Eden Medina at Cabinet Magazine:
In July 1971, the British cybernetician Stafford Beer received an unexpected letter from Chile. Its contents would dramatically change Beer’s life. The writer was a young Chilean engineer named Fernando Flores, who was working for the government of newly elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. Flores wrote that he was familiar with Beer’s work in management cybernetics and was “now in a position from which it is possible to implement on a national scale—at which cybernetic thinking becomes a necessity—scientific views on management and organization.” Flores asked Beer for advice on how to apply cybernetics to the management of the nationalized sector of the Chilean economy, which was expanding quickly because of Allende’s aggressive nationalization policy.
Less than a year earlier, Allende and his leftist coalition, Popular Unity (UP), had secured the presidency and put Chile on the road toward socialist change. Allende’s victory resulted from the inability of previous Chilean governments to resolve such problems as economic dependency, economic inequality, and social inequality using less drastic means.
more here.