The ultra-Taylorist Soviet utopianism of Aleksei Gastev (including Gastev’s landmark book <i>How to Work</i>/<i>Как надо работать</i>)

Portrait of Aleksei Gastev by Tolkachev (1924)

Download Алексей Гастев - Как надо работать (1923) [Aleksei Gastev - How to Work]

The following are excerpts from my thesis on the scientific management of labor and psychotechnics in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.

Aleksei Gastev (1926)

NOT (1925)

TsIT presidium (1925)

The Constructivists’ goal to rationalize artistic labor and thus enter life can be traced to the early Soviet intellectual fascination with the Taylorist industrial theory of scientific management.  As was covered in the previous section, American Taylorism exerted an influence throughout the European world of modernist art and architecture.  However, the especially central role it played through its reception and dissemination in the Soviet Union warrants further contextual reflection.  For the Soviet architectural avant-garde did not simply absorb the influence of Taylorism through its mediation by the Constructivists in art, but also directly from a number of academic sources as well.  Taylorism was enthusiastically embraced in the USSR by many in the revolutionary intelligentsia and even some leading Bolsheviks, including Trotskii and Lenin himself[562] (despite his 1914 article “Taylor’s System: The Enslavement of Man to the Machine”).  It was mostly popularized by writers like Osip Ermanksii[563] and later advocates of the Scientific Organization of Labor (abbreviated NOT [for Nauchnaia organizatsiia truda]) like the poet and factory worker Aleksei Gastev.  Gastev was the founder and, from 1920 to 1937, the director of TsIT (Central Institute of Labor).  TsIT was dedicated to the improvement of industrial efficiency.  Under Gastev, its official philosophy was that of Taylorism.  He was doubtless the most passionate exegete of Soviet Taylorism.  For Gastev, Taylor was modern industrialism’s greatest theoretician, and Henry Ford its greatest practitioner.  Ford was a heroic figure for many in the Soviet Union during the 1920s for his contribution to assembly-line production and his rationalization of labor practices.  Gastev, however, took this much further, going so far as to align Ford with Karl Marx as compatible (and indeed complementary) thinkers in his 1927 article “Marx and Ford.”[564]  For reasons that will be discussed later, Taylorism and machine-worship was stronger in Russia than in Western Europe.  As the Hungarian academic René Fülöp-Miller keenly observed, “[i]n contrast to the intoxicated enthusiasm with which Russians speak of the application of the mechanizing process to the whole of existence, Europeans describe the invasion of their life by technical elements in a completely skeptical fashion.”[565]

Motion tests, TsIT (1924)

The choreography of labor: TsIT cyclograph testing motive efficiency

The biomechanics of labor: TsIT ergometric testing (1925)

The Constructivists’ artistic and architectural appropriation of Taylorism in large part came by way of Gastev.  Indeed, Gastev’s significance as an interlocutor can hardly be overstated, since it was his own distinctive interpretation of Taylor that so lent itself to modernist aesthetics.  It was his fanatical promotion of its aspects of automation and mechanization, emerging out of a decidedly Futurist Weltanschauung, that made it a vital contribution to the early Soviet cult of the machine.  He advocated “systematic planning,” the “chronometration [khronometrirovanie] of time” through the introduction of time cards, and an “automated uniformity of labor” through that standardization of the most efficient laboring motions.[566]  Addressing the workers’ relation to industrial machinery, Gastev wrote:

The modern machine…possesses its own laws of pulsation, functioning, and relaxation — laws that do not stand in conformity with the rhythm of the human organism.  The world of the machine, the world of mechanical equipment [oborudovaniia] and urbanized labor [trudnogo urbanizma], produces specially connected collectives, begets certain types of people.  These are people who we must accept, just as we accept the machine, though we must not smash their heads on its gears.  We must bring some kind of equalizing coefficient into the machine’s iron disciplinary pressure, though history insistently demands we pose these not as petty problems of the social protection of the individual personality [lichnosti], but rather the bold engineering [proektirovaniia] of human psychology according to such an historical factor as machinism.[567]

The Scientific organization of labor

TsIT logo (1920s)

In training workers, reasoned Gastev, “[w]e begin with the most primitive, the most elementary motions and carry out the mechanization of man himself.  This mechanization we understand in the following manner: the less perfect the motion, the greater the element of deceleration and the less kinetic automatization.  The perfect mastery of a given movement implies maximum automatization.”  Furthermore, “[t]his principle of the mechanization or biological automatization [of man] must go very far, all the way to his so-called mental activity.”[568]  Notice also, then, that here psychology is encompassed by biology (or physiology).

Nikolai Rubinshtein of TsIT administering an ergonomic test (1928)

TsIT biomechanics (1925)

Gastev extended this efficacious principle even to language.  He sought to remove excessively ornate and florid language from Soviet speech, encouraging instead economy of word choice.  He thereby hoped to reform the Russian language, in order to maximize its functionality. “To save time,” Fülöp-Miller explained, “efforts were also made to mechanize language and to introduce short and pregnant expressions instead of the ordinary rambling Russian circumlocutions.  Gastev issued a series of appeals and orders for the purpose of stemming the prolix and long-winded methods of writing and speaking used by his comrades, and accustoming them to clear, brief, and easily understood sentences.”[569]  As a practicing poet, Gastev actively adhered to this streamlined language of expression in his own work.  One of his most popular Taylorist poems, “We are Built from Iron,” had particular architectural resonances:

Look! — I stood in their midst: among the shopfloor machines [stankov], hammers, flames, furnaces, and hundreds of [their] comrades.
Atop the wrought-iron expanse [prostor].
To the sides were beams and girders.
They went up ten lengths.
[They] bent to the left and to the right.
[They] connected to the rafters and cupolas [kupolakh] as the shoulders of a giant, sustaining the whole iron construction.
They were swift, they flourished, and were strong.
[But] they still required greater force.
I looked at them and straightened.
In my veins flowed the blood of a new railway.
I grew myself higher.
Began to sprout firm hands and immense steel shoulders.
I merged with the iron construction.
I arose.
[My] shoulders stuck out of the rafters, the headers and beams, and the roof.
My feet still stood on the ground, but my head soared above the building.
Still choking from this superhuman effort, I only cried:
“These words I ask of you, my friends, these words!”
Iron covered the echo of my words, the whole building looked shaken.
And so I went even higher, accompanied by trumpets.
And there is no story, no question — but only one cry, my iron shout:
“We will win!”[570]

Gastev’s radical Taylorist position was not monolithic within the organization NOT, however.  He was opposed by another prominent figure in the field of ergonomics and industrial psychology, Platon Kerzhentsev.  Kerzhentsev was more critical of Taylorism, but nevertheless defended its utility and acceptability in his 1924 book The Struggle Over Time, once it was fitted to socialism.[571]  He helped form a splinter group, the League of Time, in 1924.[572]  Though the League of Time and TsIT were opposed tendencies within the greater movement NOT, both sides supported some form of Soviet Taylorism.

One tendency within TsIT both broke ranks with both the organization and Taylorism as a whole — the supporters of the “psychotechnician” Isaak Spilrein.  The discipline of psychotechnics was officially founded by the German-American Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, who in turn was expanding upon the theories of both Taylor in labor and the greater study of psychophysiology in German philosophical discourse.  As an independent field of study, psychophysiology had risen to prominence within the Western academy in the second half of the nineteenth century.  It originated in the theories of the renowned German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose works on optics and the aesthetic physiology of perception inspired his equally famous student, Wilhelm Wundt.[573]  Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, himself took up the question of the “psychophysiological parallelism” between the excitations of produced by sensation (aesthesis) and psychological states in his two-volume treatise on the subject, The Principles of Psychophysiology.[574] Münsterberg had been one of Wilhelm Wundt’s final doctoral students.  In 1913, he published a book on Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, which he then followed with his 1914 Fundamentals of Psychotechnics [Grundzüge der Psychotechnik].  In these works he coined the term “psychotechnics” and effectively established it as a discipline.  Psychotechnics for the followers of Münsterberg was a means by which one could control human behavior through psychological techniques.  Or, as Vygotskii would later put it in his 1927 Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology, “psychotechnics, in a word…is the scientific theory which would lead to the seizure and subordination of the mind [psikhovoi], to the artificial control of behavior.”[575]

At his Harvard laboratory, Münsterberg carried out a number of experiments related to the study of aesthetics.  The results of these experiments, as he surmised, would have a considerable impact on artistic and architectural practice.[576]  He wrote:

Among the psychological laboratories at Harvard, mine is the only one that has a number of aesthetic studies planned annually already in gear.  I stress the following, mutually complementary work of my laboratory to give an idea of ​​the variety of problems, which can be examined by the experimental method: the balance of simple shapes (Pierce); symmetry (Puffer); unequal division (Angier); repetition of the spatial forms (Rowland); vertical separation (Davis); simple rhythmic forms (McDougall), rhythm and rhyme (Stetson); impression of the poetic language elements (Givler); psychophysics of melody (Bingham); resolution of dissonances (Moore); unmusical tone intervals (Emerson); the conditions of uniform appearance (Otis); interaction of objects (Keith); combination of feelings (Johnston); rhythmic alternation of feelings (Kellogg); and some others, wherever the aesthetic — but not the sensory — point of view was crucial, psychologically.  More or less isolated work of other laboratories are based on color combinations to basic shapes, and combinations of notes to tunes on associative factors, physiological conditions, to elements of the comic and the like.  But all these together today constitute only a beginning.[577]

So influential were these preliminary studies that the Soviet Rationalist architect Nikolai Ladovskii cited them explicitly in an article he wrote proposing the foundation of “A Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture (Posing the Problem).”[578]  After this proposal was ratified and a laboratory installed into the VKhUTEMAS studios, Ladovskii carried out a number of psychotechnical tests with the help of his assistant, Georgii Krutikov.  It is known that the science of psychophysiology was of some interest to Kandinsky, as well (especially in his 1920 “Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture [INKhUK],” about which more later); however, it is doubtful that nonobjectivists such as Malevich were directly influenced by developments in this field.  Nevertheless, Aleksei Gan rightly noted the affinity between the work of the Suprematists and Ladovskii’s assimilation of Münsterbergian psychotechnics: “[W]hat Malevich does…has great psychological importance…This is where Suprematist studies could be very important.  They could be very beneficially introduced into the Basic Course of the VKhUTEMAS, in parallel to those exercises currently conducted [by Ladovskii] under the influence of the psychologist Münsterberg’s Harvard Laboratory.”[579]  Though a Constructivist, Teige was also quite impressed by the results of psychotechnical experimentation.[580]

In the Soviet Union, psychotechnics made up an important part of the study of industrial psychology.  Spilrein was its chief proponent in TsIT, which he joined in 1921.  The brother of one of the first female psychoanalysts (and Jung’s lover), Sabrina Spilrein, Spilrein himself was educated in Germany with Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Stern before returning to Russia.  He became acquainted with Münsterberg’s theory of psychotechnics and began to promote its use at TsIT, under the directorship of Gastev.  After some frustration with the doctrinaire Taylorism he experienced in the Institute, Spilrein started to view Münsterbergian psychotechnics as a preferable alternative to the extreme biological “mechanization” championed by Gastev. As Spilrein’s ergonomic theories drifted further from Taylorism, he sided with Platon Kerzhentsev in opposition to Gastev[581] before leaving TsIT altogether in 1922.  At the Moscow University’s Psychological Institute, Spilrein was joined by Solomon Gellerstein and a young Lev Vygotskii[582] in founding the first Russian psychotechnical facility in the Laboratory of Industrial Psychotechnics in 1923.[583]  This group later started a journal in 1928 calling itself The Psychophysiology of Labor and Psychotechnics,[584] which was published under Spilrein’s editorship until 1932, when it changed its name to Soviet Psychotechnics.[585]

It should be noted with irony that, as was mentioned earlier, Münsterberg was a great admirer of Taylor’s system, and never saw his own discipline of psychotechnics as an alternative — but rather as a supplement — to the theory of scientific management.  Only in the context of the Soviet Union did the two fields come to be opposed to one another.  Both were modes of ergonomics and industrial psychology; the debate between Gastev, Spilrein, and their followers boiled down to the issue of which held primacy.

~ by Ross Wolfe on December 7, 2011.