Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.
Maxwell Maltz
The story of cybernetic economic planning in the first half of the 20th century is not one of technical failure, but of repeated sabotage by ideology, faction, and power.
It is a tragic chronicle of brilliant minds who reached for abundance, only to be crushed under the weight of the very systems they tried to serve.
1. Oskar Lange and the Ghost of Market Socialism
Oskar Lange, a Polish economist and committed Marxist, was the first to see the potential of computation to solve the socialist calculation problem.
In 1936–38 he proposed that planners could simulate market prices through iterative trial-and-error equations, an early feedback loop.
By the 1950s, with the first electronic computers arriving in Eastern Europe, Lange’s ideas could have evolved into real-time cybernetic adjustment.
They never did.
The Polish Marxist establishment, still traumatised by Stalin’s purges and terrified of any hint of “market mechanisms,” denounced even simulated prices as ideological deviation, despite them being pure and non-ideological mathematics.
Lange himself was sidelined into diplomatic posts.
The computers that could have run his model were instead used for military cryptography and prestige projects. A promising seed was smothered in the cradle by dogmatic fear of anything that smelled like capitalism, even when it was only a harmless mathematical shadow.
2. Wassily Leontief and the Input-Output Revolution
Wassily Leontief was a Russian-born, Nobel Prize–winning economist who turned the economy into solvable mathematics.
His input-output tables, first published in 1936 and refined through the 1940s and 50s, reduced the entire productive system to a gigantic matrix of linear equations.
Give him accurate data and enough computing power, and Leontief could tell you exactly how much steel, coal, labour, and electricity were required to produce a bicycle, a hospital bed, or an ICBM, and how changing one variable rippled through everything else.
This was the raw engine that every later cybernetic project desperately needed.
The United States funded his Harvard lab lavishly during the Cold War, but only to optimise military logistics and corporate supply chains.
Leontief himself warned that the same tables could plan an entire peacetime economy for human needs instead of profit or war.
His pleas were ignored by Western governments and treated as dangerous heresy in the East.
For after all, ironically, it was treated as bourgeois decadence.
To quote soviet sources:
Cybernetics: a reactionary pseudoscience that appeared in the U.S.A. after World War II and also spread through other capitalist countries. Cybernetics clearly reflects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war. At the same time, for cybernetics an imperialistic utopia is characteristic—replacing living, thinking man, fighting for his interests, by a machine, both in industry and in war. The instigators of a new world war use cybernetics in their dirty, practical affairs.
It would change, in classic soviet revisionist style, once they realized what a powerful tool it was, but always kept at arm’s length.
In the Soviet Union, input-output analysis was officially adopted in the 1960s, but too late, and only as a static, annual planning tool.
The ministries refused real-time updates or inter-sectoral transparency.
By the time Glushkov tried to plug Leontief’s matrices into OGAS, the old guard had already turned the tables into another bureaucratic ledger, updated once a year on paper.
Leontief died in 1999, watching his life’s work used to make Walmart and the Pentagon more efficient, never to make scarcity obsolete….
2. The Soviet Thaw and the First Spark: Anatoly Kitov’s All-State Automated System
Anatoly Ivanovich Kitov, a brilliant and bold a Red Army colonel was the first man to propose a nationwide computer network for economic management.
In 1956 he published The Red Atom and, in 1958, sent a letter directly to Khrushchev titled “On the Possibility and Expediency of Using Electronic Computing Machines for Managing the National Economy.”
His vision: a unified network of computing centres linked by telephone lines, providing real-time data for planning.
He even suggested dual-use civilian-military infrastructure, an idea decades ahead of ARPANET.
The response?
Kitov was immediately expelled from the Communist Party, stripped of his positions, and banned from classified work.
Why?
He had dared to suggest that the Ministry of Defence share its computers with civilian planners.
The military faction, jealously guarding its toys, and the party apparatus, terrified of any decentralising force, crushed the proposal outright.
The first serious Soviet cybernetic project died not from technical impossibility, but from bureaucratic territorialism and Marxist-Leninist paranoia about “dual power.”
4. The Great Hope: Viktor Glushkov and OGAS
Viktor Glushkov, a genius mathematician, academician, and the most powerful cyberneticist in the USSR, took Kitov’s dream and made it rigorous.
His OGAS (Nationwide Automated System for Computation and Information Processing) was to be a three-tier, real-time hierarchy of 20,000 computing centres, linked by dedicated lines, constantly updating plans with feedback from factories, warehouses, and shops.
By 1964 Glushkov had working prototypes, linear programming solutions, and even early packet-switching concepts.
The plan was approved at the highest levels in 1963.
Then the sabotage began.
- The Ministry of Finance, led by Vasily Garbuzov, saw OGAS as a threat to its control over resource allocation.
- The Central Statistical Administration feared loss of its monopoly on data.
- Regional party secretaries dreaded real-time transparency that would expose their fiefdoms.
- Old-guard Marxists muttered that “cybernetics replaces the leading role of the working class with machines.”
By 1970, after endless commissions and diluted compromises, Kosygin’s reformist government fell.
Brezhnev’s stagnation triumphed.
Funding for the dedicated communication lines was slashed.
OGAS was quietly buried under mountains of paper plans and ideological denunciations.
Glushkov died in 1982, heartbroken, warning that without OGAS the Soviet economy would face insurmountable difficulties by the end of the decade.
He was right…
5. Chile’s Cybersyn: The Most Beautiful Failure
Stafford Beer, the British cybernetician, built Project Cybersyn for Salvador Allende’s government: a national operations room with swirling chairs, real-time factory data fed through telex lines, and the famous algedonic feedback system to detect pain or pleasure in the economic organism.
In October 1972, during the CIA-backed truckers’ strike, Cybersyn kept the country running, coordinating 200+ factories and rerouting scarce resources with primitive computers and sheer ingenuity.
It worked.
And then the military coup came.
On 11 September 1973 the bombs fell on La Moneda.
The operations room was dismantled, the telex machines smashed, the engineers scattered or disappeared.
Pinochet’s regime, which was backed by Chicago Boys and multinational corporations, had no interest in a system that threatened hierarchical control.
The most advanced, humane cybernetic experiment of the century was murdered by tanks and torture chambers….
6. The Venus Project: The Dream That Turned Inward
Jacque Fresco was an engineer, industrial designer and self-taught futurist, perhaps the purest cybernetic visionary of them all.
From the 1970s onward he preached a global resource-based economy run entirely by automated systems: cities were to be designed from the ground-up with efficiency in mind, with real-time sensors feeding data into central cybernetic brains, artificial intelligence allocating resources according to need and ecological carrying capacity, with zero input from money, markets, or politics.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Fresco and his partner Roxanne Meadows built a 21-acre research centre in Venus, Florida.
They constructed scale models, drafted blueprints, filmed hundreds of hours of lectures, and inspired a worldwide following.
The Venus Project was to be the living prototype, the first node of a planetary cybernetic nervous system.
And then the sabotage came, slow and internal.
- The organisation became increasingly insular. Fresco’s insistence on total control and his rejection of collaboration with existing open-source or academic communities isolated the project from the very technological ecosystem it needed.
- After Fresco’s death in 2017, the remaining staff gradually transformed the centre from a research hub into a paid-tour venue and merchandise operation. Membership fees, lecture tickets, and souvenir sales replaced serious engineering work.
- The original cybernetic plans were locked behind copyright claims, despite them once being freely sketched and discussed. Detailed designs were never open-sourced. The promised test city never materialised.
- By the 2020s the Venus Project had drifted into ideological limbo: neither a functioning prototype, nor a political movement like us, just a non-profit selling DVDs and dome postcards while the world burned.
The tragedy is bitter.
Fresco had seen farther than almost anyone: a fully automated, cybernetic, moneyless civilisation.
Yet the project died the same death as its predecessors.
Not from external tanks or party commissars, but from the quiet, familiar poisons of centralisation, personality cult, and the slow creep of profit motive inside what was meant to be its opposite.
Parting words
In retrospect, we can trace the relentless ascent of cybernetics from the periphery to the center of economic thought.
Oskar Lange first envisioned it as a a mere shadow, a way to just simulate market economics in the service of socialism, but premature technology and ideology led him to the timid conclusions of market socialism.
Then came Wassily Leontief, who stripped away the theory to build the actual mathematical engine, the Input-Output Analysis, proving that the complex web of an economy could be solved as a system of linear equations.
Later, the soviets wanted to use cybernetics as a tool through which to perform their central soviet socialist planning, a blunt instrument of the equally blunt central command of the soviet government, the same soviet government which would slowly strangle it under bureaucracy, factional party interests, and Marxist ideology.
Kantorovich and Nikolai Veduta took this further still: Kantorovich supplied the optimisation mathematics, while Veduta and the Novosibirsk Institute turned it toward the living territory itself, building cybernetic “economic geography” models that treated the Siberian steppe not as an empty resource frontier but as a delicate biosphere whose limits had to be continuously monitored and respected.
In an era that otherwise bulldozed nature in the name of progress, these projects quietly embedded ecological feedback into the planning algorithms, proving that cybernetic coordination could be made sensitive to soil, water, forests, and carrying capacity. Elena Veduta carries that legacy forward today.
Project CyberSyn refined it into a national nervous system, which even in it’s crude form, was to be made into the coordinating tool of the economy, based upon cybernetic principles first and foremost.
And while it was battle-tested in the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, coordinating resources even under crisis, it fell to geopolitical sabotage, proving it needs to be distributed, to prevent a single point of failure.
Most recently, The Venus Project wished to use it to manage the economy without direct intervention.
But it’s fatal flaw was that the plans for it’s implementation were restricted through their organization, their technicians, and their ideology, which would be it’s grave undoing, once that organization ossified and became more interested in profit than actually building this glorious, scientific future.
And today, modern corporate logisticians have since perfected the scale of this automated planning, but trapped it within the narrow, self-destructive laws of monetary profit.
Each time it has relied upon any other crutch, said crutch has beaten it to death.
So the time has come to shed the final layer of ideological baggage, since no socialist revolution will help us, no army will give up their tools in the service of peace, and no state will want to see itself become redundant.
We must move beyond using cybernetics to prop up political systems and corporations, and allow it to exist for its own sake: a pure science of organization of our economic machine.
It is time for a system that plans prosperity in real-time.
Not for a party, a nation, or a creed, but for the well-being of everyone, without distinction of race, religion, class, or species.
And the Accessist International is there to help direct that final emergence.
Because Liberation begins with Access.