146.
28 Eden Medina, ‘Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 38 (3), 2006, pp 571-606.
29 Beer, Brain of the Firm, op cit, p 313-4.
30 Espejo, op cit.
31 Medina 2011, op cit, p 165.
32 Medina 2011, op cit, p 198.
33 Beer, Brain of the Firm, op cit, p 285.
34 Interview with the author, Jan 2011.
35 Enrique Rivera, Catalina Ossa, Daniel Opazo, Sebastián Vidal, Benjamín Marambio & Edgard Berendsen, Cybersyn/Cybernetic Synergy, nin.tl/1XfCAm2 Accessed 4 July 2015.
36 No author given, ‘Chiquita Brands International Inc’ nin.tl/ChiquitaDuke Accessed 25 Sep 2014. See also Philip McMichael, Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995, p 134.
37 COHA, ‘The Inequality Behind Chile’s Prosperity’, nin.tl/Chileinequality Accessed 24 Sep 2014.
38 Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Massey Lectures, 1973. Text available at nin.tl/BeerFreedom; audio available at: nin.tl/BeerFreedomaudio.
39 Beer, Brain of the Firm, op cit, p 346.
40 MA Altieri & A Rojas, ‘Ecological Impacts of Chile’s Neoliberal Policies, with special emphasis on agroecosystems’, Environment, Development and Sustainability, 1, 1999, pp 55-72.
41 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, Alfred E Knopf, 1971.
42 Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism, George Allen and Unwin, 1983, p 161.