We publish here a selection of texts and excerpts by Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939) and Evgenii Petrov (1900–83), translated and annotated by Ewan McPhee and introduced by Aleksandra Selivanova. Developed within the framework of the Soviet Central Institute of Labor (TsIT) founded by Gastev in 1920, these writings engage the theory and practice of “operations” as a central category of labor organization, training, and social research.
A poet, anarchist, revolutionary, and worker, Gastev conceived TsIT as a site for reconfiguring the relation between human and machine through new pedagogical and organizational forms. The texts presented here form part of the broader and controversial project of the “New Man,” a productivist horizon that extended beyond industrial production into everyday life and cultural practice. Long regarded as ambivalent, this project sought both to empower workers through technical knowledge and collective organization, and to systematize labor within a technocratic regime of discipline and rationalization.
Evgenii Petrov, one of Gastev’s closest collaborators and head of TsIT’s Pedagogical Laboratory, played a key role in developing and systematizing these methods. Author of The Training Method of the Central Institute of Labor (1929), he later contributed to the posthumous reception of Gastev’s work as an editor of reissued volumes such as How to Work (1966) and Labor Attitudes (1973).
—Elena Vogman and Matteo Pasquinelli, guest editors
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Introduction by Aleksandra Selivanova
Aleksei Gastev changed numerous professions and names over the course of his life, making it difficult to fill in all the blank spots in his biography. In one of his articles, he described his life up to 1923 as “thirteen laboratories.”1 These experiences ultimately shaped him into a multiskilled worker and a flexible organizer. Among these “laboratories” were about a dozen different factories (mechanical-engineering, metalworking, and electrical plants) in Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkiv, Nikolaev, and Paris. Working as a fitter, registrar, turner, and engineer, he studied various labor techniques and systems of quality control and became acquainted with Frederick Taylor’s ideas on scientific management. He also included in this series of “laboratories” his periods of imprisonment and exile from 1900 to the 1910s, where he had the opportunity to read, reflect on the experience he had accumulated, and establish connections with like-minded anarcho-syndicalists and scientists. Yet more of these “laboratories” included his work in the Metalworkers’ Union, as well as the writing—together with his comrades Aleksandr Goltzman and Vladimir Oborin, who were sent with him into exile in Narym—of the Platform of Worker Industrialism, a manifesto of anarcho-syndicalism that set out a program for the development of labor standardization and wage grading.
Gastev omitted from his list a number of other “laboratories” that, in my view, are essential to understanding the full scope of his experience. First, and most obviously, is his revolutionary experience—the organization of strikes, the agitation in factories, and the creation of networks of underground “tea houses.” This experience helps explain his ability to inspire and mobilize such a wide range of people: workers, scientists, engineers, artists, and students. Second is his work as a publicist and poet, carried out under nearly two dozen pseudonyms during the 1900s and 1910s, which later shaped the unique language of the Central Institute of Labor (TsIT). This language oscillated between avant-garde poetry, futurism, scientific journalism, instructional manuals, and training cards. Gastev made extensive use of metaphors and poetic formulas, often printed in the margins as slogans. These were combined with terminology borrowed from other fields, including biology, economics, social psychology, and engineering. Together they formed a vivid and experimental lexicon understandable to people with very different backgrounds.
Labor as Social Engineering
These diverse laboratories of experience eventually culminated in the creation of TsIT, which became the institutional realization of Gastev’s long-term project of social engineering. In Gastev’s understanding, social engineering was not a technology of control but a new science concerned with the laws governing the interaction between complexes of machines and “complexes of individuals.” He conceived the development of social engineering as a research-pedagogical process: first in the form of a School of Social-Engineering Sciences, envisioned in Kharkiv in 1919, and later as the Social-Engineering Laboratory of the TsIT. The project of a “social-engineering machine,” developed at the TsIT in 1924, was intended to function as a kind of instructional system without a teacher or instructor. In this framework, an “operation” defines the organizational unit of labor and production. It is not defined simply as a technological but as a social form, as part of the cooperative dimension of labor. Gastev and his associate Evgenii Petrov defined operations in relation to techniques as follows:
From this we can conclude that the factors which constitute an operation are evidently the worker themselves, the workstation, and the tool … When referring to the worker as one of the factors constituting the operation, one should keep in mind the techniques he uses which, in fact, make each operation possible. With regards to our nomenclature of factors constituting the operation, then, it is better to write “techniques” rather than “worker.”2
This mechanized system included not only the automatic control of operations but also feedback—the possibility for the worker to influence and modify the process. Thus, the programming of actions was combined with the possibility of their correction and development. The worker thereby functioned as an operator within the production process—something that in the 1960s was interpreted as an early precursor of cybernetics and later debates on human-machine systems.3 In Gastev’s view, factories in the future should be such dynamic, adaptive social-engineering machines.
Beginning in 1920 with just a few rooms in a former hotel and five employees, TsIT soon moved into a large former bank building. Its laboratories and workshops eventually employed more than one hundred people. Vladimir Lenin, who had maintained good relations with Gastev since their years in exile,4 instructed the People’s Commissariat of Finance, and later the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade, to purchase equipment for TsIT in Germany “with Romanov money.”5
Within a few years the institute developed into a major scientific and practical center where physiologists, engineers, economists, and sociologists worked alongside writers, artists, and theater directors. At the same time, hundreds of locksmiths, carpenters, builders, turners, textile workers, engineers, and industrial instructors were being trained in TsIT’s courses. After fifteen years of activity, TsIT had trained 548,643 workers and twenty thousand industrial instructors in some two hundred professions. By the 1930s, TsIT was providing consultancy to more than six hundred enterprises across the USSR, had established 1,700 training centers, and had developed around ten thousand sets of instructions and 950 work organization charts.6 An in-house printing press was established. In large print runs it produced books and journals on the organization of labor, instructional manuals, and chronocards, as well as translations of foreign authors on psycho-physiology, psychotechnics, and management.7
Taylorism in the Soviet Union
Despite its activity and scale, TsIT was not recognized as the country’s sole or principal methodological center for the scientific organization of labor.8 Owing to its experimental orientation and its ties to the trade unions, it was continually subjected to attacks and criticism from other theorists and institutions working in this field. Gastev was widely regarded as a “Taylorist,” although he repeatedly distanced himself from that label. It is important to emphasize that capitalist “Taylorism” served only as an initial point of departure for TsIT.
Gastev was an admirer of the work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. He valued their studies of micromotion—which they termed “therbligs” (an anagram of the name “Gilbreth”)—as well as the methods they devised for visual recording (using small light bulbs attached to moving parts of the body, along with photographic and cinematographic equipment and a micro-chronometer, which made it possible to produce chronocyclograms of various movements with a precise measurement of their speed). The Gilbreths’ methodology was further developed and adapted by TsIT collaborators—the physiologist Krikor Kekcheev and the photographer Nikolai Tikhonov.9 It is particularly important to emphasize the social orientation of the Gilbreths’ writings and research, which focused on convenience and the reduction of worker fatigue (essentially on ergonomic problems).
Another important figure for Gastev was Taylor’s associate Henry Gantt, who developed a graphic method for planning labor operations—the Gantt chart—which was introduced by TsIT in the USSR. Gantt’s ideas differed somewhat from Taylor’s more rigid technocratic conception: in his theory, workers were to participate in the process of optimizing production and could in principle influence or modify instructions. Such “social preparedness,” as Gastev noted, was linked to the influence of Gantt’s close colleague, the Marxist engineer Walter Polakov, who in the 1920s became an important mediator between TsIT and the United States. For Gastev, however, this did not imply the abandonment of operational discipline but rather its transformation: instead of fixed norms and rigidly codified operations, the worker was to be trained for a regime of constant adjustment, mobility, and transformation.10
In accordance with his original anarcho-syndicalist position, Gastev believed that a worker “infected with the demon of invention” and with a “constructive demon” would be able to “pass the examination not only in managing a workshop, but in managing a factory—and, we dare say, in managing the state.”11 In this context, tektology—the “universal science of organization,” formulated and elaborated in the 1910s by Alexander Bogdanov, Gastev’s and Lenin’s opponent—acquired concrete practical forms.12
Through this activity-based approach to the machine and to systems of machines, embedded directly into the very structure of training, the situation described by Marx—namely, the alienation of workers and their subordination to production—was to be overcome:
Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman … The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the “master.”13
In Gastev’s conception, the factory as a functioning laboratory, existing in a state of constant becoming, development, and improvement by virtue of an established proto-cybernetic system of the social-engineering machine, cannot ossify or subordinate the worker to the machine tool.
The Theater of Biomechanics
Training at TsIT was organized on what was termed a “narrow base,” a method that attracted considerable criticism. Any process or movement was decomposed into microelements and practiced step by step. For example, striking something with a hammer was first broken down into isolated movements of the hand and arm before gradually involving the entire body. Workers used special devices and templates designed to isolate and train individual components of movement. Machine work was also mastered progressively: parts of the machine were initially concealed so that trainees could focus on a single operative element, gradually revealing the entire mechanism. Through this analytical approach, workers learned to understand both physically and intellectually the structure of the production process.
Around the same time, this principle of “propaedeutics” was also applied to artistic education for the first time, at VKhUTEMAS in Moscow (and also at the Bauhaus). Theatrical biomechanics was organized according to the same logic in the pedagogy of Gastev’s friend, the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold.14 For Gastev, the theatrical dimension of labor was crucial to the hybrid character of TsIT, which struck all of its visitors: the conjunction of scientific, engineering, and laboratory labor with performative practices, in which the presentations of TsIT instructors and trainees were transformed into theatricalized actions. The demonstration space in TsIT’s large main hall, divided into squares and filled with training apparatuses and instructional workbenches connected by signaling equipment, looked like the theater of a new epoch. The trainees, dressed in prozodezhda (standardized industrial workwear), resembled actors performing biomechanical études in Meyerholdian productions.
TsIT and Stakhanovism
The idea of horizontal autonomy and inter-factory cooperation embedded in the principles of TsIT—their orientation toward development from within, made possible by independent and trained workers who would gradually ascend to the positions of engineers and inventors—stood in fundamental contradiction to the concept of udarnichestvo (“shock labor”), introduced by the Stalinist leadership from the early 1930s onward. Top-down administration and multitiered hierarchical structures of industrial control came to dominate. Superhuman output was extracted through unregulated overtime and so-called “socialist competition.” These practices were promoted as the only possible means of industrialization. By the time of the Second Five-Year Plan, the independence and self-governance of trade unions had been destroyed.
In the early 1930s, following purges within the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, with which Gastev had been closely connected, TsIT was now overseen by the newly created People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. TsIT was tasked with providing “scientific” justification for shock labor and the Stakhanovite movement—an agenda that fundamentally contradicted its original pedagogical principles.
During the 1930s, TsIT increasingly shifted toward standardization, the intensification of production, and functional planning schemes. By mid-decade, the earlier concept of the social-engineering machine had effectively disappeared, and TsIT was reoriented toward military-industrial tasks. Mikhail Tomsky, head of the trade unions, committed suicide, while Gastev and many of his colleagues were arrested and executed as members of a so-called “right-Trotskyist terrorist organization.” Significantly, they were also accused of syndicalism and trade unionism.
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“Paying Attention to ‘the Minor Detail’” by Aleksei Gastev15
We want to draw our reader’s attention to the work being done in our cultural antipode, America. This work clearly focuses on the structural and administrative side of things while completely obscuring the organizational and technological side.
In our own efforts directed toward rationalization, we have moved away from structure and instead place all our attention on organizational and technological minutiae.
In America, these minor details are overshadowed by the entire complex of relentless and advanced technological progress. In our case, however, owing to a low level of technological development, the minor detail is the center of our attention. Our rationalizing epoch is an era of refining operations and operational transmissions, operational connections. Essentially, we are now working on the very culture of work itself, while the Americans—who already possess it—are working on questions of top-down management.
We said above that “we have moved away from structure.” We have already dealt with it—and more than necessary—during the period of War Communism. This engagement was justified in the organizational-creative (constitutional) period of the revolution. But by 1920 or ’21, a structural “frenzy” had already emerged, degenerating into an amateurish zeal for reorganization.
We will of course arrive at structure, but we will do so armed with operational analysis and with a careful refinement of the techniques of production and institutional operations. Only on the basis of this “culture of the operation” will there emerge a generation of rationalizers who will project forth structure just as scrupulously and solidly as they plan operations, workplaces, and techniques.
And we dare to think that in a structural sense we have an advantage over the Americans, who still have their old government apparatus with its structural “idiocies,” which even the American proponents of the Scientific Organization of Labor do not dare disturb out of respect for the traditions of ministries, states, and governors. We are a young, revolutionary country, and there is still much for us to write on this blank slate.
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The Training Method of the Central Institute of Labor (excerpts) by Evgenii Petrov16
The term “operation” is a fully developed concept that Karl Marx uses to characterize very specific production elements in “The Division of Labor and Manufacture.”
In discussing carriage manufacture, Marx writes that “gradually, production of carriages was divided into various partial operations, each of which crystallizes into the exclusive function of a particular worker, the manufacture as a whole being performed by these partial workers in conjunction.”17
From this quote alone, we can establish that Marx uses the word “operation” to refer to the separate parts of the production process involved in creating a certain product. In advanced machine production these parts of production (or operations) are performed by individual workers at separate specialized workstations (at machines, or tools), whereas in the craft mode of production, on the contrary, only a single craft worker performed every operation from the first to the last.
It is important to know how to separate one operation from another, that is, to establish boundaries between the end of one operation and the beginning of the next.
This is possible only when we can recognize the characteristics which define an operation. Then, the change of one or another characteristic will clearly change the operation as a whole. In other words, it is important to know the factors that constitute an “operation.” To clarify this question, we use the following quote from Capital, from the section titled “The Specialized Worker and His Tools”:
A craftsman who performs the various partial operations in the production of a finished article one after the other must at one time change his place, at another time his tools. The transition from one operation to another interrupts the flow of his labor and creates gaps in his working day, so to speak. These close up when he is tied to the same operation the whole day long; they vanish in the same proportion as the changes in operation diminish.18
From this we can conclude that the factors which constitute an operation are evidently the worker themselves, the workstation, and the tool.
A change in the workstation or the tool changes the operation.
We should keep in mind, however, that in craft production it often happens that one and the same tool can accomplish various operations, adapting in each situation to the specific conditions of the new operation. Only when the operations are strictly separated from one another can there appear a specialized tool specific to the operation at hand.
Apropos of this, Marx writes the following:
Tools of the same kind, such as knives, drills, gimlets, hammers, etc., may be employed in different processes; and the same tool may serve various purposes in a single process. But as soon as the different operations of a labor process are disconnected from each other, and each partial operation acquires in the hands of the worker a suitable form peculiar to it, alterations become necessary in the tools which previously served more than one purpose.19
When referring to the worker as one of the factors constituting the operation, one should keep in mind the techniques he uses which, in fact, make each operation possible.
With regards to our nomenclature of factors constituting the operation, then, it is better to write “techniques” rather than “worker.”
Furthermore, when identifying the techniques corresponding to an operation, it is crucial to find precisely those operational techniques which carry out the operation itself as a part of the production process, and to distinguish these techniques from different kinds of activity performed by the worker, even those activities which are related to the given operation, and in particular those activities in which the worker is utilized as a motive power:
In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power and man as worker or operator properly so called is very striking indeed. For instance, the foot is merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning.20
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“The Social Banner of the Central Institute of Labor” by Aleksei Gastev21
At present, there is no doubt that the Central Institute of Labor (TsIT) is becoming established as a social organization with a well-defined path forward. Those renowned formulas of the institute (the strike of the chisel, and later the training regime) are now only slogans.22 These narrow methodological formulas, necessary in their own time, were long ago outgrown by TsIT, which has since shifted its focus to the
organic renewal of the workplace.
We would now like to install TsIT’s social path with more clarity than ever. TsIT is filled with a world of material constructions, labor-assisting devices, models, and machines. But behind this forest of levers, wheels, gears, and signals, the social face of TsIT is being constructed with great precision.
The dream which has been torturously born and carried in the heads of a hundred thousand proletarians is being realized at TsIT. That which each worker thought of vaguely as they stood bent in the drainage ditches of railway and tram workshops, as they repaired steam locomotives in the pouring rain, or when they were paid with rheumatism for their service at a workbench or a weaving machine—to all of this we respond not with lamentations or agitations against the hardship of labor or its harmfulness, but with a new organizational structure for the workplace.
It wasn’t in vain that we emerged from the depths of the factories, and it wasn’t in vain that our predecessors were the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions and the All-Union Metalworkers’ Union.
We have decades of work in the factory behind us. We don’t depend on anyone for anything. We do not “go to the people” with the notorious slogans to “unite with production” or to “come closer to the masses.” We ourselves are this mass, and from its depths we carry a thirst for the renewal of accursed labor and its transformation into a genuine world of industrial insurgency and power.
From the first, we had no desire to focus on nor elevate the problem of the top-down management of the workplace; instead, we produced our first manifesto on “How to Work.” We did not address factory directors, foremen, or engineers, but rather the broad anonymous element of the factory: the worker. In this work, we were concerned with activity, skill, and organization. We did not preach about “occupational safety,”23 and instead called on every comrade at their respective machines to be reorganizers of their own work and developed manuals for such reorganization. We produced the following slogan: that
every worker
working at their machine is the
director of their own workplace.
Each of these “workplaces” have their own “departments,” which are managed by their director:
a supply department (the material),
an energy department (the motor),
a speed department (the gears, the pulleys),
an installation [ustanovka]24 department (the center, the spindle),
a tool department (the cutters, the presses),
an accounting department (the turnover and supply counters),
a control department (the product evaluation),
and a managerial department (an interface with levers and wheels).
Each machine has its own “administrative documentation,” which has long been carried out on the “card system” (detail-work cards, quality control cards, piecework cards).25
The idea of a “plan” with regards to the machine is not a static construction, but a system filled with the movements of the living worker.
The
dexterous maintenance
of this system also cultivates precise and active managerial functions in each worker.
And the workbench is just the same as the machine. Its improvement should be considered analogously to the machine.
We approach the human in the same way. The human is also a machine, created as the result of a million-year process.26
We
call for the improvement
of the human organism, constructing within it a calculated culture of skill, a culture of energy, a culture of speed, orientation, accounting, control, management, and “administration.”
Our slogan is not to protect, but to demand. Create, improve. Don’t defend. Attack.
We counter the prevalent slogan—“adopt from abroad!”—with our own:
Adapt (to) your conditions.27
People approach you, a worker who has given decades of their life to machine work, with idle chatter from abroad about Ford’s assembly lines. To this we say: don’t imitate the consumers, be a producer. Look at the vast network of high-speed presses, look at this mobile matrix, look at the revolving head of the automaton, look at the elevator, look at the feeds of the textile machines. This is exactly what the popularizers of Ford are yelling about—this, right here, this is the assembly line! Don’t wait like a passive consumer. Be an active producer. Introduce the principle of “transmission” into your system without waiting for some Fordist miracle from America.
We exalt the machine, the workbench, the living worker-machine. We cultivate a love for adaptation—for what frames our motion, for what guides our trajectory, and for what drives us into action.28
We say to our comrade-worker: let the men of letters discuss plans and the arrival of ready-to-use equipment.29 You must constantly keep watch over your machine, over your own personal work. Improve your machine by installing washers, valve lifters, cartridges, spigots, and uninterrupted high speeds. And know this: in you—in every one of you—sits a Ford, but only the kind of Ford who would give all his strength to our new, unprecedented fatherland.
Each worker should feel the power of the constructive instinct he possesses. We encourage the worker to constantly improve himself, we encourage him to create constantly.
We developed the so-called worker’s zone30 by carefully refining the workstation, breaking it down into its components, thereby ensuring precision in the distribution of movement and accuracy in the arrangement of the material. We view this delimited worker’s zone as the most perfect of workplaces. And we are sure that anyone who can pass an exam in this worker’s zone will just as brilliantly
pass the exam
for the management of the shopfloor, for the management of the factory and, we dare say, for the management of the state.
The methods of machine management predetermine the methods for management of the most complex structures.
We exalt machines.
Whatever new organizational and institutional forms humanity may create, they will yield nothing better than the efficiency of movement provided by the modern factory machine, whether it be metalworking or textile machinery.
We exalt the functions of the worker. Just like you can change the position of your feet, or unclench a vice, or reorient the direction of a lathe’s cutter, so too can one organize the factory and evaluate the organization of an institution.
The way you hold a screwdriver or a hammer, or guide the cutter across an ingot—calculated, confident, and precise—is the same way you should perform
organizational functions for the state.
Just like you evaluate the commodities you have produced with quality control, introduce the same quality control for use in institutions. Just like you register the movement of a machine with tachometers and rev counters, apply a principle of measurement in one form or another for the organization of an institution or the state.
We always encourage the worker to be active. The calculation of your personal functions automatically solves the problem of occupational safety. It is the calculation of your functions and your constant creativity that are the best reorganizers of production.
The proletariat did not come to power to wait for some kind of gift. It arrives as a new, massive reorganizer, which will completely regenerate everything created prior to it.
Develop your capabilities, train, improve!
We are revolutionizing modern biology.
The human is full of possibilities;
the human organism has thousands of possibilities for adaptation, training, victory. This is why we rigidly oppose ourselves to psychotechnics. Our priority is not sorting people but training them.
Move ahead, activate, accomplish the task!
Even if the entire production process were mechanized, even if everything were put on conveyors and moving belts, we know that alongside this it would be necessary to cultivate
a new high-speed man
with rapid reactions, who could remain constantly alert while exerting the minimum of nervous energy.
Here, again, we are dealing not with a principle of selection, but a general training regiment, for everyone should be so capable, and not only the chosen ones.
Speaking of science, we address both the worker and the professor alike, so that there will be no distinction drawn between work in the factory and in the laboratory.
We absolutely reject the opinion that laboratory work is carried out with methods which are different from any other work. Even in its birth throes the modern factory is the
most perfect laboratory of all,
with its thousands of registries, its million-strong output, and its massive crowds of quality inspectors and controllers.
Just as the radio is distributed by the thousands, and just as every radio enthusiast loves their apparatus, so too will we implant our laboratory workers in the factories by the thousands.
We will make an explorer of every worker, and will develop within him a thirst for constant reorientation,
constant reorganization,
which, of course, serves as the best guarantee of future victory.
A top-down approach to the problem of the administration and management of the workplace will be as powerless to solve social questions as its Western and American counterparts.
Only with the
organic renewal of production,
when each worker, upon entering the factory, suddenly feels that it is not only a place of work, but also an exploratory workshop, where every day everything is improved under the strength of the worker’s own legs, the strength of their own hands—only then will the reorganization of production be organic, uninterrupted and victorious.
We turn now to the modern view on education. They tell us that the worker should be “educated.” This is simply the old pedagogy of “drill” cloaked in a new language.31 There is no better “teacher” than the factory itself. But here the word “education” is inappropriate—
cultivation
would be more suitable.
A worker standing in front of the machine and soaking in the logic of its movements will absorb theoretical knowledge like a sponge and from this will construct a lever for the revolution of the machine. An “educated young man,” on the other hand, without the worker’s organic
constructive passion
will approach the machine and the workbench with fear, stuttering formulas and syllogisms. In the best case, he’ll end up a raisonneur or an orator.
Our science is therefore not at all like those which had been popular previously among the Russian intelligentsia and which were smuggled under the cloak of “labor” into the new school. Our science is an attention to the machine; an attention for the body and the nerves; the setup of speeds and tools; the establishment of proper supply for the machine; the proper positioning of the body; automatization of nervous response in movements; alertness; the rapidity of the worker’s response to technology. It is a science of what frames our movement, a science of what guides our trajectory, a science of the worker’s operation, a science of the worker’s technique. If this science develops properly, it will energize and excite the worker to such an extent that the formulas will come to him like metal is attracted to a magnet.
And that’s exactly it—you need
to magnetize, not to drill!
Thus, we understand culture not as education, but as the cultivation of
skill.
Only in such a manner can we cultivate in the proletariat a love for the tool and a love for the machine. Machines and tools are becoming the property of the proletariat in the full sense of the word—after improvement and training, the worker will come to love all these tools and means of production a hundred times more than yesterday. The worker is becoming the creator, the full master of these means of production, which he does not keep simply in the savings account of socialism, but which he improves and develops for an organic integration with socialism itself.
The worker is organically integrated with the factory mechanism, with the production process as a whole.
Is it possible to take all this away from him?—No! He will never give it away, for he is organically integrated with his own production, in which he crafts a new part of his “self” every day. Every new and seemingly insignificant adaptation, every handle and lever which appear today on the machine, are cold monuments to his creative fever.
It should now be clear what kind of social force lies in TsIT’s “orientation.”
The October Revolution solved the problem of the transfer of power to the proletariat. We must now prepare
for the coming revolution
of the proletariat as a class—but this revolution must occur in cooperation with the proletariat’s means of production against the petty self-serving owners of machines, patents, and personal inheritances. The force of this event will be greater than any mere human uprising, greater than the triumphant march of the machine, but also greater and stronger than everything the educated, philosophically stilted capitalist world boasts so arrogantly of. This revolution will be a tractor carrying the social orientations of the proletariat, and our course runs along the unprecedented highways of its advance.
Aleksei Gastev, “Preface,” in Ustanovka proizvodstva metodom TsITa: Organicheskoe vnedrenie (Production installation by the TsIT method: Organic implementation) (Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo, 1927). Quoted in Gastev, Labor Attitudes (Ekonomika, 1973).
Evgenii Petrov, The Training Method of the Central Institute of Labor, emphasis in original. Excerpted below.
See Yuri Gastev, “From Social Engineering to Cybernetics: On the Methodological Concept of the Central Institute of Labor,” in Aleksei Gastev, Labor Attitudes (Ekonomika, 1973). Yuri Gastev, the son of Aleksei Gastev, was a mathematician and one of the founders of cybernetics in the USSR. He explicitly linked the concept of the social-engineering machine to cybernetics.
Lenin and Gastev were in active correspondence during the strikes of 1904–5; they met in Geneva in 1905 and again in 1906 at the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP in Stockholm. In 1907, Gastev left the party and turned to syndicalism, which, however, did not affect his relationship with Lenin.
Vladimir Lenin, note to the Deputy People’s Commissar of Finance Alsky, June 3, 1921: “I would like to help Comrade Gastev, head of the Institute of Labor. He needs to purchase about 0.5 million gold rubles. This, of course, we cannot do now. Is it possible to buy at least something in Germany using the Romanov money?” Quoted in Alexei Gastev, “Meeting with Lenin,” Organizatsiia truda, no. 1 (1924): 15.
“Figures on the TsIT Over Fifteen Years of Its Activity,” Organizatsiia truda, no. 3 (1936): 4.
Over fifteen years, by 1936, the TsIT published 269 books and journals totaling 3,238 printed sheets.
The most active institutions included the Kazan Institute of Scientific Organization of Labor, the Kharkiv Institute of Labor, and the Taganrog Institute for the Organization of Production, as well as a party group of administrators led by P. Kerzhentsev (the “Group of 17”). Specific aspects of the scientific organization of labor were also addressed by the Petrograd Laboratory of Labor at V. Bekhterev’s Institute for the Study of the Brain and Psychic Activity, the Institute of Management Technology, the Department of Standardization at the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, and the Laboratory of Industrial Psychotechnics at the People’s Commissariat of Labor headed by I. Shpilrein.
“The part of the body whose movement is being studied is fitted with one or several electric bulbs; if the shutter of a photographic camera is opened during work, the movement of the glowing bulbs produces white lines on a black background on the plate; these lines become dotted if a disk with sector-shaped openings, like a cinematographic shutter, rotates rapidly before the lens; by counting the dashes in the dotted line, their length, and the distances between them, one can draw a number of highly interesting conclusions about the speed, acceleration, and force of movement at any given moment, and from these data derive the most correct form of economical movement.” K. Kh. Kekcheev, How to Increase Labor Productivity: (A Psycho-Physiological Essay), Part 1: Lighting and Working Movements (Krasnaia nov’, 1923).
Aleksei Gastev, “Report on the Trip to the First International Congress on the Scientific Organization of Labor in Prague,” Organizatsiia truda, no. 6–7 (1924).
Aleksei Gastev, How to Work (Moscow, 1927), 196.
Aleksander Bogdanov, Tektology: Universal Organization Science, 1912–22.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (C.H. Kerr, 1912), 422–23.
Aleksei Gastev, “Preface to Poetry of the Worker’s Strike,” 6th ed. (1925), in Poetry of the Worker’s Strike (Sovetsky Pisatelʹ, 1964), 32.
From the preface to an article by B. V. Babin on the works of the American economist T. F. Willoughby, published in Economy and Management, no. 2 (1925). Not titled by the author.
Evgenii Petrov, Metod obucheniia TsITa (The Training Method of the Central Institute of Labor) (Gostrudizdat, 1930).
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London 1976), 456.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 460.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 460.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 495–96.
Originally published in Pravda, November 27, 1925. Reprinted in Aleksei Gastev, How to Work.—Trans.
TsIT’s early research included motion studies of the strike of a chisel (a sketch of which would become the institute’s logo) and the development of a biomechanical training regime for the worker.—Trans.
Gastev refers here to the widespread practices of workplace safety adopted after the revolution in the Codex of Labor Laws (KZOT), which would be comparable to OSHA in an American context.—Trans.
Ustanovka, one of Gastev’s central concepts, can be translated as either “installation,” “setup,” or “orientation.” I have selected one of these meanings in each instance depending on context. But in the Russian, Gastev often leaves its exact meaning rather ambiguous.—Trans.
Gastev adapted Frederick Taylor’s instructional cards for use in Soviet factories. In contradistinction to Taylor’s cards, which were individualized for particular operations within the division of labor, Gastev created generalized instructional cards, which were applicable to any operation in the production process.—Trans.
The theory of Darwin is the theory of the development of biological adaptations.
Our slogan will be understood by the serious production worker, by the technician, and by the shop engineer. But it may be incomprehensible to the humanist intellectuals and the engineers of administration, who are so common to our country.
Gastev here indicates the need to adapt the general training of the worker to the specific task at hand. He advocated for the introduction of adaptive devices to the workstation, designed for a specific operation, both to increase the efficiency of the process itself and to make the introduction of the worker to a new operation as frictionless as possible.—Trans.
Oh, you Oblomovian modernists! Dobrolyubov absolved you too quickly, Pisarev should have never stopped disparaging you, and Lenin let you off too easy!
A pedagogical space at TsIT designed to train the worker in a replica factory environment.—Trans.
Gastev uses the term “drill” to indicate a pedagogical process that demands rote repetition from the student. He distinguishes this from his own pedagogical method (ustanovka) and its cultivation of creativity and combinatorial capacities in the worker.—Trans.
