Designing freedom, regulating a nation: Socialist cybernetics in Allende's Chile

Journal of Latin American Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 571-606

  Medina, Eden ^a,b  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADMINISTRATION; GOVERNMENT; INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH; NATIONAL PLANNING; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; REGIONAL ECONOMY; SOCIALISM;

CHILE; SOUTH AMERICA;

EID: 30344452140     PISSN: 0022216X     EISSN: 1469767X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X06001179     Document Type: Article

References (126)

1. 'Cybersyn' comes from a synthesis of the two concepts driving the project, 'cybernetics' and 'synergy'. The abbreviation 'Synco' conveyed the objective of the project, namely 'Sistema de Informacion y Control'. The project name has also appeared as 'Sinco' or 'Cinco'.
2. Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (New York, 1974), p. 257.
3. Wiener himself christened Beer the 'father of management cybernetics'.
4. Stafford Beer, interview by author, Toronto, Canada, 15-16 March 2001.
5. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 257.
6. Ibid., p. 258. The meeting between Allende and Beer constitutes one of the most popularly printed anecdotes of the Cybersyn project, always constructed from Beer's account. Here I have retold the story drawing from Beer's account in Brain of the Firm, an interview with Beer, and an interview with Roberto Cañete, Viña del Mar, Chile, 16 Jan. 2003.
7. The biography of Salvador Allende Gossens is well known, but it warrants a brief synopsis here. Although he had run as the presidential candidate for the left in the previous two presidential elections, he first attracted worldwide attention in 1970 after he defeated his opponent, the rightist candidate Jorge Alessandri, by a slim 1.3% margin of the popular vote. His election marked the arrival of Chile's first democratically-elected socialist leader and the first to attempt socialist transformation through peaceful means. A socialist since the age of twenty-four, Allende entered politics fighting for his cousin Marmaduke Grove Vallejo, the Air Force Commander who became Chile's first socialist president for a short-lived twelve days in 1932. After establishing a branch of the socialist party in his hometown of Valparaíso, Allende quickly rose through the ranks of the party and was elected to Congress in 1937. Always in favour of socialist reform through existing democratic practices, unlike many of his more radical contemporaries, Allende consistently pushed for a leftist agenda from the senate and later from the presidential palace.
8. This should not imply that the project has not been documented. Beer published his account of the project in the last five chapters of Brain of the Firm, as well as in the last chapter of Platform for Change (New York, 1975).
9. Other references include Armand Mattelart and Hector Schmucler, Communication & Information Technologies: Freedom of Choice far Latin America (Norwood, 1985).
10. Project participants, such as Raúl Espejo, Herman Schwember and Roberto Cañete have also published their accounts of Cybersyn in international cybernetics journals. Discussions of the project have similarly appeared in publications such as New Scientist, Datamation and Data Systems. These, however, are all publications dedicated to science and technology and not to the documentation Chilean history during the Allende period.
11. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, 1948), p. II.
12. Although little attention has been paid to cybernetics in Latin America, scholars have addressed the development of cybernetic ideas in the Soviet Union, most notably Vyacheslav Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, 2002).
13. For a more in-depth treatment of the origin of cybernetics, see Paul Edwards, The Closed World (Cambridge, 1996)
14. and Steve Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, 1991).
15. An alternative reading of the field's evolution is presented in David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore, 2002).
16. It is also worth noting that the British cybernetics community, of which Beer was part, placed a greater emphasis on applying their cybernetic ideas outside the laboratory than their American counterparts. See Andrew Pickering, 'Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer, and Pask,' Social Studies of Science, vol. 32, no. 3 (2002), pp. 413-37.
17. Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, 'Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,' Philosophy of Science, vol. 10 (1943), pp. 18-24.
18. Humberto Maturana, interview by author, Santiago de Chile, 8 September 2003.
19. Jerome Lettvin et al., 'What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain,' Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, vol. 47, no. 11 (1959), pp. 1940-51.
20. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, De máquinas y seres vivos: Una caracterización de la organización biológica (Santiago, 1973). This book was later translated into English as Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston, 1980) with an introduction by Stafford Beer.
21. Beer, interview.
22. Ibid.
23. Beer, Platform for Change, and Beer, interview.
24. Michael Becket, 'Beer: The Hope of Chile,' The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 10 August 1973, p. 7.
25. Beer, interview.
26. See for example Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas Parke Hughes, Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, 2000).
27. Stafford Beer, Decision and Control (New York, 1966)
28. Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management (London, 1967).
29. Fernando Flores, interview by author, Viña del Mar, Chile, 30 July 2003
30. Oscar Guillermo Garretón, interview by author, Santiago de Chile, 4 August 2003.
31. Régis Debray, Conversations with Allende: Socialism in Chile (London, 1971), p. 85.
32. Salvador Allende, 'The Purpose of Our Victory: Inaugural address in the National Stadium, 5 November 1970,' in Richard Gott (ed.), Chile's Road to Socialism (Baltimore, 1973), p. 59.
33. Sergio Bitar, Chile: Experiment in Democracy (Philadelphia, 1986).
34. Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism (New York, 1986), p. 142.
35. Bitar, Chile: Experiment in Democracy, p. 52.
36. Ibid., p. 45.
37. Winn, Weavers of Revolution, p. 228.
38. Nathaniel Davis, The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 23-6, 67-71.
39. Allende's administration used the word 'interventor' to refer to the politically appointed officials who replaced the previous factory managers and literally intervened in factory production practices by bringing each newly nationalised factory under the control of state.
40. Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, Chile (Baltimore, 1978), p. 66.
41. Ibid., p. 62.
42. Ibid., p. 55.
43. Ibid., p. 61.
44. Letter from Fernando Flores to Stafford Beer, 13 July 1971, box 55, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
45. Letter from Stafford Beer to Fernando Flores, 29 July 1971, box 55, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
46. Salvador Allende, 'First Anniversary of the Popular Government, National Stadium, Santiago, November 4, 1971', in James D. Cockcroft (ed.), The Salvador Allende Reader (New York, 2000), pp. 123-4.
47. Bitar, Chile: Experiment in Democracy, p. 65.
48. Roberto Cañete, 'The Brain of the Government: An Application of Cybernetic Principles to the Management of a National Industrial Economy,' 22nd Annual North American Meeting, Avoiding Social Catastrophes and Maximizing Social Opportunities: The General Systems Challenge (Washington, DC, February 1978), pp. 516-25.
49. Flores, interview.
50. Ibid.
51. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 249.
52. 'Ten Pints of Beer: The Rationale of Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Books (1959-94), Discussion with Stafford Beer', Kybernetes, vol. 29, no. 5/6 (2000), pp. 558-69.
53. Beer, The Brain of the Firm, p. 239. This statement illustrates a reoccurring characteristic of Beer's work, namely the synthesis of metaphors drawn from biology and engineering characteristic of work in the field of cybernetics.
54. This law holds that the variety in the control system must match the variety in the system to be controlled. See W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London, 1956).
55. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 156.
56. Ibid., p. 249.
57. Aaron Finerman, 'Computing Capabilities at Argentine and Chilean Universities,' Communications of the ACM, vol. 12, no. 8 (August 1969), p. 427.
58. Barry Boehm, 'Computing in South America', Datamation, vol. 16, no. 5 (May 1970), p. 98.
59. Raimundo Beca, interview by author, Santiago de Chile, 9 September 2003.
60. ECOM owned three IBM mainframes (two 360/40 models and one 360/50) and one Burroughs 3500 mainframe. Notes on available ECOM computing resources, 11 Nov. 1971, box 55, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
61. A 48-hour processing delay on the IBM machine prohibited real-time analysis and caused much frustration among the Cybersyn team members.
62. Flores, interview.
63. Beer entitled one of the earlier project schedules, 'Project Cybersyn, Programme Beat-the-Clock'.
64. Beer, interview.
65. Cañete, interview. Cañete also noted that he received several inquiries from private factory owners of who wished to join the Cybersyn project in return for free access to telex technology.
66. Reminding factory managers to send data on a daily basis proved to be a great source of frustration for the project team. Isaquino Benadof, interview by author, Santiago de Chile, 10 April 2002.
67. Régis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations With Allende (New York, 1972), p. 111.
68. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 253.
69. CORFO created INTEC in September 1968 to promote technological research in Chile and study the development of new industrial products. In March 1971 the Allende government appointed Flores president of INTEC, a position Flores leveraged to secure resources for the Cybersyn Project.
70. Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom (New York, 1974).
71. Mensaje Presidente Allende ante Congreso Pleno, 21/Mayo '73 (Santiago, 1973), pp. 412-13.
72. The idea of war occurs frequently throughout the project notes, and certainly there is more to be said about this relationship than the scope of this article allows. Beer invoked the war room analogy as a means of conveying the importance of visual displays of information in rapid decision-making, but also as a means of reminding participants that they were fighting an economic war where time was of the essence.
73. Beer, Platform for Change, p. 449.
74. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 270.
75. General Carlos Prats, head of the Armed Forces and later Secretary of the Interior, expressed interest in the Cybersyn Operations Room for its potential military applications.
76. Benadof, interview.
77. Telex from Stafford Beer to Ron Anderton, 21 March 1972, box 66, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
78. Letter from Stafford Beer to Robert Simpson of Electrosonic, 1 Oct. 1972, box 62, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
79. The Gremialista movement began in protest to government nationalisation efforts and gained considerable momentum in October 1972 after a 40,000-member independent trucking association tried to prevent the creation of a parallel state-owned equivalent. The October strike attempted to shut down the Chilean economy by mobilising truck drivers, shopkeepers, professional and economic associations, bank clerks, and even several student and campesino organisations.
80. Flores, interview.
81. Gustavo Silva, interview by author, Santiago de Chile, 5 Sept. 2003.
82. Fernando Flores, 'Fernando Flores habla sobre el Proyecto Synco,' The Clinic, vol. 5, no. 108 (July 2003), p. 9.
83. Letter from Herman Schwember to Stafford Beer, 6 Nov. 1972, box 66, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
84. Comando Operativo Central, 'Situación General del País', 3 Sept. 1973, private collection of Roberto Cañete.
85. Letter from Herman Schwember to Stafford Beer, 12 Nov. 1972, box 64, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
86. Letter from Stafford Beer to Herman Schwember, 21 Feb. 1973, box 66, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
87. Although it does illustrate the increasing instability of Chile's economic and political situation, which by 1973 overshadowed the gains made by the Cybersyn system.
88. Stafford Beer, 'The Extension of Cybernetic Management Systems to the Enterprises: A Reconsideration of the Political Context', 14 Oct. 1972, box 57, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
89. Ibid.
90. Lyrics 'Letanía para una computadora y para un niño que va a nacer', box 64, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
91. Karl Marx, 'The Possibility of Non-Violent Revolution,' in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, 1978), pp. 522-4.
92. Salvador Allende, 'The Chilean Road to Socialism: First Annual Message to Congress, 21 May 1971,' in Richard Gott (ed.), Chile's Road to Socialism (Baltimore, 1973), p. 149.
93. Debray, The Chilean Revolution, p. 87.
94. Allende, 'The Chilean Road to Socialism,' p. 150
95. Winn, Weavers of Revolution, p. 185.
96. Beer, Brain of the Firm, pp. 160-1.
97. Herman Schwember, 'Cybernetics in Government: Experience with New Tools for Management in Chile 1971-1973,' in Hartmut Bossel (ed.), Concepts and Tools of Computer-Assisted Policy Analysis, Vol. 1 (Basel, 1977), p. 136.
98. Ibid., pp. 86, 135
99. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York, 1964), p. 125.
100. Beer, interview.
101. Beca, interview. Beca, who was both director of ECOM and interventor in MADEMSA during the government of the UP, noted that the use of the system depended strongly on interventor support. For example, MADEMSA discontinued all work on Cybersyn's implementation after Beca left the factory.
102. Beer, Platform far Change, p. 425.
103. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 180.
104. Ibid., p. 260.
105. Stafford Beer, 'The Extension of Cybernetic Management Systems to the Enterprises,' p. 3.
106. Beer did not elaborate much on how these signals would travel from Chilean homes to the Chilean government, but the effect seems similar to the current practice of monitoring focus group reactions to political speeches.
107. Stafford Beer, 'Project Cyberfolk', March 1972, box 61, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
108. Telex from Stafford Beer to Raúl Espejo, 6 Nov. 1972, box 66, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
109. Letter from Raúl Espejo to Stafford Beer, 22 May 1973, box 66, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
110. Beer, interview.
111. Stafford Beer, 'On Decybernation: A Contribution to Current Debates,' 27 April 1973, box 64, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
112. 'El "hermano mayor" de Mr. Beer,' Ercilla, no. 1958 (23-30 Jan. 1973), p. 11.
113. 'Plan Secreto "Cyberstride": La UP nos controla por computación,' Qué Pasa (15 Feb. 1973), p. 7.
114. John Adams, 'Everything under Control,' Science for People, no. 21 (April-May 1973), pp. 4-6
115. Joseph Hanlon, 'Chile Leaps into Cybernetic Future,' New Scientist, vol. 57, no. 833 (15 February 15 1973), pp. 363-364.
116. Herb Grosch, 'Chilean Economic Controls,' New Scientist, vol. 57, no. 837 (15 March 1973), pp. 626-7. Grosch himself is a rather interesting character within the history of computing circles, first for his self-coined 'Grosch's Law', which governed the mainframe computing industry during the 1960s and 1970s, and second for his notoriously cantankerous personality. While his harsh commentary in New Scientist may be attributed to the latter, it is also the case that Grosch had travelled to Santiago during the late 1960s to advise the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva on ways to improve Chile's computer capabilities.
117. Telex from Stafford Beer to Raúl Espejo, 1 March 1973, box 66, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
118. Letter from Tomás Kohn to Stafford Beer, 19 April 1973, box 63, The Stafford Beer Collection, Liverpool John Moores University.
119. Tomás Kohn, interview by author, Santiago de Chile, 5 Sept. 2003.
120. Schwember, 'Cybernetics in Government,' p. 88. It is interesting to note that Beer diverged from this view as the project progressed and eventually drafted both a report and a letter to President Allende emphasising the importance of the workers learning to create the models themselves rather than looking to the advice of technocratic experts.
121. Beer, 'On Decybernation', p. 6.
122. Beer, Brain of the Firm, p. 323.
123. Mensaje Presidente Allende Ante Congreso Pleno, 21/Mayo '73, pp. 412-13.
124. Alberto Martínez, telephone conversation with the author, 7 October 2003. Martínez served as CORFO director of planning during Vuskovic's appointment as CORFO president.
125. Beer, 'On Decybernation,' p. 5.
126. Guillermo Toro, email correspondence with author, 5 June 2004. Toro, who began working as the Cybersyn project coordinator in June 1973, vividly recalls risking his life by leaving CORFO headquarters with Project Director Raúl Espejo on the day of the coup with four packages of photocopied Cybersyn documents that Espejo still holds in his possession. In Toro's words, the documentation, 'debe ser salvado para contarlo'.