Thoughts on Syndicalism: Part Four

Part Four: Detroit and Donetsk

An early Soviet propaganda poster exhorted its readers:

Let’s take the torrent of the Russian revolution

Add the effectiveness of American technology

And construct socialism!

On a similar note, Bolshevik leader and former New York resident Nikolai Bukharin called for the party to “add Americanism to Marxism”. For them, and for many other leftists of their generation, the United States symbolised all that was modern and progressive.

In the first post in this series, I mentioned that the political base of Daniel De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party was in Detroit. In 1914, it was attempting to organise workers at Henry Ford’s automotive plant at River Rouge. To stave off the threat of unionisation and reduce staff turnover, Ford more than doubled the daily pay of his employees to the previously unthinkable five dollars, reducing the working day from nine hours to eight in the process. Thus, syndicalism – or the threat thereof – provoked one of the most important changes in the nature in capitalism.

Fordism was the practical implementation of the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer from Philadelphia who had become a household name in the United States in the early 1910s thanks to his work on rationalising the operations of firms. Aside from raising wages and lowering the prices of consumer goods, Fordism aimed at simplifying production methods so as to reduce the power of skilled workers, the base of the early American craft unions. Indeed, Fordism was opposed by the class-collaborationist leader of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gospers, and welcomed by the IWW, which fancied its chances of recruiting all the new unskilled workers created in the Detroit factories.

When these techniques spread across the Atlantic, they initially met with fierce resistance. As mentioned earlier, the quasi-syndicalist Workers’ Opposition arose in Russia and the Ukraine to resist the Taylorist policies of the Soviet leadership in the transport and metallurgy industries. In France, the then-syndicalist CGT said that the worker under the Taylorist regime was “reduced to a machine without a soul, producing intensely and excessively”. But after the War, much of the European Left came round to the position of a German writer who stated that Fordism was “the most powerful and welcome ally of socialism”. The new breed of CGT leaders such as Jouhaux and Merrheim became supporters of both Fordism and the consumerist economy which was the logical product of its proto-Keynesian stimulation of demand (which meshed nicely with their revision of pre-war producer-only syndicalism), while commentators inside and outside of the early Soviet Union hailed it as the world’s first Taylorist state.

In some ways, the CGT’s reconciliation with mass production was not an accident. There was a definite technocratic and productivist strand in left-wing French thought going back to Saint-Simon, the déclassé aristocrat and early nineteenth-century utopian socialist who proposed a new order based on industrial progress, full employment, class collaboration, and technocracy. It was Saint-Simon who first introduced the concept of the ‘government of men’ being replaced by the ‘administration of things’. CGT leaders and thinkers in the 1910s adapted some saint-simonien ideas, such as the central role of technology in economic history, and used them to reassess their own ideas. For example, the Marxist contention that capitalism was doomed by a falling rate of profits was held to be negated by mass production and mass consumption.

While the Left saw the emancipatory potential in Fordism, it was Europe’s reactionaries who defended the small workshop and craftsman of the nineteenth century against this new invasion. Rightists such as French electoral geographer and future Vichy collaborator André Siegfried bemoaned the homogenising and levelling social effects of consumerism; a fashionable Frenchwoman, Siegfried moaned, could no longer be the only lady in Paris wearing a particular type of hat if hats were being mass produced for an undifferentiated mass market. Unlike the twenty-first century, when so-called ‘leftists’ take up middle-class NIMBY concerns about development and growth and attack popular consumption habits, the Dieselpunk era was one in which the Left was the side of politics which hailed technological advance and consumerism.

With the economic climate of the New Economic Policy being open to the granting of concessions to foreign capitalists, Henry Ford took the opportunity to set up a plant at Nizhny Novgorod (later known until the fall of communism as Gorky) in 1929. The Soviet regime’s emulation of American industry went even further – when it established the planned iron and steel city of Magnitogorsk, the city was modelled on Gary, Indiana. Like many good things about early Soviet society, this flirtation with Americanism was cut short by Stalin’s accession to power.

The Soviet Union in the following years did, however, have its own version of Fordism-Taylorism. Named after Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner from the Donetsk region who supposedly hauled a ridiculous amount of coal in a short period of time, the Stakhanovite movement was the regime’s way of exhorting workers to higher productivity. Writers on the subject have suggested that Stakhanovism was less about increasing the authority of management, and was instead a way for the regime to harness the workers against their managers; nevertheless, Stakhanovism was only an incomplete adaptation of Fordism, lacking the high wages and consumerism of its American counterpart.

The impact of Ford’s new way of doing business was profound enough that the era from (approximately) the 1920s to the 1960s is referred to as the ‘Fordist’ period, and that Aldous Huxley portrayed his dystopian future society in Brave New World (1931) as worshipping Ford as a deity. While Ford was hostile to unions, many syndicalists saw his methods as beneficial to the material prosperity of the working class, while also providing a blueprint for a rationally governed post-capitalist economy.