112. The Ford System And The Kronstadt Commune: The Underground History
of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
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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