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On August 11, 1911, the molders at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts, one of the United States' largest factories for military armaments, abruptly walked off the job. The action was spontaneous, unsanctioned by their union local, and was sparked by a simple piece of technology: the stopwatch.
The dreaded "Taylor system" had come to Watertown. Under pressure to reduce costs, General William Crozier, the head of the Army's Ordinance Department, decided to adopt the latest techniques of "scientific management" developed by Frederick W. Taylor, a dyspeptic and fanatical engineer renowned among business leaders for improving industrial productivity. Taylor and his team promised to rationalize manufacture, rendering it more efficient and productive, by determining the "one best way" for every aspect of the work process. Workers should follow detailed instructions on which tools to use, how fast to use them, how far to walk to various stations, and even what postures to adopt. But before those commands could be developed, the Taylorites had to study the labor process in depth. This is where the infamous stopwatch came in: the scientific managers timed each worker's every movement, breaking down work into a set of discrete tasks. Then they demanded workers speed them up.
As biographer Robert Kanigel describes it:
Formerly, the workmen earned a fixed amount for turning each tire to size. But once Taylor was through, their job was no longer to machine a tire but was a succession of smaller tasks: Set tire on machine ready to turn. Rough-face front edge. Finish-face front edge. Rough-bore front. And so on, each step minutely described and timed to the tenth of a minute.
When one molder refused to be timed, he was summarily fired. His coworkers, already pushed to the edge by a week of scientific management, struck in solidarity. It was the beginning of a conflict that would eventually reach the halls of the US Congress.
Taylor was no stranger to facing workers' pitched resistance to his methods. In fact, he practically welcomed their hatred. The son of a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer, Taylor had prepared to attend Harvard and follow in his father's footsteps into the legal profession. But his nervous disposition caused him to abandon these plans, and instead he apprenticed to a machinist, working his way up into supervisory positions on the shop floor.
Taylor's factory career did not bestow upon him any special working-class consciousness; if anything, it only sharpened his contempt for workers, whom he viewed as stupid and lazy. His bête noire, going back to his experience as a foreman, was "soldiering," where workers toiled below their maximum effort. Taylor, with his factory floor experience, understood that workers could control their pace of work because they possessed a distinct advantage over their managers: their knowledge of the production process. At the turn of the century, it was the workers, rather than their overseers, who understood how manufacturing worked, and their methods for completing tasks were often based on intuitive and informal "rules of thumb": what color a chemical admixture should take, the appropriate heft of a specific part, and the like. Factory owners and managers might have only a dim idea about how products were actually put together, and no ability to do it themselves. This control of knowledge meant that workers could control the pace of work. Out of desire or necessity, they could slow it down, even stop it altogether.
Scientific management, for all its pretensions, was less about determining ideal working methods and more about shattering this tremendous source of worker power. By breaking apart each work process into carefully scrutinized component tasks, Taylor had cracked the secret of labor's advantage, thereby giving management complete mastery over the productive process. The modernizing terminology of "science" and "efficiency" masked the prerogatives of discipline and control of workers. In political economist Harry Braverman's estimation, "Taylor raised control to an entirely new plane when he asserted as an absolute necessity of adequate management the dictation to the worker of the precise manner in which work is to be performed."
Taylor's own methods fell short of those of science. To get workers to obey his instructions, Taylor pulled from a mixed bag of deception, cajoling, and outright punishment. The best times achieved by the hardest workers became the new benchmarks for all workers; failure to measure up could mean docked pay. Often his "scientific" estimations of work rates were according to arbitrary metrics of his own invention. Reynold Spaeth, a physiologist who was a contemporary of Taylor's, noted that the latter's "law of heavy laboring," which stated that workers could handle heavy loads 43 percent of the day, lacked "all but the most fragmentary published data" and so must be accepted "on faith." Most historians agree that the famous story of Schmidt, the "high-priced man" who quadrupled his rate of loading pig iron under Taylor's supervision, was a fabrication Taylor rarely tired of telling.
Scientific management was, then, less a science of efficiency and more a political program for reshaping the worker as a pliant subject — what Taylor himself called "a complete mental revolution on the part of the workingmen … toward their work, toward their fellow men, and toward their employers." This revolution had its own philosophy. According to historian Bryan Palmer, it was rooted in "a conservative analysis of men and human nature": that human beings were inherently lazy, that labor was machine-like, and that people's aspirations could ultimately be boiled down to acquisition of goods. This "mental revolution" would be one of complete obedience.
Adam Smith had fretted, in "The Wealth of Nations," that the division of labor could have a deleterious effect on the mind of the worker. Set to a repetitive task, "he naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." For Taylor, what Smith referred to as the worker's "torpor of mind" was both his starting point and his end goal. "Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type," Taylor wrote. He never tired of likening workers to animals — horses, oxen, even songbirds and sparrows — in need of training and discipline.
Unfortunately for Taylor, workers were rarely as easily controlled as a draft horse. At Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania, where he first began his experiments, a rash of mechanical breakdowns followed the imposition of Taylor's new time standards. The workers blamed the destruction on the elevated pace, but Taylor argued that "these men were deliberately breaking their machines as a part of the piece-work war which was going on" and forced workers to pay to repair machines.
As Taylor's methods spread, so too did opposition. The strike at Watertown led to involvement from the union, which contacted friendly politicians in the area. In January 1912, Taylor and his men were called to account before Congress. There, Taylor's skittish and arrogant manner did little to advance his cause, especially when placed beside the testimony of workers, many of whom had worked at the arsenal for years. "It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give to the Government the best that was in us," explained one of the molders. "This method is un-American in principle, and we most respectfully request that you have it discontinued at once." The unions supported this position. In a follow-up study, economist R.F. Hoxie catalogued "more than a hundred specific reasons" given by union representatives for fighting against the hated Taylor system. "Scientific management," he wrote, "properly applied, normally functioning, should it become universal, would spell the doom of effective unionism as it exists today."
Remarkably, Congress took the side of the loyal arsenal workers and their union. Taylorism was discontinued at Watertown, and the fired molder was reinstated. Taylor was bewildered by the experience. As Hugh Aitken, historian of the Watertown strike, described it, Taylor was convinced the new method
would do far more for the workers — if only they would "cooperate" — than unions ever had done or could do, for scientific management was based on an understanding of the laws of production, not upon the opinion of the ignorant. These laws could not be bargained over.
Taylor himself never recovered from the grueling interrogations, and died in 1915. But his revolution was carried on, often by unlikely disciples: the leaders of radical workers' movements.
Leaders of the Marxist workers' movements of the early twentieth century viewed capitalist technologies like scientific management much as Taylor did: as an objective way to improve productivity, and therefore the condition of workers. Based on a particular interpretation of Marx's theory, they believed that capitalism, in its pursuit of profit, raised productivity through competitive technological innovation and the discovery of efficient working methods. These discoveries had no politics of their own; technology was neutral and could be appropriated with a change in ownership from private capital to state control, and thereby used to emancipate workers from drudgery. True, these new forms of work were difficult, dangerous, and widely hated. But if workers could table their protests about the productive forces, they could enjoy a world of plentiful goods and leisure — eventually. In other words, for orthodox Marxist theory, socialist production was *already contained* within the capitalist mode of production, as long as the capitalist mode of production could continue to develop.
This view of the objectivity and inevitability of technology, science, and progress in general was at the heart of the philosophies driving the most successful Marxist movements in history. Yet it was often at odds with the practical activity of workers themselves. Further, it shaped socialist strategy in ways ultimately detrimental to the goal of building emancipatory societies. These mistakes are not simply historical curios, but continue to influence left politics of technology. And so, before we can invent our future, we should return to the past and take stock of these movements' approaches to machines and technology.
The struggles against mechanization in the nineteenth century detailed in the previous chapter were largely forgotten or suppressed by the official workers' movement as it grew in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth. Karl Kautsky, the so-called Pope of Marxism, had inherited Marx and Engels's legacy directly from Engels himself. As leading theoretician of the openly Marxist German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the nation's most popular political party, Kautsky exercised tremendous influence over the reception and interpretation of Marx's work, as well as the strategy of the workers' movement, coordinated through the congresses of the Second International. While many people's first encounter with Kautsky is through Lenin's polemical denunciations of him, Kautsky had enormous stature among Marxists, including Lenin himself, before the onset of the First World War.
Kautsky's "orthodox Marxism" portrayed socialism as a kind of destiny that would inevitably emerge from the husk of capitalism in accordance with scientific laws of history, driven by the motor of productive forces. As he put it: "In the last analysis, the history of mankind is determined, not by ideas, but by an economic development which progresses irresistibly, obedient to certain underlying laws and not to anyone's wishes or whims," bringing about "new forms of production which require new forms of society." Socialism would arise on the basis of the development of capitalist production, which followed its own logic and laws.
In Kautsky's theory, the problem of capitalism was "the growing contradictions between the powers of production and the existing system of property," the solution to which could only be provided by socialism. He disavowed the most mechanical notions of transition:
When we declare the abolition of private property in the means of production to be unavoidable, we do not mean that some fine morning the exploited classes will find that, without their help, some good fairy has brought about the revolution.
And yet, the Erfurt Program, the SPD manifesto coauthored by Kautsky, is full of fatalism: all capitalist development moves society closer to socialism, and any resistance to this, such as machine breaking, can only impede the revolution.
The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable.
This faith that the progression of capitalist production would lead to a socialist destiny matched the SPD's cautious and patient attitude toward building the power of the working class through parliamentary means, with the party as its vehicle. As the capitalist economy grew larger, more complex, and more bureaucratic, it would thus require a political organ to match. This meant the SPD tended to disdain demands for workplace democracy. As Geoff Eley describes it in his history of the European left, "Leading theorists like Karl Kautsky specifically rejected workers' control, arguing that the complexities of the advanced industrial economy and the modern enterprise precluded bringing democratic procedures directly into the economy itself." Questions over the organization of production were scientific, not political, affairs. Instead, the SPD maintained, politics should train its sights on seizing the reins of the economy by contesting for leadership of the national parliament.
Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, the inevitability of socialism had come into doubt. While capitalist economies had gone through a long period of decline, they seemed to emerge, through consolidation into monopolies and trusts, into a new phase of stability. As socialists scrambled to make sense of the new situation, two leading perspectives emerged. One pole, represented by Kautsky and the young Polish-German communist Rosa Luxemburg, thought that the increased concentration of capital was the last step before a crisis and a revolutionary situation. On the other, Erfurt Program coauthor Eduard Bernstein argued that this indicated, rather, an unfore-told resilience of capitalism, which meant that revolution was off the table. Luxemburg's 1899 polemic against Bernstein's "revisionism," "Social Reform or Revolution," takes up this very question. In it, she argues that the contradictions of capitalism had not been overcome, but had been intensified, even as the final crisis was temporarily postponed. In doing so, Luxemburg reveals her continued debt to Kautskyian determinism: she counters Bernstein's "ethical socialism" with the "objective necessity of socialism, the explanation of socialism as the result of the material development of society" — in other words, a socialism proceeding mechanically from a terminal crisis stemming from internal contradictions of capitalist production.
How did these heirs of "scientific socialism" differ in their approach from Marx himself? Lucio Colletti, in his philosophical analysis of Second International Marxism, points out that "the Marxism of that period transformed what Marx himself has declared a *historical tendency*" — that is, crisis — "into an 'inevitable law of nature.'" Regardless of the differing views on breakdown and revolution, Bernstein, Kautsky, Luxemburg, and even figures outside of Germany such as Russian theorist Georgi Plekhanov all shared certain assumptions:
The so-called "economic sphere" — which in Marx had embraced both the production of *things* and the production (objectification) of *ideas*; production and intersubjective communication; material production and the production of social relations (for Marx, the relation between man and nature was also a relationship between man and man, and vice versa) — was now seen as *one isolated factor*, separated from the other "moments" and thereby emptied of any effective *socio-historical* content, representing, on the contrary, an antecedent sphere, prior to any human mediation.
In other words, the theory of the Second International had erred by constructing reified categories of an "economic base" of machines and a "superstructure" of language, law, and other elements of human sociality, which were merely epiphenomena of the base. By conceiving of the "economic base" as exclusively technologies — "production techniques" — and treating them as objective, "scientific" features of production, the Second International left out the social content of this production: the way production intimately shaped the arrangement of human beings, their culture, and their struggles. It was a socialist theory for which the content of class struggle was secondary, and for which capitalism's endogenous contradictions drove history and laid the groundwork for the transition to socialism.
This determinist belief ultimately formed the basis of Kautsky's critique of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which, in organizing a seizure of power in a peasant-majority country where capitalist social relations had only begun to take hold, had not followed the orderly progress of developmental stages. "It is an old Marxist saying," he admonished, "that revolutions cannot be made, but arise out of conditions." This perspective informed Kautsky's Social Democratic Party's support for Germany, rather than a commitment to internationalism, during the onset of the First World War. As Eley describes it, the SPD's justification for betraying their internationalist commitments and supporting the war consisted, in part, of the argument that they were defending their gains against "tsarist reaction and Slavic backwardness," lending a "progressive" élan to a sudden lapse into nationalist militarism.
After the war, Kautsky continued to adhere to what biographer Dick Geary terms his "mechanistic view of processes of historical change," arguing that socialism could only come about when the productive forces were sufficiently "ripe" (a term he repeatedly deployed). "Socialism cannot arise from a crippled and stagnant capitalism, but only from a capitalism carried to its highest point of productivity," he wrote in 1924. An entire Marxist tradition of endlessly deferred action and disdain for the struggles in the "periphery" of capitalist production has followed in its wake. To take one recent example, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of "Jacobin" magazine, reiterates Kautskyian arguments about Marx in his recent "Socialist Manifesto": "The Third World's experience with socialism vindicates Marx," who "argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces."
In the United States, which lacked the developed workers' parties of Europe, an alternate perspective prevailed. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a massive organization of militant and transient workers and unemployed people that tended to prioritize direct action over all else, recognized the implications of scientific management for class struggle. As Taylorist "rationalization" spread through industry, the so-called Wobblies, as Mike Davis tells it, "attempted to develop a rank-and-file rebellion against the rationality of Taylor and the speed-up." Amid a heightened interest among workers in militant opposition to the new work methods, the IWW published two remarkable tracts in 1913 on the topic of sabotage. After one of these pamphlets was used to prosecute an organizer, the union withdrew them from publication and publicly renounced sabotage as a tactic.
"Sabotage" at this time could mean any number of subversive techniques employed by a worker that interfered with production, including absenteeism, work slowdowns, "working to rule" by following only explicit requirements of the job, even striking. It could refer to disrupting equipment — "the displacement of parts of machinery or the disarrangement of a whole machine" — but it could also mean creating better-quality products than owners intended. As leading IWW member Walker C. Smith wrote,
The workers are coming to see that their class is the one to whom adulterated food, shoddy clothing and rotten materials are sold, and by refusing to adulterate products they not only destroy the employers' profits but safeguard their own lives as well.
In fact, he argued with a note of irony, "sabotage" could even describe the actions of employers when they halted production by locking out workers.
Smith argued that the benefits of sabotage were twofold. First, it had a direct economic impact on capitalists: "The aim is to hit the employer in his vital spot, his heart and soul, in other words, his pocketbook." Second, and more important, it was a means of developing militancy and solidarity among workers. Smith likened its effects on class struggle to those of guerilla warfare:
Guerilla warfare brings out the courage of individuals, it develops initiative, daring, resoluteness and audacity. Sabotage does the same for its users. It is to the social war what guerillas are to national wars. If it does no more than awaken a portion of the workers from their lethargy it will have been justified. But it will do more than that it will keep the workers awake and will incite them to do battle with masters. It will give added hope to the militant minority, the few who always bear the brunt of the struggle.
Sabotage techniques drew from the specific placement of workers within a production process, "a weapon which the masters cannot wrest from them." And if, like guerilla warfare, it was a weapon of the weak, then Smith admitted as much:
Is it not true that the workers are still largely without consciousness of power? It would be suicidal to act on the theory that we are today clothed with the might for which we are struggling. Being weak we must guard our embryonic organization, using every means within our grasp save that of compromise with our enemy, the employing class.
Legendary IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn attempted a more precise definition in her tract: "sabotage" referred to any effort "to limit his production in proportion to his remuneration," or in other words, "the deliberate withdrawal of efficiency by a competent worker." Rather than argue, as Smith did, for the salutary effects of sabotage for class consciousness, Flynn argued that workers *already* engaged in sabotage all the time, but without having a consistent name for what they were doing. Flynn quotes a worker at the Paterson silk mill in New Jersey, where organizers debated the efficacy of sabotage during the 1913 strike:
I never heard of this thing called sabotage before Mr. Boyd spoke about it on the platform. I know once in a while when I want a half-day off and they won't give it to me I slip the belt off the machine so it won't run and I get my half day. I don't know whether you call that sabotage, but that's what I do.
As Flynn noted, "one member of the executive committee after another admitted they had used this thing but they 'didn't know that was what you called it!'" Flynn's analysis of sabotage was, in this sense, eminently Marxist: rather than dictate strategy in a top-down manner, she conceptualized the actually existing tactics of workers as a fundamental component of class struggle. "We are to see what the workers are doing," she wrote, "and then try to understand why they do it; not tell them it's right or it's wrong, but analyze the condition."
A few years later, the themes and ideas from these infamous Wobbly tracts appeared in a somewhat surprising place: one of the major works of the unorthodox American sociologist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen's "The Engineers and the Price System" is most famous for his sketch of a technocratic socialist transformation in the United States. But the book opens with a somewhat odd discursus on, of all things, sabotage. Veblen reiterates the arguments of Smith and Flynn to such a degree that he must have had their work in mind. He even uses Flynn's definition of sabotage: "the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency."
Like the Wobblies, Veblen expanded the definition of sabotage to include techniques used by manufacturers in the course of business:
Such manoeuvres of restriction, delay, and hindrance have a large share in the ordinary conduct of business; but it is only lately that this ordinary line of business strategy has come to be recognized as being substantially of the same nature as the ordinary tactics of the syndicalists.
Many scholars have viewed Veblen's analysis as part of his characteristic ironic approach to criticizing the capitalists of his day, and such a tone is clearly evident. But Veblen's discussion of sabotage also reflects his engagement with the IWW and their politics, which lasted for years. As economic historian John F. Henry describes, Veblen had a great deal of sympathy for the IWW, signing petitions against their persecution and going so far as to recommend that the American Farm Bureau hire out-of-work Wobblies to work the fields. The latter suggestion prematurely ended his career at the Department of Agriculture.
While Veblen likely shared the IWW's antipathy to capitalism, he did not approve of their methods. In describing the epidemic of sabotage committed by both workers and owners, he sought not to valorize the side of the workers, but to posit a mediating figure: the engineer. Veblen argued that engineers, whom he classified with the "common men" of the workforce rather than the "vested interests" of the capitalists, had "begun to become uneasily 'class conscious'" due to "a growing sense of waste and confusion in the management of industry by the financial agents of the absentee owners." With their "common interest in productive efficiency, economical use of resources, and an equitable distribution of the consumable output" rather than profit and competition, engineers would be the worthy inheritors of the United States' industrial capacity, which they could run for the common good. They would form a "soviet of engineers."
Veblen died before he could do much more work on this front, but he inspired others to carry the torch of creating a more egalitarian society out of new technologies and restructured labor processes. One of the most influential and long-lasting think tanks dedicated to a society rationally administered by technical experts was organized by Howard Scott, a fast-talking engineer who had occasionally collaborated with Veblen.
In the 1920s, Scott had been the research director of the IWW, studying waste in the capitalist system; in 1932, with engineering professor Walter Rautenstrauch, he formed the Committee on Technocracy at Columbia University. Like Veblen, the Technocrats criticized the "price system" they saw as the root problem with capitalism, arguing instead for a currency system based on "energy units," a plan that was never fully explained. Even amid these somewhat crankish schemes, Technocracy reached the zenith of its influence in the early 1930s as the Great Depression shattered faith in the existing economic system and sent people looking for answers to what would come next.
Technocracy's diagnosis of the capitalist system sounds remarkably like the predictions of today's Fully Automated radicals: that a social crisis was upon us, caused by the substitution of machines for laborers. As the Technocrats avowed in their eponymous magazine, from ditch digging to adding machines,
one machine after another has been or is being perfected to take the place of the worker. It is, however, obvious that it is only a question of time when machines will have displaced so many workers that an entirely new system of providing the people of the earth with a living must be devised.
What would this system look like? By deploying machinery to reduce labor hours, and by eliminating methods of wealth accumulation through money, the Technocrats maintained that "if every man labored a little more than six hundred hours a year for twenty years, his efforts would entitle him to an income of approximately $20,000 a year!" In today's dollars, such a universal basic income would place a household in the top 1 percent of earners. But it was the embrace of the machine that was the raison d'être of Technocracy: "Why should we fight machinery when under the system of Technocracy we could make machines do more and more of our work so that we would have more and more leisure to enjoy life?"
The vogue for Technocracy proved short lived: a "media fad and political dead end" in the estimation of engineering historian David F. Noble, and one that took increasingly cultish turns. Indeed, Scott's organization, Technocracy, Inc., still exists today, decades after his death, and its rudimentary website promotes postwork futures and environmentalism-oriented experiments like aquaponics. Ultimately, for all its lofty (and occasionally bizarre) goals, the organization was content to merely outline the problem and hypothetical solutions. During the Depression, the IWW, weakened after years of repression, showed some initial interest in Technocracy. For instance, one "Industrial Worker" headline from 1933 screamed, "Scientist Predicts End of Capitalism within Three Years," though Scott, the "scientist" in question, had exaggerated his credentials. However, the IWW eventually tired of these visions and subjected Technocracy to a pithy critique: "Aside from their columns of figures and determinations, they do not have a program for accomplishing things, and they completely exclude the class struggle, so there is nothing left to discuss there."
The Bolsheviks shared much of the theoretical outlook of Second International, despite differences in political strategy. Even after the Russian Revolution, building socialism in the "backward" Soviet Union was largely a matter of acquiring capitalist technologies in order to speed through the stages of development thought necessary for a socialist economy. One historian remarks that a faith in science prevailed among all classes and political tendencies in Russia, including the Bolsheviks, part of a longer discourse about the empire's need to "catch up" to the level of Britain, France, and Germany.
In spite of a general acceptance of a stagist road to socialism, there was much debate among Bolshevik intellectuals over the question of technology and the labor process. On the philosophical plane, Nikolai Bukharin took a technologically determinist position similar to Kautsky's, sketching a linear notion of development via the economic "base," with technology as an autonomous actor. He writes, "The historic mode of production, i.e. the form of society, is determined by the development of the productive forces, i.e. the development of technology."
Philosopher Georg Lukács criticized this view, noting the alignment between Bukharin's analysis and the ideology of the capitalist world's view of science: "The closeness of Bukharin's theory to bourgeois, natural-scientific materialism derives from his use of 'science' (in the French sense) as a model." Lukács insisted that a true historical materialist analysis meant that science and technology could not be divorced from the class system in which they were embedded. "In its concrete application to society and history," he wrote, "it therefore frequently obscures the specific feature of Marxism: *that all economic or 'sociological' phenomena derive from the social relations of men to one another*." For Lukács, this meant that capitalist production is not so easily divorced from capitalism's class structure and its prerogatives to rule and control workers, particularly at the point of production.
Lenin himself often appeared to lean toward Bukharin's side, believing that technology was independent of social relations, and that the Soviet Union needed to adopt capitalist production methods. In his writing on the "Taylor system," Lenin theorized that while Taylorism was a form of enslavement under capitalism, under socialism it would alleviate the burdens of labor:
The Taylor system — without its initiators knowing or wishing it — is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers' committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalising all social labour. Large-scale production, machinery, railways, telephone — all provide thousands of opportunities to cut by three-fourths the working time of the organised workers and make them four times better off than they are today.
In essence, the efficiency gains produced by Taylorized production, which simply meant a greater intensity of exploitation under capitalism, could be realized under socialist ownership of the means of production as the reduction of work hours — eventually, once adequate development had been achieved. Elsewhere, Lenin expressed a more ambivalent attitude, referring to Taylorism as "a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements." Eager to raise productivity in the fledgling Soviet Union, he ultimately argued for "combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism" such as Taylorism.
The subject of Taylorism sparked much debate among the Bolsheviks. Alexander Bogdanov, whose Proletkult initiatives sought to construct a worker-oriented culture and aesthetics as an alternative to bourgeois artistic forms, criticized the adoption of Taylorist methods. Bogdanov believed that Taylorism would undermine the goals of the revolution by forcing workers into repetitive tasks that would cause their critical and creative abilities to atrophy. Instead, Bogdanov believed that socialist production would be characterized by "a highly developed mental equality of the workers as universally developed conscious producers." Furthermore, he recognized that Taylorism relied upon a strict managerial control, which could introduce divisions among workers, especially between laborers and engineers.
On the other side of the debate was Alexei Gastev, a former poet who became the head of the Central Institute of Labor. For Gastev, Taylorism's chief partisan among the Bolsheviks, scientific management was not simply a matter of efficiency, but a means for the creation of a new socialist subject and a modernist utopia. As Richard Stites describes it in his cultural history of the Soviet Union, Gastev envisioned "a mechanized, standardized world, in a literal sense, with production ruled by self-regulating and self-correcting machines, joined throughout the world in a machine city — that is, a single unbroken mechanized civilization stretching around the globe." Gastev was emphatic: machines should set the pace not only of work, but of all social life, which would hence become rationalized and standardized — "a single mode of speech, a standardized catalog of thoughts, and a unified collection of meals, of housing, and of sexual and spiritual life."
Such rationalization effaced any need for democracy, as society would be more like a machine in need of tinkering than an unruly assemblage of individuals and groups. These outdated political forms should be banished, he reasoned, along with outdated production methods:
The method of solving social problems by "vote" and by finding the majority or minority must be seen as old-fashioned hand production; the essence of the new industry will be to end this and to create new means of revealing the general will.
Indeed, a machinic class of workers could mean a machinic governance: "Machines from being managed will become managers."
Gastev was forced to moderate his wildest flights of techno-utopian fancy in the face of pushback from workers and other members of the intelligentsia, who wanted room for the human being within the production process. But, due to intense pressure to rapidly boost productivity, the Soviet Taylorists ultimately won out, and massive state-driven industrialization and bureaucratic management became the means to create a new socialist subject. While policy was articulated in the ambivalent language of Lenin — Taylorism was, in the last analysis, a means to alleviate the burdens of workers — workers experienced it more as Taylor himself had described it: as a means to enforce labor discipline at the expense of the autonomy of workers. Those workers, who had fought and sacrificed for proletarian democracy, responded with bitter opposition to the machinic organization of labor. According to Paul Avrich, a historian of anarchism, the rebellious workers and sailors of Kronstadt identified "the Taylor system" as one of their grievances against the Bolshevik government.
By the time of the Great Purge of the 1930s, Gastev and many of the other Taylorist utopians were marginalized and executed under Stalin, though their preferred methods remained Soviet industrial policy. As Stites describes it, "Only the crudest and harshest elements of Taylorism were retained, but stripped of all dreamlike qualities and aspirations and made into tools of labor exploitation." The massive manufacturing center at Magnitogorsk, built under Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, emblematized this prevailing theory of technology and socialism. While under Lenin, Soviet efficiency and productivity had weighed weakly against working conditions and proletariat politics, Stalin's program saw industrial development as simply *synonymous* with socialism. Thus, even while class struggle was refracted away from the shop floor and toward competition with the capitalist world, it made no difference to Stalin that American engineers designed the Magnitogorsk complex, or that the great Soviet industrial city of was modeled on a city located in the heart of American capitalist production: Gary, Indiana. The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser suggests that this represents a weakness Stalin shared with Kautsky and the German Social Democratic Party: "Might it not be that Stalin fell short of Lenin's politics, as his 1938 text attests, veering towards the tradition of the Second International's politics, the politics of the primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production?"
For their part, Soviet workers repeatedly resisted and rebelled at the point of production. During the construction of Magnitogorsk, laborers revolted over the difficult conditions, sabotaging the construction or simply running away. Jeffrey Rossman documents that during the first Five-Year Plan, resistance by textile workers
included mass demonstrations, bread riots, strikes, slowdowns, industrial sabotage, subversive speeches at factory assemblies, acts of violence against local authorities, written protests to party leaders, anonymous leafleting, and the composition and circulation of subversive works of the imagination (chiefly, songs and poems).
These workers rebelled on the grounds that the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution, which included limits to toil and baseline compensation, were being undermined by Stakhanovite ideology celebrating total devotion to work. Thus, alterations to the labor process, characterized by the loss of control and intensifications of Taylorism, were a chief flashpoint of labor strife. And, similar to their forbears of a century before, this strife manifested in breaking the new machines.
Sabotage had a number of advantages for the Soviet worker. For one, it directly expressed an opposition to new labor processes centered around new industrial equipment, and it did so in a less public way than strikes or demonstrations, which could lead to punishment. And even when resistance took more overt forms such as work stoppages, sabotage was an important component, as it became a means to enforce discipline among the entire labor force. Would-be strikebreakers often found their machines incapacitated, and when shock-work brigades and labor competitions among young workers threatened the overall pace of work, they too found their equipment destroyed. "In Teikovo, Vichuga, and Iaroslavl," Rossman notes, "unidentified 'class enemies' — veteran operatives, no doubt — sabotaged the looms of those taking part in the Competition for Best Weaver and Overlooker."
Across his essays and philosophical writings, Walter Benjamin remained a perennial critic of the notion of progress rife in the Marxism of his day. In his "Arcades Project," for instance, Benjamin sought "to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress." Yet Benjamin was neither a primitivist nor a romantic. Particularly when it came to new technologies of media and cultural production, Benjamin was optimistic, and in his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," he marveled at the ability of photography and film to abolish the distance between the masses and art, and to reveal the contingency of everyday life:
By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
Similarly, the spread of publishing techniques meant that "the distinction between author and public" was "about to lose its basic character." Moreover, Benjamin argued that the presumption of bourgeois "competence" tied to cultural work should be broken down by new technologies, and that more workers should be brought into the sphere of intellectual production.
These views horrified Benjamin's interlocutor Theodor Adorno, who wrote extensively on the degradation of cultural production, specifically music, via technologies of reproduction. But more important than Adorno's oft-cited technological antipathy, musicians themselves fought against recordings, which they recognized as rendering them superfluous. In San Francisco, theaters were repeatedly hit with stench bombs for refusing to hire orchestras; in St. Louis, unionized musicians planted time bombs that damaged the Vitaphone sound film equipment that had replaced them.
As fascism, itself an ideological formation imbued with an infatuation with machines, continued to march victoriously through Europe, Benjamin sought to evaluate the historic failure of German socialism. Writing in 1940, shortly before his death, he located its essential mistake in the belief in progress connected to the further development of productive technologies:
There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that *they* were swimming with the tide. Technical developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement.
As Michael Löwy describes it in his study of the text, Benjamin attacks "the essential article of faith" of the Second International's strategy: that victory for socialism amounted to a rapidly expanding balance sheet, "the quantitative accumulation of productive forces, of the gains of the labour movement, of the number of party members and voters in a movement of linear, irresistible, 'automatic' progress."
Historian Mary Nolan sketches a portrait of interwar Germany that supports Benjamin's dialectical inversions. Evolutionary beliefs, she notes, continued to characterize large portions of the fragmented German left into the Weimar years: "The [SPD]'s unifying theory was an updated version of Kautskyian orthodoxy, provided by Rudolf Hilferding, and displayed all the economic determinism and political passivity of the original." And even while the German Communist Party (KPD) criticized the techniques of Fordism and Taylorism as increasing exploitation, "the Communists were equally convinced that the same technology that served capitalism could also serve socialism." Ultimately, "the shared productivism and technological determinism of the Second and Third Internationals led to a shared inability to imagine any forms of production other than highly rationalized ones."
Such rationalized work did not merely reproduce structures of domination on the shop floor; it was also deleterious to the health and well-being of the workers. Nolan notes that injuries and illnesses, particularly "nervous ailments," skyrocketed after rationalization. And, as processes became more efficient, throwing people out of work, the socialist politicians who continued to back rationalization policies lost legitimacy among their members, leading to generalized resentment toward Weimar social democracy. While leaders hemmed and hawed about the effects of new technologies, workers were increasingly of one, hostile, voice.
Rather than a natural outgrowth of history's progression, for Benjamin, a revolutionary class has to "explode the continuum of history." Indeed, this history is not a tale of progress, or even a succession of events, but "one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet." Elsewhere, Benjamin is even more explicit on this point: "Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake." Here an openly *decelerationist* Benjamin emerges. Technology does not lead toward a revolutionary break, nor does a revolution necessarily spur on new technological developments. Rather, Benjamin reconceives revolution as a cessation of catastrophe. It halts "progress" in its tracks.
What will motivate this revolutionary action, if not the faith in technological progress upon which the Second International wagered its fortunes? Benjamin looks to the past for inspiration, though not to see the wonders achieved by the bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels did in the heady days of 1848. Instead, Benjamin looks to class struggle. While that struggle may be one of loss and catastrophe, it has bequeathed to the present "fine and spiritual" qualities:
They are present as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question.
Löwy clarifies:
What interests [Benjamin] in the past is not the development of the productive forces, the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, forms of property or state forms or the development of modes of production — essential themes of Marx's work — but the life and death struggle between oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, dominators and dominated.
Here Benjamin sounds similar notes as the Wobbly proponents of sabotage. Redemption from capitalism and its violence will not come from a simple appropriation of its devices. Instead, he suggests, it is borne on the backs of those sedimented experiences of the nameless people who fought against them, who broke, jammed, sabotaged — who grabbed for the emergency brake — in their circumstances. This is the raw material of future emancipation.