Allende´s Governing Machine

Allende´s Governing Machine

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

While Marx spoke of a centrally planned economy, Hayek mentioned the difficulty of being able to not only count on the information of those countless variables, as well as the enough knowledge to understand the markets, for the nefarious followers of Marx it was not about understanding the markets, but how to  “subordinate them” or "dominate" them, which they never could, for the most nefarious followers of Hayek, it was only to leave them free, without any restriction, nor excesses of control or debauchery would seem a sensible solution to the question of economic execution, even if that Keynes tried to establish theories about less authoritarian, but equally fraudulent control measures that promoted small long-term improvements in exchange for large imbalances in the long run.

Salvador Allende was the first democratically elected socialist president in America, for many Allende was a kind of "Che Guevara" and Fidel Castro all rolled into one Chilean version, for others, a man drawn from Marxism who had understood the signals of Eduard Bernstein regarding democratic socialism, I differ in the thinking of those who consider Allende a faithful follower of Soviet or Castrist thinking, within the context of the centrally planned economy, Allende sought to overcome the initial shock he had had with the markets, he knew that his plan detonated with the nationalization of several key industries would not be a solution, and he knew even more, that in the short term the inability to control the economic variables would explode in his hands (finally it exploded, he lacked time), so his next plan was to challenge the concept of controlling, to be able to "understand" those variables and to be able to act with the necessary anticipated vision.

The question was how to obtain information in real time and how to create scenarios that recreate the effects of each of those variables affected by each of the decisions to be made, for this Allende and one of his ministers Fernando Flores, contacted Strafford Beer , an English expert in a then obscure discipline known as "cybernetics", like Milton Friedman years later, Beer immediately jumped excited before the opportunity to put into action his theories regarding information, the processing of it, the creation of scenarios and the possibility of influencing them, in those years, such a vision would seem impossible, and would lean towards the judgment issued by Hayek, today, if we talk about systems of "predictability" developed by algorithms by companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google, the balance could ironically have tilted towards Beer and Allende.

Synco, or information and control system, was the idea conceived by Beer for its implementation in the nascent socialist Chile of Allende, a system that obtained information online from each of the productive generators (many years before the arrival of the Internet) capable of to present this information to middle managers, capable of creating various resulting scenarios for decision making, in addition to "thermometers" capable of measuring emotions, such as joy or sadness of operant and affected, all of this (Big Data) linked to a superior command in which those more complex situations arrived as final destination for their definitive solution, in summary, Synco sought to summarize the events in each one of the processes, inform them online (Could Riaz Khadem the "Infoman" came out with his TOPS system inspired by Synco?) and provide simulators and thermometers, in this way it was possible to act with advantage over events before they happened and have a long-term vision of not only how events would happen , but of how people would react, it must sound deeply crazy in its time, nowadays we seem to talk about how Facebook or Amazon suggest buying options, through a concentration of our activities, tastes and interests, searching through algorithms patterns similar and suggesting the actions carried out by agents similar to us, in this way a bit creepy, we do not control a market, but understand it more thoroughly, take advantage of it and use it for a certain purpose, difficult to think of "controlling" if we consider that the last decision is ours, but the possibility of influencing is great.

It is said that all this project was eliminated after the coup d'etat exercised by Augusto Pinochet with external support, and from there, in the ruins of one project, another wild experiment would be raised in another direction, but that's another story, maybe Hayek and Friedman would have been very interested in the Beer and Allende machine, even Keynes, who would not?