The
Ford System And The Kronstadt Commune
"An anti-intellectual, a
hater of individuals," is the way Richard Stites characterizes Taylor in Revolutionary Dreams, his
book on the Utopian beginning of the Soviet Era. Says Stites, "His system is the basis for virtually
every
twisted dystopia in our century,
from death under the Gas Bell in Zamiatin's We for the unspeakable crime
of deviance, to the maintenance of
a fictitious state-operated underground in Orwell's 1984 in order to draw deviants into disclosing who they
are."
Oddly enough, an
actual scheme of dissident entrapment was the brainchild of J.P. Morgan, his unique contribution to the
Cecil Rhodes-inspired "Round Table" group. Morgan contended that revolution could be subverted
permanently by infiltrating the
underground and subsidizing it. In this way the thinking of the
opposition could be known as it
developed and fatally compromised. Corporate, government, and foundation cash grants to subversives might be one
way to derail the train of insurrection that Hegelian theory predicted would arise against every ruling
class.
As this practice matured, the insights
of Fabian socialism were stirred into the mix; gradually a socialist leveling through practices pioneered
in Bismarck's Prussia came to be
seen as the most efficient control system for the masses, the bottom 80 percent
of the population in advanced
industrial states. For the rest, an invigorating system of laissez- faire market competition would keep the
advanced breeding stock on its toes.
A large portion of
the intellectual Left jumped on Taylor's bandwagon, even as labor universally opposed it. Lenin himself
was an aggressive advocate:
The
war taught us much, not only that people suffered, but especially the fact that
those who have the best
technology, organization, discipline and the best machines emerge on top; it is this the war has taught us.
It is essential to learn that without machines, without discipline, it is impossible to live in
modern society. It is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed.
But even in Russia,
workers resisted Taylorish methods. The rebellion of the Kronstadt Commune in 1921 charged that Bolsheviks
were "planning to introduce the sweat labor system of Taylor." They were right.
Taylor distilled the
essence of Bismarck's Prussian school training under whose regimen he had witnessed firsthand the defeat
of France in 1871. His American syntheses of these disciplines made him the direct inspiration for Henry Ford and
"Fordism." Between 1895
and 1915, Ford radically transformed factory procedure, relying on
Taylorized management and a mass
production assembly line marked by precision, continuity, coordination, speed, and
standardization. Ford wrote two extraordinary essays in the 1920s, "The Meaning of Time,
" and "Machinery, The New Messiah, " in which he equated planning, timing, precision, and the
rest of the scientific management catalogue with the great moral meaning of life:
A clean factory, clean tools, accurate gauges, and precise
methods of manufacture produce a
smooth working efficient machine [just as] clean thinking, clean living,
and square dealing make for a
decent home life.
By the 1920s, the
reality of the Ford system paralleled the rules of a Prussian infantry regiment. Both were places where
workers were held under close surveillance, kept silent, and punished for small infractions. Ford was unmoved
by labor complaints. Men were
disposable cogs in his machine. "A great business is really too big to be
human," he commented in 1929.
Fordism and Taylorism swept the Soviet Union as they had swept the United States and Western Europe.
By the 1920s the words fordizatsiya and
teilorizatsiya, both appellations describing good work habits, were
common across Russia.
The National Press Attack On Academic
Schooling
Baldwin Templeton 3:19 PM
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