How Salvadore Allende The Scientist Could Help 21c Leaders.

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What can 21st Century Socialism learn from Salvador Allende the scientist? The near-success and rapid collapse of of the anti-Chavez coup of April 12th. 2002 is often spoken of in the same breath as the CIA-Augusto Pinochet coup against Chile's elected President, Salvador Allende, on September 11th 1973. This is the story of Allende's government that everyone knows. The story of his murder and the imprisonment, torture and disappearance of many thousands of Chileans that followed. The economic aftermath of the CIA-Pinochet coup, when the infamous Professor Milton Friedman applied his economic shock-treatment to Chile society and culture, was also so horrendous that everyone who cares for the people of Venezuela is rightly concerned that Chavez should avoid Allende's fate. Creating a civilian defence force and buying some sophisticated weaponry makes a lot of sense. It should at least make Washington think twice about trying to do to Venezuela what they did to Chile - and Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and Grenada, and so many of its other victims in Latin America. Yet, for students of socialism and democracy, there is a far more important story to be told about Salvador Allende's government than that of its failure to anticipate and withstand the treachery of Augusto Pinochet on September 11th 1973. It concerns a project that ran from early 1971 to September 10th 1973 and is a story that provides the most useful lessons for everyone who is trying to work out what “21st century socialism” should really mean,. As everyone knows, in 1970, Salvador Allende became Chile's lawfully-elected president. Like many Latin American radicals, he called himself a Marxist but was also a severe critic of both Soviet and Chinese communism. By the time our story starts, in mid-1971, he had completed the wholly-legal but fairly chaotic nationalisation of many of Chile's industrial and commercial companies and banks, several of them partly or wholly-owned by US Corporations. He had raised agricultural wages, increased social security benefits, broken up estates larger than 80 hectares and handed over much of the surplus land to government supported cooperatives. Inevitably, Allende was vehemently and viciously opposed by landowners, industrialists, the privately-owned mass media, the middle and professional classes - and of course, the USA. The Chilean economy came under attack both from his internal opponents and a USA-organised international boycott of Chile's copper exports and its access to credit. Inflation was rising steeply. There was a constant shortage of bread. Regular, well-organised

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and orchestrated anti-Allende demonstrations got lavish media coverage. Rumours of some kind of US-backed coup were everywhere. It was at this point that Allende's understanding of science, derived from his training and practice as a medical doctor enters the story. Fernando Flores, his 29 year old Finance Minister, and a group of young advisers came to Allende with an extraordinary proposal. They wanted to hire Stafford Beer, an English cybernetician and management consultant , to help them to use cybernetic principles to manage the Chilean economy out of its constant crises. In the late 1960s, Stafford's consulting firm (everyone called him Stafford, from peasants to students to presidents) had been hired to apply his Viable Systems Model (VSM) to improve the effectiveness of the Chilean metallurgical industry, and his approach had worked very well, Like the science of cybernetics itself, the VSM is based on biological principles. In biological systems, the sub-systems and the sub-sub-systems within the different levels of complexity communicate with each other instantly, in real time. When we sit down to lunch, our stomach doesn't have to wait an hour or a week before receiving instructions from our brains to release the juices with which it will digest the food we are eating. It all happens in real time and its always works. Equally, if a snarling dog jumps out from a gateway, your reactions are instantaneous. Once the stimulus/information is received by the biological system, the appropriate muscles, organs, glands, vocal chords, lungs go into action. By comparison, the information flows and reaction processes of our much less complex human organisations are painfully slow, incomplete and inappropriate. By the time the bureaucracy (whether public or private) collects, digests and acts on the available information, its actions are often too late, and ideologically biased, thus potentially misconceived and counter-productive. The VSM aims to cut through all of those bureaucratic delays, prejudices and inaccuracies. It describes all human organisations - or systems - in terms of Five Levels of sub-systems. Each level of sub-systems contains its own sub-systems and sub-sub-systems. As in biological systems, to be viable, all of them have to be mutually coherent and in constant communication yet highly autonomous so as to be able to react virtually instantly and, above all, appropriately, to whatever information the system receives from its external and internal environments. The cybernetic principles at the heart of the VSM require the human organisation to set up continuous and reliable real-time communication, control and feedback processes so that the effectiveness of the whole system can be constantly - and sustainably - improved. As Stafford had said many times, the cybernetic principles underpinning the VSM were universally applicable. Thus the improved effectiveness that its application brought to firms or

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groups of firms, could also be achieved by a whole social economy or indeed a whole country. All it needed was a government that could free itself from the straitjacket of ideology and start to think scientifically. So, Flores asked, why not take Stafford at his word? He was not an ivory-tower academic or ideologue. He was a very successful businessman with a track-record of delivering on his promises, as well as one of the founding fathers of systems science. Allende agreed and within a few weeks, Flores and Stafford and their teams had done the preliminary work, and the project was ready to start whenever Allende approved the budget. Stafford was duly invited to Santiago to explain in person to Dr. Allende what the project would entail. Stafford always told the story of that meeting with great emotion. He says that Allende and he sat down with a sheet of paper between them, and “..since he is by profession a medical man, I drew for him the entire (project) in terms of’ neurophysiological version of the (Viable Systems) model1” .

For those of us who are not medical men, the VSM works - very roughly - as follows. Within the First Level of the VSM, there are all of the primary activities that enable the organisation (or in this case Chile) to achieve its purposes. Primary activities within the industrial sector, for example, would include the smelting, metalworking, electronics, plastic, shipbuilding industries, and all of their factories, workshops, foundries, shipyards and so on. In the agricultural sector, there are the meat, cereals, vegetables, fruit and dairy industries and then the individual farms that produce the products for the market. All the other sectors - transport, finance, mining, retail, housing, energy, construction, and so on - can be described and mapped in the same way. On the Second Level there is the production and sharing of information, the processes by which the elements in Level One communicate with each other and with Level Three which monitors and coordinate what is going on in Level One. Level Three covers the structures and controls that determine the rules, resources, rights and responsibilities of Level One and its interface with Levels Four and Five. Level Four uses the outputs of Level Three to look outwards, to monitor how the whole system is performing and work out how it should change and adapt in order to remain viable. Level Five is where policy decisions are taken, competing demands from within the system and its environment are balanced and the system as a whole is steered on a steady course. Stafford talked Allende through the first, second, third and fourth Levels and then, when he

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reached Level Five, he paused, drew a deep breath and was about to say, “And here, compañero Presidente is You!” when Dr. Allende forestalled him, “Aah,” he said, with a broad smile, “at last, the people!!.”

This was not only Allende the radical democrat speaking, it was also Allende the trained scientist and instinctive systems thinker. For Stafford, it was a moment of profound revelation. In one simple sentence, Allende had expressed the true meaning, the higher purpose. not only of the project they were about to embark upon but also of Stafford's life's work. By the time Allende approved the Cybersyn Project, (as they called it) Chile was becoming ungovernable. Eighty percent of Chile's foreign earnings had came from its copper exports and the US-led boycott had effectively cut off that income stream. The country could no longer endure economic mis-management based on a mixture of ideological determinism and traditional bureaucratic incompetence. The Cybersyn Project had to produce results very rapidly. Within a few months, the Cybersyn teams were receiving daily inputs from over one thousand enterprises and organisations in Levels One and Two of the Chilean economy. Primary and Coordination Activities all over Chile, banks, factories, construction companies, farms, shops telexed some pre-specified items of their daily input and output data to the Cybersyn team in Santiago at 17.00 hours every day. Inevitably, many of those who collected and transmitted the data were opponents of all that Allende stood for, and some of the data was suspect, incomplete or late. Even so there was enough for a brilliantly designed and executed suite of computer programmes to convert the raw figures into dynamic quantified flow charts that were displayed on large TV screens in a specially designed room the next day. This may not have been quite as fast as the real time processes of biological systems but it was pretty close and an extraordinary technical, scientific, creative and logistical achievement, Today of course, with much faster and more powerful computers and the Internet, those dynamic representations of quantified flow-charts would be produced instantly rather than after twelve hours. As it was, the dynamic displays enabled Allende and his Ministers to see on screen how raw materials, goods, money and people were moving through and around the Chilean economy. They could stop a display, run it again, compare or even combine one chart with another, go to higher levels of detail, stand back and see the broader picture, discuss what they saw, and reach consensus on what action to take within hours rather than months or even years. Economic crisis management and policy-making could now be based on a shared understanding of a

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reasonably accurate picture in reasonably real time of what was really going on 'out there', whether they were hundreds of miles from the Ministers' offices or just round the corner. In effect Cybersyn enabled Allende and his ministers to restore much of the integrity and coherence of the Chilean economy. At the same time, in the most difficult circumstances, it allowed surprising but appropriate levels of autonomy to the people working in Levels One and Two. An essential feature of the VMS and of the Cybersyn software was a real-time simulation programme. Once the dynamics of an economic - or any - system can be seen and their basic patterns understood, the way is open for some scientific experimentation. Using the simulation programmes, policy-makers can try out different options and the computer will show them what- in general terms - will be the consequences of those actions. Simulation software is now commonplace but it is rarely used as Stafford intended it. . In Chile, the simulation experiments were not intended to make specific predictions. Complex systems do not work like that. The aim of the simulations was to gain a deeper and deeper understanding of the whole system, of its properties and possibilities and of the likely consequences of change. They were intended to identify the crucial parameters, to show where it was vulnerable, where it was robust, and how best to ensure its continuing viability in many different situations. These experiments showed that problems with the economy can be tackled with cybernetic measures that increase the system's capacity to cope with the demands made by its environment by improving the self-regulation of society as the higher-level cybernetic system. Thus, economic management can be subsumed within strategies that increase the effectiveness of the wider system against many different parameters and variables, some of which relate to the economy. Speaking in February 1973, when Cybersyn was having a major impact on the effectiveness of the Allende government's economic management, Stafford said2: I wanted Ministers to have a direct experience, an immediate experience, an experimental experience. And what goes for ministers goes for managers, whether managers of the social economy or of enterprises or plants. If Participation has any meaning no-one must be disbarred because of an inadequate grasp of jargon, of mathematics, of high-level rituals. The workers themselves must have access to the whole of this. Society can no more afford the alienation of the people from the processes of government than it can afford their alienation from science.

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The CIA-Pinochet coup killed not only Allende and thousands of other good people, it killed the Cybersyn project. Pinochet's thugs junked the computers, the screens and the telex links and rounded up all the people who had been part of the project. Today, nearly thirtyfive years and many governments later, the Chilean people are still suffering from the continuing application of the economic shock treatment that first hit them when Pinochet consigned them to the tender mercies of Professor Milton Friedman and his monetarist storm troopers from the University of Chicago. Looking around Latin America today, the freely-elected governments of Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Raphael Correa , Tabare Vazquez and Daniel Ortega face dilemmas that Allende would instantly recognise. They want to lead their people out of generations of poverty, hunger, oppression, ignorance, superstition and fear towards an altogether better world, but progress is painfully slow, patchy and unpredictable. They have enemies at home and abroad who are trying to bring down their governments by economic warfare and subversion. They are constantly attacked and slandered by platoons of corporate hacks in newspaper articles, and on radio or TV programmes. They are burdened and frustrated by congenitally inefficient, corrupt and uncooperative bureaucrats and security-forces. They lack effective and reliable ministers and advisers, some of whom are plainly using their position to line their pockets and those of their families and cronies. Their grass-roots supporters and followers are deeply dissatisfied with their inability to tackle deep-rooted social, economic, environmental, and cultural injustices. They are accused to not trying hard enough, of lacking the determination to ride rough-shod over those who get in the way of long-overdue reforms. Yet they know it would be fatal to replace one dysfunctional and anti-human system, (corporate capitalism) with another one in the form of a dictatorship on the Soviet or Chinese or Peronist model. They also have problems that Allende did not have. Thanks in large part to the policies of the IMF and World Bank, high levels of unemployment, urban violence, drugs and over-population create a climate of fear and insecurity in every Latin American society. And then there are the looming problems of global warming and ecological devastation. The latest figures on the rise in global temperature, de-forestation and carbon-emissions indicate that the whole of the Amazon Rainforest eco-system is likely to collapse within the next half-century.3 To prevent that happening, the governments of Latin America will have to take a wholly unprecedented global lead on climate change. It is an issue they seem not to have even begun to discuss, at least not in public.

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Yet, they also have advantages and opportunities that Allende did not have. The Cold War is over, but both at home and abroad the USA is descending ever deeper into a morass of mistrust, corruption, injustice, inequality, despair and violence. The moral and theoretical foundations of the whole system of so-called “Western democracy” are now open to question for the first time in a hundred years. Latin America is no longer an agonising test-bed for the cruellest policies of exploitation and oppression that the USA, and its client-politicians can devise. Rather, it is a seething cauldron of radical social, economic and democratic innovations. In 1971, almost every government in Latin America had been installed by the USA and was either a military dictatorship or a polyarchy, ever ready to jump at Washington's command. Today, there are only a handful of the old-style puppets in Latin America, and even they are not as docile as they were when Allende was under attack. Unlike Allende, his political heirs are certainly not alone and defenceless in a hostile world. On all of those questions, whether they are problems or opportunities, Allende's wisdom, humanity and humour, his scientific insights and the lessons of the Cybersyn project would have been an immense help to his successors. He would have been able to make an invaluable contribution to the debate about what 21st Century socialism should be, both in theory and in practice. Sadly, Allende cannot speak directly to us. But many of those who worked with him and Stafford on the Cybersyn project are still around. Stafford died in 2002, but again, his work and his ideas live on through dozens of cybernetic practitioners around the world.4 In 1992, Stafford said We are looking at the rubble that remains of two competing empires. Soviet communism has accepted its own demise;Western capitalism has not accepted it yet.

He pointed out that though to the political analyst, the two management systems are quite different, and to the politician they are wholly opposed, for Stafford, the cybernetician, and Allende, the natural scientist, it is inevitable that Western capitalism will die of the same disease as Soviet Communism . It is the disease of dysfunctional over-centrality.

Wherever you look in Latin America, that disease is not being defined and tackled in the way that it was in Chile in 1971-1973. Instead, the old - and fatal - mistakes of dysfunctional over-

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centrality are being repeated by the new leaders. I will not presume to know what Allende would say to them, but a reasonable approximation of his views could be obtained from a dialogue between Latin America's democratic leaders and a few dozen of the Spanish -speaking scientists, economists and cyberneticians who worked both with him in 1970 -1973 and with Stafford up to his death in 2002. There is no need to bring them all into one place. Instead, we can build on the ideas behind the West German TV programme ORAKEL, which was designed by the Systems Research Study Group in Heidelberg and transmitted on the Second Television Channel over three nights in 1971.5 An up-dated ORAKEL on Allende and 21st Century Socialism , would use the resources of Telesur and the internet to link together the participants wherever they were in the world. They would dialogue over several days, using up-graded versions of Stafford's original Cybersyn software, modern computers and visual displays in front of Telesur's TV Cameras. Some would contribute individually, some in groups. The design of programme should reflect Stafford's VSM, and, above all, Allende's insistence that at Level Five, there would be, “at last, the people” with the viewers making their contributions via phone and internet or in specially convened groups. The result would be a uniquely radical Network TV/Internet programme that would be both a tribute to Allende the scientist, and an exploration of the true meaning of that wonderful but tantalising concept, 21st Century Socialism. And it might just make a difference. Roy Madron, Ubatuba, SP, October 7th 2007 3490 words Roy Madron is the lead-author of Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation and People-Power (UK Schumacher Society 2003) and is currently writing Leading the Gaian Revolution: Common Sense for Desperate Times He is based near São Paulo, Brazil

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1

Stafford Beer: Fanfare for Effective freedom: Cybernetic Praxis in Government The Third Richard Goodman Memorial Lecture,Brighton Polytechnic, 14th February 1973

2 Stafford Beer: Fanfare for Effective freedom: Cybernetic Praxis in Government The Third Richard Goodman Memorial Lecture,Brighton Polytechnic, 14th February 1973

3Jack Chang: As Brazil's Rain Forest Burns Down, Planet Heats Up. McClatchy Newspapers. 08 September 2007 4 See Fernando Flores at www.bda.com Raul Espejo http://itsy.co.uk/archive/sisn/Member/Raul.htm Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik, Chairman Management Zentrum St. Gallen, the Cwarel Isaf Institute Switzerland (www.managementkybernetik.com/en/fs_inst.html ) a Real Time Government ( www.nickgreen.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/control.htm)

5

Georg Rudinger and Helmut Krauch "Ein Rückkoppelungs-System zwischen Rundfunkansalt und Zuhöreschaft " ; Analysen und Prognosen May 1971