Four Essays on Russia Today Industry
ASHE, GEOFFREY
INDUSTRY Emulation of U.S. methods could again bring changes in the social structure By Geoffrey Ashe To paraphrase Marx, a great deal has been said with a view to explaining Soviet Communism—the...
...It brought Russia the technical achievement without the democratic safeguards...
...The proposition looks hopeless...
...If—as is more likely—they automate as fast as they can in the effort to keep up, their system of industrial relationships will crumble under the strain into something more human...
...Such changes as these would seem to pose insoluble problems for the Communist system as it functions at present, with its arbitrary bosses and social castes...
...Material is not only processed mechanically, but transferred mechanically from point to point, through a bewildering array of electronically-guided devices...
...The slave-driver used a whip...
...To put the matter in a phrase, Stalin copied Ford, and Stalin's Russia became a monstrous caricature of the Ford plant...
...The company-union movement and other devices of the Twenties were, in effect, perverted Taylorism...
...Under Stalin, the American grand techniques of high productivity—Taylor-style scientific management and Ford-style mass production—took root in Russia...
...All three are known to have spread to Russia...
...Now it happens that, throughout the first half of this century, the most promising techniques for high productivity were compatible with, and even conducive to, a despotic system...
...The contrast between the worker on the one hand and the industrial bureaucracy on the other will become less marked...
...205) occurs the following paragraph: "The more automatic production becomes, the harder it is to provide meaningful incentives for workers...
...Soviet leadership gave him his reward in special pay and privileges...
...A word again from the American Management Association pamphlet quoted above: "Supervisory personnel need more skill in handling people to cope with the better-educated and more demanding employes that automation brings with it...
...Taylor's system never carried the day in America, but his individual techniques of efficiency were widely adopted...
...Ford...
...In the automotive industry, the oil industry and the chemical industry, plants are springing up where much of the productive labor has been taken entirely out of human hands...
...But it enabled the dictatorship to maintain itself against all comers...
...Since the pace of operations is governed by the mechanism itself, he need only step up that pace to the limit of endurance...
...In the competitive situation between the Western and Soviet blocs, increased production is a matter of desperate concern to both sides...
...The obsolescence of effort, and therefore of practices to extort effort, is not the whole story...
...Under Communism, both these principles were long ago violated...
...What were these tools...
...It is well known how collectivization went hand in hand with the import and manufacture of tractors, large under the aegis of Henry Ford...
...But if you use this technique to fix an output standard and a rate for the job, you must be careful of two things: first, that you form your concept on the basis of an average worker and not a record-breaker?or the rest will have to wear themselves out to meet your standard...
...In the USSR, their potentialities for abuse developed with less hindrance...
...Where American engineers and scientists lead, Russians follow...
...Their impact on the state-worker relationship showed itself in great gains but also in great abuses, of which the most characteristic and the most evil were four...
...Any American employer would have been glad to achieve such perfected company-unionism as Stalin created...
...The answer is most interesting...
...Taylor is known as the "father of scientific management...
...There are no longer enough of him to set the tone of the factory...
...It appears that a more democratic type of organization may be forced into existence...
...The process of copying is still going on...
...But in Russia there was no CIO, and social conscience took un-American forms...
...Communism will not be replaced by this process...
...And is there anything they can do which will loosen the bonds their predecessors unintentionally helped impose...
...The group of bosses swaying an enterprise with their individual whims will be replaced by teams of analysts and computer-operators, whose essentially factual findings will largely govern executive action...
...But, without the technological tools of mastery, their grip will be weakened...
...What effects will they have...
...Dubious...
...Teams of experts converge on a problem from many different angles, and arrive, in partnership, at a mathematical statement which enables them to solve it by calculation...
...How, after all, is a piecework rate to be determined...
...He toiled like a madman...
...Incentives may in the future be based on quality rather than quantity, on standards of competence rather than application...
...Moreover, while a measure of centralization must persist, the increasing use of scientific techniques and automatic computers will curtail the zone of arbitrary decision...
...In America and Western Europe, democracy slowly forced these techniques into fairly beneficent modes of operation...
...With the coming of these trends, the technological basis of the Soviet order has begun to crack...
...What is a reasonable standard...
...He also applied the latest efficiency techniques himself, in the Taylorite spirit of collaboration with management...
...Computing principles will in due course be embodied in simpler, less tricky installations, and in proportion as this happens management's key information-processers will be less and less sharply differentiated from the people on the plant floor...
...Russia and America may be worlds apart in all other respects, but in this they are linked, and very largely (even today) by a link of cause and effect...
...The Stakhano-vite shock-worker, with his disruptive privileges, will drop out of the picture...
...Automation and other changes have led to staggeringly complex problems in management...
...Abuses now becoming technologically impossible have already for some time been socially impracticable...
...The new Communist managers and efficiency chiefs were usually former workers themselves, but very definitely former...
...The most promising techniques for high productivity are not compatible with a rigidly despotic system—at any rate, not with any yet devised...
...Doubt remains as to their proper scope...
...At this juncture, the ghost of Taylor emerged...
...The old idea of increased effort's getting its reward doesn't make much sense in such cases...
...He invented time-study and methods-study in an attempt to utilize labor to the best advantage, and set standards of output as a base for piecework incentives...
...The chief trends in American technology at the moment are three...
...Thousands of his kind appeared, and together they constituted a labor aristocracy docile to those above...
...second, that you abide by the resultant wage rate...
...For today the pattern of the last fifty years has changed...
...It is an idea which statesmen and industrialists might do well to ponder...
...Assembly lines began to roll, and labor underwent minute subdivision...
...The mass-production auto worker surrendered craftsmanship perforce, because his job was so tightly circumscribed...
...They are closely connected...
...Also, the ideal of minutely centralized planning on the part of management, and zealous, well-rewarded obedience on the part of labor, exerted a lasting influence...
...Standards were set "scientifically" in the approved Yankee style—but they were set on the best workers, and all the others were then required to catch up...
...Nearly everybody in the plant will be simply working some sort of machine...
...In the frenzy of the original Five-Year Plans, technological factors assumed a cruel importance...
...The signs are that they will find their place in industry mainly as the extension of automation to the staff level...
...The decisive factor can be summed up in a word: technology...
...They are concerned with maintenance and control instead of production...
...Officials were obliged to concern themselves not only with machine design and construction, but with the management of machines and of the workers who had to use them...
...Taylor went on to project a system of management in which the worker has to surrender his judgment, his bargaining power and his job preferences, and rally behind the management's team of experts with the single goal of maximum output—offering suggestions in that spirit, and taking his recompense in the high wages which such a collaboration would make possible...
...But by what method...
...Resentment slowly gave place to defeated submission...
...Consider the collective-farm movement, that essentially political venture which fixed Government regulation on the peasants...
...It will raise productivity at the highest rate thus far imaginable...
...No one need pretend that collective agriculture succeeded...
...Koestler and others have pointed out the correlation between expanding industry and expanding autocracy, up to the era of the Great Purges...
...Output in automated plants does not vary in any obvious ratio with the activity of the workers...
...GM, General Electric and Monsanto Chemicals are now experimenting with them...
...Stalinism depended from its inception on Americanization...
...Yet, for thirty years Americans have been doing precisely that—not indeed as a matter of policy, but by irresistible influence...
...If the Communist rulers decline to follow the American lead, they will lose the race for production and sink back into a much weaker position in world affairs...
...technology to the Soviet system...
...Out of the campaign for production came still a fourth emanation of United States technology: the loyal, energetic, methods-minded Stakhanovite worker...
...The Communist governments must press forward with automation or be left hopelessly behind in the production race...
...They seized on everything they could learn, again chiefly from the U.S., about the means of increasing industrial productivity—increasing it at all costs, in readiness for the wars which Stalin anticipated...
...Human workers continue to exist, but they do not make anything or directly contribute to the product by their own efforts...
...The political Left had been, denouncing piecework for decades, but Stalin brought it in and his followers reacted accordingly...
...In answer to this challenge, a technique called "operations research" has begun to take root in industry...
...The state had shown who was in the saddle...
...and, in the process, it furnished several of the chief tools by which the police and the Party achieved control over the workers, disciplined their minds, and broke down the capacity for counter-organization or revolt...
...So much for the contribution of U.S...
...Together, they hold out the best visible promise of high productivity...
...and the extent of America's unwitting responsibility for the condition of the Russian worker is little realized...
...The boss no longer decides...
...But whereas in Stalin's era this imitation was helpful to despotism, in Malenkov's it is harmful...
...The question is: Which way are they guiding them...
...Therefore, we may expect the Russians to go along with them...
...Upton Sinclair brought out this truth as early as 1904, in his portrayal of the hideously efficient Meat Trust and its stranglehold on the Chicago packinghouse workers...
...A Fortune symposium on the robot factory showed a widespread agreement that computers fitted in somewhere, but little agreement as to where...
...But, under the new order, there would seem to be immense difficulty in setting up incentives at all...
...The most promising methods used by Americans to raise productivity will be imitated by the Communists, just as they were during the 1930s...
...Here, then, are these three trends—toward automation, operations research, and the performance of staff functions by electronic computers...
...In each automated plant, the police and the Party will doubtless do their best to hold firm...
...Preventive war...
...It is a long step toward truly scientific management...
...This upward movement of the workers, if not incompatible with the Stalinist system, will at least create problems for it...
...Until the last few years of his life, he opposed unions rigidly, and fought them with all the resources of espionage and violence which such an enterprise as his could command...
...In a pamphlet published by the American Management Association (Automation and Other Technological Advances, Management Series No...
...Any vestiges of workers' control of industry, in the revolutionary sense, withered away...
...Henry Ford, though he lacked the scientific temper, gave physical expression to some of Taylor's ideas...
...methods could again bring changes in the social structure By Geoffrey Ashe To paraphrase Marx, a great deal has been said with a view to explaining Soviet Communism—the point, however, is to change it...
...The word "automation" was coined by a Ford executive, and the Ford Engine Plant at Cleveland led the way...
...Where the worker could control his own pace, another possibility lay open: piecework wage incentives...
...But it could not have endured at all if it had not functioned well enough to keep a majority of Russians alive...
...If the assembler couldn't keep up, it was too bad for him...
...You can take a stop-watch to a worker and find out what time you should allow him to perform an operation upon a part...
...The mass-production boss has a slicker method...
...That safety margin which always divided it from total catastrophe was preserved by the tractors and other alien apparatus...
...Remote experts planned...
...Piecework incentives were introduced, but workers found themselves cheated of the rewards of effort by cuts in the rates...
...Up to a point, Stalinism was Americanization...
...Thus, he introduced the efficiency expert, as opposed to the craftsman, into industry...
...American technology, absorbed and exploited in the absence of constitutional checks, was the mainspring of Stalinism as it affected the peasants...
...many shop employes approximate the status of engineers...
...But it will also exert a strong influence on the Soviet bloc...
...Stalin's major achievement, however, lay in industrialization...
...People say despairingly that Americans have no means of affecting the internal structure of the Soviet Union...
...The first fruit of Stalin's unbridled productivity drive was a rapid growth of centralization and "experting...
...Neither the narrow specialist nor the genius with "hunches" is equal to the task...
...Problems at present beyond human capabilities will enter the field of practical administration...
...In the first place, the correlation between production and human effort is disappearing...
...He also followed Taylor—and grimly improved on him—in the matter of labor organization...
...First is the trend toward "automation" or robot factories...
...God forbid...
...Factory personnel split apart into a group of bosses making arbitrary decisions about everything and a mass of downgraded hands reduced to ignorance and obedience...
...A factory manager with orders to improve performance could reduce his workers to exhausted automata strictly in the line of duty...
...For example, with the field of time-study and methods-study sharply reduced, the efficiency expert will be less in evidence...
...It has been noted by several industrial commentators that automation brings changes in the work force and in the kind of labor required...
...Western industry acquired them principally from Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) and, of course, the ubiquitous Ford...
...Workers know from bitter experience how easy it is to ginger up a whole shop with piecework bonuses and then cut the rates...
...Problems now solved (after a fashion) by the informed judgment of engineers and accountants will in the future be handled objectively and in far fuller detail by computers...
...Or, if he wants to economize on wages, he can give each man on the line a little more work to do, fire the ones whose share is thus parceled out, and keep the line rolling as before...
...Hence, the traditional mass-production man, downgraded and without control over his job, becomes a far less frequent phenomenon...
...Conversely, the speed of the mechanism does not govern this activity in anything like the manner of a manual assembly line...
...Therefore, a rapid growth of automation in the U.S., if it occurs, will be of more value to the nation and the world than might at first sight appear...
...Management and supervision will be forced to re-learn and re-train at a headlong pace in order to keep their people in line...
...As long as a worker's output depends on his pace, it is in the interest of management that he should work fast...
...Since quality, in the automated plant, is so much more important than physical energy, the whip will be no adequate answer...
...Speedup may continue to some extent, but it will no longer bludgeon the worker into the same state of insensitivity...
...submissive handymen executed...
...On the whole, America still leads technologically...
...Even the worker's pace on an assembly line could be fixed by the engineer who governed the line speed...
...But the faster the progress, the more subversive it will be of the present industrial despotism...
...He only executes...
...Another tool which America placed in the Kremlin's arsenal was the speedup...
...But Communist management will...
...Two further points deserve careful consideration...
...Underground agitation...
...Technology did not make the dictatorship...
...Without this and other measures of mechanical progress, American in source and substance, all the efforts of urban Bolshevism would have foundered on the sheer impossibility of forcing results...
...Let us take a close look, in the hope of extracting from the past a key to the future...
...There is ample evidence that the same tools were very early used in the satellite countries...
...The CIO and social conscience virtually put a stop to this in America...
...Among Westerners, labor organization and a more humane outlook have already restrained the evils of Taylorism and Fordism...
...Those who guide developments here are also guiding developments there...
...Ford followed Taylor by compensating his faithful employes with big wages...
...Most jobs call for higher levels of skill...
...However, such developments as the growth of a genuine Russian labor movement could become practical politics, with major results in the way of internal compromise and liberalization...
...It has been reasonably forecast that automation will squeeze out time-study and piecework incentive schemes...
...We may rest reasonably assured that the latest advances made on this continent will soon have their counterparts in the Eastern world...
...The extraction of maximum effort by piecework manipulation will become obsolete...
...Craftsmanship gave way to the expert-victim relation...
...To serve the needs of operations research and to perform many other controlling functions, the famous electronic brains or computers are gradually proving themselves indispensable...
...A report by Malyshev to the Communist Party Congress of October 1952 indicates that rapid progress is in fact being made...
...The Stalinist kolkhoz, with the political fact which it embodied, rested on an imported mechanical foundation...
...Italics supplied...
...Lastly, there are the remoter consequences of automation and allied trends, with respect to the nature of management and the kind of function it discharges...
...They have little choice if they are to deliver the goods which the state requires of them...
...Hence, we will not feel the sharpness of the transition...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 32
