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the world such as the Middle East.
-- 232-233
+
+## Misc
+
+ The strike also had the effect of radicalizing factions of the left,
+ some of which began preparing for armed conflict. Political scientist
+ Arturo Valenzuela notes: “ironically, it was the counter-mobilization
+ of the petite bourgeoisie responding to real, contrived, and imaginary
+ threats which finally engendered, in dialectical fashion, a significant
+ and autonomous mobilization of the working class.”18 Rather than
+ bringing an end to Chilean socialism, the strike pitted workers against
+ small-business owners and members of the industrial bourgeoisie and
+ created the class war that the right openly feared.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The solution he proposed was social and technical, as it configured
+ machines and human beings in a way that could help the government adapt
+ and survive.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Accusations come from Britain and the USA. Invitations [to build
+ comparable systems] come from Brazil and South Africa.” Considering the
+ repressive governments that were in power in Brazil and South Africa in
+ the early 1970s, it is easy to sympathize with Beer’s lament: “You can
+ see what a false position I am in.”46 Beer was understandably
+ frustrated with these international misinterpretations of his
+ cybernetic work.
+
+ [...]
+
+ This Government is shit, but it is my Government.’ ”51
+
+ [...]
+
+ The big problem was “not technology, it was not the computer, it was
+ [the] people,” he concluded.70 Cybersyn, a sociotechnical system,
+ depended on more than its hardware and software components. For the
+ system to function, human beings also needed to be disciplined and
+ brought into line. In the case of Cybersyn, integrating human beings
+ into the system, and thus changing their behavior, proved just as
+ difficult as building the telex network or programming the software—or
+ perhaps even more difficult. While the Cybersyn team could exert some
+ degree of control over the computer resources, construction of the
+ operations room, or installation of a telex machine, they had very
+ little control over what was taking place within the factories,
+ including levels of management participation or whether Cybersyn would
+ be integrated into existing
+
+ [...]
+
+ Beer, however, recognized the real possibility of a military coup. In
+ his letter to the editor of Science for People, he considered whether
+ Cybersyn might be altered by an “evil dictator” and used against the
+ workers. Since Cybersyn team members were educating the Chilean people
+ about such risks, he argued, the people could later sabotage these
+ efforts. “Maybe even the dictator himself can be undermined; because
+ ‘information constitutes control’—and if the people understand that
+ they may defeat even the dictator’s guns,” Beer mused.79 I have found
+ no evidence that members of the Cybersyn team were educating Chilean
+ workers about the risks of using Cybersyn, although they might have
+ been.
+
+ [...]
+
+ after the Pinochet military coup, information in Chile did constitute
+ control but in a very different way than Beer imagined. The military
+ created the Department of National Intelligence (DINA), an organization
+ that used the information it gleaned from torture and surveillance to
+ detain and “disappear” those the military government viewed as
+ subversive
+
+ [...]
+
+ The cybernetic adventure is apparently coming to an end, or is it not?”
+ Kohn asked. “The original objective of this project was to present new
+ tools for management, but primarily to bring about a substantial change
+ in the traditional practice of management.” In contrast, Kohn found
+ that “management accepts your tools, but just them. . . . The final
+ objective, ‘the revolution in management’ is not accepted, not even
+
+ [...]
+
+ Decybernation,” a reference to the technological components of Cybersyn
+ that were being used independent of the cybernetic commitment to
+ changing government organization. Beer wrote, “If we want a new system
+ of government, we have to change the established order,” yet to change
+ the established order required changing the very organization of the
+ Chilean government. Beer reminded team members that they had created
+ Cybersyn to support such organizational changes. Reduced to its
+ component technologies, Cybersyn was “no longer a viable system but a
+ collection of parts.” These parts could be assimilated into the current
+ government system, but then “we do not get a new system of government,
+ but an old system of government with some new tools. . . . These tools
+ are not the tools we invented,” Beer wrote.81
+
+ [...]
+
+ Decybernation” was influenced by the ideas of the Chilean biologists
+ Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Understanding the import of
+ Beer’s insistence on organizational change requires a brief explanation
+ of how Maturana and Varela differentiated between organization and
+ structure. According to the biologists, the “structure of a system”
+ refers to its specific components and the relationships among these
+ components. The “organization of the system” refers to the
+ relationships that make the system what it is, regardless of its
+ specific component parts. The structure of the system can change
+ without changing the identity of the system, but if the organization of
+ the system changes, the system becomes something else. In their 1987
+ book The Tree of Knowledge
+
+ [...]
+
+ On 5 May the violent actions of the ultraright paramilitary group
+ Fatherland and Liberty pushed the government to declare Santiago an
+ emergency zone. Placing the city under martial law, Allende accused the
+ opposition of “consciously and sinisterly creating the conditions to
+ drag the country toward civil war.”92 The escalating conflict between
+ the government and the opposition did not bode well for the future of
+ Chilean socialism.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Marx, capital was evil and the enemy. For us, capital remains evil, but
+ the enemy is STATUS QUO. . . . I consider that if Marx were alive
+ today, he would have found the new enemy that I recognize in my
+ title.”101 In “Status Quo” Beer used cybernetics to explore some of
+ Marx’s more famous ideas and to update them for the modern world,
+ taking into account new technological advances in communication and
+ computing. According to Beer, the class struggle described by Marx was
+ out of date and “represent[ed] the situation generated by the
+ industrial revolution itself, and [was] ‘100 years old.’ ”102 Beer felt
+ that capitalism had since created new forms of work and new
+ exploitative relations.103
+
+ [...]
+
+ Bureaucracy always favors the status quo,” he argues, “because its own
+ viability is at stake as an integral system.” In order to survive,
+ bureaucracy must reproduce itself, Beer claimed. This process
+ constrains freedom in the short term and prevents change in the long
+ term.109 “This situation is a social evil,” Beer asserts. “It means
+ that bureaucracy is a growing parasite on the body politic, that
+ personal freedoms are usurped in the service demands the parasitic
+ monster makes, and above all that half the national effort is deflected
+ from worthwhile activities.” Beer concludes that since bureaucracy
+ locks us into the status quo, “dismantling the bureaucracy can only be
+ a revolutionary aim.”110 Beer had long railed against bureaucracy
+
+ [...]
+
+ Nevertheless, Beer’s cybernetic analysis failed to tell him how to
+ advise his Chilean friends and help them save Chile’s political
+ project. In fact, it led him to the opposite conclusion: that it was
+ impossible for a small socialist country to survive within a capitalist
+ world system. “If the final level
+
+ [...]
+
+ societary recursion is capitalistic, in what sense can a lower level of
+ recursion become socialist?” he asks. “It makes little difference if
+ capital in that socialist country is owned by capitalists whose subject
+ is state controls, or by the state itself in the name of the people,
+ since the power of capital to oppress is effectively wielded by the
+ metasystem.”112 Or, to put it another way, Beer did not see how the
+ Allende government could survive, given the magnitude of the economic
+ pressure that a superpower like the United States was putting on the
+ small country. But Beer continued to work for the Allende government
+ even after he reached this conclusion, because his personal and
+ professional investment in Chilean socialism outweighed the pessimistic
+ judgment of cybernetics.113