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beastly. It is a good thing for humanity, and for Chile in particular, that it is
as yet only a bad dream.” Beer's reply (1973b) stated that the Cybersyn project
had indeed achieved what was claimed for it, that “perhaps it is intolerable
to sit in Washington DC and to realise that someone else got there first—in a
Marxist country, on a shoestring,” and that “as to the 'horror' of putting com-
puters to work in the service of the people, I would sooner do it than calculate
over-kill, spy on a citizen's credit-worthiness, or teach children some brand
of rectitude.”
The political critique of Cybersyn and the VSM was further elaborated
and dogged Beer over the years, and I want now to review its overall form,
rather than the details, and how one might respond to it. The critique is fairly
straightforward, so I shall present it largely in my own words. 35
In 1974, Beer said of Cybersyn that it “aimed to acquire the benefits of
cybernetic synergy for the whole of industry, while devolving power to the
workers at the same time” (Beer 1974a, 322), and there is no doubt of his
good intentions. His critics felt that he was deluding himself, however, and
Hanlon's description of Beer as a “supertechnocrat” presaged what was to fol-
low. I find it useful to split the critique into four parts.
1. The VSM undoubtedly was a technocratic approach to organization, in-
asmuch as it was an invention of technical experts which accorded technical
experts key positions—on the brain stem of the organization at levels 3 and
4. No one had asked the Chilean workers what sort of a subpolitical arrange-
ment they would like. Nor, I believe, did Beer ever envisage the basic form
of the VSM changing and adapting once it had been implemented in Chile.
There is not a lot one can say in reply to this, except to note that, on the one
hand, the fixity of the overall form of the VSM can be seen as a noncybernetic
aspect of Beer's cybernetic management. As ontology in action, the critics
seized here on a nonexemplary feature of Beer's work. But we might note, too,
that expert solutions are not necessarily bad. Beer's argument always was that
cyberneticians were the experts in the difficult and unfamiliar area of adapta-
tion, and that they had a responsibility to put their expertise to use (see, e.g.,
Beer 1975 [1970], 320-21). To say the least, Cybersyn was a new and imagina-
tive arrangement of socioinformatic relations of production, which might,
in principle—if the Pinochet coup had not happened—have proved to have
increased the freedom of all concerned. Beyond this, though, the critics found
more specific causes for concern within the structure of the VSM itself.
2. Another thread of the critique had to do with the algedonic signals that
passed upward unfiltered to higher levels of the VSM. Beer spoke of these
as “cries for help” or “cries of pain.” They were intended to indicate that
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