Lebowitz was in Venezuela for some time. In this article he discuses Vietnam as well which he visited recently. This is from the Socialistproject. Lebowitz is an emeritus professor of economics at Simon Fraser University in B.C. Canada.
The B u l l e t
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 315
February 20, 2010
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Socialism: the Goal,
the Paths and the Compass
[Presentation of “El Socialismo no Cae del Cielo: Un Neuvo Comienzo” at the 2010 Havana Book Fair, 18 February 2010.]
Michael A. Lebowitz
There's an old saying that if you don't know where you want to go, any road will take you there. As I've said on many occasions, this saying is mistaken. If you don’t know where you want to go, no road will take you there. In other words, you need an understanding of the goal. You need a vision for the future.
Marx had a very clear vision. It was a vision of a society which would permit the full development of human beings – a society which allowed everyone to develop their potential. And, that would occur not because of gifts from above but, rather, as a result of the activity of human beings. This was his concept of revolutionary practice – the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self change. Human development and practice – this “key link” in Marx reminds us that there are always two products as the result of our activity, the change in circumstances and the change in people themselves. It reminds us that what Marx called rich human beings, socialist human beings, produce themselves only through their own activity.
The Goal
Elementary triangle of socialism.
The Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela incorporates this concept. It stresses that the goal of society must be the full development of every human being and that participation and protagonism is “the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective.” In 2007, President Chavez of Venezuela reinforced this vision by introducing what he called “the elementary triangle of socialism.” Social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers and production for social needs and purposes make up this triangle.
Firstly, social ownership of the means of production is the way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of producers, or state bureaucrats. Secondly, social production organized by workers permits workers to develop their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace and, thus, to produce not only things but also themselves as self-conscious collective producers. Thirdly, satisfaction of social needs and purposes is the necessary goal of productive activity in the new society because it substitutes for the focus upon self-interest and selfishness an orientation to the needs of others and relations based upon solidarity.
The Paths
This is the vision of the society we want to build. This is where we want to go. And if we don’t know that, no road will take us there. However, knowing where you want to go is not enough. It’s not true that if you do know where you want to go, any road will take you there. Isn’t there a relationship between the goal, and the road you take to get there? Are these independent of each other? For example, can you get to the goal by going in the opposite direction? Do you build social ownership by relying upon capitalist ownership of the means of production and the capitalist monopoly of our social heritage and of the products of our labour? Do you build a society of associated producers and social production by preventing decision-making by workers and retaining the gap between thinking and doing? Do you build a society based upon solidarity, where production is for social needs, by stressing selfishness? In other words, do you go forward by going backwards?
Maybe. Maybe sometimes it is necessary. Socialism does not fall from the sky. It is necessarily rooted in particular societies. We all start from different places – in our development, in our histories. Therefore, there cannot be one single path. All paths will be different. Some will be longer than others. Some will be relatively straight, while others will require switchbacks because of the obstacles along the road. As we have learned, the biggest mistake is thinking that there is one road and one model.
The Compass
But there is a problem. When you are not going directly toward the goal, how do you avoid getting lost? How you avoid the problem of the growth of capital and capitalist interests, the alienation of workers in the process of production and thus an emphasis upon possessing things and consumerism, the growth of self-interest at the expense of solidarity? Some would say that there is no problem as long as we have a compass, as long as we have a directional finder. And that the party is that compass; the party can point in the direction of the goal when obstacles have temporarily forced you to go in the opposite direction.
I agree with that in principle. But I also believe that we need to learn from historical experience that the party is not itself immune, that it does not stand outside society and thus does not always point to the true North. This was certainly the case, for example, in Hungary, Yugoslavia and China. And, not only there. I have just returned from an intense month in Vietnam. There is no question in my mind that under the conditions facing Vietnam in the 1980s, it was essential for them to make a significant change in the path they were on.
The Example of Vietnam
By developing an economy which they describe as a market economy with a socialist orientation, they have succeeded in lifting their people from significant poverty. Whereas previously people were facing starvation, now Vietnam exports food. This is a very important achievement. They have also begun a process of industrialization.
However, there are serious problems. Young people are overwhelmingly oriented toward capitalism. They say openly that Vietnam needs more foreign investment, and they credit that foreign investment with ending poverty. They want capitalism, and they look upon Marxism as having no relevance to their lives. I stress this point because the students we met were not selected randomly. They came largely from the young communists.
And the dominant views increasingly are in fact no different from those in other countries in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Malaysia, and other nearby countries relying upon foreign investment and export oriented industrialization are the basis of constant comparison in Vietnam. In other words, capitalism is winning in Vietnam. There is growing inequality, there is the emergence of millionaires (not as many as in China so far) and there is a significant process of privatization of state-owned industry (which is called equitisation).
And then there is the party, “the socialist orientation.” It is my sense that a growing portion of the party is looking to Sweden and social democracy as the appropriate model. (In fact, this was openly advocated at the conference I attended at the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy, the Party school.) In other words, an emerging goal is not the socialist vision but, rather, capitalism plus social policies which reduce inequality – a capitalist welfare state.
There is an infection in Vietnam, and the party is not immune to that infection. I suspect that the next Party Congress will involve a struggle over this direction. Some party leaders are very worried about these tendencies. Certainly, the direction of change in the party in recent congresses has been to strengthen capitalist tendencies – for example, they have removed the prohibition on membership in the party by capitalists.
Something has been missing in Vietnam. Missing so far has been a sufficient emphasis upon that participation and protagonism that is “the necessary way” to ensure the complete development of human beings, “both individually and collectively.” While there has been some focus upon grassroots democracy (for example, in Ho Chi Minh City), there has been very little decision-making by workers in workplaces (outside of annual congresses in state-owned industry), and there has been little emphasis upon conscious production for social needs. And, the results are predictable. In the absence of social production organized by workers and production for social needs, the third side of the socialist triangle, social ownership, is withering away. And, increasingly, the human product is people who embrace the logic of capital.
I think that Vietnam reinforces the lesson that every step to the market must be accompanied by two steps in the direction of building a socialist society: building worker decision-making in workplaces and building institutions based upon solidarity. If we recognize that people produce themselves through their activity, then their activity should unleash their potential rather than be left to an orientation to the market and self-interest. This is what I was stressing in Vietnam – that the party needs to create the conditions in which people can develop their capacities as protagonists within their workplaces and their communities, institutions such as the communal councils and workers councils being developed in Venezuela.
I suggest that through such a process of producing rich human beings with confidence and dignity, both the people and the party will be inoculated against the infection that can prevent us from reaching the socialist goal. That won’t be achieved, however, by a one-sided focus upon developing productive forces. In short, we should never forget the essential insight of Che Guevara – the necessity simultaneously to build productive forces and socialist human beings. •
Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class (also available on Scribd) and Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. This article also published at MRZine.org.
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Showing posts with label Socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socialism. Show all posts
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Washington, auto union to take control of GM, Chrysler.
No doubt some commentators on Fox News and other US media giants will claim that this is socialism. Quite the opposite, it is the rescue of capitalism on the backs of taxpayers and workers. Workers get a share in almost bankrupt auto makers and also the taxpayers get to invest in them as well! While it is true that investors such as bondholders and shareholders have also lost instead of following the free market ideology of letting the companies fail the govt. and workers rush in to bail the companies out. If and when the companies turn profitable the government and probably the unions too will sell their equity. Profit is for private capital not the public or workers the latter share only the risks!
Washington, auto union set to take control of GM, Chrysler
In Washington: Government to buy 50% of GM, UAW seeks 55% of Chrysler GREG KEENAN AND SHAWN MCCARTHY
With a report from AP
April 28, 2009
In a historic reshaping of American capitalism, the U.S. government and the auto workers union are on the verge of controlling both General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.
The latest proposal offered up by GM - now subsisting on loans provided by Washington - would see the U.S. government hold 50 per cent of the company if it accepts a debt-for-equity swap. The United Auto Workers union would hold another 39 per cent of GM, if it agrees to allow a new health-care trust fund to be financed with GM shares.
Ottawa is watching the GM deal closely and is also looking at taking an equity stake.
In a separate deal, the auto workers union would eventually own 55 per cent of a restructured Chrysler under an agreement reached by the union and the auto maker, according to a summary of the arrangement. The revised Chrysler-UAW contract says that Italian automaker Fiat Group SpA eventually will own 35 per cent of a restructured Chrysler, with the remaining 10 per cent stake divided between the U.S. government and secured lenders, mostly banks and hedge funds.
The landmark Chrysler deal was forged at the demands of the Obama administration, which required that equity fund at least half of Chrysler's $10.6-billion obligation to a union-run retiree health care trust. The deal will slash retiree benefits in the U.S., and hand control of the company over to the union, though perhaps only in the interim. Chrysler stock eventually will be traded publicly again, as there are mechanisms for the UAW to sell shares to fund the trust, the summary said.
Chrysler workers will vote to ratify the deal, a process the union hopes will be done by Wednesday, one day before Chrysler's government-imposed deadline to restructure.
The GM deal eliminates another one of its storied brands, vaporizes another 22,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada and the United States, and wipes out almost half its dealer network in both countries by the end of next year. The company's top executive cast it as a plan to remake the company in one fell swoop.
"We need to take this as an opportunity to restructure, and restructure General Motors once," Fritz Henderson, GM's chief executive officer, said yesterday as he outlined the demise of Pontiac and a bond exchange that offers reluctant debt holders shares in GM for their $27-billion (U.S.) in debt.
The plan needs to be approved by government and bondholders, who are likely to be unhappy about receiving just 225 shares of GM in return for every $1,000 worth of bonds.
A senior Canadian official said Ottawa is also looking at taking an ownership stake in GM, which yesterday promised to slash its Canadian production and cut work force by an additional 1,000 jobs. The plan would accelerate job losses in Canada, shrinking to about 5,500 employees by 2014 from more than 20,000 just 15 months ago.
"There's a menu of options we're looking at," the federal official said. "We know the United States is looking at that [equity-for-debt] option quite seriously and we have to see whether that might work for us."
Asked whether Ottawa would take an ownership stake in GM, Industry Minister Tony Clement said: "We've got another 30 days to go [before the GM deadline]. There's a lot of proposals on the table. We have not made any conclusions at this point."
The GM announcement kicked off what is likely to be the most significant week in the history of the Detroit auto makers with the guiding hand of the U.S. Treasury Department on the steering wheel.
GM officials indicated yesterday, for example, that the Treasury Department said it would not support the GM plan if debt holders ended up owning more than 10 per cent of the company after the debt-for-equity swap.
The Canadian and U.S. governments have intervened because a failure by GM would wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs across the continent. "It would trigger a catastrophe in the economy, if that were to happen," noted David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"I have a hard time putting my finger on another [such critical time] unless it was 1941 when the industry just stopped making cars and made guns and planes," added Gerald Myers, a former chairman of American Motors Corp. and now a professor at the University of Michigan.
Some of the restructuring pain is being imposed by governments, which are seeking to ensure that the companies they bail out with long-term loans can survive. "It will take severe restructuring, there's no doubt about it and the job losses are terrible," Mr. Clement said outside the House of Commons. GM will slash its Canadian dealer network in half, to between 395 and 425 outlets by 2010 from 705 outlets now. That's a deeper and faster cut in its retail operations than was in a plan unveiled in February that called for a reduction to between 450 and 500 dealers by 2014.
GM Canada is negotiating with Ottawa to secure a $3-billion bridge loan to carry it until the end of May, and the company said the two sides are "close" to agreement. It is also looking for $7.5-billion in long-term loans from Ottawa and the province of Ontario to keep it alive until North American car sales pick up.
General Motors of Canada spokesman Stew Low said the company remains committed to Canada and that its plan here is largely unchanged, save for the elimination of a planned third shift in Oshawa next year to build the Impala. The company now has to begin negotiations with the Canadian Auto Workers union in an effort to extract the same concessions that the union provided to Chrysler in a deal ratified on the weekend.
GM said it expects to reduce its unionized work force to 4,400 by 2014, mostly through already announced closings at its truck plant in Oshawa next month and Windsor transmission plant in the summer of 2010.
"The landscape is going to shrink dramatically and it's going to have a negative impact right across our communities," said Chris Buckley, president of CAW Local 222 in Oshawa.
The loss of auto jobs is already devastating communities in Southern Ontario that rely on the assemblers and their parts suppliers for high-paying manufacturing jobs. Parts suppliers are warning of a cascading effect as the manufacturers cut back and parts makers face bankruptcy.
GM's survival plan includes slimming down to just four brands, compared with the eight it now offers. The lineup will consist of Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC. The auto maker's Saturn, Saab and Hummer brands will be gone by the end of the year.
The plan calls for GM to break even financially in the worst vehicle markets such as that being experienced during the current U.S. downturn and to generate lots of profit when the market returns to healthier levels next decade.
Washington, auto union set to take control of GM, Chrysler
In Washington: Government to buy 50% of GM, UAW seeks 55% of Chrysler GREG KEENAN AND SHAWN MCCARTHY
With a report from AP
April 28, 2009
In a historic reshaping of American capitalism, the U.S. government and the auto workers union are on the verge of controlling both General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC.
The latest proposal offered up by GM - now subsisting on loans provided by Washington - would see the U.S. government hold 50 per cent of the company if it accepts a debt-for-equity swap. The United Auto Workers union would hold another 39 per cent of GM, if it agrees to allow a new health-care trust fund to be financed with GM shares.
Ottawa is watching the GM deal closely and is also looking at taking an equity stake.
In a separate deal, the auto workers union would eventually own 55 per cent of a restructured Chrysler under an agreement reached by the union and the auto maker, according to a summary of the arrangement. The revised Chrysler-UAW contract says that Italian automaker Fiat Group SpA eventually will own 35 per cent of a restructured Chrysler, with the remaining 10 per cent stake divided between the U.S. government and secured lenders, mostly banks and hedge funds.
The landmark Chrysler deal was forged at the demands of the Obama administration, which required that equity fund at least half of Chrysler's $10.6-billion obligation to a union-run retiree health care trust. The deal will slash retiree benefits in the U.S., and hand control of the company over to the union, though perhaps only in the interim. Chrysler stock eventually will be traded publicly again, as there are mechanisms for the UAW to sell shares to fund the trust, the summary said.
Chrysler workers will vote to ratify the deal, a process the union hopes will be done by Wednesday, one day before Chrysler's government-imposed deadline to restructure.
The GM deal eliminates another one of its storied brands, vaporizes another 22,000 manufacturing jobs in Canada and the United States, and wipes out almost half its dealer network in both countries by the end of next year. The company's top executive cast it as a plan to remake the company in one fell swoop.
"We need to take this as an opportunity to restructure, and restructure General Motors once," Fritz Henderson, GM's chief executive officer, said yesterday as he outlined the demise of Pontiac and a bond exchange that offers reluctant debt holders shares in GM for their $27-billion (U.S.) in debt.
The plan needs to be approved by government and bondholders, who are likely to be unhappy about receiving just 225 shares of GM in return for every $1,000 worth of bonds.
A senior Canadian official said Ottawa is also looking at taking an ownership stake in GM, which yesterday promised to slash its Canadian production and cut work force by an additional 1,000 jobs. The plan would accelerate job losses in Canada, shrinking to about 5,500 employees by 2014 from more than 20,000 just 15 months ago.
"There's a menu of options we're looking at," the federal official said. "We know the United States is looking at that [equity-for-debt] option quite seriously and we have to see whether that might work for us."
Asked whether Ottawa would take an ownership stake in GM, Industry Minister Tony Clement said: "We've got another 30 days to go [before the GM deadline]. There's a lot of proposals on the table. We have not made any conclusions at this point."
The GM announcement kicked off what is likely to be the most significant week in the history of the Detroit auto makers with the guiding hand of the U.S. Treasury Department on the steering wheel.
GM officials indicated yesterday, for example, that the Treasury Department said it would not support the GM plan if debt holders ended up owning more than 10 per cent of the company after the debt-for-equity swap.
The Canadian and U.S. governments have intervened because a failure by GM would wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs across the continent. "It would trigger a catastrophe in the economy, if that were to happen," noted David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"I have a hard time putting my finger on another [such critical time] unless it was 1941 when the industry just stopped making cars and made guns and planes," added Gerald Myers, a former chairman of American Motors Corp. and now a professor at the University of Michigan.
Some of the restructuring pain is being imposed by governments, which are seeking to ensure that the companies they bail out with long-term loans can survive. "It will take severe restructuring, there's no doubt about it and the job losses are terrible," Mr. Clement said outside the House of Commons. GM will slash its Canadian dealer network in half, to between 395 and 425 outlets by 2010 from 705 outlets now. That's a deeper and faster cut in its retail operations than was in a plan unveiled in February that called for a reduction to between 450 and 500 dealers by 2014.
GM Canada is negotiating with Ottawa to secure a $3-billion bridge loan to carry it until the end of May, and the company said the two sides are "close" to agreement. It is also looking for $7.5-billion in long-term loans from Ottawa and the province of Ontario to keep it alive until North American car sales pick up.
General Motors of Canada spokesman Stew Low said the company remains committed to Canada and that its plan here is largely unchanged, save for the elimination of a planned third shift in Oshawa next year to build the Impala. The company now has to begin negotiations with the Canadian Auto Workers union in an effort to extract the same concessions that the union provided to Chrysler in a deal ratified on the weekend.
GM said it expects to reduce its unionized work force to 4,400 by 2014, mostly through already announced closings at its truck plant in Oshawa next month and Windsor transmission plant in the summer of 2010.
"The landscape is going to shrink dramatically and it's going to have a negative impact right across our communities," said Chris Buckley, president of CAW Local 222 in Oshawa.
The loss of auto jobs is already devastating communities in Southern Ontario that rely on the assemblers and their parts suppliers for high-paying manufacturing jobs. Parts suppliers are warning of a cascading effect as the manufacturers cut back and parts makers face bankruptcy.
GM's survival plan includes slimming down to just four brands, compared with the eight it now offers. The lineup will consist of Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC. The auto maker's Saturn, Saab and Hummer brands will be gone by the end of the year.
The plan calls for GM to break even financially in the worst vehicle markets such as that being experienced during the current U.S. downturn and to generate lots of profit when the market returns to healthier levels next decade.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Chris Hedges: Why I am a socialist.
I suppose this is socialism in fact a radical socialism as understoon in the United States but it falls short of socialism as I understand it. Socialism is the socialisation of the means of production distributions and exchange and production on the basis of need not profit. It is not clear that Hedges envisages anything but a partial nationalisation of electric and gas companies. This would leave the major means of production in private hands. Socialism seems to come in as a govt. relief and work program to remedy the ills of the still existing market capitalist system. Nevertheless Hedges vision is much more progressive than anything coming from the two main US parties including Obama and the Democrats. Of course there are no doubt many in the US who consider Obama socialist!
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081229_why_i_am_a_socialist/>Why I Am a SocialistPosted on Dec 29, 2008By Chris HedgesThe corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist “Red” Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke’s platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.“By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water,” Wendell Berry wrote in “The Unsettling of America.” “Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.”The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good or impact on the environment. Corporate laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make as much money as possible for shareholders, although many have moved on to fleece shareholders as well. In the 2003 documentary film “The Corporation” the management guru Peter Drucker says: “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.”A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, says in the film: “The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.” Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corp., the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a “present day instrument of destruction” because of its compulsion to “externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”“The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,” Anderson says.In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan’s book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” asserts that the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically defined as psychopaths.Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists in the film psychopathic traits and ties them to the behavior of corporations:callous unconcern for the feelings for others;incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;reckless disregard for the safety of others;deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;incapacity to experience guilt;failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.And yet, under the American legal system, corporations have the same legal rights as individuals. They give hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates, fund the army of some 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation, drain taxpayer funds and abolish government oversight. They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newsprint and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. They have high-priced legal teams, millions of employees, skilled public relations firms and thousands of elected officials to ward off public intrusions into their affairs or halt messy lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed sources of information. A few media giants—AOL-Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup—control nearly everything we read, see and hear.“Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist. “The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”Labor and left-wing activists, especially university students and well-heeled liberals, have failed to unite. This division, which is often based on social rather than economic differences, has long stymied concerted action against ruling elites. It has fractured the American left and rendered it impotent.“Large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate not in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook,” Orwell wrote in 1937 during the last economic depression. “Here I am, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I, personally, in any important issue, would side with the working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time—the office-workers and black-coated employees of all kinds—whose traditions are less definite middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a working class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist party.”Coalitions of environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, sustainable-agriculture and anti-globalization forces have coalesced in Europe to form and support socialist parties. This has yet to happen in the United States. The left never rallied in significant numbers behind Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it threw its lot in with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars, empowers the national security state and does the bidding of corporations.If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class, especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism.
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081229_why_i_am_a_socialist/>Why I Am a SocialistPosted on Dec 29, 2008By Chris HedgesThe corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism—one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars—or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke (The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by the veteran socialist “Red” Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke’s platform. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states. They are vampires.“By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water,” Wendell Berry wrote in “The Unsettling of America.” “Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.”The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life, the social good or impact on the environment. Corporate laws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make as much money as possible for shareholders, although many have moved on to fleece shareholders as well. In the 2003 documentary film “The Corporation” the management guru Peter Drucker says: “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.”A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, says in the film: “The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.” Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corp., the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a “present day instrument of destruction” because of its compulsion to “externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”“The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,” Anderson says.In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan’s book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” asserts that the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically defined as psychopaths.Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists in the film psychopathic traits and ties them to the behavior of corporations:callous unconcern for the feelings for others;incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;reckless disregard for the safety of others;deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit;incapacity to experience guilt;failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.And yet, under the American legal system, corporations have the same legal rights as individuals. They give hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates, fund the army of some 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation, drain taxpayer funds and abolish government oversight. They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newsprint and magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly face of the corporation. They have high-priced legal teams, millions of employees, skilled public relations firms and thousands of elected officials to ward off public intrusions into their affairs or halt messy lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed sources of information. A few media giants—AOL-Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsGroup—control nearly everything we read, see and hear.“Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist. “The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”Labor and left-wing activists, especially university students and well-heeled liberals, have failed to unite. This division, which is often based on social rather than economic differences, has long stymied concerted action against ruling elites. It has fractured the American left and rendered it impotent.“Large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate not in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook,” Orwell wrote in 1937 during the last economic depression. “Here I am, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I, personally, in any important issue, would side with the working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time—the office-workers and black-coated employees of all kinds—whose traditions are less definite middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a working class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist party.”Coalitions of environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, sustainable-agriculture and anti-globalization forces have coalesced in Europe to form and support socialist parties. This has yet to happen in the United States. The left never rallied in significant numbers behind Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it threw its lot in with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars, empowers the national security state and does the bidding of corporations.If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class, especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Chile, Allende, Cybernetics and Socialism
Here are three articles on Socialism in Chile under Allende and the role of Simon Beer and others who attempted to use cybernetics in planning. The first is from the NY Times. The second is from the Financial Post. The final article is from the
National Post and was written by the son of Stafford Beer who was the cyberneticist who helped Allende.
March 28, 2008 / New York TIMES
Santiago Journal
Before '73 Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
SANTIAGO, Chile — When military forces loyal to Gen. Augusto Pinochet
staged a coup here in September 1973, they made a surprising
discovery. Salvador Allende's Socialist government had quietly
embarked on a novel experiment to manage Chile's economy using a
clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines.
The project, called Cybersyn, was the brainchild of A. Stafford Beer,
a visionary Briton who employed his "cybernetic" concepts to help Mr.
Allende find an alternative to the planned economies of Cuba and the
Soviet Union. After the coup it became the subject of intense military
scrutiny.
In developing Cybersyn, Mr. Beer changed the lives of the bright young
Chileans he worked with here. Some 35 years later, this little-known
feature of Mr. Allende's abortive Socialist transformation was
remembered in an exhibit in a museum beneath La Moneda, the
presidential palace.
A Star Trek-like chair with controls in the armrests was a replica of
those in a prototype operations room. Mr. Beer planned for the room to
receive computer reports based on data flowing from telex machines
connected to factories up and down this 2,700-mile-long country.
Managers were to sit in seven of the contoured chairs and make
critical decisions about the reports displayed on projection screens.
While the operations room never became fully operational, Cybersyn
gained stature within the Allende government for helping to
outmaneuver striking workers in October 1972. That helped planners
realize — as the pioneers of the modern-day Internet did — that the
communications network was more important than computing power, which
Chile did not have much of, anyway. A single I.B.M. 360/50 mainframe,
which had less storage capacity than most flash drives today,
processed the factories' data, with a Burroughs 3500 later filling in.
Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a
28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking
his help in organizing Mr. Allende's economy by applying cybernetic
concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test
his ideas.
He wanted to use the telex communications system — a network of
teletypewriters — to gather data from factories on variables like
daily output, energy use and labor "in real time," and then use a
computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information
the government needed to make decisions.
Mr. Beer set up teams of computer programmers in England and Chile,
and began making regular trips to Santiago to direct the project. He
was paid $500 a day while working in Chile, a sizable sum here at the
time, said Raúl Espejo, who was Cybersyn's operations director.
The Englishman became a mentor to the Chilean team, many of them in
their 20s. On one visit he tried to inspire them by sharing Richard
Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," the story of a seagull who
follows his dream to master the art of flying against the wishes of
the flock.
An imposing man with a long gray-flecked beard, Mr. Beer was a college
dropout who challenged the young Chileans with tough questions. He
shared his love for writing poetry and painting, and brought books and
classical music from Europe. He smoked cigars and drank whiskey and
wine constantly, "but was never losing his head," Mr. Espejo said.
Most of the Cybersyn team scrupulously avoided talking about politics,
and some even had far-right-wing views, said Isaquino Benadof, who led
the team of Chilean engineers designing the Cybersyn software.
One early challenge was how to build the communications network. Short
of money, the team found 500 unused telex machines in a warehouse of
the national telecommunications company.
Cybersyn's turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by
truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The
interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a
potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize
alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving.
The strike dragged on for nearly a month. While it weakened Mr.
Allende's Popular Unity party, the government survived, and Cybersyn
was praised for playing a major role. "From that point on the
communications center became part of whatever was happening," Mr.
Espejo said.
"Chile run by computer," blared The British Observer on Jan. 7, 1973,
as word of the experiment began leaking out.
But as the country's political and security situation worsened, Mr.
Beer and his Chilean team realized that time was running out.
Mr. Allende remained committed to Cybersyn to the end. On Sept. 8,
1973, he gave orders to move the operations room to the presidential
palace. But three days later the military took over; Mr. Allende died
that afternoon.
Military officials soon confronted Cybersyn's leaders, seeking to
understand their political motivations. Mr. Benadof said he was
interrogated at least three times. Mr. Espejo, after being questioned,
was warned to leave the country; two months after the coup he fled to
England.
The military never could grasp Cybersyn, and finally dismantled the
operations room. Several other Cybersyn team members went into exile.
Mr. Flores, who was both economy and finance minister in the Allende
government, spent three years in military concentration camps. After
his release, he moved with his family to California to study at
Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where
he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy.
He later was one of the inventors of the Coordinator, a program that
tracked spoken commitments between workers within a company, one of
the first forays into "work flow" software. He became a millionaire
and returned to Chile, where today he is a senator representing the
Tarapacá Region.
Mr. Beer, who died in 2002, helped some team members secure college
teaching positions in England. That included Mr. Espejo, who dedicated
himself to advancing cybernetics.
"The Chilean project completely transformed Stafford's life, and he
obviously had a huge impact on all of us," Mr. Espejo said. "Clearly,
his work was not recognized during his lifetime. But what he has
written will remain for a long time."
Here is the Financial Post article.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Presented by
Socialist dreams always turn totalitarian
Peter Foster, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, March 01, 2008
On Nov. 12, 1971, Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, sat down in the presidential palace in Santiago opposite a large, bearded Englishman named Stafford Beer.
Allende, a committed socialist, had been in power for a year, during which he had unleashed a wave of expropriations and populist measures that threatened massive inflation. The economy was in turmoil. Beer, the eccentric founder of "cybernetic management," had come to lay out a master plan for control of the rapidly expanding nationalized sector of the Chilean economy. On a sheet of paper, Beer drew the "neurological" basis for his system. Allende, who had trained as a doctor, reportedly "immediately grasped the biological inspiration behind Beer's cybernetic model and knowingly nodded throughout the explanation."
Beer sketched his "viable system model" based on five hierarchic levels. After he had drawn the top "box," he declared theatrically: "And this, companero presidente, is you." Allende leaned back and with a broad smile said: "At last, the people."
Two years after his first meeting with Beer, Allende was killed during the coup that installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
He has since become an icon for crushed socialist dreams. This view is reflected in Naomi Klein's recent book, The Shock Doctrine. Strangely, however, Ms. Klein makes no mention of Stafford Beer, who provides valuable insight into what "socialist control" looks like in practice. Ms. Klein's oversight is especially puzzling since Stafford Beer's story has a strong Canadian angle. In 1973, he gave the CBC Massey lectures with the telling title: Designing Freedom. He lived much of the latter part of his life in Toronto, and consulted to several levels of Canadian government.
Leftist commentators such as Ms. Klein persistently claim that socialism
has "never really been tried." Those countries that called themselves socialist or Communist were always either repressive perversions of the ideal, or were thwarted by the dark machinations of their capitalist enemies. The latter is the conventional leftist take on Chile, and certainly has an element of truth. The U.S. companies that Allende expropriated indeed ran to Washington, which sought to undermine his regime. However, the left inevitably fails to put enough emphasis on the role of Allende's own policies in destroying the Chilean economy. While his Keynesian delusions and reflexive grab for assets would have been damaging enough, they were as nothing compared with the regime's naivete in supporting Beer's "Project Cybersyn," (a word formed from melding "cybernetics" and "synergy.")
Beer was a larger-than-life character, a polymath who dabbled in Eastern religions, poetry and painting. He was also a well-known management consultant who had previously held senior positions in the British steel and the publishing industry. Beer was a specialist in operations research (OR), the study of organizing systems to produce the required results, and had melded OR with cybernetics, the science of control mechanisms which had been founded by Norbert Weiner. Above all, however, Beer was a committed socialist.
Beer's Cybersyn utilized a network of telex machines that ran the length of Chile. These theoretically provided the real-time data from state factories and mines that would then be fed into a specially programmed central computer. The whole operation would be overseen from a control module, the "Opsroom," that resembled the deck of the starship Enterprise. There, seven controllers would act in a "symbiotic relationship" with the computer "to amplify their respective powers in one new synergy of enhanced intelligence." The seven would sit surrounded by numerous screens -- including an eight-by-four-foot master screen -- in ergonomically designed swivel chairs. These chairs' arms featured a series of knobs that the controllers would bash to control the commanding heights of the Chilean economy. The knob thumping was intended by Beer as part of the "drama" of cybernetic control: centralized government as performance art. (More practically, it was based on the assumption that the seven masters of the economy would be keyboard illiterate. Beer apparently didn't want women typists in the room.) Nationalized enterprises would be dynamically modelled in terms of "quantified flow-charts" that would give the central puppeteers all they needed to know. Glitches would be indicated by "algedonic signals."
True to solid socialist principles, this enormously elaborate system would, according to Beer, facilitate worker participation. How wasn't clear. The Russian and Cuban revolutions had somehow missed out on this "democratic" element, but Chile would be -- as with every socialist experiment -- "different." It wasn't.
Beer rejected accusations that his system was Orwellian, but was soon speaking the language of thinly veiled threats. Opposition was allegedly rooted in the "vindictiveness" of the "rich world." Media criticism was written off as part of a corporate plot. Those who had been expropriated had to "talk the new language [of cybernetic viability] or get out." Those who refused to leave were accused of "polarizing" society.
Cybersyn, not surprisingly, never became fully operational, and its only alleged success was in helping the government respond to a nationwide 1972 strike. But that was a very long way from running the public sector, much less an economy. Meanwhile, U.S. computer guru Herb Grosch wrote: "It is a good thing for humanity, and for Chile in particular, that [Cybersyn] is only a bad dream." (Beer got expressions of interest in his system from the repressive regimes in South Africa and Brazil).
What saved Cybersyn from descending into utter farce and/or totalitarian nightmare was the Pinochet coup. According to his credulous biographer, Beer subsequently wondered if the "success" of his experiment might havehastenedAllende's fall and the "demise of democracy."
Beer went off to live for some years in isolation in a cottage in Wales, then went back to consulting. In a speech he gave in 1990, he admitted-- while castigating the Thatcher and Reagan regimes -- that countries seemed to "go into chaos" as soon as he arrived. He died in 2002, apparently without ever grasping why.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Finally the National Post article:
Allende was no totalitarian
Simon Beer, National Post
Published: Saturday, March 29, 2008
As Stafford Beer's son, I was saddened to read Peter Foster's article of March 1, "Socialist dreams always turn totalitarian." Foster seems to have rather a poor grasp of the politics, economics and business management involved in President Salvador Allende's Chile in general and Stafford Beer's work in particular.
He misses the point about the "at last the people" anecdote. Stafford Beer ended with "… and this companero presidente ..." whereupon Allende finished the sentence for him "… at last -- the people." The point is that it wasn't about the president, but about the people. The way Foster writes it, it doesn't make any sense at all.
To claim the Chilean economy was in "turmoil" is fallacious. Allende's super-inflation model was a deliberate act. The premise being that if 5% of the population have all the money and 95% have none, then inflate the cost of everything and subsidize the poor, who receive food, clothing, education and housing for free. The rich meanwhile, have to pay $50 for a loaf of bread and don't even think about a mink coat. To claim this is "turmoil" shows a misunderstanding of the circumstance. Allende knew exactly what he was doing.
Foster's comment that "project Cybersyn never became fully operational" is demonstrably wrong. The distinguished Cybernetician Raul Espejo was responsible for the day-to-day running of the operations room with his colleagues until the American-backed coup d'etat put Pinochet in power, forcing Raul to escape to England. His colleagues? Well, some escaped, some were imprisoned and tortured and some were killed. So tell me again, Mr Foster, about socialist totalitarianism.
Foster quotes Herb Grosch (who knew nothing about what took place or was achieved in Chile). Perhaps Henry Kissinger, who played such a big part in Allende's death, would have been more apposite: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
It wasn't Allende, a democratically elected president, remember, who herded people into the national stadium and machine-gunned them, it was America's puppet dictator Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet (with the help and support of the American State Department and the CIA), tortured and murdered many thousands of Chilean people for which he would be harangued as a war criminal until death saved him even greater public ignominy. Foster's premise that socialism turns to totalitarianism seems weak in the extreme when using Allende's Chile as a paradigm. Chile produced most of the world's copper; America wanted it. The Chilean government was truly "thwarted by the dark machinations of their capitalist enemies," despite Foster's assertion to the contrary.
Foster suggests "the left inevitably fails to put enough emphasis on the role of Allende's own policies in destroying the Chilean economy." Not surprising, really. The fact that these policies were outside the American accounting norm may be hard for Foster to understand, but then, I suggest his understanding of the whole project is, at best, a little weak.
The summation of Stafford Beer's life, with its paucity of information, is rather akin to suggesting that Kennedy was a man who liked women, dabbled in politics and died. Stafford Beer was indeed a polymath. His books on Cybernetics and decision-making in management are read and respected around the world. Cybernetics is now an international business philosophy. If you enter Stafford Beer into Google, you get 137,000 references. To deride him for his politics is both irrelevant and asinine.
Foster reveals his lack of understanding of the interconnected telex machines that ran the length of Chile, "theoretically" providing real-time data. "Theory" becomes "reality" once the system is working.
And work it did. As for the operations room, he totally misses the point yet again because he fails to understand how the chairs worked. Beer proved that "girls working at keyboards" were not necessary to input data into the system. This could all be achieved by the controls in the arm of the chair: a whole new concept of system control in 1972. That was why "girls working at keyboards" were not required. It wasn't some misogynist plot. Foster describes Cybersyn as "an enormously elaborate system," yet in truth, Cybersyn was a deceptively simple system offering democratic inputs at every point along the operational chain. There were literally thousands of inputs, filtered so that the data weren't overwhelming. Had Foster understood the Cybersyn system, he would have known this.
Foster isn't always wrong, "…Chile would be -- as with every socialist experiment --different. It wasn't."
How true. It was the American politicians and their military, coupled with the CIA and Pinochet, that guaranteed that it wouldn't be.
Foster suggests that Stafford Beer expressed the view that criticism of Cybersyn was part of a "corporate plot." On the contrary, Beer understood corporate inadequacy and its inability to function as a viable system. He wrote many books on the subject. The corporate world would have been incapable of organizing such a plot. More likely, he riled against ill-informed members of the press, writing simplistic text about matters that they didn't understand and couldn't be bothered to adequately research.
Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr. Foster.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to Henry Kissinger, that champion of freedom-loving people everywhere: "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer." - Simon Beer is Stafford Beer's son.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved
--
National Post and was written by the son of Stafford Beer who was the cyberneticist who helped Allende.
March 28, 2008 / New York TIMES
Santiago Journal
Before '73 Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
SANTIAGO, Chile — When military forces loyal to Gen. Augusto Pinochet
staged a coup here in September 1973, they made a surprising
discovery. Salvador Allende's Socialist government had quietly
embarked on a novel experiment to manage Chile's economy using a
clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines.
The project, called Cybersyn, was the brainchild of A. Stafford Beer,
a visionary Briton who employed his "cybernetic" concepts to help Mr.
Allende find an alternative to the planned economies of Cuba and the
Soviet Union. After the coup it became the subject of intense military
scrutiny.
In developing Cybersyn, Mr. Beer changed the lives of the bright young
Chileans he worked with here. Some 35 years later, this little-known
feature of Mr. Allende's abortive Socialist transformation was
remembered in an exhibit in a museum beneath La Moneda, the
presidential palace.
A Star Trek-like chair with controls in the armrests was a replica of
those in a prototype operations room. Mr. Beer planned for the room to
receive computer reports based on data flowing from telex machines
connected to factories up and down this 2,700-mile-long country.
Managers were to sit in seven of the contoured chairs and make
critical decisions about the reports displayed on projection screens.
While the operations room never became fully operational, Cybersyn
gained stature within the Allende government for helping to
outmaneuver striking workers in October 1972. That helped planners
realize — as the pioneers of the modern-day Internet did — that the
communications network was more important than computing power, which
Chile did not have much of, anyway. A single I.B.M. 360/50 mainframe,
which had less storage capacity than most flash drives today,
processed the factories' data, with a Burroughs 3500 later filling in.
Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a
28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking
his help in organizing Mr. Allende's economy by applying cybernetic
concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test
his ideas.
He wanted to use the telex communications system — a network of
teletypewriters — to gather data from factories on variables like
daily output, energy use and labor "in real time," and then use a
computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information
the government needed to make decisions.
Mr. Beer set up teams of computer programmers in England and Chile,
and began making regular trips to Santiago to direct the project. He
was paid $500 a day while working in Chile, a sizable sum here at the
time, said Raúl Espejo, who was Cybersyn's operations director.
The Englishman became a mentor to the Chilean team, many of them in
their 20s. On one visit he tried to inspire them by sharing Richard
Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," the story of a seagull who
follows his dream to master the art of flying against the wishes of
the flock.
An imposing man with a long gray-flecked beard, Mr. Beer was a college
dropout who challenged the young Chileans with tough questions. He
shared his love for writing poetry and painting, and brought books and
classical music from Europe. He smoked cigars and drank whiskey and
wine constantly, "but was never losing his head," Mr. Espejo said.
Most of the Cybersyn team scrupulously avoided talking about politics,
and some even had far-right-wing views, said Isaquino Benadof, who led
the team of Chilean engineers designing the Cybersyn software.
One early challenge was how to build the communications network. Short
of money, the team found 500 unused telex machines in a warehouse of
the national telecommunications company.
Cybersyn's turning point came in October 1972, when a strike by
truckers and retailers nearly paralyzed the economy. The
interconnected telex machines, exchanging 2,000 messages a day, were a
potent instrument, enabling the government to identify and organize
alternative transportation resources that kept the economy moving.
The strike dragged on for nearly a month. While it weakened Mr.
Allende's Popular Unity party, the government survived, and Cybersyn
was praised for playing a major role. "From that point on the
communications center became part of whatever was happening," Mr.
Espejo said.
"Chile run by computer," blared The British Observer on Jan. 7, 1973,
as word of the experiment began leaking out.
But as the country's political and security situation worsened, Mr.
Beer and his Chilean team realized that time was running out.
Mr. Allende remained committed to Cybersyn to the end. On Sept. 8,
1973, he gave orders to move the operations room to the presidential
palace. But three days later the military took over; Mr. Allende died
that afternoon.
Military officials soon confronted Cybersyn's leaders, seeking to
understand their political motivations. Mr. Benadof said he was
interrogated at least three times. Mr. Espejo, after being questioned,
was warned to leave the country; two months after the coup he fled to
England.
The military never could grasp Cybersyn, and finally dismantled the
operations room. Several other Cybersyn team members went into exile.
Mr. Flores, who was both economy and finance minister in the Allende
government, spent three years in military concentration camps. After
his release, he moved with his family to California to study at
Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where
he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy.
He later was one of the inventors of the Coordinator, a program that
tracked spoken commitments between workers within a company, one of
the first forays into "work flow" software. He became a millionaire
and returned to Chile, where today he is a senator representing the
Tarapacá Region.
Mr. Beer, who died in 2002, helped some team members secure college
teaching positions in England. That included Mr. Espejo, who dedicated
himself to advancing cybernetics.
"The Chilean project completely transformed Stafford's life, and he
obviously had a huge impact on all of us," Mr. Espejo said. "Clearly,
his work was not recognized during his lifetime. But what he has
written will remain for a long time."
Here is the Financial Post article.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Presented by
Socialist dreams always turn totalitarian
Peter Foster, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, March 01, 2008
On Nov. 12, 1971, Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, sat down in the presidential palace in Santiago opposite a large, bearded Englishman named Stafford Beer.
Allende, a committed socialist, had been in power for a year, during which he had unleashed a wave of expropriations and populist measures that threatened massive inflation. The economy was in turmoil. Beer, the eccentric founder of "cybernetic management," had come to lay out a master plan for control of the rapidly expanding nationalized sector of the Chilean economy. On a sheet of paper, Beer drew the "neurological" basis for his system. Allende, who had trained as a doctor, reportedly "immediately grasped the biological inspiration behind Beer's cybernetic model and knowingly nodded throughout the explanation."
Beer sketched his "viable system model" based on five hierarchic levels. After he had drawn the top "box," he declared theatrically: "And this, companero presidente, is you." Allende leaned back and with a broad smile said: "At last, the people."
Two years after his first meeting with Beer, Allende was killed during the coup that installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
He has since become an icon for crushed socialist dreams. This view is reflected in Naomi Klein's recent book, The Shock Doctrine. Strangely, however, Ms. Klein makes no mention of Stafford Beer, who provides valuable insight into what "socialist control" looks like in practice. Ms. Klein's oversight is especially puzzling since Stafford Beer's story has a strong Canadian angle. In 1973, he gave the CBC Massey lectures with the telling title: Designing Freedom. He lived much of the latter part of his life in Toronto, and consulted to several levels of Canadian government.
Leftist commentators such as Ms. Klein persistently claim that socialism
has "never really been tried." Those countries that called themselves socialist or Communist were always either repressive perversions of the ideal, or were thwarted by the dark machinations of their capitalist enemies. The latter is the conventional leftist take on Chile, and certainly has an element of truth. The U.S. companies that Allende expropriated indeed ran to Washington, which sought to undermine his regime. However, the left inevitably fails to put enough emphasis on the role of Allende's own policies in destroying the Chilean economy. While his Keynesian delusions and reflexive grab for assets would have been damaging enough, they were as nothing compared with the regime's naivete in supporting Beer's "Project Cybersyn," (a word formed from melding "cybernetics" and "synergy.")
Beer was a larger-than-life character, a polymath who dabbled in Eastern religions, poetry and painting. He was also a well-known management consultant who had previously held senior positions in the British steel and the publishing industry. Beer was a specialist in operations research (OR), the study of organizing systems to produce the required results, and had melded OR with cybernetics, the science of control mechanisms which had been founded by Norbert Weiner. Above all, however, Beer was a committed socialist.
Beer's Cybersyn utilized a network of telex machines that ran the length of Chile. These theoretically provided the real-time data from state factories and mines that would then be fed into a specially programmed central computer. The whole operation would be overseen from a control module, the "Opsroom," that resembled the deck of the starship Enterprise. There, seven controllers would act in a "symbiotic relationship" with the computer "to amplify their respective powers in one new synergy of enhanced intelligence." The seven would sit surrounded by numerous screens -- including an eight-by-four-foot master screen -- in ergonomically designed swivel chairs. These chairs' arms featured a series of knobs that the controllers would bash to control the commanding heights of the Chilean economy. The knob thumping was intended by Beer as part of the "drama" of cybernetic control: centralized government as performance art. (More practically, it was based on the assumption that the seven masters of the economy would be keyboard illiterate. Beer apparently didn't want women typists in the room.) Nationalized enterprises would be dynamically modelled in terms of "quantified flow-charts" that would give the central puppeteers all they needed to know. Glitches would be indicated by "algedonic signals."
True to solid socialist principles, this enormously elaborate system would, according to Beer, facilitate worker participation. How wasn't clear. The Russian and Cuban revolutions had somehow missed out on this "democratic" element, but Chile would be -- as with every socialist experiment -- "different." It wasn't.
Beer rejected accusations that his system was Orwellian, but was soon speaking the language of thinly veiled threats. Opposition was allegedly rooted in the "vindictiveness" of the "rich world." Media criticism was written off as part of a corporate plot. Those who had been expropriated had to "talk the new language [of cybernetic viability] or get out." Those who refused to leave were accused of "polarizing" society.
Cybersyn, not surprisingly, never became fully operational, and its only alleged success was in helping the government respond to a nationwide 1972 strike. But that was a very long way from running the public sector, much less an economy. Meanwhile, U.S. computer guru Herb Grosch wrote: "It is a good thing for humanity, and for Chile in particular, that [Cybersyn] is only a bad dream." (Beer got expressions of interest in his system from the repressive regimes in South Africa and Brazil).
What saved Cybersyn from descending into utter farce and/or totalitarian nightmare was the Pinochet coup. According to his credulous biographer, Beer subsequently wondered if the "success" of his experiment might havehastenedAllende's fall and the "demise of democracy."
Beer went off to live for some years in isolation in a cottage in Wales, then went back to consulting. In a speech he gave in 1990, he admitted-- while castigating the Thatcher and Reagan regimes -- that countries seemed to "go into chaos" as soon as he arrived. He died in 2002, apparently without ever grasping why.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Finally the National Post article:
Allende was no totalitarian
Simon Beer, National Post
Published: Saturday, March 29, 2008
As Stafford Beer's son, I was saddened to read Peter Foster's article of March 1, "Socialist dreams always turn totalitarian." Foster seems to have rather a poor grasp of the politics, economics and business management involved in President Salvador Allende's Chile in general and Stafford Beer's work in particular.
He misses the point about the "at last the people" anecdote. Stafford Beer ended with "… and this companero presidente ..." whereupon Allende finished the sentence for him "… at last -- the people." The point is that it wasn't about the president, but about the people. The way Foster writes it, it doesn't make any sense at all.
To claim the Chilean economy was in "turmoil" is fallacious. Allende's super-inflation model was a deliberate act. The premise being that if 5% of the population have all the money and 95% have none, then inflate the cost of everything and subsidize the poor, who receive food, clothing, education and housing for free. The rich meanwhile, have to pay $50 for a loaf of bread and don't even think about a mink coat. To claim this is "turmoil" shows a misunderstanding of the circumstance. Allende knew exactly what he was doing.
Foster's comment that "project Cybersyn never became fully operational" is demonstrably wrong. The distinguished Cybernetician Raul Espejo was responsible for the day-to-day running of the operations room with his colleagues until the American-backed coup d'etat put Pinochet in power, forcing Raul to escape to England. His colleagues? Well, some escaped, some were imprisoned and tortured and some were killed. So tell me again, Mr Foster, about socialist totalitarianism.
Foster quotes Herb Grosch (who knew nothing about what took place or was achieved in Chile). Perhaps Henry Kissinger, who played such a big part in Allende's death, would have been more apposite: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
It wasn't Allende, a democratically elected president, remember, who herded people into the national stadium and machine-gunned them, it was America's puppet dictator Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet (with the help and support of the American State Department and the CIA), tortured and murdered many thousands of Chilean people for which he would be harangued as a war criminal until death saved him even greater public ignominy. Foster's premise that socialism turns to totalitarianism seems weak in the extreme when using Allende's Chile as a paradigm. Chile produced most of the world's copper; America wanted it. The Chilean government was truly "thwarted by the dark machinations of their capitalist enemies," despite Foster's assertion to the contrary.
Foster suggests "the left inevitably fails to put enough emphasis on the role of Allende's own policies in destroying the Chilean economy." Not surprising, really. The fact that these policies were outside the American accounting norm may be hard for Foster to understand, but then, I suggest his understanding of the whole project is, at best, a little weak.
The summation of Stafford Beer's life, with its paucity of information, is rather akin to suggesting that Kennedy was a man who liked women, dabbled in politics and died. Stafford Beer was indeed a polymath. His books on Cybernetics and decision-making in management are read and respected around the world. Cybernetics is now an international business philosophy. If you enter Stafford Beer into Google, you get 137,000 references. To deride him for his politics is both irrelevant and asinine.
Foster reveals his lack of understanding of the interconnected telex machines that ran the length of Chile, "theoretically" providing real-time data. "Theory" becomes "reality" once the system is working.
And work it did. As for the operations room, he totally misses the point yet again because he fails to understand how the chairs worked. Beer proved that "girls working at keyboards" were not necessary to input data into the system. This could all be achieved by the controls in the arm of the chair: a whole new concept of system control in 1972. That was why "girls working at keyboards" were not required. It wasn't some misogynist plot. Foster describes Cybersyn as "an enormously elaborate system," yet in truth, Cybersyn was a deceptively simple system offering democratic inputs at every point along the operational chain. There were literally thousands of inputs, filtered so that the data weren't overwhelming. Had Foster understood the Cybersyn system, he would have known this.
Foster isn't always wrong, "…Chile would be -- as with every socialist experiment --different. It wasn't."
How true. It was the American politicians and their military, coupled with the CIA and Pinochet, that guaranteed that it wouldn't be.
Foster suggests that Stafford Beer expressed the view that criticism of Cybersyn was part of a "corporate plot." On the contrary, Beer understood corporate inadequacy and its inability to function as a viable system. He wrote many books on the subject. The corporate world would have been incapable of organizing such a plot. More likely, he riled against ill-informed members of the press, writing simplistic text about matters that they didn't understand and couldn't be bothered to adequately research.
Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr. Foster.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to Henry Kissinger, that champion of freedom-loving people everywhere: "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer." - Simon Beer is Stafford Beer's son.
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved
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