A Global History of Cybernetics 31
In 1953, an author who wrote under the pseudonym “Materialist” pub-
lished the infamous article “Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?” in a lead-
ing journal for ideological and intellectual battles, Questions of Philosophy.
“Materialist” waxes poetic in his rebuke:
the theory of cybernetics, trying to extend the principles of modern computing ma-
chines to a variety of natural and social phenomena without due regard for their
qualitative peculiarities, is mechanicism turning into idealism. It is a sterile flower of
the tree of knowledge arriving as a result of a one-sided and exaggerated blowing up
of a particular trait of epistemology.^51
Later in the article, Materialist contends that “in the depth of their
despair, [those in the capitalist world] resort to the help of pseudo-sciences
giving them some shadow of expectation to lengthen their survival.”^52
With somewhat less vitriol, in 1954, the fourth edition of the Concise Dic-
tionary of Philosophy cast cybernetics as a slightly ridiculous, although still
harmful anti-Marxist “reactionary pseudo-science.” The entry reads:
Cybernetics: a reactionary pseudo-science 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 ma-
chine, both in industry and in war. The instigators of a new world war use cybernet-
ics in their dirty, practical affairs.^53
The campaign continued in the popular and scholarly press more or less
unabated through the 1950s, although the first public rehabilitation efforts,
noted below, began in earnest as early as 1955.
The list of epithets reserved for cybernetics by the Soviet press should
be put into perspective. The campaign against cybernetics, however mean-
spirited and aggressive, appears far from the most vicious of campaigns
that were organized by Soviet journalists and public commentators against
American thought. Stalin, who was known to read widely across the sci-
entific fields, seems to have known little to nothing about cybernetics; his
fury against it appeared independent of “any essential features of cybernet-
ics itself,” according to Gerovitch.^54 Without any direct evidence of Sta-
lin’s involvement in the campaign against cybernetics, we can speculate
that Stalin likely reviled cybernetics for the same reasons that he hated
all imperialist “pseudo-sciences”: ideological opposition was necessary to
fuel and power his monumental state building and modernization proj-
ects. The campaign against cybernetics, which came in the wake of Stalin’s