Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century: The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe 9789463721943, 9789048552399

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Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century

Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe

Erik de Gier

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Gijs Klunder Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 194 3 e-isbn 978 90 4855 239 9 (pdf) doi 10.5117/ 9789463721943 nur 694 © E. de Gier / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9 Preface 11 Note on sources

13

1 Bringing together the fields of sociology and literature: Towards an integration of Modernist industrial novels into industrial sociology Introduction Methodological considerations

15 15 21

2 The rise of welfare work capitalismand the Americanization of production processes in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union Welfare work capitalism in historical perspective The Americanization of production processes Consensual American hegemony and the politics of productivity after World War II 3 Between ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’: American 20th-century industrial novels Introduction Between utopia and dystopia Contextualizing American early-20th-century industrial novels Upton Sinclair’s industrial novels ‘U.S.A. is the speech of the People’: John Dos Passos’s experimental trilogy Conclusion 4 Socialist-realist industrial novels in the Leninist and Stalinist Soviet Unionin the 1920s and 1930s Introduction Amerikansky Temp: Taylorism and Fordism in the Soviet Union The Soviet application of Taylorism: Shock brigades and Stakhanovism

29 29 31 34 37 37 39 40 44 50 55 59 59 61 66

Socialist realism and the role of the industrial novel (Gorky and writers’ brigades) Yevgeny Zamyatin’s anti-Taylorism: We (1921) Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov’s Cement (1925) Ilja Ehrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile (1929) The Magnitogorsk steel works: Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932) and John Scott’s memoir Behind the Urals (1942) Conclusion 5 New Objectivity industrial novels in Weimar Germany Introduction Weimar and Americanism Neue Sachlichkeit in literature Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter (1924) Franz Jung’s Gequältes Volk (1927) Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (1930) Willi Bredel’s Maschinenfabrik N. & K. (1930) Erik Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931) Conclusion

67 69 71 74 77 82 87 87 89 92 93 96 99 103 105 107

6 Neo-realist industrial novels in post-war Italy: The Olivetti case 111 Introduction 111 The Italian context of welfare work capitalism in the 1950s 115 Welfare work at Olivetti 116 Adriano Olivetti’s communitarian utopia: Humana Civilitas 119 Ottieri’s and Volponi’s neo-realist (Olivettian) industrial novels 121 Conclusion 136 7 Simone Weil and Modernist industrial novels in France Introduction Taylorism in France Simone Weil and Georges Navel Other notable French neo-realist post-war industrial novels Conclusion

141 141 143 144 147 158

8 Transnational comparison and concluding reflection Introduction Cross-country comparison Surplus value of Modernist documentary industrial novels for the sociology of work

161 161 162 167

Bibliography 171 Index 183



Acknowledgements

I started writing this book in the autumn of 2018. Hit f iercely by the Covid19-Pandemic in spring 2020, I had to postpone working on it until full recovery by the end of 2021. Looking back, I am very grateful to two people in particular who supported me in those difficult circumstances in publishing two articles on which this book is partly based in scientific journals. They are Jean-Pierre Durand, professor of Sociology at the University of Evry Paris-Saclay and chief editor of La Nouvelle Revue du Travail and Simon Fietze, editor in chief of Management Revue: Socio-Economic Studies. Jean-Pierre Durand also commented extensively on the final manuscript of the book. I want to thank Louise Visser, at the time editor at Amsterdam University Press (AUP), as well as her successor Ilse Lazaroms, for the very pleasant guidance and collaboration during the publication process of the book. Thanks also to Lea Greenberg, gatekeeper with AUP and Jonathan Dore, copyeditor, for their tremendous job editing the final manuscript of the book swiftly and professionally. Finally, thanks to my wife Gine Kruijer for her patience and regular critical but positive feedback on different parts of the manuscript.



Preface

The idea for this study was born while writing a book on capitalist workingmen’s paradises in different countries in the golden age of capitalism. That book was published in 2016 by Amsterdam University Press (AUP) (De Gier, 2016). In the golden age of capitalism, generally spanning the decades between 1880–1930, major fiction writers also dealt with welfare capitalism in industrial novels in these countries. Well-known examples include Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (first published in 1854) in Great Britain and Émile Zola’s Germinal (first published in 1885) in France (Dickens, 1854/1993; Zola, 1885/1991). In the same context, it was obvious that the writing of industrial novels continued in modern times, after the turn of the 19th century. In literary writing naturalism was succeeded by realism. In general, this implied more systematic attention by authors to reinforcing the empirical underpinnings of these novels. For this reason, the distinction between realist or modernist industrial novels and academic sociology blurred to some extent. Nevertheless, until today industrial sociology has neglected entirely the twentieth-century industrial novel as a meaningful research source. This book tries to bridge that gap. It is based largely on synthesizing and analysing a significant number of 20th-century modernist industrial novels in five countries. All these novels are based on empirical fundamentals, and will be compared in successive time periods, from about 1900 until today. Any remaining omissions and inaccuracies in the book remain the author’s responsibility. Erik de Gier The Hague, Spring 2023



Note on sources

The chapters on the US, Weimar Germany and Italy are partly based on earlier published articles by the author: De Gier, E. (2018). Modernist industrial novels and industrial sociology: A comparison between Weimar Germany and post-WWII Italy. Przeglad Socjologiczny/Sociological Review, 67(3), 179–196. https://www.ceeol.com/ search/article-detail?id=718121 De Gier, E. (2020). Between ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’: American 20th century industrial novels and industrial sociology. La Nouvelle Revue du Travail, 17, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.4000/nrt.7496 De Gier, E. (2022). From the good factory toward a new sustainable post-war social order in Italy: The remarkable ‘utopian’ welfare work policies of Adriano Olivetti and his typewriter company in the 1950s. Management Revue Socio-Economic Studies, 33(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.5771/0935-9915-2022-1

1

Bringing together the fields of sociology and literature: Towards an integration of Modernist industrial novels into industrial sociology 1 Abstract This chapter focuses on the main research question dealt with in this study: do modernist 20th-century industrial novels have a surplus value for industrial sociology? There are several reasons for aff irming this question. During recent decades industrial sociology has lost momentum in academic study, due for example to the increased significance of organizational sociology and the popularity of human resource management. A revaluation of the historical dimension in industrial sociology could restore this, as well as the application of relevant complementary sources such as realist industrial novels. This book focuses on the possible contribution of 20th-century modernist industrial novels written in the USA, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe in successive time periods in this so-called ‘machine age’. Keywords: 20th-century industrial novels, industrial sociology, alternative social research sources, history of sociology, interdisciplinary international comparative approach.

Introduction Modernist 20th-century (documentary) industrial novels, partially or completely based on empirical facts and statistical data, constitute a typical 20th-century phenomenon. Before that time, starting with the 1 In this book the terms ‘sociology of work’ and ‘industrial sociology’ have the same meaning and are used interchangeably.

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH01

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DOCUMENTARY INDUSTRIAL NOVELS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK

first industrial revolution, a substantial number of industrial novels had already been written in various countries. But with some exceptions, such as Friedrich Engels’s non-fictional reportage The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1845/1993) and Emile Zola’s mineworker novel Germinal (Zola, 1885/1991), these were not intentionally based on empirical facts, but were fiction.2 One of the most renowned examples of a narrative industrial novel is Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993). In this novel Dickens questioned working conditions and labour relations in his fictional ‘Coketown’ (Manchester). Dickens was not unique. In the middle of the 19th century there were several other renowned British and American authors who published remarkable industrial novels. British literary critic and art historian Raymond Williams summarized a number of these novels in his seminal book Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Williams, 1958/1963). Williams considered mid-19th-century British authors of industrial novels as expressions of ‘industrialism’ – a new collective system composed of manufacturing and productive institutions and their general activities. In his view industrial novels such as Looking Backward (Bellamy, 1888), Mary Barton (Gaskell, 1854/2008), North and South (Gaskell, 1854–1855/1996), Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993), Sybil (Disraeli, 1845), Anton Locke (Kingsley, 1892/2016), and Felix Holt (George Eliot, 1866) ‘provide vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common assumptions within which direct response was undertaken’ (Williams, 1958/1963, pp. 13, 99). Table 1: ‘Traditional’ 19th century versus 20th century ‘modernist’ industrial novels (see footnote 2) Traditional industrial novels:

Modernist industrial novels:

– 18th-19th century – Naturalism – Fiction, narrative

– (20th century) – (Neo-) realism; ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ – Reportage, documentary, montage,

Examples: Dickens (1854), Gaskell (1848), Elliot (1866), Zola (1885)

cinematic, memoir Examples: see Table 2

2 As a matter of fact, industrial novels are as old as the first English industrial revolution. Only the nature of these novels varied over time. A meaningful formal distinction can be made between ‘traditional’ industrial novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries and ‘modernist’ industrial novels written in the 20th century. The earlier ones usually have a more fictional character, whereas the later ones are more often based on documentary facts, statistical data and author’s research on site. See also Table 1.

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17

Though still of interest for sociology as a possibly secondary source, the primary significance of the traditional industrial novel lies in its lasting contribution to the literary world. By contrast, modernist documentary industrial novels, just because of their empirical underpinnings, could actually contribute still in a positive way to the acquis (main core knowledge) of the sociology of work. Regrettably this has often been ignored by today’s industrial sociologists. In particular, the sociology of work is traditionally focused on the collection and practical application of empirical data in behalf of the formulation of practical employment and human-resource policies important for either the workers, the management or both, for example regarding the improvement of working conditions and labour relations on the shop floor or at company level. Enriching the sociology of work with insights from modernist industrial novels could turn industrial sociology into a more multifaceted sociological subdiscipline. From the onset of sociology as an autonomous academic discipline in the 19th century, at several moments in time sociologists have recognized the possible relevance of literature and narrative to their discipline. For example, narrative fiction already played an important role in 19th century Chicago’s urban sociology.3 Today in the 21st century a new but (compared to the past) definitely smaller corpus of industrial novels is being written in countries like the United States, Germany and France. 4 Compared to the 20th century, the socioeconomic context in the 21st century has changed dramatically. Instead of the long-lasting increase and growth of modern industry in the 19th and 20th centuries, the 21st century is characterized by the downturn of traditional industry in the developed, post-industrial economies and the rise of a non-industrial service economy. This book attempts to enrich industrial sociology as an academic discipline, making it into a more widely conceived sociological subdiscipline by linking it more explicitly with relevant observations in 20th century modernist industrial novels. Therefore, a selective but deliberate sample of both illustrative as well as illustrious industrial novels will be analysed from a sociological viewpoint. This exercise may also be considered an attempt to complement the more usual methodology employed in the sociology of work. Industrial sociology as a separate subdiscipline of sociology developed first in the United States in the context of the process of industrialization 3 Think in this respect of Park, Thomas, Burgess, Wirth, Zianecki and Veblen (Abbott, 1999; Fine, 1995). 4 In Chapter 7, on France, I will pay attention to one of these novels published after 2000 (Ponthus, 2019).

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DOCUMENTARY INDUSTRIAL NOVELS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK

in the 20th century. Among its milestones were the Hawthorne studies by Elton Mayo in the 1930s focused on analysing human relations on the shop floor (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939). Thereafter, industrial sociology got a footing also in European countries such as the UK, Germany and France, often adapted to national economic and social circumstances. However, from the 1970s onwards industrial sociology got into a critical situation caused by structural societal changes with respect to work and labour (Dahrendorf, 1967; Schmidt, 1974; Düll, 1975). First, the subdiscipline was overhauled by another, the sociology of organizations (Burawoy, 1979). Then subsequently, another competitive discipline (not strictly sociological), human resource management, emerged in the academic field. At the same time the historical dimension of industrial sociology became less pronounced and moved to a secondary position. Only recently have pleas emerged for an ‘updating’ (‘contemporalization’) of industrial sociology from a historical perspective (Lallement, 2007). It is in this context that a sturdier coupling of industrial sociology and industrial novels in a longitudinal time perspective becomes particularly interesting. As it is already being debated vigorously among academic historians, good historical research need not be strictly limited to the usual research sources of a discipline. It can gain a substantial new significance by more extensively utilizing other relevant sources, such as novels, photography, film, paintings, and even material artefacts (machines, factory buildings, products, and so on) (Schlögel, 2017).5 Industrial sociology could benef it equally from this approach. By combining it with knowledge from, in this case, documentary industrial novels, the ‘sociological imagination’ of the discipline could improve substantially. Both industrial sociologists and authors of modernist industrial novels aimed to come as close as possible to the subjective perceptions of workers (the world of life and work), but in general it is assumed here that authors of modernist industrial novels have been more successful in this. I will return to this point in the concluding Chapter 8 by brief ly comparing the industrial novels considered in this book and some important examples of industrial sociological research in which the researcher(s) not only applied formal social research methods but, like the majority of the novelists discussed, also worked for a time as workers or managers in the factories described (Roy in 1946, cit. in: Burawoy, 1979; Braverman, 1974; Burawoy, 1979; Snyder, 2016). 5 See also Smith, 1993. Smith chronicled the making of the modern in the United States between the world wars by coupling developments in industry, work processes, art, and design.

Bringing together the fields of sociology and literature

19

The florescence of the modernist documentary industrial novel as a distinct literary sub-genre of social novels in the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union coincided with the rise of welfare work capitalism and the so-called ‘Americanization’ of production processes in many industrializing countries in the first half of the 20th century (De Gier, 2016). This is the period of the second industrial revolution, also called the ‘machine age’, which started in the United States by the end of the 19th century. After the turn of the century, it spread rapidly across European countries, first and foremost to Germany, the UK, France, and then also to the communist Soviet Union, and after World War II again to France as well as to Italy. Its main characteristic was the rise of mass-production and, related to this, mass-consumption. The resulting Americanization of production processes is also often indicated as ‘Taylorism’ and ‘Fordism’. Fordism was above all: ‘a productive system of incessantly self-refining functionality in which nothing was original except the system itself, in particular its capacity to redefine, simplify, and proliferate – that is to make new – its own parts’ (Smith, 1993: p. 15). In several European countries, the United States, and the Soviet Union, industrial or factory novels based on empirical observations, and sometimes also statistical data, were written between 1900 and the 1970s. Because these books are not exclusively fictional but also based on empirical facts, I will call them from a sociological viewpoint ‘modernist’. Altogether these novels belong to the literary genre of realist or neo-realist novels, which became an important literary genre for a while in various industrial countries before World War II and in the period 1945–1970s respectively. One of the more specific forms it took in the 1920s and 1930s in Weimar Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union is ‘reportage’. This was a literary form that is perhaps closer to research journalism or cinema than to literature. On the other hand, reportage has a lot of similarities with academic social research. The period 1900–1970s was a very turbulent time in the history of industrial capitalism. Not only did humanity endure two world wars, but it saw the rise of communism and fascism, sustainable strong economic growth after 1945 as well as the very serious economic slump of the 1930s (the Great Depression). In industry Americanization was aimed at increasing mass production as well as mass consumption (Freeman, 2019; Maier, 1970; Maier, 1975/2016; Kershaw, 2016; Kershaw, 2018; Judd, 2005). It is in particular this more specific background that influenced the writing of modernist industrial novels in various countries. It also determined to a large extent the nature and content of these novels. Important themes that emerge in them include:

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DOCUMENTARY INDUSTRIAL NOVELS AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK

class conflict, bad working and living conditions, worker alienation, job satisfaction, worker participation, changing employee cultures, urbanization, and the migration of workers. The primary goal of these novels was to document and make public the developments of working conditions in factories and offices, often with a deliberate intention to influence in a positive way companies’ welfare provisions for their workers as well as state social and labour policies. Also, they often intentionally tried to contribute to the emancipation of the working class and were therefore written with that aim in mind. Although in principle this commitment conflicts with the ideal of viewpoint neutrality meant to characterize academic work, the difference from academic sociology is not always that great. After all, industrial sociology is not particularly neutral. It has turned out to a large extent as a mixture of management-oriented or worker-oriented sociology. This study focuses on modernist 20th-century industrial novels written in f ive major industrial nations in several time periods. These are pre-World War II United States and Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, and post-World War II Italy and France. The choice for the United States and the USSR is determined by the fact that these countries represented two fundamentally opposing ideological blocks (capitalism and communism). This caused different, but in both cases interesting types of industrial novels.6 It is important to keep in mind that despite particular striking methodological similarities, Soviet industrial novels differ principally from capitalist ones in that they were to a large extent a top-down expression of ‘socialist realism’ aimed at glorifying the Soviet worker and Soviet labour. By contrast, industrial novels written in the pre-World War II United States, Weimar Germany, and post-World War II Italy and France, despite some signif icant differences, had a lot in common. In these countries the Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘New Objectivity’ style originating from Weimar Germany determined to a large extent the documentary approach of the modernist industrial novel. Table 2 briefly summarizes the works that will be analysed in this book.

6 Called ‘production novels’ in the Soviet Union.

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Table 2: Modernist industrial novels in the United States, The Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, Italy and France in the 20th century USA

Soviet Union

Weimar Germany Post-WWII Italy

Pre-WWII resp. Post-WWII France

1900-1935

1920-1935

1918-1933

1950-1989

Upton Sinclair: – The Jungle (1906) – King Coal (1917)/– The Coal War (1976) – The Flivver King (1937)

Alexei Gastev: – Poetry of the Factory Floor

Egon E. Kisch: – Der rasende Reporter (1925)

1935-1940 1945-2019 Georges Navel: – Travaux (1945)

Maxim Gorky – writer brigades

Franz Jung: – Gequältes Volk (1927)

Ottiero Ottieri: – Tempi Stretti (1957) – Donnaruma Simone Weil: all’asalto (1959) – La condition – La linea Gotica ouvrière (1951) (1963)

John Dos Passos: – U.S.A. (1938)

Yevgeny Zamyatin: – We (1924) Siegfried Kracauer: Paolo Volponi: – Die Angestellten – Memoriale (1962) (1930) Fyodor V. Gladkov: – Corporale (1974) – Cement (1925) – Le mosche del Willi Bredel: capitale (1989) – MaschinenfabIlja Ehrenburg: rik N&K (1931) – The life of the automobile (1929) Erik Reger: – Union der Festen Hand (1931) Valentin Kataev: – Time Forward! (1933) John Scott: – Behind the Urals (1942)

Claire Etcherelli: – Èlise ou la vraie vie (1967) Robert Linhart’ – L’Établi (1978) Leslie Kaplan: – L’excès-l’usine (1968) François Bon: – Sortie d’usine (1982) Joseph Pontus: – À la ligne (2019)

Methodological considerations The principal question this book tries to answer is to what extent do, or could, 20th-century modernist industrial novels based on empirical observations and documentary sources contribute to industrial sociology and its practical applications? Should the formal boundaries between these novels and mainstream sociology of work be blurred in order to further enable this? If we take Schlögel’s argument seriously, alternative research sources for historical study have become increasingly important. His argument may also apply to the sociology of work. If so, 20th-century Modernist industrial

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novels are certainly a relevant research source for the sociology of work, as either a primary or a secondary source (Schlögel, 2017). Apart from this, John Jackson discerned four areas in which sociology and literature could be complementary (Jackson, 1969). First, literature could fulfil the function of general documentation for the sociologist. Second, the sociologist, by drawing illustrations from literature, could underline a particular period included in sociological analysis. Third, by analysing intrinsically a literary work a sociologist could consider such a literary work as the given subject of his research. And fourth, according to the famous Thomas-theorem (‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’), the interpretation of social action requires from the sociologist some understanding of the Weltanschauung of the writer (Thomas & Thomas 1928: pp. 571-572). More recently, Alberto Penadés contended that literature generally may contribute to the social sciences in three different ways: first, by observations of otherwise unknown data; second, by interpretation (through specific examples) of how certain social mechanisms function; and finally, by exploring alternatives to the current reality. In his view, literature potentially making this contribution not only encompasses literary fiction in a narrow sense but also science fiction and detective fiction. For example, by combining imagination, logic and empirical contrasts, Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes contain at least 12 significant lessons for social scientists, such as the capacity to reason backwards (or ‘backward induction’) in addition to induction and deduction (Penadés, 2019; see also Bradbury 1969). As such, literature could even serve as a primary source for social research. Reasoning the other way around – that is, starting from a sociologicalhistorical viewpoint – added sociological value in the case of Modernist industrial novels will be realized more properly if these novels are considered and analysed in the specif ic time periods and proper socio-economic, cultural, and political contexts in which these are set. In the case of American industrial novels written in the first part of the 20th century, such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (both discussed in this book), the relevant historical context is the so-called ‘Progressive Era’ between around 1900 and 1923 as well as the subsequent ‘New Deal’ period between 1933 and 1941. Apart from being a time of impressive social and cultural change and reform in the United States, the broad period from 1900 to 1940 encompassed a period of increasing wealth and consumption never experienced before in American history until the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. As a result, the traditional small-town culture based on traditional family values – still dominant in the preceding Gilded Age

Bringing together the fields of sociology and literature

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– was almost entirely replaced by a more cosmopolitan individualistic materialist culture.7 In the United States, as well as in other industrializing and industrialized countries, industrial novels contributed, sometimes significantly, to the introduction of social labour and welfare work policies by industrial companies and states. They also contributed to the legal regulation of businesses (such as anti-monopoly legislation, known in the United States as anti-trust laws) and the emancipation of workers by giving them a voice. This was for example explicitly the case in post-World War II Italy. In that country major authors like Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini and Paolo Volponi gave workers their own voice for the first time in Italian literature – until the post-war economic boom the real workman’s voice was almost entirely absent in Italian literature (De Gier, 2018). The Italian Communist Party (PCI) played a significant background role in pushing forward this development. Both Calvino and Volponi had been active members of the Partito Communista Italiano, and Volponi even became a senator for this party in the Italian parliament.8 Contextualizing modernist industrial novels in the specific times and places in which they were written is crucial for being able to assess their surplus-value for the sociology of work. In this book this will be done in several explanatory layers. First, the context and development of welfare work will be described briefly. According to Brandes ‘welfare work’, was defined in 1916 by the American government as: ‘anything for the comfort and improvement, intellectual and social, of the employees, over and above wages paid, which is not a necessity of the industry nor required by law’ (Brandes, 1957: 5). The discussion of welfare work will be followed by a description of the dominant economic process at the corporate level in the 20th century until the 1970s in the five countries being studied. This process can be summarized in two significant terms that are common to all of them: the Americanization of production processes, and mass consumption. Americanization refers to the introduction of scientif ic management and Fordist production methods in industry and services, first in the United States and soon thereafter adopted widely in European industrial countries and the Soviet Union. The contextualizing will become more specific and in-depth subsequently, when analysing the case studies of each country. 7 By 1925 the majority of Americans had at their disposal hot and cold running water, flush toilets, furnaces, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, telephones, cars, and so on (Pastorello, 2014: 193). See also Lynd & Lynd, 1929; Lynd & Lynd, 1937. 8 Calvino left the party after a few years.

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The industrial novels that will be analysed from each country and time-period all belong to the most characteristic works of their period and country. All were written by established major writers and contain an empirical foundation (whether documentary, statistics, reportage, of personal manual work experience and observation). All in all, the choice of novels may be considered as representative, though not fully exhaustive. From the onset, given the economic dominance of the United States in the 20th century, the concept of the ‘American Empire’ should not be missed in this study.9 To some extent it forms its centrepiece. What is more, the chosen perspective of the Americanization of production processes also co-determined the choice of the other countries in this study, to show the extent of its influence. It is important to realise that Americanization of production by introducing scientific management and Fordist work methods on the shopfloor have been main themes both in the sociology of work and in 20th-century industrial novels. As Dutch-American-studies expert Rob Kroes has made clear, the Americanization of production processes outside the US (in this case in the Soviet Union and Western Europe) has always involved both rejection and acceptance (Kroes, 1996: ix). Based on the American idea of ‘interchangeable parts’, industrial products henceforth were ‘conceived as a set of components separately produced and separately replaceable’. This phenomenon was going to contribute enormously to the economic wealth of the United States and other countries, but at the same time collided with traditional, non-economic cultural values in both the Soviet Union and Western Europe (Kroes, 1996: 33). For that reason, the outcome of the Americanization of production processes in these areas always involved some ‘mediation’ of the original concept (Kroes, 1996: 176). Americanization more specifically had a very strong impact on countries such as the German Weimar Republic in the 1920s, the pre-World War II Soviet Union, and France in the 1930s.10 Also, a choice for post-World War II Italy is justified because, after initial pre-war initiatives by for example car maker Fiat and type writer company Oliveti, Americanization of production 9 The term American Empire is derived from Joshua Freeman’s book of the same title (Freeman, 2012). 10 In his book To Hell and Back on the history of Europe between 1914 and 1949, British historian Ian Kershaw confirms this with respect to Weimar Germany and France: ‘France, like Germany, was among the countries most advanced in adopting in large-scale industry the modern management methods pioneered in the USA by Frederick Winslow Taylor soon after the turn of the century and mass-production techniques introduced into car manufacturing by Henry Ford in 1913’ (Kershaw, 2016: 157).

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processes in Italy got a further firm footing in the rapidly expanding industry during the economic boom of the 1950s. What makes Italy moreover a very interesting case is the fact that this country may be considered a relative latecomer with respect to extensive corporate welfare work programmes. It is remarkable that the Italian economic boom of the 1950s caused an overwhelming and impressive wave of industrial novels by a large group of authors. Finally, France is also included in this study because this country across time has a long-flowering tradition of industrial novels that continues to this day.11 In sum, a selection of 20th-century modernist industrial novels written in five industrial countries will be analysed in successive time periods. Both ‘content’, focused on Americanization of production processes and its consequences for workers, and certain aspects of ‘form and style’ of the novels will be analysed. By ‘form and style’ is meant in what way (‘how’) the respective authors carried out their research as well as how they presented their results (see Table 4 in Chapter 8). It is not my intention to carry out a formal in-depth content analysis of these novels, which encompasses an analysis of the nature and function of their aesthetic dimensions. Rather, the analysis will focus mainly on its content, in particular the consequences of Americanization of production processes for the workers, within the context of the age of the ‘American Empire’ in the so-called American Century.

Works cited Abbott, A. (1999). Department & discipline: Chicago sociology at one hundred. Chicago University Press Bellamy, E. (1888). Looking backward. Amazon Kindle E-books. Publisher unknown. Bradbury, M. (1969). Sociology and literary studies II. Romance and reality in Maggie. Journal of American Studies, 3(1), 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800021770 Brandes, S. D. (1976). American welfare capitalism, 1880–1940. University of Chicago Press. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital. The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press. 11 The UK is not included separately in this study since its main phase of industrial growth, coinciding with a flourishing of (traditional) industrial novels, had taken place significantly earlier – in the 19th century in the wake of the first industrial revolution. See with respect to this period Williams, 1963: 99–119. As regards the introduction of American production techniques, historically seen, the UK was not in the in the forefront (see footnote 10).

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Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. University of Chicago Press. Conroy, S. S. (1970). Sinclair Lewis’s sociological imagination. American Literature, 42(3), 348–362. https://doi.org/102307/2923910 Dahrendorf, R. (1967). Pfade aus Utopia. Piper. De Gier, E. (2016). Capitalist workingman’s paradises revisited: Corporate welfare work in Great Britain, the USA, Germany and France in the golden age of capitalism 1880–1930. Amsterdam University Press. http://doi.org/10.5117/9789089645814 De Gier, E. (2018). Modernist industrial novels and industrial sociology: A comparison between Weimar Germany and post-WWII Italy. Przeglad Socjologiczny/Sociological Review, 67(3), 179–196. https://www.ceeol.com/search/ article-detail?id=718121 Dickens, C. (1993). Hard times. Penguin. (Original work published 1854) Disraeli, B. (1845). Sybil, or the two nations. Amazon Kindle E-books. Publisher unknown. Düll, K. (1975). Industriesoziologie in Frankreich: Eine historische Analyse zu den Themen Technik, Industriearbeit, Arbeiterklasse. Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Eliot, G. (1866). Felix Holt, the radical. Amazon Kindle E-books. Publisher unknown. Engels, F. (1993). The condition of the working class in England. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1845) Fine, G. A. (ed.) (1995). A second Chicago school: The development of a postwar American sociology. University of Chicago Press. Freeman, J. B. (2012). American empire: The rise of a global power, the democratic revolution at home 1945–2000. Viking. Freeman, J. B. (2019). Behemoth: A history of the factory and the making of the modern world. W.W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 2018) Gaskell, E. (1996). North and south. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1854–1855) Gaskell, E. (2008). Mary Barton. W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1854) Jackson, J. A. (1969). Sociology and literary studies I. The map of society: America in the 1890s. Journal of American Studies, 3(1), 103–110. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0021875800021769 Judd, T. (2005). Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945. Penguin. Kershaw, I. (2016). To hell and back: Europe 1914–1949. Penguin. (Original work published 2015) Kershaw, I. (2018). Roller-coaster Europe 1950–2017. Penguin. Kingsley, C. (2016). Anton Locke. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform. (Original work published 1892)

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Kroes, R. (1996). If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all: Europeans and American mass culture. University of Illinois Press. Lallement, M. (2007). Le travail: Une sociologie contemporaine. Gallimard. Lynd, R. S. & Lynd, H. M. (1929). Middletown: A study in modern American culture. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Lynd, R. S. & Lynd, H. M. (1937). Middletown in transition: A study in cultural conflicts. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Maier, C. S. (1970). Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 27–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947000500202 Maier, C. S. (2016). Recasting bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the decade after World War I. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1975) Mayo, E. (1933). The human problems of an industrial civilization. McGraw-Hill. Mills, C. Wright. (1970). The sociological imagination. Penguin. (Original work published 1959) Penadés, A. (2019). Sociología y literatura: invitación a una amistad. Letras Libres, 213(June). https://www.letraslibres.com/revista/sociologia-y-literaturainvitacion-a-una-amistad/ Ponthus, J. (2019). À la ligne: Feuillets d’usine. La Table Ronde. Roethlisberger, F. J. & Dickson, W. J. (1939). Management and the worker: An account of a research program conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago. Harvard University Press. Schlögel, K. (2017). Das Leben der Dinge. Materielle Kultur als Wahrnehmungsregister der Russischen Revolution. Lettre International, 118: 66–73. https://www. lettre.de/magazin/li-118 Schmidt, G. (1974). Gesellschaftliche Entwicklung und Industriesoziologie in den USA. Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Smith, T. (1993). Making the modern. Industry, art, and design in America. University of Chicago Press. Snyder, B. H. (2016). The disrupted workplace: Time and the moral order of flexible capitalism. Oxford University Press. Thomas, W.I. & Thomas, D.S. (1928). The child in America: behavior problems and programs. Knopf. Williams, R. (1963). Culture and society 1780–1950. Penguin. Wright Mills, C. (1970). The sociological imagination. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1959) Zola, É. (1991). Germinal. Fasquelle (Le Livre de Poche). (Original work published 1885)

2

The rise of welfare work capitalismand the Americanization of production processes in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union Abstract This chapter provides, as a necessary background of this study, a short overview of the history of welfare capitalism in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union, mainly until World War II. It pays attention to the content of corporate welfare work programmes as well as to the main motives of employers to introduce and implement welfare work programmes for workers in their enterprises. In the second part of this chapter further attention is paid to the Americanization of production processes by means of a combination of scientific management and Fordist work methods in the United States and its adapted forms abroad. A crucial aspect is the interrelationship between technological development and social engineering. Keywords: history of corporate welfare work, Americanization of production, scientific management, Fordism, employment relations

Welfare work capitalism in historical perspective Welfare work capitalism developed from the onset of the industrial revolution in 18th-century Britain. Textile factories created the first factory villages with workmen’s dwellings. But also, other forms of welfare work were introduced, such as factory shops, provisions in case of sickness, libraries, sports facilities, and so on. In due time welfare work could encompass, not only in textiles but also in other sectors, a wide variety of provisions varying from housing, education, recreation, profit sharing, stock ownership, reading rooms, dance halls, medical care, sickness payments, pensions, social work, grievance procedures, and worker participation. Well-known examples of early British

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH02

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welfare work capitalism are the textile mills of New Lanark (on the Clyde in south-west Scotland) and Saltaire (in Bradford, West Yorkshire). Of course, there existed big differences in the supply of welfare work between factories and enterprises. The actual size and quality of these developments depended on various factors. An important one was the availability (or lack) of relevant local infrastructure, the availability of workmen on the local labour market, the speed at which factories grew and so on. The motives of employers for introducing welfare work also varied. These could be ideology- or religiondriven. For example, in the UK and the United States Quaker employers very often introduced sizeable packages of welfare work based on the idea that the owner was obliged to do good for his workers. Next to ethical motives, many employers had other reasons. For example, welfare work could contribute to economic growth of the firm, could improve competitiveness, could prevent social conflict, and so on. It also turned out to be a strong competitive means of keeping out the emerging trade unions. After the UK, welfare work spread rapidly to the European continent and the United States. Large enterprises very often emulated their welfare work programmes, even across continents (Rodgers, 1998).1 Appealing examples of welfare work capitalism in various countries in the 20th century included RCA, Heinz, US Steel, and Hershey in the United States; Cadbury and the Lever Brothers in the UK; Krupp Steel and Siemens in Germany; Schneider steelworks and the Menier Chocolate Company in France; and the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks and the Gorky Automobile Works in the Soviet Union. Over time the nature of welfare work changed in accordance with the almost continuous growth of industry and services as well as with the increasing role of states as social policy actors. Workmen’s housing constructed by employers, for example, became less dominant after the turn of the 19th century and the onset of the 20th, when state social housing policies developed. Also, the nature of paternalism changed from traditional patriarchal and family-bound towards a non-family-bound, less personal managerial form. Worker participation and recognition of trade unions became an essential part of corporate welfare work policies in many enterprises, as well as the Americanization of production processes from the onset of the 20th century. It is in particular this fundamental change of welfare work capitalism which set the determining context of modernist industrial novels in industrialized countries. 1 For an in-depth international comparative overview of the development of welfare work in various industrial countries, see De Gier, 2016.

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The Americanization of production processes Taylorism and Fordism reorganised in a revolutionary way the organization of production processes from the 1880s onward.2 As a consequence, the productivity of individual workers increased enormously, and mass production was the result – that is, ‘the modern method by which great quantities of a single standardized commodity are manufactured’.3 This gave rise to economic growth over a long period. Productivity rises contributed to higher wages of workers and to the rise of mass consumption. These innovations of American production processes emerged before World War I, and then trickled down rather quickly to European industrial countries and the Soviet Union. Taylorism (‘scientific management’) was first introduced by the end of the 19th century. It was an approach invented by the American engineer Frederick W. Taylor (1865–1915) in the 1880s. Taylor broke down the job of a worker into its essential stages, and trimmed and timed them by carrying out time-and-motion studies of each stage, with the object of increasing efficiency. It was his intention to realize ‘the one best way to do the work’.4 From then on, the separate parts of a job would be split between several workers operating in sequence. This increased not only physical efficiency but contributed also to a huge rise in production and the minimization of waste. After its publication in 1911, Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management was rapidly translated into German, French, Russian, and other languages. His ideas almost immediately secured a strong footing in American industry. Soon after the turn of the century and World War I these innovations were widely emulated in Europe and the Soviet Union. A second revolutionary innovation of the production process was the introduction of ‘Fordism’, first again in American industry and then subsequently abroad. Based on earlier applied working methods in the meatpacking industry of Chicago and in bicycle production, it was Henry Ford who introduced for the first time in history the moving assembly line. In contrast to Taylor, Ford brought the work to the worker. Again, for a second time, this made possible enormous productivity increases as well as cost savings. From 1909 Henry Ford produced his cheap standardized Model-T car. By 1913–1914, after Ford raised the wage of his workers to $5 a day and shortening their working 2 For an in-depth overview see Hounshell, 1984, pp. 189–330. 3 ‘Mass production’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th ed., 1926, cited in Freeman, 2019, p. 118. 4 Taylor’s eloquent phrase became the title of Kanigel’s 1997 work on the subject.

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hours, many Ford workers could themselves afford to buy a Model-T, known affectionately as the ‘Tin Lizzie’. Ford’s innovation of the production process in car making was to combine one existing and one completely new principle, respectively ‘interchangeable parts’ and ‘continuous flow’ (see also Kroes, 1996, p. 33). But apart from a revolutionary technical innovation, Fordism also became an ideological innovation focused on the creation of a new type of worker and consumer (Freeman, 2019, pp. 118–168). In an important study, David Noble examined the concurrent emergence of modern technology and the rise of corporate capitalism as ‘two sides of the same process of social production in America’. According to Noble there exists no rigid separation, but instead a fundamental interrelationship, between the forces of production and social relations: ‘Technology, as a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices, and contrivances which characterize the machine age, is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination’ (Noble, 1977, Introductory chapter & loc. 237). Scientific management and Fordism, therefore, are not just technological developments, but at the same time strongly linked with technology-related forms of social engineering. It was the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci who characterized American Fordism as ‘the biggest collective effort to date to create with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and man’ (Smith, 1993, pp.50-51). From then on, the ‘Fordized’ worker was controlled in a hegemonic way both at work and at home: at work to prevent mechanized labour from taking too great a psycho-physiological toll; at home to prevent sexual misconduct and/or abuse of alcohol (Also, Gramsci, 1976/1971, pp. 277–318). According to Freeman, Taylorism and Fordism revolutionized both the American economy and society. It also gave mass production a new, more democratic meaning (Freeman, 2019, p. 168). From the outset it was believed that Taylorism and Fordism could solve social conflict between capital and labour in a sustainable way because both sides would profit. Also, Taylor himself underlined the mutual interest of workers and management when careful scientific investigation could also settle the proper award for the work. To Ford, the assembly line created ‘spontaneous teamwork and brilliant ad hoc innovation’ (Hughes, 1989: 200, 203). Both Taylorism and Fordism were generally considered a new sort of (American) industrial utopia. For this reason, they became essential parts of corporate welfare work in both the United States and Europe. The Americanization of production processes beyond the United States

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received strong momentum shortly after World War I and in the 1920s, first in Weimar Germany, Fascist Italy, and almost at the same time in the Soviet Union. In England and France, the reception of the ‘new American gospel’ was somewhat retarded (Hughes, 1989, p. 249–294; Freeman, 2019, pp. 169–225). On the whole, according to American historian and political scientist Charles S. Maier, who extensively studied the reception of Taylorism and Fordism in the most important European industrial countries at the time, its adoption was more selective, and mixed with national economic and political ideologies directed at neutralizing social class conflict: ‘Rationalization in Europe, was only a stunted off-spring of the American productive vision as originally conceived. It served a conservative business community seeking to exploit, first the transition to overall non-inflationary monetary conditions, then the prosperous but increasingly saturated market of the later 1920s’. However, the Great Depression ‘undermined all Americanist industrial utopias. Economic contraction destroyed the postulates for class collaboration and discredited the managers of the system. At least until the Second World War and its aftermath, America’s model of industrial productivity lost its catalytic inspiration’ (Maier, 1970, pp. 27–61; see also Kroes, 1996, pp. 33, 176). After World War II, however, the United States succeeded quickly in creating a consensual American hegemony within the Western economies. European leaders accepted for a while in the 1950s and 1960s America’s leadership with respect to the recovery of their economically wasted economies and security assistance. This implied accepting the prewar American ‘politics of productivity’, focused on ‘enhancing productive efficiency through scientific management, business planning, industrial cooperation, or corporatist groupings’ as well as ‘transcending the class conflict that arose from scarcity’ (Maier, 1977, pp. 613, 630). Taylorism and Fordism had a particular impact on Weimar Germany. In that country, the new approach not only implied improvement of efficiency and productivity in German industry in the inter-war years, but the construction of a complete political programme and agenda for social change. The Weimar republic was fascinated by the ‘New World’. Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work (1922), translated into German in 1923, became an overnight bestseller (Ford, 2019/1922). Some Germans considered Henry Ford as ‘the greatest Prussian in America’ (Hughes, 1989, pp. 285, 288). Perhaps the biggest reverberations of Fordism occurred in the Soviet Union (Freeman, 2019, p. 174). After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 the economy – until then overwhelmingly agrarian – had to be transformed by a crash industrialization in a very brief time into an industrial economy which in the end would lead to a socialist salvation state. Lenin intended to

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overcome the economic backwardness of the country by introducing scientific management methods or ‘Amerikansky Temp’. After Lenin’s death in 1924 and after the translation of Henry Ford’s autobiography into Russian in 1925, Fordism (Fordizatsia) became very popular in the Soviet Union too. Instead of contributing to the neutralization of class conflict, however, as in the United States and Europe, the introduction of American production techniques in the Soviet Union was primarily considered by Lenin, and then also initially by his successor Stalin, as a means of establishing a sustainable Soviet power. The Soviet Union’s first Five Year Plan of 1928 involved a serious attempt to introduce scientific management and Fordist ideas – with strong and active American support – into the new Russian industry. Ford, for example, supported the Bolsheviks by establishing a tractor factory in Stalingrad in 1928 as well as a new automobile industry in Nizhny Novgorod in 1929 (the city was renamed Gorky, after the novelist, in 1932). The new modernist factory buildings for what became known as the Gorky Automobile Works were designed by Albert Kahn, the same famous American architect who also designed the Modernist Ford factory buildings in Highland Park and River Rouge (both in present-day Detroit). Other American companies were involved in the construction of the new Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks, a sort of Soviet copy of the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana (Hughes, 1989, pp. 278–283. American intervention in Soviet industry continued until Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ in the late 1930s.5 Although Taylorism and Fordism did contribute to some extent to the prevention of class conflict both at the factory level and the societal level, they also generated serious negative effects for workers. The basis of worker problems was located in the fact that ‘Taylor tried to systematize workers as if they were components of machines’, whereas ‘Ford’s image was a factory functioning as a machine’ (Hughes, 1989, p. 187). For example, the high-speed monotonous repetition of work tasks could easily create stress, as well as a lack of job satisfaction. Ford workers complained in this respect about ‘Forditis’, pointing to a nervous condition as an effect of working at the assembly line (Freeman, 2019, p. 127).

Consensual American hegemony and the politics of productivity after World War II After World War II the process of Americanization of production processes both in United States as well as in Western Europe was picked up again 5

For more details on the ‘crash industrialization’ of the Soviet Union see Freeman, 2019, pp. 169–225.

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in the context of reviving corporate welfare work policies. However, compared to pre-war years, economic and political conditions had changed in a fundamental way. European economies were destroyed for a second time in thirty years by vast war damage and largely needed to be rebuilt. At the same time there was a broadly felt threat of a communist threat in a number of Western European countries such as France and Italy. In these countries communist parties had acquired a strong societal position. The adapted policies of productivity became embedded in the so-called post-war Marshall Plan (1948).6 This resulted in a global continuation of American hegemony with respect to productivity policies (Maier, 1977, pp. 607–633). Important aspects of post-war ‘consensual’ American hegemony were f inancial aid, technical assistance and anticommunist policies embedded in cold war politics. In Europe in particular this motivated some governments and large companies to search for an alternative corporatist third way between capitalism and communism. In these countries class conflict would be successfully avoided by the ‘supposedly apolitical politics of productivity’ (Maier 1977, p. 613), at least for about two decades. In Italy, for example, Adriano Olivetti, owner of the renowned typewriter and office machines company, actively strived for a corporatist ‘communitarian’ society. Olivetti was convinced that his communitarism could reform the economic, social, and political ills of Italian society and could function as a viable alternative to communism as well as to pre-war Fascism (see Chapter 6). More generally, according to American historian and political scientist Richard Maier, ‘the major issues Washington sought to influence in economic reconstruction concerned new monetary arrangements and trade agreements (the whole complex structure of multilateralism), and the role of foreign assistance. Also at issue were the nature of labour representation (specifically, how to organize trade union support for plans consonant with American leadership) and the total reconstruction possible in West Germany and Japan. Each of these massive and perplexing set of issues tested the American postulates of productivity’ (Maier, 1977, p. 619).

6 The Marshall Plan (1948) may be considered as one of the most singular expressions of the American Century. It was designed by George Marshall, then the US Secretary of State. The Plan provided economic assistance for the restoration of economic infrastructure in post-war Europe, severely damaged by World War II. In total, several European countries received more than $13 billion (see, for example, Behrman 2008).

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Works cited Behrman, G. (2008). The most noble adventure: The Marshall Plan and how America helped rebuild Europe. Free Press. De Gier, E. (2016). Capitalist workingman’s paradises revisited: Corporate welfare work in Great Britain, the USA, Germany and France in the golden age of capitalism 1880–1930. Amsterdam University Press. http://doi.org/10.5117/9789089645814 Ford, H. (2019). My life and work. Asher Eden Publishing. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1922) Freeman, J. B. (2019). Behemoth: A history of the factory and the making of the modern world. W. W. Norton. (Original work published 2018) Gramsci, A. (1976). Selections from the prison note-books (ed. and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith). Lawrence and Wisehart. (Original work published 1971) Hounshell, D. A. (1984). From the American system to mass production 1800–1932. Johns Hopkins University Press. Hughes, T. P. (1989). American genesis: A century of invention and technological enthusiasm. Penguin. Kanigel, R. (1997). The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. Viking. Kroes,R. (1996). If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all: Europeans and American mass culture. University of Illinois Press. Maier, C. S. (1970). Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 27–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947000500202 Maier, C. S. (1977). The politics of productivity: Foundations of American international economic policy after World War II. International Organization, 31(4), 607–633. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706316 Noble, D. (1977). America by design: Science, technology and the rise of corporate capitalism. Alfred A. Knopf. Amazon Kindle E-books. Rodgers, D. T. (1998). Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive age. Harvard University Press. Smith, T. (1993). Making the modern: Industry, art, and design in America. University of Chicago Press. Taylor, F. W. (2011). The principles of scientific management. Digi Reads.com Publishing. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1911)

3

Between ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’: American 20th-century industrial novels Abstract This chapter deals with American Modernist industrial novels dating from the turn of the 19th century until World War II. It focuses on novels by Upton Sinclair and John dos Passos. Sinclair, an exponent of the ‘Progressive Era’, believed strongly in the ‘American Dream’, encompassing a substantial improvement of working and living conditions for the working class. This was different from Dos Passos. His trilogy U.S.A. was set against the background of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the New Deal in the 1930s. U.S.A. no longer expressed the strong middle-class reform ideal of the ‘American Dream’. Sinclair’s style is documentary, while Dos Passos introduced an innovative experimental style. The sociology of work could benefit from studying both. Keywords: American industrial novels, American Dream, New Deal, working conditions, Taylorism, Fordism.

Introduction This chapter deals with a selection of exemplary modernist American industrial novels published in the first decades of the 20th century. These are Upton Sinclair’s novels about working and living conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking houses (1906), American coal mining (1917), and Henry Ford and his motor company (1937) as well as a major industrial novel, U.S.A. (1938), written in the middle of the Great Depression by John Dos Passos. They were not the only writers of industrial novels in the United States in this period,1 but in my opinion they are by far the most important and influ1

For an extensive overview of American novels about work see Koziol, 1992.

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH03

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ential, and are representative of the broader context of American industrial relations as they developed over the decades. Also, at the time of the Great Depression a substantial stream of so-called ‘proletarian’ literature evolved. One remarkable exponent of this stream of literature is Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1931/1991), about working conditions in a Missouri coal mine. Conroy was a young working-class author who pictured his life as a boy in a coal-mining town (Denning, 1997/2010, pp. 200–229; Basset, 2014). According to Denning, proletarian literature was not simply literature by workers, on behalf of workers, or about workers. It was more like a literary formation or movement marked by an alliance of writers, editors, agents, publishers, reviewers, political activists and readers. They met each other in formal and informal clubs, magazines, contests, conferences, schools, public lectures, political rallies, May Day parades, and picket lines. Well-known assembling points at the time were so-called local John Reed Clubs, which spread across the country.2 Also important were dozens of proletarian magazines, the so-called ‘mushroom-mags’. The movement as a whole left a lasting imprint on American literature. It was to some extent inspired by examples of proletarian literature in the Soviet Union (Denning, 1997/2010: pp. 201–204, 211). Striking also, but somewhat differently at the other end of the range of social novels, was journalist James Agee’s collaboration with Depression-era photographer Walker Evans. On behalf of Fortune magazine, both Agee and Evans explored in 1936 the living and working conditions of three sharecropper families in the South. This resulted in 1941 in a publicly acclaimed book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee & Evans, 1941/2001). This book encompasses a mixture of investigative reportage by Agee and appropriate accompanying pictures taken by Evans.3 Like many authors of industrial novels in other countries, Upton Sinclair and Dos Passos were leftists. Sinclair intentionally aimed to influence national political and corporate elites (in 1934 he was the Democratic candidate for Governor of California). Dos Passos, before ultimately leaving his leftist stance after publishing his magnum opus U.S.A. (Dos Passos, 1938/1960), was for a time a member of the American communist party. Nevertheless, their books may be considered as reliable ‘realist’ descriptions of labour relations and working conditions in American industry at that time. 2 These were named after the American journalist John Reed, best known for his classic account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919). 3 In this context also should be mentioned John Steinbeck’s seminal The Grapes of Wrath, a social novel regarded as an epic of the Great Depression. It deals with the migration of farmers from the Dust Bowl to the promised land of California, in particular the Joads, a family from Oklahoma (Steinbeck, 1939/1976).

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Next, I will first sketch the background of American industrial novels. This background was characterized by an almost permanent contrast between concepts of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’. Then I will contextualize the industrial novels of both Upton Sinclair and Dos Passos. Their novels may be considered exponents of a unique long-lasting politically and economically progressive period in the United States characterized by rationalization of production processes. Finally, the industrial novels of both Sinclair and Dos Passos will be analysed against this context.

Between utopia and dystopia Two significant other ‘industrial novels’ mark the beginning and the end of the era of the modernist industrial novel in America. The first, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, published in 1888 and is full of utopian optimism (Bellamy, 1888). 4 It sketches in a preliminary way a futuristic, 20th-century socialist welfare utopia. By contrast, the second novel, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, published in 2013, sketches a gloomy dystopian future of American (industrial) society (Eggers, 2013) – a totalitarian knowledge society dominated by large international technology enterprises.5 Looking Backward tells the story of Julian West, a young Bostonian, who falls into a deep hypnotic sleep in a basement bedroom with thick concrete walls in 1888 (Bellamy, 1888). He wakes up in a totally changed, ‘utopian’, society in the year 2000. By 2000 the Gilded Age society West had known had been transformed into one in which middle-class women, in particular, enjoyed new rights and opportunities thanks to new labour-saving devices and government services. By contrast to late-19th century American society, women in this future were entitled to paid work, property rights and voting rights. Bellamy’s book was widely read and debated at the time and had an enormous societal impact. It heralded the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (Tichi, 1987, p. 115). Tichi considers Looking Backward as ‘a hymn to eff icient America and to the engineers entrusted to achieve it’ (Tichi, 1987, p. 58). Reformist so-called ‘Bellamy societies’ sprang up all across America, as the book inspired the new late-19th-century middle-class reform movement in the country (McGerr, 2003, pp. 48–52). 4 Cecelia Tichi analyses Bellamy’s book in an interesting way by relating it to the later efficiency movement in the United States (Tichi, 1987, pp. 105–117). 5 In 2021 Eggers published a sequel, The Every (Eggers, 2021).

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How different then is Eggers’s recent book (Eggers, 2013). Like Bellamy’s, it is a sort of future-oriented science-fiction, but a future in which utopianism is entirely replaced by a postmodern pessimism. Its protagonist, 24-year-old Mae Holland, is working for a large American internet company called The Circle. By means of subtle hegemonic internet-based management techniques she is forced indirectly to permanently increase her work-speed. At the same time her room for manoeuvre and freedom of speech is limited. However, as an inducement to good corporate behaviour Mae and her family are offered all kinds of welfare work rights, such as extensive health insurance. In the background Mae’s former boyfriend, who does not work for The Circle, sees through the situation and in vain warns her about her increasing dependency of The Circle and her loss of freedom. The resulting picture is without doubt gloomy: a future American society dominated by large internet firms almost entirely controlling both the working life and living conditions of its workers. Between them the novels span more than a century in which the nature of working life has been changed radically in the United States. In the late-19th century, there was still a lot of hope and confidence among reformers and trade unionists about being able to improve the class conditions of the new industrial army of workers. At the beginning of the 21st century this hope has faded almost entirely. Instead, future work will be dominated by modern information and data technologies, and the novelist sees future workers as being contained both professionally and privately by large big-brother like corporations such as The Circle. These two novels also illustrate the wider background tension of the societies from which they emerged, and not only in the United States.

Contextualizing American early-20th-century industrial novels When interpreting industrial novels in their proper context, it is essential to consider also the factual socio-economic and political milieu of the specific time in which they were written. With respect to early-20th-century American industrial novels these include two successive periods known in American history as the Progressive Era, running from around 1900 to the early 1930s, and the New Deal era, running from 1933–1941. Since the Progressive Era may be considered a reaction to the preceding, more conservative period, I also need to pay some attention to the so-called Gilded Age (1870–1890s). During the Gilded Age the country, recovering economically after the Civil War, rapidly industrialized and urbanized, with continuous

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high economic growth.6 The most important industries of that time were railroads, steel, and mining. This growth attracted a huge number – about twenty million – mostly European immigrants (Pastorello, 2014, p. 50). Although the wealth of the country increased enormously, its distribution was highly unequal. On one side there were the extremely wealthy so-called ‘robber barons’ such as industrialists Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. On the other hand, a mass of usually poor industrial workers emerged, the majority European immigrants. This resulted in a new social and national labour problem, aggravated by two economic recessions in 1873 and 1893 respectively. One important indicator of this new social problem was the increasing incidence of lockouts of workers, and severe and violent strikes such as the railroad strike of 1877, the ‘Haymarket Affair’ in 1886, the ‘Battle of Homestead’ in 1892, and the Pullman strike of 1894. The Battle of Homestead stands out in particular as a turning point in American industrial relations. This conflict dealt with control of the Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburgh, owned by Andrew Carnegie. After a ‘dramatic and bitter’ strike Carnegie and his chief executive Henry Flick succeeded in eradicating the ‘Amalgamated Association of Iron Steel Workers’ (a craft union) and gained complete control of his steel company, leading to a new economic and political order in America. This new order, founded on an alliance between industry and the federal and state governments, ‘brought spectacular technological innovations and greater national output, visible everywhere from the great urban skyscrapers to the swell of mass-produced consumer goods. It also brought new social dislocation and suffering to industrial workers, who had lost any measure of power at the workplace’ (Wilentz, 1992; Krause, 1992). In sum, the excesses of the Gilded Age prompted a reformist reaction to address, to some extent, the new working-class problem. This became the Progressive Era. Historian Karin Pastorello defines the progressivism of the era as ‘a multifaceted effort of reformers to identify and solve the problems of industrialization and urbanization’ (Pastorello, 2014, p. 7; also, Hofstadter, 1955). Its main objective was to create a new middle-class paradise in the United States by means of a ‘great work of reconstruction’ (McGerr, 2003, pp. 80, 317, 319). Social reformers tried to realize this by a two-sided complementary approach to neutralize the extremities of the Gilded Age. One part of this was 6 This process continued during the Progressive Era: in 1900 two-thirds of the US population lived in rural areas and small towns. By 1920 more than half of all Americans lived in cities (Pastorello, 2014, p. 194).

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to contain the rich, including the robber barons and the large corporations, while the other was to uplift and civilize the mass of American workers by forging them into a new American middle class. In a practical sense, this resulted in nation-wide educational reforms, redistribution of wealth and income, and the introduction of anti-trust legislation (to break up industrial monopolies), food safety regulations, and health and safety legislation. During the Gilded Age America had become a country of two extremes – of ‘two nations’. On the one side, there was the rich individualistic leisure class living in extreme luxury as described extensively by Thorstein Veblen in his seminal book The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen, 1925/1970). On the other, there was the rapidly increasing socialist working class. In between these extremes the new emerging middle class, by 1900, consisted of 12–16 million people, or about 20 per cent of the American population at that time (McGerr, 2003, p. 43). The progressive movement and its leaders formulated a very ambitious reform agenda, which encompassed reshaping adult behaviour by banning liquor, eradicating prostitution, limiting divorce, and promoting women’s rights. The movement also aimed to improve the working and living conditions of workers by promoting welfare work and efficiency (F. W. Taylor’s scientific management), controlling corporate power and big business, rural reform and, last but not least, demanding a more active role from the federal government in the socio-political and economic field (McGerr, 2003, pp. 79–81). As such, the progressive movement consisted of a variety of organizations, institutions and middle-class reformers, including such key f igures as Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Both women established Hull House, the first American settlement house in a Chicagoan working-class neighbourhood. Also important were the so-called Social Gospellers, a Protestant group of social reformers,7 educational reformers (such as John Dewey), trade unions, and a group of progressive investigative journalists (such as Upton Sinclair) as well as the three successive presidents who made up the Progressive Era: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. The ultimate overall objective of the progressive movement was not only to end class conflict but ‘to remake America’ (McGerr, 2003, pp. 94, 118). All in all, the Progressive Era was constituted by three particular phenomena. These were industrialization, immigration, and urbanization (Pastorello, 2014, p. 10). The Progressive Era was also the period in which 7 According to the Social Gospellers, employers should treat their workers primarily as members of a larger social Christian family, and not as parts of an industrial machine (Pastorello, 2014, p. 66).

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entertainment and leisure became accessible to workers. For the first time in history American workers were able to visit dance halls, cinemas, and enjoy other forms of entertainment like sports (Pastorello, 2014, p. 51). According to historian Daniel T. Rodgers, the Progressive Era was first and foremost ‘an era of shifting, ideologically fluid, issue-focused coalitions, all competing for the reshaping of America’ (Rodgers, 1982, p. 114). The progressives focused their discontent through three clusters of ideas: antimonopolism, an emphasis on social bonds and the social nature of human beings, and finally, the language of social efficiency (Rodgers, 1982, p. 123). Efficiency became the dominant economic and cultural buzzword in the United States. As described by Cecelia Tichi, ‘the engineer’ replaced ‘the cowboy’ as the dominant American role model. The engineer stood not only as model for the increase of industrial production by enhancing efficiency and the prevention of waste, but also for form and style experiments in literature: ‘The engineer was the exponent of efficiency and the slayer of that dragon, waste. In the age of pervasive machine technology, he was a messianic figure, at least a priestly one. His values – efficiency, organization, production, functional and elegant design – enabled Americans once again to expect national salvation’ (Tichi, 1987, p. 105). Not only John dos Passos but also Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams became ‘designer-engineers’ in literature and poetry (Tichi, 1987). Harry Sinclair Lewis should be mentioned too: this ‘sociological novelist’ and 1930 Nobel Prize-winner strikingly grasped the mentality and values of the new American small-town middle class in his famous novels Main Street (Sinclair Lewis, 1920/2010) and Babbit (Sinclair Lewis, 1922/2020; see also (Conroy, 1970, pp. 348–362; Hardwick 2002). In the wake of the Great Crash of the stock market on Thursday October 24, 1929, and the subsequent Great Depression in the 1930s, the ‘New Deal’ was shaped by President F. D. Roosevelt and his group of so-called ‘New Dealers’ (Francis Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and others) when they came into office in 1933. This turned out to become a second substantial progressive social reform period in the United States. At its core the New Deal consisted of vast package of federal legislation and administration, as well as investments in public works. It was primarily directed at overcoming and repairing the vast economic and social damage (mass unemployment, poverty and want) of the economic slump. Usually, a distinction is made between the so-called ‘First New Deal’ and the ‘Second New Deal’. ‘The First New Deal’, from 1933 onwards, encompassed the institutions set up in the first hundred days of F. D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Roosevelt started with reorganizing the American banking system and introduced various

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recovery-oriented administrations, such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). During the ‘Second New Deal’, from 1935 onwards, the active role of the federal government further expanded with the introduction of new and more extensive work programmes (administered through the Works Progress Administration, the WPA) and the introduction of the Social Security Act including old age insurance, unemployment and disability insurance, as well as aid for poor families. Also, a new labour law was introduced (the National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act). The Wagner Act created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and regulated collective bargaining. It also stimulated the growth and recognition of trade unions by employers. The most visible outcome of all these efforts was not only the recovery of the American economy and eradication of mass unemployment in the 1930s but also the creation of the first labour-protective American welfare state, thus achieving one of the aims of the preceding Progressive Era. In sum, the New Deal was an era of the development of an ambitious spirit of pragmatic experimentation aimed at establishing new rules of social justice. Like the Progressive Era it was broadly supported by the American middle class (Rauchway, 2008; Kennedy, 1999). However, unlike in the Progressive Era the main agency of reform of the New Deal were not the civil society organizations of the middle class but the federal government. For the first time, the federal government acted as an active ally of organized labour and other reform groups.

Upton Sinclair’s industrial novels Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was not only a writer of a large number of literary novels but also a journalist and a leftist political activist (Arthur, 2007; Mattson, 2008). He wrote some ninety novels, among which were several industrial novels. In these works, Sinclair not only commented critically on industrialized America from the viewpoint of the workers, but also from the perspective of capitalist employers such as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. Nevertheless, his heart was beyond doubt on the workmen’s side. He gives workers a clear and proper voice in his industrial novels. According to historian Mattson, Sinclair was first of all a recorder of historical events as they occurred rather than a novelist. For this reason, in his opinion, Sinclair turned out to become more a political than a literary figure (Mattson 2008, p. 8). The Jungle, published in 1906 when he was 27

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years old, is widely considered as his most important industrial novel.8 Thereafter he published a second industrial novel, King Coal in 1917, and a third one in 1937, The Flivver King. A sequel to King Coal, The Coal War, was also written in 1917 but only published posthumously, in 1976. As a writer of industrial novels, partly narrative fiction and partly investigative journalism, Upton Sinclair belonged to the high-profile, reform-oriented group of investigative journalists and photographers known as the ‘muckrakers’, who tried to use their influence to reform company and government policies. The term, originally from Pilgrim’s Progress, had been brought into currency in a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to refer to those agitating across a multitude of issues related to industrialization, including life in urban areas, political corruption, child labour, inhumane living conditions in prisons, women’s inequality, the drug trade, the tax system, the insurance, oil, tobacco, and beef industries, and the exploitation of natural resources. As well as Sinclair, well-known muckrakers included Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell. Their primary audience were middle- and upper-class readers (Pastorello, 2014, pp. 57–64; see also Filler, 1976). Both Tarbell and Sinclair dealt with injustice and abuse in industry and published several books and magazine articles about it. Between 1912 and 1916 Tarbell visited a multitude of factories in the United States studying workers’ living and working conditions: ‘The work took me from Maine to Alabama, from New York to Kansas. I found material in all sorts of industries: iron and steel in and around Pittsburgh, Chicago, Duluth; mines in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wisconsin; paper boxes and books, and newspapers everywhere; candy in Philadelphia; beer and tanneries, and woodwork in Wisconsin; shirts and collars, and shoes in New York and Massachusetts’ (quoted in Sommervill, 2002, pp. 72–73). She was remarkably positive about two ‘enlightened’ entrepreneurs, Thomas Lynch, president of the Frick Company, and Henry Ford, president and founder of the Ford Company. In the eyes of Tarbell, Lynch not only took care of the workers by providing about 7,000 houses with running water, and most with gardens. He also gave them pride. With regard to Ford, Tarbell was impressed by his business principles, such as the revolutionary introduction of the $5 a day wage. On the other hand, Tarbell was very critical of the coal industry: ‘Every year over nine hundred bituminous coal miners are entombed in American mines … Falling earth, rocks, timber, coal, trap them. They die victims of industry – part of the price we pay for warmth and flying wheels … Nine 8 After publishing the book was published Sinclair also adapted it for the stage and, in 1913, a film as well (Sinclair, 1962/2016: loc. 2351, 3691).

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hundred (victims) a year – nine thousand in ten years – and we treat the awful toll a necessary incident to keeping the world running …’ (quoted in Sommervill, 2002, pp. 75–76). When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906 the public and political influence of the muckrakers was at its peak. Their publications contributed to the introduction of anti-trust regulations, the regulation of railroad fares, the establishment of the United States Department of Agriculture, the introduction of the Pure Food Act, as well as to the direct election of US senators, who had previously been elected only by state legislatures (Pastorello, 2014, pp. 63–64). Sinclair’s The Jungle, dealing with the living and working conditions of immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry of Chicago, as well as with unsanitary food processing circumstances, provoked government intervention in the meatpacking industry (introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both in 1906).9 In response to The Jungle President Theodore Roosevelt even invited Sinclair for a personal luncheon talk at the White House. Before writing The Jungle, Upton Sinclair carried out several months of preparatory research including working undercover for about seven weeks in Chicago’s meatpacking industry during a stockyard strike: ‘So, in October 1904 I set out for Chicago, and for seven weeks lived among the wage slaves of the Beef Trust, as we called it in those days’: I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign-born and native, and they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes of everything. In the daytime I would wander about the yards, and my friends would risk their jobs to show me what I wanted to see. I was not so much better dressed than the workers, and found that by the simple device of carrying out a dinner pail I could go anywhere. (Sinclair, 1962/2016: loc.2055–2063)

And: I went about the district, talking with lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, policemen, politicians, real-estate agents – every sort of person. (Sinclair, 1962/2016: loc. 2063; Mattson 2008: 54)

9 Chicago was at that time a city where all of America’s new problems and progress converged, including a substantial element of strikes and labour conflict. As such, for Sinclair it was the perfect place to set his dramatic novel (Mattson, 2008, p. 61).

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His research and documentary work resulted, for example, in the following striking observations: It was all so very business-like that one watched it fascinated. It was pork making by machinery, pork making by applied mathematics (Sinclair, 1906, p. 27). At the end of this hog’s progress every inch of the carcass had been gone over several times; and then it was rolled into the chilling room, where it stayed for twenty-four hours, and where a stranger might lose himself in a forest of freezing hog (Sinclair, 1906, p. 28). You might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they worked under the eye of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was called ‘speeding up the gang’ (Sinclair, 1906, p. 42). The speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on (Sinclair, 1906, p. 81). Most of the men hated their work. They hated the bosses and they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighbourhood – even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce (Sinclair, 1906, pp. 42–43). She [Marija] was shut up in one of the rooms where the people seldom saw the daylight, beneath her were the chilling rooms … she stood on an ice-cold floor, while her head was often so hot that she could scarcely breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the hundred-weight, while standing up from early morning till late at night, with heavy boots on and the floor always damp and full of puddles (Sinclair 1906, p.77). A physician made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomains, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city (Sinclair, 1906, p. 71).

The book was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, with a circulation of about 300,000, and subsequently also in the socialist journal One-Hoss Philosophy. Sinclair was directly inspired by formerly published articles on working in the meatpacking industry of another muckraking journalist, Algie Martin Simons, in the Journal of American Sociology in 1899 (quoted in Pastorello, 2014, pp. 62–63). Almost immediately The Jungle stirred a sensation in the country and raised fierce public discussion. Sinclair’s contemporary socialist writer and admirer Jack London remarked: ‘The beautiful theoretics of

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Bellamy’s Looking Backward are all very good. They served their purpose, and served it well. Looking Backward was a great book, but I dare say The Jungle, which has no beautiful theoretics, is an even greater book’ (London, 1905).10 The main narrative of the novel is set up by the arrival in Chicago of an extended Lithuanian immigrant family at the turn of the 19th century. Several members of the family find work in the slaughterhouses and the meatpacking industry. But the working and living conditions they meet in the so-called ‘Beef-Trust’, one of the biggest industries at that time in the United States, are very tough – in fact, they are exploited. The protagonists are the young couple Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszalte. After being sacked by the big Durham Pork factory Jurgis takes several other jobs in a harvester works and a steel mill respectively. Gradually he develops into a labour activist. The first part of the book is a meticulous documentary reconstruction of the division of labour in the meatpacking industry and its bad working conditions (Mattson, 2008, p. 62),11 in which he also gives a ‘detailed description of the applied methods of dispatching livestock and the ways the carcasses are transmuted into a plenitude of products’ (Brewster Folsom, 1979, pp. 242-243). The book’s last fifty pages are a propagandist plea for socialism, ‘ceasing to be a story at all and becoming a harangue’ (Becker, 1959, p. 133). To Sinclair, The Jungle was not only a muckraking book or a Zola-like naturalistic novel, but ‘a book which would show the economic forces driving the working class to socialism’ (Brewster Folsom, 1979, p. 251). It’s worth noting that Sinclair didn’t begin working on The Jungle as a novel but, as he contends in his autobiography, as a piece of social research. The narrative part was added after he observed a Lithuanian wedding party while carrying out his on-site research activities – a scene depicted near the beginning of the book (Sinclair, 1962/2016, loc. 2076). 10 The Jungle also attracted serious attention, particularly in the UK. For example, the later prime minister, but at the time a new MP, Winston Churchill, published a favourable two-part review in T. P.’s Weekly: ‘His book is a tract in a swelling political agitation, and it takes the form of an indictment of the huge meat-packing business on the shores of Lake Michigan popularly called the great Beef Trust’ (Dawson, 1991: 74). In the United States, as well as Jack London the Hull House reformer Jane Addams was in support of the book (Sinclair, 1962, loc. 2067). The novel also met with criticism on behalf of the meatpacking lobby. J. Ogden Armour, whose plant formed the setting of The Jungle, debated in a number of articles in the Saturday Evening Post the ‘unscrupulous attacks upon his great business’ (Sinclair, 1962, loc. 2191). The book became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad, and was translated into 17 languages (Sinclair, 1962, loc. 2293). 11 According to Mattson, Henry Ford’s famous assembly line was foreshadowed in the Chicago meat factories (Mattson, 2008, p. 62).

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During his lifetime Sinclair published some other remarkable documentary industrial novels, in particular two works about a vicious labour conflict in the coal-mining industry in Colorado in 1913–1914, and a novel about Henry Ford and the strained labour relations in his company. The two novels on coal mining were both written in 1917; the first (King Coal) was published that year, but the second (The Coal War) was only published posthumously in 1976 (Sinclair 1917; Sinclair 2015/1976). From the viewpoint of industrial sociology, the latter is definitely the more interesting, because it is chiefly a documentary account of the Colorado coal-miners’ strike.12 The Coal War, effectively, is a supplement to King Coal. At that time, it was written the publisher (Macmillan) asked Sinclair to adapt it into a less-documentary and more narrative form, but he refused to do so. Therefore, this sequel of King Coal remained unpublished until 1976, when John Graham, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, edited and finally published the manuscript (Barnes Jensen 1978; Owen 1978). The labour conflict dealt with in the two novels concerns a long-lasting strike (from late 1913 until spring 1914) in the Colorado coal fields, owned by John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and other mine owners.13 The owners wanted to get rid of the existing closed-shop system by guaranteeing the right to work without union membership. Subsequently, more than 10,000 workers went on strike to prevent this. Then strikers were evicted from company housing and state militia was brought in. At Easter 1914 the militia attacked a striker’s tent camp and killed some 16 people, including 12 children (the so-called ‘Ludlow massacre’). This caused a ten-days’ war between the strikers and the state militia. Ultimately federal troops disarmed the strikers (Rosenzweig et al., 2008, p. 253). The protagonist of both King Coal and The Coal War is Hal Warner, a son of a wealthy upper-class family, who is going to work as a sort of undercover worker in the coal fields. Warner identifies himself strongly with the plight and fate of the miners and the labour unions. He becomes their advocate. However, after the strike he appears to no longer be able to commit himself to the working class. The Flivver King: A Story of Ford America was published in 1937 (Sinclair 2010/1937). In this novel Sinclair intertwines the story of industrialist Henry Ford with that of a fictional Ford employee, Abner Shutt, and his family 12 Before writing King Coal and The Coal War Sinclair made several trips to the Colorado coalfields during the strike. 13 Muckraker Ida Tarbell’s fame is largely based on her critical two-volume study of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (Tarbell, 1904).

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during the first decades of the 20th century. In this way Sinclair contrasted two opposing social worlds. From the perspective of the Shutt family it is a fictional novel about the dehumanizing working conditions at Ford, the spying and policing of the workers, the ascent into, and subsequent descent from, the middle class of Abner Shutt’s family while working for Ford. The novel ends with the beating of Tom, Abe’s youngest son, by Ford Company thugs while he is actively supporting the new Union of Automobile Workers (UAW) inside the company. Sinclair describes the background in his autobiography: Henry Ford was blindly and stubbornly opposed to unionization and declared that he would close his plants rather than have them organized. There was a strike. ‘Because I had known Ford, I was much interested in what was going on … I decided to make a novel of it. I called the book Flivver King, and when it was done, I sent a copy of the manuscript to one of the strike leaders in Detroit … They wanted the story, and they wanted it quickly. I offered them 200,000 pamphlet copies.

As a consequence, according to Sinclair, Henry Ford ‘suddenly gave way and permitted his plants to be organized’ (Sinclair, 1962/2016, loc. 5068–5086; also, Mattson, 2008, p. 200). In May 1962 the renowned chairman of the UAW, Walter Reuther, awarded Sinclair on behalf the of the Union the ‘Social Justice Award’, an ebony plaque with the following citation: ‘With admiration and affection and in thankful appreciation for the great moral courage and social conscience that motivated your writings as you exposed the inhuman exploitation of labour in American industrial jungles. Your life and your work have contributed immeasurably to the extension of the frontiers of Social Justice’ (Sinclair, 1962/2016, loc. 5714).

‘U.S.A. is the speech of the People’: John Dos Passos’s experimental trilogy 14 In comparison to Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos (1896–1970), although still a naturalist writer, was a radically different Modernist. Both had in 14 Dos Passos considered U.S.A as ‘the speech of the people’. He ends his introduction to the trilogy (added in 1938) with this particular sentence (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 7).

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common their leftist progressive political activism, as well as their interest in documentary facts and reportage. But Dos Passos, contrary to Sinclair, developed a radical new avant-gardist experimental Modernist style.15 The method he applied was influenced strongly by Cubist painting (Léger, Braque, Picasso) and experimental cinema (Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin) (Foster, 1986, pp. 186–194).16 Dos Passos was a member of the so-called Cultural Front, an arm of the Popular Front (Denning, 1997/2010, pp. 163–164; 4–5).17 This influential avant-gardist proletarian club of intellectuals, painters, musicians, and film-makers had the intention to reshape American culture. U.S.A., his most important work, is not strictly an industrial novel in itself,18 – it has a wider scope. In U.S.A. Dos Passos tried to ‘chronicle’ in a kaleidoscopic way American society in the first decades of the 20th century. This was the beginning of the American century, marked by continuous intensive industrialization, urbanization, and immigration as well as a bigger political involvement by the United States in international matters. It was also the aftermath of the Great War, the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the onset of the Great Depression. In this context, according to Dos Passos, no less than the survival of the American dream was at stake. During his lifetime Dos Passos wrote more than forty books including novels, biographies, essays, memoirs, and poetry. Apart from U.S.A., his most important novels are Three Soldiers (2023/1920) and Manhattan Transfer (2000/1925). U.S.A. is itself a trilogy, bringing together three earlier published novels, The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen-Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Three Soldiers, written in France, is the story of three American 15 After finishing U.S.A. Dos Passos changed his political stand radically into a rightist conservative direction. He had already left the Communist Party in 1934. 16 Dos Passos was well aligned with the ‘New Objectivity’ style (neue Sachlichkeit), which emerged first in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. In the case of (industrial) novels it applied a documentary and montage style (De Gier, 2018). See also Chapter 5. 17 According to Denning there were several overlapping but distinct groups in the Cultural Front. The oldest and most established group was a circle of novelists including not only Dos Passos but also F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Josephine Herbst, and John Howard Lawson (Denning, 1997/2010, p. 164). The Popular Front, according to Denning, ‘was the insurgent social movement forged from the labor militancy of the fledging CIO, the anti-fascist solidarity with Spain, Ethiopia, China and the refugees from Hitler, and the political struggles on the left wing of the New Deal. Born out of the social upheavals of 1934 and coinciding with the Communist Party’s period of greatest influence in US society, the Popular Front became a radical historic bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists ….’ (Denning, 1997/2010, p. 4.) 18 Denning considers U.S.A. as a sort of library of American novels, in sum: ‘a war novel, a Hollywood novel, a novel of the returning vet, a working-girl romance, a proletarian novel’ (Denning, 1997/2010, p. 170).

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soldiers ‘destroyed by a military system that closely mimicked the core values and methods of a modern industrial society’ (Pizer, 2012, p. 53). Manhattan Transfer deals with the complexity of New York life between 1890 and the mid-1920s (Pizer, 2012, p. 56). Both novels can be considered preludes to the U.S.A. trilogy. In U.S.A. Dos Passos perfected his avant-garde writing method, which encompassed a ‘montage’ (combination and juxtaposition) of different fragments of cubism/futurism, film technique, reportage, and narrative. According to Donald Pizer, American literary critic and renowned expert on the works of Dos Passos, the author’s key ideas are ‘simultaneity’ and ‘fragmentation’: ‘a reality is stripped to its basic fragmentary components as these exist in space and time and these parts are then rearranged on the canvas to represent the whole as a simultaneity’. Thus, the ‘fleeting world is recorded the way the motion picture film it recorded’ (Pizer, 2012, pp. 54–55). According to Tichi, who also analysed U.S.A. from the viewpoint of efficiency, Dos Passos effectively brought ‘machine design into fiction. He is America’s engineer-novelist’. He was strongly influenced by Italian F. T. Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto, as well as by the works of sociologist Thorstein Veblen (Tichi, 1987, 201–202, 204).19 Effectively, Dos Passos applied four different alternating, albeit linked, ‘devices’ or descriptive forms. These are ‘newsreels’, ‘camera eye’, ‘subjective narrative’, and ‘biography’ respectively. Each device chronicles actual scenes from different angles, such as objective facts, impressions, images, and personal subjective thoughts of the author. On the whole the book consists of 68 Newsreels, 51 Camera eyes, 27 biographical portraits, and a number of fictional narratives organized around 12 major characters.20,21 American studies expert Michael Denning considers the concise biographical essays as the best part of the trilogy: ‘More than any other part of the book, the portraits embody the history Dos Passos wanted to tell, 19 See Tichi’s extensive and provoking analysis of the work of Dos Passos (Tichi 1987, pp. 194–216). 20 An extensive critical content analysis of U.S.A. has been carried out by Denning (Denning, 1997/2010, 163–199). See also Pizer, 1988. 21 Gretchen Foster summarizes the meaning of the various devices as follows: ‘While the newsreels’ montages document public voices and scenes, the camera eye sections present private, subjective images. If the newsreels, biographies, and fictional narratives work with the outside of people and events in order to say something about their insides, the camera eye does the reverse.’ Of the biographies: ‘In these short lives, he [Dos Passos] skillfully carries out what Eisenstein envisioned when he wrote about filming the lives of actual people in a new way, using montage with its dynamic juxtaposition of images to portray character. Dos Passos’s biographies, rather than showing the person in “long uncut dramatic scenes”, juxtapose fragments from his life in such a way that, in three or four pages, we see around into the whole man. The biographies are a graphic portrait that symbolize parts of the United States and its people.’ (Foster, 1986, pp. 186–194).

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chronicling the republic from the year of Buchanan’s election (when, we are told, both Woodrow Wilson and Frederick Winslow Taylor were born) to 1929, the symbolic year in which both Thorstein Veblen and Paxton Hibben die’ (Denning, 1997/2010, p. 171)). These biographical essays deal with a number of high-profile Americans of the time, such as steel baron Andrew Carnegie, car producer Henry Ford, the inventor of scientific management Frederick W. Taylor, and labour leader Eugene V. Debs. Illustrative for Dos Passos’s succinct experimental style are for example the following text fragments: Debs was a railroadman, born in a weatherboarded shack at Terre Haute (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 37) … At fifteen Gene Debs was already working as a machinist on the Indianapolis and Terre Haute Railway. He worked as a locomotive fireman, clerked in a store joined the local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, was elected secretary, travelled all over the country as organizer He was a tall shamblefooted man, had a sort of gusty rhetoric that set on fire the railroad workers in their pineboarded halls made them want the world wanted … (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, pp. 37–38). Frederick Winslow Taylor (they called him Speedy Taylor in the shop) was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the year of Buchanan’s election … His mother came from a family of New Bedford whalers; she was a great reader of Emerson, belonged to the Unitarian Church and the Browning Society … She laid down the rules of conduct: self-respect, self-reliance, self-control and a cold long head for figures (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 745. …. But when he got to the foreman, he was on the management’s side of the fence, gathering in on the part of those and the management’s side all the great mass of traditional knowledge which in the past has been in the heads of the workman and in the physical skill and knack of the workman. He couldn’t stand to see an idle lathe or an idle man (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 746). He broke up the foreman’s job into separate functions, speedbosses, gangbosses, timestudy men, order-of-work men. The skilled mechanics were too stubborn for him; what

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he wanted was a plain handyman who’d do the what he was told (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 747). He [Henry Ford] was forty years old before the Ford Motor Company was started and production began to move (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 770). In 1913 they established the assembly line at Ford’s. That season the profits were something like twenty-five million dollars, but they had trouble in keeping the men on the job, machinists didn’t seem to like it at Ford’s (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 771 The American Plan; automotive prosperity seeping down from above: it turned out there were strings to it. But that five-dollars a day paid to good, clean American workmen who didn’t drink or smoke cigarettes or read or think, and who didn’t commit adultery and whose wives didn’t take in boarders, made America once more the Yukon of the sweated workers of the world; made all the tin lizzies and the automotive age, and incidentally made Henry Ford the automobileer, the admirer of Edison, the birdlover, the great American of his time (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 772).

For industrial sociologists it is not only worthwhile to analyse the biographical sketches, but also the other devices applied by Dos Passos in U.S.A. For example, Newsreel 59, which succinctly pictures the city of Detroit at that time: DETROIT LEADS THE WORLD IN THE MANUFACTURE OF AUTOMOBILES…. DETROIT IS FIRST IN PHARMACEUTICALS STOVES RANGES FURNACES ADDING MACHINES PAINTS AND VARNISHES MARINE MOTORS OVERALLS

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SODA AND SALT PRODUCTS SPORT SHOES TWIST DRILLS SHOWCASES CORSETS GASOLINE TORCHES TRUCKS…. ‘DETROIT THE CITY WHERE LIFE IS WORTH LIVING’ (Dos Passos, 1938/ 1966: 961-962).

Dos Passos himself concluded in his ‘Statement of Belief’ in 1928: ‘I think any novelist who is worth his salt is a sort of truffle dog digging up raw material which a scientist, an anthropologist or a historian can later use to permanent advantage’. That is, the future reader of U.S.A. collects the truffles, while the author ‘simply buries the items of his own time, awaiting future historians who will uncover what he has stored’ (Trombold, 1998, p. 241).

Conclusion In this chapter I analysed several modernist documentary American industrial novels written in the context of the relevant social, economic, and cultural developments in the United States of the early-20th century. It turned out that the United States fundamentally changed from a smalltown, still overwhelming agrarian society in which a new middle class emerged into an industrialized mass-production and mass-consumption society. Efficiency and prevention of waste became the dominant indicators of the new age. As for example Cecilia Tichi has shown, the figure of the engineer became the new national hero. He embodied the optimism of the new machine age. Likewise, scientific management and Fordism also influenced both form and content of Modernist industrial novels. This was most obviously visible in Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. In essence the industrial novels of both Sinclair and Dos Passos criticized the negative effects of new technologies and management techniques on workers and their families. Also, both authors tried to influence national and corporate social policies. As regards social reform it is important to make a distinction between a period of optimistic, utopian reform between 1890 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the more pessimistic, dystopian correctional social reform of the 1930s and thereafter. Upton Sinclair, still an exponent of optimistic utopian reform, strongly believed

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in the possibilities of a better ‘socialist’ or progressive world. In his opinion America could be and had to be remade into a middle-class paradise. By contrast, John Dos Passos, an exponent of dystopian reform, forecasted the end of the American dream and finally lost his progressive stance. He preferred the definite but lost American pastoral idea (‘Back to the land that gave me birth. The grandest place on God’s green earth, California. That’s where I belong’ (Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 962) above the materialist, consumptive industrial capitalism of the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. In sum, the industrial novels of Sinclair and Dos Passos are not that different from social research, even in terms of the ‘research methods’ they applied: participant observation, interviewing, and documentary material. What makes Dos Passos most interesting is his experimenting with various new, experimental ‘research techniques’ based on montage, reportage, and narrative (such as in his newsreels, camera eyes, biographical portraits, and fictional narratives, and the combination of these four). In principle these techniques are applicable too in social research. As we shall see further on in this book Dos Passos is fully in line with other innovative New Objectivity authors in Weimar Germany, such as Siegfried Kracauer, as well as with Soviet Russian writer Ilja Ehrenburg (see next chapter). Finally, in all the countries considered in this study the essential characteristics of the machine age have strongly influenced both the form and content of Modernist documentary industrial novels.

Works cited Agee J., & Evans, W. (2001). Let us now praise famous men: Three tenant families. Houghton Mifflin Company. (Original work published 1941) Arthur, A. (2007). Radical innocent: Upton Sinclair. Random House. Barnes Jensen, B. (1978). The Coal War: A sequel to King Coal. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 32(1), 112–113, book review. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2522427 Becker, G. T. (1959). Upton Sinclair: Quixote in a flivver. College English, 21(3), 133–140. https://www.jstor.org/stable/372837 Bellamy, E. (1888). Looking backward. Amazon Kindle E-books. Publisher unknown. Brewster Folsom, M. (1979). Upton Sinclair’s escape from the jungle: The narrative strategy and suppressed conclusion of America’s first proletarian novel. Prospects, 4(October), 237–266. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300002891 Conroy, J. (1991). The disinherited. University of Missouri Press. (Original work published 1931)

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Conroy, S. S. (1970). Sinclair Lewis’s sociological imagination. American Literature, 42(3), pp. 348–362. https://doi.org/102307/2923910 Dawson, H. T. (1991). Winston Churchill and Upton Sinclair: An early review of ‘The Jungle’. American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, 24(1), 72–78. https://www. jstor.org/stable/27746475 De Gier, E. (2018). Modernist industrial novels and industrial sociology: A comparison between Weimar Germany and Post-WWII Italy. Przeglad Socjologiczny/Sociological Review, 67(3), 179–196. https://www.ceeol.com/search/ article-detail?id=718121 Denning, M. (2010). The cultural front: The laboring of American culture in the twentieth century. Verso. (Original work published 1997) Dos Passos, J. (2023). Three soldiers. Bibliotech Press. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1920) Dos Passos, J. (2000). Manhattan transfer. Penguin. Kindle E-books Amazon. (Original work published 1925) Dos Passos, J. (1960). U.S.A. Penguin. (Original work published 1938) Eggers, D. (2013). The circle. Vintage. Eggers, D. (2021). The every. Vintage. Filler, L. (1976). The muckrakers. Stanford University Press. Foster, G, (1986). John Dos Passos’ use of film technique in Manhattan Transfer & The 42nd Parallel. Literature/Film Quarterly, 14(3), 186–194. https://www.jstor. org/stable/43796267 Hardwick, Elisabeth (2002). Pilgrim’s progress. New York Review of Books, June. https://www.nybooks.com Hofstadter, R. (1955). The age of reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. Vintage. Kennedy, D.M. (1999). Freedom from fear: The American people in depression and war, 1929–1945. Oxford University Press. Koziol, K. G. (1992). Novels and short-stories about work: An annotated bibliography. University of California. National Center for Research in Vocational Education. Krause, P. (1992). Rethinking the Homestead lockout on the fourth of July. Western Pennsylvania History, 75(2), 53–59. https://journals.psu.edu/wph/article/ view/4322/4139 London, J. (1905). Appeal to Reason. November 18. Mattson, K. (2008). Upton Sinclair and the other American century. John Wiley & Sons. McGerr, M. (2003). A fierce discontent: The rise and fall of the progressive movement in America. Oxford University Press. Owen, J. E. (1978). The Coal War by Upton Sinclair. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 435(January), 325, book review. https://www.jstor. org/stable/1043133

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Pastorello, K. (2014). The progressives: Activism and reform in American society, 1893–1917. Wiley Blackwell. Pizer, D. (1988). Dos Passos’s U.S.A.: A critical study. University Press of Virginia. Pizer, D. (2012). John Dos Passos in the 1920s: The development of a modernist style. Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 45(4), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/mos.2012.0047 Rauchway, E. (2008). The Great Depression & the New Deal: A very short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Rodgers, D. T. (1982). In search of progressivism. The promise of American history: Progress and prospects. Reviews in American History, 10(4), 113–132. https://www. jstor.org/stable/2701822 Rosenzweig, R., Lichtenstein, N., Brown, J., & Jaffee, D. (2008). Who built America? Working people and the nation’s history, vol 2: Since 1877. Bedford/St. Martin’s. Sinclair Lewis, H. (2010). Mainstreet. Createspace Independent Pub. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1920) Sinclair Lewis, H. (2020). Babbit. Grapevine. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1922) Sinclair, U. (1906). The jungle. Amazon Kindle E-books. Publisher unknown. Sinclair, U. (1917). King coal. Amazon Kindle E-books. Publisher unknown. Sinclair, U. (2010). The flivver king: A story of Ford America. Charles Kerr Publishing Company. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1937) Sinclair, U. (2015). The coal war. Open Road Media. Amazon Kindle E-Books. (Original work published 1976, written in 1917) Sinclair, U. (2016). The autobiography of Upton Sinclair. Pickle Partners Publishing. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1962) Sommervill, B. A. (2002). Ida Tarbell. Pioneer investigative reporter. Morgan Reynolds Publishers. Steinbeck, J. (1976). The grapes of wrath. Penguin. (Original work published 1939) Tarbell, I. (1904). The history of the Standard Oil Company. 2 vols. Macmillan. Tichi, C. (1987). Shifting gears: Technology, literature, culture in modernist America. University of North Carolina Press. Trombold, J. (1998). From the future to the past: The disillusionment of John Dos Passos. Studies in American Fiction, 26(2), 237–256. https://doi.org/101353/ saf.1998.0000 Veblen, T. (1970). The theory of the leisure class. Unwin. (Original work published 1925) Wilentz, S. (1992). A triumph of the Gilded Age. New York Review of Books, October 22.

4

Socialist-realist industrial novels in the Leninist and Stalinist Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s Abstract The focus in this chapter is on the mimicking of the Americanization of production processes in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. In this period the Soviet Union underwent a process of crash industrialization, with the intention to surpass even the United States and become the world’s foremost industrial nation. Architecture, arts, film, photography, and industrial or ‘factory’ novels were marshalled to contribute to this end. Based on the formal state ideology of socialist realism, many industrial novels, mainly propagandistic, were written by individual writers as well as writers’ collectives. Generally, writers of factory novels were seen as ‘engineers of the soul’. Four of these novels are analysed here against the background of the Americanization of Soviet industry. Keywords: Soviet Union, American tempo, Fordism, shock brigades, Stakhanovism, industrial novels.

Introduction Like the United States and Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union was at the forefront of writing Modernist industrial novels in the 1920s and 1930s. But as has been argued, in contrast to the US and European countries, the primary goal of Soviet documentary literature was propagandistic. This implied denying the existence of a class-struggle in the Soviet Union between capital and labour, as well as ‘highlighting the great progress being achieved across the vast nation’ (Freeman, 2019, p. 211). The monthly large-format magazine USSR in Construction, published between 1930 and 1941 in Russian, English, German, French, and partly also in Spanish, combined photography and

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH04

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journalism. Its illustrative issues were devoted to dams, canals, hydroelectric plants, railroads, car and tractor factories such as the Gorky Automobile Works (called the ‘Soviet Detroit’) and the gigantic Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. Famous photographers such as Alexander Rodchenko were involved, as well as ‘the number one’ writer of the Stalin Era, Maxim Gorky. Next to this monthly magazine, comparable documentary books were published, such as, for example, the seven-volume work Heavy Industry (1935). In 1931 Maxim Gorky initiated a big documentary project on the History of Factories and Plants. By 1938 this project had resulted in the publication of 30 volumes. Another notable documentary work of the 1930s was Those who Built Stalingrad, as Told by Themselves. This was an oral history of the Soviet and foreign workers who built the Tractorstroi (tractor factory) of Stalingrad. Renowned western industrial photographers and cinematographers went to the Soviet Union to picture the main industrial sites of the First Five-Year Plan. Margaret Bourke-White, American factory photographer of the New Deal, went to Russia and published photographs of the Stalingrad tractor plant, the Dnieprostroi Dam, the Black Sea cement plant fictionalized in Fyodo Vasilievich Gladkov’s renowned industrial novel Cement, as well as the Magnitogorsk industrial complex. Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, meanwhile, went to Magnitogorsk for several months to film the construction of a huge blast-furnace (Freeman, 2019, pp. 210–218). The writing of industrial novels in the Soviet Union fitted narrowly into the broader literary genre of ‘socialist realism’. Socialist realism, the successor to earlier politicized deployments of the arts such as ‘Agitprop’ and ‘Proletkult’, may be considered as arts and literature controlled by the state and used as a tool to create propaganda.1 It was considered as ‘the most progressive form of art’. Further clarification of the concept of socialist realism was given by Politburo member Andrey Zhdanov at the inaugural meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 in Moscow. Zhdanov, following Stalin in calling writers ‘engineers of the soul’, formally defined socialist realism as ‘the authentic representation of reality against the background of the revolutionary development of the Soviet Union’ (Westerman, 2002/2011, pp. 168–169). After further paving the way by paying additional attention to the remarkable adoption of Taylorism and Fordism in the Soviet Union of the 1920s 1 Agitprop (agitation propaganda) and Proletkult (proletarian culture) were renewal movements of avant-garde artists and writers after the Russian Revolution, peaking in the 1920s. Their principal objective was to develop communist avant-gardist working-class art and literature. Other (international) currents may be considered as precursors of agitprop, proletkult and socialist realism, including Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism.

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and 1930s, as well as to the concept of socialist realism, this chapter will offer an overview of Leninist and Stalinist industrial novels. In particular four trend-setting socialist-realist works will be analysed in more depth – Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (Zamyatin, 1924/1993), Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov’s 1920s production novel Cement (Gladkov, 1925/1994), Ilja Ehrenburg’s documentary novel The Life of the Automobile (Ehrenburg, 1929–1930/1983), and Valentine Kataev’s production novel Time, Forward! (Kataev, 1933/1995). Kataev’s novel dealt with the construction of the large Magnitogorsk metallurgical complex during Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. In addition, Kataev’s novel will be compared with John Scott’s remarkable documentary memoir Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (Scott, 1942/2016). John Scott was a skilled 20-year-old American welder who spent several years in the Soviet Union during the Great Depression period. He wanted to contribute to the communist experiment and lived and worked in Magnitogorsk. After his return to the United States, he documented his experiences in book form.

Amerikansky Temp: Taylorism and Fordism in the Soviet Union As has been argued, Americanization of production – that is, the implementation of Taylorism and Fordism – played an important role in the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union, at least from the Russian Revolution in 1917 until the period of Stalin’s Great Terror in the second half of the 1930s.2 Although never fully embraced, both Taylorism and Fordism supported in a substantial way the crash transformation of the country from a backward agrarian economy into an industrial economy. During the latter part of the civil war (1917–1923), when the ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP) was initiated, both Lenin and Trotsky propagated the benefits of Taylorism for the Soviet economy.3 Already in 1918 Lenin had put it as follows: ‘The possibility of building socialism depends exactly on our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out 2 This paragraph is largely based on Freeman, 2019, pp. 169–225. See also Hughes, 1989, 249–284; Schlögel, 2008, pp. 576–591: Bailes, 1981, pp. 421–448; Stites, 1989, 145–164. 3 The New Economic Policy or NEP was initiated by Lenin in 1921 and lasted until the implementation of the First Five Year Plan in 1928 by Stalin. During the NEP heavy industry, banking, and foreign trade remained nationalized, but private enterprise was allowed to re-enter the remaining part of the economy and the agricultural sector.

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and adapt it to our ends’ (quoted in Smith, 1993, p. 4; see also Braverman, 1974, p. 12). Fordism got its momentum during Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan from 1928–1933.4 Important in this respect was a ‘long-term trend toward chronic inefficiency and economic decline’ after the revolution, the civil war and the successive introduction of the NEP, and the First Five-Year Plan. Predominant here was the issue of labour discipline of a workforce mainly consisting of former peasants not accustomed to working in the new industrializing context. Problems of high labour turnover, absenteeism, drinking, slow work, sabotage, disregard of quality, alienation, and so on were abundant, and needed to be solved as quickly as possible (Filtzer, 1996, 9–28). Though in principal capitalist innovations, Taylorism and Fordism could also offer solutions to communist industrialization. According to Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Fordism ‘deeply impressed Marxist theoreticians, the technical intelligentsia, the cultural avant-garde, and ordinary readers of mass-circulation popular science journals’ (Siegelbaum, 2011, p. 2; also Greenstein, 2014). In his seminal history of the factory, American historian Joshua B. Freeman concisely describes the so-called ‘crash industrialization’ of the Soviet Union during this period (Freeman, 2019). Lenin considered scientific management not only as a tool to increase productivity, but also as an indispensable means to establish a socialist society by underpinning the Bolshevik revolution. The Soviet leadership aimed to learn from America by combining Bolshevist passion with American pragmatism (Schlögel, 2008, p. 587). Rogger (1981) contends that for the Soviets at that time America signified youth and invincibility, the triumph of the machine, and the possibility of freeing humanity from the burdens of poverty and toil. In sum, Americanism stood for mass production, the assembly line, and Fordizatsia. (Rogger, 1981, p. 383). American Tempo (Amerikansky Temp) should not only contribute to the Soviet Union catching up with the United States, but even surpassing it. The Central Labour Institute, founded and led by worker-poet Alexei Kapitonvich Gastev, was established to promote scientific management in the Soviet Union. Gastev, nicknamed the ‘Ovid 4 Stalin implemented various successive Five-Year Plans focused on the rapid development of industry and the forced collectivization of agriculture. The First Five-Year Plan of 1928–1933 was focused on the construction of necessary industrial infrastructure such as the establishment of the vast Magnitogorsk steel and mining complex, car and tractor factories, canals, and dams. Stalin appointed Serge Ordzhonikidze, member of the Politbureau, as People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry. In the Second Five Year Plan of 1933–1938 the increase of consumption also became a priority.

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of engineers’, lauded in his well-known poem ‘We Grow Out of Iron’ the fusion of man and machine. He considered the relationship between groups of workers and groups of machines as ‘mechanized collectivism’ (Hughes, 1989, 257–258). His Taylorism not only included speeding up production but also making work more human. He formulated sixteen rules for work which became also the core of his Taylorism, such as for example: ‘Don’t begin to work until your instrument is prepared and entirely ready for work; if the work doesn’t go right, don’t get angry, but take a break, think about it, and start again, calmly; and during work you must rest. During heavy work you must rest more often and sit down if possible. In lighter work take less frequent breaks, but distributed uniformly’ (Carden, 1987).5 Gastev’s Poetry of the Factory Floor contains the following poem that reminds one not only of Taylor’s time and motion studies, but also of John Dos Passos’s experimental style in U.S.A.: Order 2 Chronometer, report to duty. To the machines. Rise. Pause. Charge of attention. Supply. Switch on. Self-feed. Stop. (Quoted in Ings, 2016, p. 77)

As well as being influenced by American poet Walt Whitman, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 utopian novel What is to be Done?, Gastev worked for a time also as a worker in the Paris Citroën factory and subsequently in Russia on the assembly line, as a machine operator, and as a tram driver. All his life he was fascinated by machinery and technology as well as working and living conditions of workers. In the Central Institute of Labour this ‘Soviet Taylor’ carried out Taylorist time-and-motion studies, wrote books and articles about scientific management, and developed a biomechanical Social Engineering Machine. This was a sort of mock-up machine which

5 On Gastev, Taylorism and Fordism in the Soviet Union see also Bailes, 1977; Wren & Bedeian, 2004; Sochor 1981; and Stites, 1989, pp. 144–164.

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was ultimately to be applied and dispersed all across the Soviet-Union (Ings, 2016, 68–84). It is important to realize that from the outset the benefits of Taylorism were disputed between two important opposing factions within the communist party. Gastev and his Central Institute of Labour belonged to the so-called ‘pragmatists’ who fully embraced American Taylorism, or ‘scientific organization of labour’ (in Russian, nauchanaya organizatsiya truda or NOT). On the other hand, were the so-called ‘ideologues’ who criticized an uncritical and literal adoption of Amerikansky temp. This group, led by Platon Kerzhentsev and his organization the Time League (Liga Vremya) promoted an adapted form of Taylorism modified by industrial psychology and worker protection. Eventually the Liga drew the short straw in the course of the 1920s (Sochor, 1981; see also Bailes, 1977). American, British, and German technical engineers and management experts as well as American architects were invited to the Soviet Union in the 1920s to help carry out the NEP and the subsequent First Five-Year Plan. The American Amalgamated Clothing Workers union (ACW) assisted in setting up the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) in 1921. The First Five-Year Plan was focused on the development of large-scale factory and infrastructure projects, such as the construction of a number of tractor factories, a car plant in the city Nizhny Novgorod (renamed Gorky in 1932), large steel works in Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Dnieporstroi hydroelectric dam, a railway connecting Kazakhstan with western Siberia, and the Volga–Don Canal. After first importing Ford’s Model T and Fordson tractors on a large scale, Ford was invited in vain to set up a Ford tractor factory in the Soviet Union. Instead, Ford’s factory buildings architect Albert Kahn signed a contract in 1929 with Amtorg, a Soviet trading company, to design a huge tractor factory (Tractorstroi) in Stalingrad, which was going to produce 40,000–50,000 tractors a year. In the same year Ford effectively supported the Soviets in designing and running the new car plant in Nizhny Novgorod. This factory, modelled after Ford’s famous River Rouge plant in Detroit, was completed in 1931. Henry Ford sent forty engineers from River Rouge to the ‘Soviet Detroit’, Nizhny Novgorod. In return, 160 selected Soviet workers went to the United States for further training (Schlögel, 2008, p. 584).6 Nizhny Novgorod car works became the largest automobile plant in Europe at that time, with about 32,000 workers plus an adjacent company town of about 120,000 people, increasing by 1938 to 250,000 inhabitants. 6 Siegelbaum wrote that ‘the architecture of the “Soviet Detroits”, the machinery, the layout of the shops, in many cases the parts themselves came directly from Detroit. So did many of the engineers, the workers and some of the directors’ (Siegelbaum, 2011, p. 5).

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The core piece of the First Five-Year Plan was the construction of the immense metallurgical factory and mining complex at Magnitogorsk (literally ‘Magnetic Mountain’), on the eastern slopes of the Urals, again with the support of foreign experts. This ‘Mighty Giant of the Five-Year Plan’ was modelled after the large US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, which also had its own iron mine at its disposal. The plant became a component of an even larger ‘Kombinat’ or industrial conglomerate of related functional facilities across the Soviet Union. By 1938 Magnitogorsk employed 27,000 workers. Part of the Magnitogorsk workforce, as well as some of the workers in the other big projects, was in fact forced labour under the control of the security police. Forced labourers were often former wealthier peasants (‘kulaks’, considered class enemies), criminals, and convicted engineers and technical experts. The best-known example of forced labour by prisoners was the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Forced labour was considered a means to re-educate or enculturate workers into socialist model-citizens and to contribute to the construction of a socialist society. This was supported by offering literacy courses and other educational and cultural programmes. For example, the steelworks at Magnitogorsk had at its disposal a large ‘Everyday-Life Administration’, which was not only responsible for the housing of workers, but also organized a broad range of social, educational, and cultural programmes. The town had at its disposal a large theatre, eighteen cinemas, four libraries, twelve workers’ clubs, and a Palace of the Metallurgists with an auditorium, marble hallways, and a reading room.7 The subsequent second and third Five-Year Plans, initiated in 1933 and 1938 respectively, coincided with the Great Depression in the United States and Western Europe. Both plans still prioritized the development of heavy industry and the forced collectivization of agriculture. The Great Depression in the United States stimulated the emigration of skilled unemployed American workers and farmers to the Soviet Union at the onset of the 1930s. On the other hand, the big slump in the industrial West dampened enthusiasm for adopting Americanism (Taylorism and Fordism) in the Soviet Union. During the period of Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ or ‘Great Purge’ in 1937–1938 Americanism gradually lost its Soviet momentum. As a consequence, many western workers and experts were forced to leave the Soviet Union or were arrested. Also, the renowned Soviet proponent of Taylorism Alexei Gastev was arrested in 1938 and then executed in 1939 for ‘counterrevolutionary terrorist activity’. 7

On Magnitogorsk see in particular Kotkin, 1997.

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The Soviet application of Taylorism: Shock brigades and Stakhanovism Russian factories had already started to adopt Taylorism before the onset of the Revolution in 1917, but this process was intensified in the 1920s. In particular, time-and-motion studies and piece-rate wages became very popular. This resulted in specific Soviet forms of Taylorism characterized by changes in work organization as well as intensification of labour, and not so much by technical innovation. First, in the 1920s, several competition campaigns and so-called shock brigades, mostly made up of youth workers from ‘Komsomol’ (the communist youth organization), contributed to significant productivity increases in various firms without systematic linkage between labour activism and advanced techniques (Siegelbaum, 1988, p. 296). Subsequently, in the 1930s the ‘Stakhanovite’ movement succeeded the shock brigades as a typical, albeit limited, Soviet interpretation of Taylorism.8 In particular, during Stalin’s second and third Five-Year Plans, this was ‘an attempt to rationalize production, to make workers work harder, by reorganizing their labour, innovation, and driving them harder’, and resulted in an ‘abundance of individual records’ without setting a standard practice (Van Atta, 1986, p. 331). Contrary to shock work, Stakhanovism, according to Siegelbaum, ‘was most obviously about productivity, about making the most of working time to achieve the maximum output with available technology’ (Siegelbaum 1988, p. 296). In this context Don van Atta refers to the importance of the common phenomenon of ‘storming’. This implied carrying out most of the work in the last ten days of the month under very high pressure. During the first ten days of the month, by contrast, workers often had to be idle because of shortages of supplies. Storming became normal practice and had negative effects on quality. Therefore, the logic of maximizing production in the Soviet Union in the 1930s did not fit well the logic of Taylorism, based on maximizing profit (Van Atta, 1986, p. 334). Another fundamental difference with Taylorism was that Stakhanovism reinforced the power of workers rather than the power of managers. Siegelbaum, who carried out an authoritative study on the Stakhanovite movement, 8 Aleksei Stakhanov was a miner who on 30 August 1935 mined 102 tons of coal, 14 times the quota he had been assigned for that shift. Held up as a heroic example of Soviet labour, others sought to emulate his example, becoming known as ‘Stakhanovites’, and the general movement for exceeding targets through increased effort and efficiency, ‘Stakhanovism’. Before his fall, Alexei Gastev became responsible for the training of Stakhanovites. By 1939, 34 per cent of all Union members, comprising 80 per cent of the Soviet workforce at that time, were designated Stakhanovites (Wren & Bedeian, 2004, p. 294).

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concluded that all in all, Stakhanovism contained an ‘amalgam of practices that both impinged on and were subjected to appropriation by different groups and institutions’. Political interventions directed at increasing productivity were only part of it (Siegelbaum, 1988, p. 6). One of the remarkable effects of Stakhanovism was also that it created a relatively small group of elite industrial workers who earned higher wages and obtained other privileges. This was at the expense of the managers needed in a fully Taylorized system. However, Stakhanovites lacked collective bargaining power. As a consequence, on balance their privileges remained ‘meagre, contingent and often ephemeral’ (Siegelbaum, 1988, p. 299). By the end of the 1930s, during Stalin’s Great Terror, the Stakhanovite movement lost further momentum in favour of more systematic attention to efficiency and profitability, called khozraschet (Davies, 1989, p. 486). This implied a reinforcement of managerial power ‘down to the level of foreman and brigade leader’ (Siegelbaum, 1988, p. 299).

Socialist realism and the role of the industrial novel (Gorky and writers’ brigades) Officially the term socialist realism was coined in 1932, and the writer Maxim Gorky is usually considered its founder. At the First All-Union Congress of Soviet writers two years later, in 1934, congress chairman Gorky contended that ‘we must choose labour as the central hero of our books, i.e., man organised by the processes of labour, who in our country is armed with all the might of modern technology, man, who, in turn is making labour easier, more productive, raising it to the level of art’ (Bowlt, 1988, p. 294). From then on socialist realism became the official doctrine of Soviet literature until the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Clark, 1997, p. 31). Andrei Zhdanov (Party Secretary and Head of Propganda), close collaborator of Josef Stalin, was influential in embedding socialist realism as official Soviet ideology. He was generally considered as Stalin’s successor, but died prematurely in 1948. Next to Gorky, Zhdanov was one of the main speakers at the 1934 writers’ congress. In his speech he clarified Stalin’s conviction that writers were ‘engineers of human souls’ who needed to contribute to the forging of a new superior people. This implied that Soviet writers had to abandon ‘the romanticism of non-existent heroes who temporarily divert the reader from his unhappy life and spirit away to an imaginary world’. Instead, ‘the human spirit had to be fine-tuned in order to awaken and focus its gaze on socialism’ (Westerman, 2002/2011, pp. 168–169; also, Todorov, 2009, p. 221 and 209-210).

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The theoretical base of Zhdanovite socialist realism was a triad of internalized attitudes: ideological commitment, party-mindedness, and national/ popular spirit. All art and literature had to be in conformity with the ideas of the communist party, not only in an abstract way but being ‘militant’, ‘aggressive’, and producing an ‘active effect’, as well as being opposed to ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘bourgeois nationalism’ (Heller, 1997, 52–54). Writers had to act first as observers and journalists of reality to then construct a world that served the interest of proletariat. Therefore, socialist realism, at the core, is not realism at all but an intentional reconstruction of reality. In the Stalinist novel the myth of the ‘Great Family’ was central. The father-figure played an important role as a ‘positive’ mentor or role model for the son. Usually, the role of the father was given to a party member (Clark, 1997, pp. 29–30). Most novels were based on a master plot derived from a limited number of exemplary model-novels that formed a canon of socialist-realist novels. Usually protagonists or ‘positive heroes’ were either workers, administrators, or soldiers. In 1932 the newly formed Writer’s Union declared socialist realism as the official and only applicable method. From then on, the Writer’s Union published regularly an updated list accepted canonical works, including those by Gorky, Gladkov, Ostrovsky, Paustovski, and Kataev (Clark, 2000, pp. 4–5, 10). According to literary scholar Katerina Clark by far the most common type of Leninist/Stalinist socialist-realist novel is the so-called production novel. This is a novel about how the plan was fulfilled or the project was constructed. Gladkov’s Cement, part of the canon, is considered the original type of the production novel (Clark, 2000, p. 256). From the outset, the writing of socialist-realist novels became more or less a collectivist affair. On the one side the canon of socialist-realist novels operated as a sort of series of common templates for future individual authors. On the other hand, so-called writers’ brigades replaced to a certain extent individual initiative. In his book Engineers of the Soul Dutch non-fiction writer Frank Westerman describes such a writers’ brigade created in 1933 by the leading Soviet author Maxim Gorky. As a contribution to Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, and based on a list of some 120 writers, Gorky created a collective of 36 writers who would report on the completion of the Belomor Canal (connecting the Baltic and White Seas). This resulted in a collectively written book published in January 1934 called Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea.9 Complementing the work of the fiziki (engineers, architects, hydrologists, electrical engineers) who were responsible 9 The canal, totalling 227 kilometres in length, was excavated by 126,000 convicts (Westerman, 2002/2011, p. 66).

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for the creation of the socialist-realist reality, engineers of the soul belonged to the liriki. These liriki consisted of writers, film-makers, composers, sculptors, and painters whose role was to contribute to ‘the metamorphosis of man and society’. Gorky’s approach made the individual writer an anachronism in the Stalinist Soviet context (Westerman, 2002/2011, pp. 60–65). Among other things, the question is how in this socialist-realist context Taylorism/Fordism was translated into the Modernist production novel. We get a first impression from the poetry of the industrial poets such as Alexei Gastev, and one may wonder to what extent Gastev himself – as the leading Taylorist – influenced other Soviet authors. Gastev obviously introduced Taylorist elements in his previously mentioned Poetry of the Factory Floor.10 An additional example concerns one of his most famous poems, ‘Factory Whistles’: Mornings when the whistles shrill in the Factory outskirts, that is no call to bondage. In the song of the future. Once we worked in wretched sweatshops, each Beginning our days at various hours. Now, every morning, at eight o’clock, the whistles cry out for the whole million. Now we start together to the minute. The whole million takes up the hammer at one Instant. Our first blow sounds together. Of what do the whistles sing? That’s the morning hymn of unity (Quoted in Carden, 1987, p. 9).

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s anti-Taylorism: We (1921) Gastev also influenced other Modernist Soviet writers and poets.11 Most remarkable in this respect is Yevgeny Zamyatin. His famous dystopian novel 10 Americanization played a role not only in socialist-realist fiction and poetry but also in theatre. Rogger mentions in this respect Nikolai Pogodin’s play Tempo: ‘the young Communist Maksimka, head of the Bureau of Rationalization at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, spends his nights studying ‘Fordism, Taylorism and the scientific organization of labor’ and declares that one has to ‘master Americanism and suffuse it with Communist principles’ (Rogger, 1981, p. 383) 11 Carden also mentions Yuri Olesha’s novel Envy, as well as the Andrei Platonov, whose early poetry is similar to Gastev’s (Carden, 1987, p. 17).

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We, written in 1920–21, received its first publication (by E. P. Dutton, New York) in an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924.12 This novel first of all seemed to be part of a wave of utopian Russian fiction that emerged in the mid-19th century. These novels laid out radical alternative socialist societies. Most famous was Nicholas Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? (1863), inspired by Charles Fourier’s utopianism. In his book Chernyshevsky sketches a picture of a primarily pastoral future, being ‘a community of people without city, state, or central power, living a round of work, leisure, love, equality, and shared lives. The immediate environment is a glass palace, enclosing a communal building with a winter garden, private rooms, and rooms for communal dining and social intercourse’ (Stites, 1989, p. 26). In the same tradition were published, at the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander Bogdanov’s Martian-Marxist utopia Red Star (1908) and its sequel Engineer Menni (1913). Effectively, We was a very critical satire of Gastev’s Taylorist and Fordist ideas and the character of an ordered and rationalized society he propagated in the Soviet Union. Patricia Carden argues that before writing We, Zamyatin was certainly aware of several pieces of Gastev’s poetry, such as his Shockwork Poetry (Carden, 1987, p. 9). Set several centuries in the future, the protagonist of We is the heroinventor – but also philosopher and poet – D-503, a character based on Aleksei Gastev himself. D-503 is involved in the design and production of a spaceship, called Integral. D-503 operates in the context of a rationally ordered society called One State, ruled in an absolute sense by an absolute dictator, the Great Benefactor. He describes life and work in One State in an almost identical way to Gastev’s description in his above-cited poem ‘Factory whistles’: Our table of Hours! Why it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning with six wheeled precision, at the same hour, and the same moment, we – millions of us – get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison, we end it. And fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths (Zamyatin, 1993, p. 13). 12 Unless cited otherwise here I base myself on Clarence Brown’s translation (1993). The original Russian text was not published until 1952 (also in New York). Unable to get his works published in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s, Zamyatin was given permission to emigrate in 1931, and lived in exile in Paris until his death in 1937. We was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

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The character Taylor mentioned in We is not literally F. W. Taylor but an ancestor or ‘the Godlike deviser of many rules for efficient behaviour’ regulated by the so-called Taylor Tables. These are schedules that regiment every permissible activity of the citizens of One State (Rhodes, 1976, p. 33). As Carolyn Rhodes contends, Zamyatin comes closest to the original F. W. Taylor when he describes the building of the spaceship: I watched how the workers, true to the Taylor system, would bend down, then unbend and turn around swiftly and rhythmically like levers of an enormous engine … I watched monstrous cranes easily rolling over glass rails; like the workers themselves, they would obediently turn, bend down, and bring their loads inward into the bowels of the Integral. All seemed one: humanized machine and mechanized humans. It was the most magnificent, most stirring beauty, harmony, music! (Quoted in Rhodes, 1976, pp. 35, 79).13

Zamyatin states the following about his imagined Taylor: No doubt about it, that Taylor was the genius of antiquity. True, it never finally occurred to him to extend his method over the whole life, of every step you take right around the clock. He wasn’t able to integrate into his system the whole spread from hour 1:00 to hour 24:00. But still, how could they write whole libraries about someone like Kant and hardly ever notice Taylor – that prophet who could see ten centuries ahead? (Zamyatin, 1993, p. 34)

A whole genre of dystopian science fiction set in future totalitarian states was subsequently inspired by We (Stites, 1989, p. 152).

Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov’s Cement (1925) Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov’s novel Cement is generally considered the first formally canonized classical socialist-realist production novel (Clark, 2000, pp. 69–82, 256–260). Gladkov (1883–1958) published his book in 1925 and

13 This quotation is from the Zilboorg translation (1924). The equivalent passage in the Brown translation is at Zamyatin, 1993, p. 81).

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revised it thereafter various times.14 He was born into a peasant family in the village of Chenavka. After being arrested for revolutionary activities in 1905, he went into forced exile for three years. Afterwards he became a journalist and writer. In 1945 he was appointed Director of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. In 1949 he was awarded the Stalin Prize for his literary accomplishments. Apart from Cement he also published the novel Courser of Fire, several short stories, and plays. Cement is set in the austere post-revolutionary context of the early 1920s. The country is in disarray and is still in the grip of extreme poverty after the Revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil war. Existing (bourgeois) production facilities are partly or completely idle or have been dismantled on a large scale. Reviving industry became a priority in Lenin’s New Economic Policy. This is also the case in Cement. When protagonist Gleb Chumalov, a communist, former mechanic of the cement factory, and decorated war hero, returns to the factory’s Pleasant Colony (the factory’s workingmen’s village) he finds the factory deserted and idle. The former workers are still at the site but to survive they have turned to farming and breeding goats. Despite bureaucratic opposition of the local party institutions, Chumalov takes the initiative to restart the cement factory. In order to do this, he needs the technical support of the former factory’s technologist engineer, a certain Herman Hermanovitch Kleist. Kleist, presumably a German immigrant, was also responsible for the construction of the main factory buildings before the Revolution. His factory room is somewhat hidden at the end of a winding corridor: No one called at his study. Who would want the technician when the factory was silent as a grave and the cement lying in damp sheds had long ago petrified into blocks hard as iron, when the cable-ways were damaged, the cables broken, the trucks derailed … rusted from rain and lying amidst grass …? No one wanted the engineer when the mechanics wandered idly along the highroad and footpaths, around the empty buildings and through the yard, carrying away wood for fuel, the metal parts of machines in order to make pipe-lighters. (Gladkov, 1925/1994, p. 76)

Chumalov and Kleist were not natural allies: before the Revolution and civil war Kleist had handed over Chumalov with some of his colleagues to the white (non-communist) authorities ‘in a spirit of revenge’ (Gladkov, 14 Lahusen remarks that the revision of Cement covered several decades (and was still ongoing at the time of the author’s death) (Lahusen, 1997, p. 16).

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1925/1994, p. 85), because of subversive activities in the factory. Nevertheless, the two principal characters of the book soon begin a positive collaboration. Eventually the factory is successfully reopened. An essential fact underlined by the novel is the need for the technical expertise of ‘bourgeois’ industrial managers like engineer Kleist in the new communist reality. Workers’ self-management as an alternative, though initially evident in the communist ideology, didn’t turn out as a real option, as Gelb describes: ‘After the elimination of workers’ self-management movements in 1917 and 1918, the Bolsheviks imposed strict hierarchical forms of industrial organization on the workers … In the factory, stern discipline was enforced and the regime made use of Taylorist techniques of management which imitated those pioneered by American corporations … workers were systematically excluded from control over production by an elite of professional managers during the early years of Soviet history’ (Gelb, 1981, pp. 57, 61). This is also illustrated in Cement: ‘Comrade Technologist, we’ve acted the fool long enough. We need heads … and hands. We’ve got to start things going! Coal and oil! Warmth and bread for the workmen. The industrial revival of the Republic…’ He seized Kleist by the shoulders and shook him in joyful excitement … ‘Your brains and hands are worth gold to us. A technologist like you – why, you’re one of the greatest in the Republic! …’ ’Well Comrade Technologist, get your brains in hand and we’ll get to work. We’ll build bigger things even than these. A new world, Comrade Technologist!’ (Gladkov, 1925/1994, p. 89).

At the end of the novel the factory is successfully restarted. This is celebrated by an official ceremony organized by the new factory management and the local communist authorities in the presence of all the factory workers. The novel’s hero, Gleb Chumalov, tells those present: ‘Comrades: we’ll do everything, build up everything, and give points to everyone, and be damned to them! If only we had more technologists like our engineer Kleist and a bit more of some other things – we’d put it all over Europe in no time’. (Gladkov, 1925/1994, p. 311).

In conclusion, Cement may be considered an exemplary novel about post-civil-war reconstruction in austere and still rather chaotic social and economic circumstances some years after the October Revolution of 1917. The main issues to be dealt with were problems of supply (wood and fuel),

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administration (bureaucracy and sabotage), labour relations, technology, and at that time still-ongoing guerrilla insurgency on the part of counterrevolutionaries (Clark, 2000, p. 75). The book does not deal in great detail with problems of productivity or the organization of work and work processes. On the other hand, the theme of waste is prominent in the background.

Ilja Ehrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile (1929) Ilja Ehrenburg, who was born in Kiev in 1891 and died in Moscow in 1967, is considered one of the most important socialist-realist authors. Here I will focus on his most famous documentary Modernist novel The Life of the Automobile, published in 1929 and translated into various languages.15 Ehrenburg was a very prolific writer, publishing some hundred novels, his memoirs of the period 1921–1941, and journalism. Though a socialist-realist writer, he nevertheless worked in various styles. The Life of the Automobile is generally considered outside the Soviet Union as a milestone of the neue Sachlichkeit style, which developed primarily in the 1920s and early 1930s in Weimar Germany and also in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity or New Realism) was not limited to literature, but was also a term applied in poetry, film, architecture, painting, and music. German philosopher Ernst Bloch strikingly called neue Sachlickeit ‘the doctor at the hospital-bed in which capitalism lay’ (Grüttemeier et al., 2013, p. 8). It was strongly influenced by Americanism, or more specifically by fast industrial tempo, productivity, and efficiency (Stites, 1991: 149). In this context it is not strange at all that novels in the sphere of neue Sachlichkeit dealt with the problems of Taylorized workers. Ehrenburg’s novel The Life of the Automobile is remarkable in the Soviet context. Its style is more in line with the German neue Sachlichkeit style than with the Soviet socialist-realist style. The main characteristics of the novel are its documentary nature and its form of social reportage, reminiscent of John Dos Pasos’s U.S.A (1938) (see Chapter 3) as well as Siegfried Kracauer’s Berlin novel Die Angestellten (1930/2013) (see Chapter 5). The Life of the Automobile is written completely in the present tense, in predominantly short sentences. It reads like a mosaic of a multitude of facts. Anten argues that the dynamic and modern worlds of trade and industry in the novel are given form in a variety of scenes whose unifying principle is contrast 15 I have based my reading of the novel on the German translation, Das Leben der Autos (1930/1983).

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and simultaneity (Anten, 2013, p. 204). According to the renowned Dutch literary critic of that time, Menno ter Braak, this quasi-cinematographic ‘literary montage’ should therefore be considered primarily as ‘an ingenious pamphlet’ (Ter Braak, 1949–1951/1980: 138–139). Ehrenburg himself considered his book a ‘chronicle of our time’. Characters, institutions, and places are real, not fictitious (Ehrenburg 1930/1983, p. 7). Ehrenburg presents the car ‘as an idol of a new materialistic religion, as the symbol of a modern technology that is associated with the accidents of haste, speed, and death rather than the chance of utility and a better life’ (Anten, 2013, pp. 204–205): Das Automobil ist eine neue Gottheit. Alle sollen sie kniefällig verehren. Folglich muss es billiger werden. Herr Citroën setzt auf die neue Karte. Er ändert die Einrichtung seiner Werkstätten. Er macht Reklame für sein letztes Modell: 5 PS. Das ist für jedermann erschwinglich. Das Glück zum halben Preis! Das Glück auf Abzahlung! Die Werke bringen täglich zweihundert Wagen heraus. Der Umsatz steigt. Die Straßen von Paris werden gefährlich. Das Automobil ist jetzt die Sehnsucht der kleinen Landesbesitzer und der Landwirte (Ehrenburg, 1930/1983, p. 42). The automobile is a new idol. All should celebrate it in a humble way. Then it will become cheaper. Mr. Citroën bets on new cards. He changes the layout of his workshops. He advertises his newest model: the 5 PS. In reach of everyone. Happiness for half-price! The works produce two hundred cars daily. Turnover rises. Parisian streets become dangerous. The automobile is now the fervent wish of the small landowner and the farmer.16

The Life of the Automobile consists of seven chapters, each dealing with a different theme linked directly or indirectly with the automobile. From the perspective of the industrial novel the most important chapter is the extensive chapter 2, on the assembly line. This chapter focuses on André Citroën himself and the Citroën works in and around Paris. Citroën attempts to copy the Fordist assembly line in France. Ford is his big example and he even wants to outpace the sale of Ford automobiles in France: Herr Citroën zeigt seinen Arbeitern ein neues überseeisches Spielzeug: es ist das Band, das laufende Band (Ehrenburg, 1930/1983, p. 43). Mr. Citroën shows his workers a new toy from abroad: it is the assembly line. 16 All translations from Das Leben der Autos are by the author.

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Für den Verkauf hat er die Agenten geschaffen, für die Produktion die Vorabeiter…. Eine lebendige Maschine! Er ist kein Aufseher. Er steht nicht am Band. Er arbeitet nur vor. Er zeigt, wie leicht jeder beliebige Mensch vergessen kann, dass er ein Mensch ist …. [For example,] Joseph Lepont … lebt mitten unter den Arbeitern, und die Arbeiter hassen ihn. Er arbeitet wie sie, sogar noch mehr; er schafft neue Rekorde; er verblüfft die Ingenieure. Er kann, wenn er will, zehn Stunden hintereinander an einem Fleck stehen, ohne sich von der Stelle zu rühren. Er kann den ganzen Tag durcharbeiten, ohne auszutreten (Ehrenburg, 1930/1983, pp. 48–49). On behalf of selling he created professional sellers, on behalf of production a sort of shock worker! He does not control the workers. He does not work himself at the assembly line. He only shows how to do the work. He shows how every human may forget that he is human … [For example,] Joseph Lepont … actually lives among workers, and the workers hate him. He works as they do, but even more; he reaches new production records; he impresses the engineers. When he wants, he is able to work ten hours in a row continuously on one spot.

Not only in France and the United States but also in the Soviet Union, managers had been seduced by scientific management and Fordist techniques. In his book Ehrenburg describes the fortunes of Boris Ignatjewitch K., a manager in the ‘Naphthasyndicat’ who also visited America. Enthusiastically he speaks of the rationalized Ford factory works: ‘Selbstredend müssen wir einen andern Inhalt hineinlegen, aber die Methode sollten wir erlernen …’ ‘We have to redefine the content by self-reasoning, but we should learn the Method ….’

As a consequence, he reorganized his department in American style: Er hat die Zahl der Mitarbeiter eingeschränkt, hat die Pflichten jedes einzeln präzisiert, die Geschäftsführung vereinfacht (Ehrenburg, 1930/1983, p. 230). He has reduced the number of workers, defined in detail the obligations of every single worker, simplified the management structure.

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Cars need rubber tyres and petrol. Therefore, chapter 3 of the novel deals with car tyres, the production of caoutchouc, and the significance in this respect of the Michelin works at Clermont Ferrand. Chapter 5 on the other hand concentrates on petrol and the significant world-wide role of Royal Dutch/Shell and its president at the time, Henry Deterding. Another key chapter (6) deals with the stock exchange. In sum, the novel is a critical – and satirical – appraisal of modern capitalism in the 1920s and some of its most important car-related ‘robber barons’, Henry Ford, André Citroën and Henry Deterding.

The Magnitogorsk steel works: Valentin Kataev’s Time, Forward! (1932) and John Scott’s memoir Behind the Urals (1942) Like Gladkov’s Cement, Kataev’s Time Forward! is part of the official canon of socialist- realist literature (Clark, 1981/2000, p. 262). The book is generally considered one of the best production novels written in the Soviet Union. Its main theme is the production of concrete by three brigades of shock workers at the site of the new Magnitogorsk steelworks in the early 1930s. Kataev describes the attempts of the Magnitogorsk brigades during 24 hours to beat the production record of the so-called Kharkiv brigades. The context is the shock industrialization during Stalin’s first Five Year Plan. The construction of both the Magnitogorsk steelworks and the adjacent idealistic Socialist City (or ‘Sotsgorod’) was one of the main showpieces of this plan. Until that time Magnitogorsk, situated far east of Moscow at the border of the Urals, consisted of two mountains with unusually high concentrations of iron ore (hence, ‘magnetic’) in a barren steppe landscape. As previously mentioned, Magnitogorsk was planned to equal or even overhaul the output of the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. In order to construct and operate the Magnitogorsk metallurgical complex Stalin needed American expertise as well as a huge, largely forced, pool of labour consisting of former kulaks, prisoners, and deportees. In 1930 a contract was signed with the US f irm McKee Co. and some other American and German contractors to construct the site. The design and construction of the socialist city with dwellings for 100—150,000 workers and their families were given to a team of famous Bauhaus architects lead by Ernst May. The f irst superblock of the Socialist city was completed in the mid-1930s. Since this coincided with the Great Depression in the United States and Europe, working in the USSR became increasingly attractive to a number of technical experts and workers

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from the United States like John Scott as well as from Europe, who despite their expertise had diff iculty f inding work at home. Kataev’s novel includes two Americans, one a wealthy tourist and businessman visiting Magnitogorsk, the other an accompanying journalist who also acts as an interpreter and a technical engineer. Kataev contrasts their – for the Soviets interesting – views with the actual experiences of the Soviet staff and workers at Magnitogorsk. Indeed, the Soviets wished to learn from the Americans eagerly, but in the end wanted to perform better.17 Taylorism as such isn’t copied in a literal sense, but the organization of work is nevertheless a central point in the novel. Rationalization of the work process is materialized primarily by the ‘innovative’ idea of ‘handling the materials in reverse order’ (Kataev, 1933/1995, p. 124). The principal influence of American ideas in the novel concerns the organization of the work itself. Speed and tempo, for example, play a signif icant and decisive role in it. 18 Quoting twice (at both the beginning and end of the book) an address of Josef Stalin on 23 June 1931, Kataev stresses the importance of tempo: … To lower tempos means to fall back, and those who fall back are beaten. But we do not want to be beaten … This was the history of old Russia: it was continuously beaten because of backwardness. It was beaten by Mongol khans. It was beaten by Turkish beks. It was beaten by Swedish feudal lords. It was beaten by Polish and Lithuanian gentry. It was beaten by English and French capitalists. It was beaten by Japanese barons. It was beaten because of military backwardness … industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness … That is why we cannot be backward any more … (Kataev, 1933/1995, 12–13, and 334).

That is also true with respect to waste, quantity (in this case the maximum number of mixtures of concrete in one shift) and quality of the output.19 For example, a worker (named Triger) in one of the three brigades states that 17 In an interesting article Vera Alexandrova examined the role of American and German engineers and experts in Russian production novels of the 1920s and 1930s. Remarkably, in these novels in particular German engineers were pictured usually as cartoon-like figures, in contrast to Americans (Alexandrova, 1943, p. 22). 18 Kataev derived the title of his novel from V. Maiakovski’s 1930 poem ‘The March of Time’, which begins with the same words ‘Forward Time, time forward!’ (Hellebust, 2013: 707). 19 A brigade in Kharkiv had established a record of 360 mixtures in one shift. One of the three concrete brigades of Magnitogorsk, consisting of 17 workers, would achieve in the end a total of

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he ‘had read everything on the subject that was available in the Russian language’ and also watched the work of the concrete men ‘attentively and persistently’, and has added to this his own ‘theory of tempos’. This consisted of an: Increase of the productivity of one machine automatically entails the increase of the productivity of others indirectly connected with it. And since all machines in the Soviet Union are connected with each other to a greater and lesser degree, and together represent a complex interlocking system, the raising of tempos at any given point in this system inevitably carries with it the unavoidable – however minute – raising of tempos of the entire system as a whole, thus, to a certain extent, bringing the time of socialism closer (Kataev, 1933/1995, p. 166).

Taylorism is not embraced in Kataev’s novel. Instead, he propagates a combination of socialist competition between workers as well as shockbrigading supported by scientific investigation so that ‘concrete-mixers must aim not only to produce a maximum quantity of mixtures, but also to maintain the required quality’, to be measured by the following indicators: Reduce time-waste during the shift to a minimum (as near as possible to zero)…. The general and equable increase in the number of mixtures over a considerable period of time – ten days, months, etc. – is determined by the proper organization of work … Reduce to a minimum … the time of separate items of the cycle. The quantity of cubic metres of concrete produced by the machine by each worker of the brigade during one shift … The necessity to eliminate the absence of personal responsibility for machinery and to place it upon responsible individuals (Kataev, 1933/1995, 145–146).

The core of the book describes the attempt by the shock brigade to beat the Kharkiv brigades’s record performance. The protagonist is the engineer in charge of the so-called sixth sector of the Magnitogorsk complex, David Lvovich Margulies. He is supported by the superintendent of the sixth sector Korneyev, the brigadiers or pace-setters of the three shock 429 mixtures without loss of quality, based on new centrally adopted quality norms (Kataev, 1933/1995).

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brigades, as well as by the foreman Moseya of the winning shift. The description of the concrete production and the record attempt of the winning shock brigade alternates with cinematic descriptions of the Magnitogorsk factory complex on the eastern slopes of the Urals, the adjacent lake and surroundings, the socialist city, and other worker settlements in the beginning of the 1930s. Indeed, as Edward J. Brown puts forward in the English translation of the book, reading the novel gives the impression that the camera eye itself is constantly in motion: ‘the metallurgical plant seen from a distance is a tiny object; then in a sudden closeup it becomes a huge, unencompassable mass; and when the camera moves inside the structure, the interior dimensions are enormous beyond belief. The great plant itself, a twentieth century industrial giant rising out of a primitive steppe wilderness, is presented as order growing out of chaos, and the naïve eye of the camera distinguishes, only with some diff iculty, evidences of plan and purpose in the tumble of freight cars, cement-mixer, iron girders, barracks, and sheer junk’ (Brown, Foreword in Kataev, 1933/1995). All in all, Time Forward! turns into a vivid, documentary-like description of the ‘Soviet Gary’ or city of steel. To achieve this Kataev lived in Magnitogorsk for several months in 1931 (Hellebust, 2013, p. 703; Schlögel, 2020, p. 101). Interestingly, we can compare Kataev’s image of the city with another primary source, in the form of a direct American observation of the working and living conditions in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. John Scott, a young, idealistic electric welder (born in Philadelphia in 1912), son of an American leftist economics professor, after two years at the University of Wisconsin and an apprenticeship at General Electric changed his Depression-afflicted country for the Soviet Union in 1932. For five years he lived and worked, and studied at the Communist University (‘Komvuz’) in Magnitogorsk, and so contributed directly to Stalin’s first and second Five-Year Plans. After Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937/1938 he left Magnitogorsk for Moscow, and returned in 1941 to the United States with his Russian wife (a teacher) and two children. Back home, Scott published a book on his Russian experiences the following year (Scott, 1942/2016; Bhavsar, 2008). Though Scott’s experiences date from a few years after Kataev’s, to a large extent his observations are in line with Kataev’s novel. Scott describes a number of things. Most important among them are: – the hard working and living conditions of the workers and their eventual families (most workers were unmarried) which improved somewhat over time;

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– the inefficiency, bureaucracy and bad organization of the work; – the shortage of food and essential materials and tools; – the layout and construction of the site of the complex; – the history of Magnitogorsk; – the implementation of Stakhanovism at Magnitogorsk and the subsequent raising of the tempo norms, with the intention to raise productivity; and – the consequences of Stalin’s Purge for the workers at Magnitogorsk.

What strikes the reader is the number of serious industrial accidents, in particular during the establishment of the metallurgical complex. These were often caused by ignorance, indifference, and lack of sufficient skills of the workforce. A dramatic example is the description of the almost deadly fall of a rigger from the scaffolding of blast furnace No.3 when under construction: I was just going to start welding when I heard someone sing out, and something swished down past me. It was a rigger who had been working up on the very top. He bounced of the bleeder pipe, which probably saved his life. Instead of falling all the way to the ground, he landed on the main platform about fifteen feet below me. By the time I got down to him, blood was coming out of his mouth in gushes (Scott, 1942/2016, p. 15).

In the early years Scott was not the only skilled foreigner at Magnitogorsk. There were a substantial number of them, Americans, Germans, and other nationalities, who lived in a better part of the complex with some 150 houses, called ‘Berezki’ or the ‘American City’, which was provided with running water and electricity. A large part of the workers however, lived in tents and barracks, and partly also in rooms and appartements in the Socialist City or ‘Sotsgorod’ (later renamed the ‘Kirov District’), which was then under construction. According to Scott, the Stakhanovite movement got a foothold at the complex from the autumn of 1935. It contributed to sharp rises in tempo as well as productivity in 1935 and 1936. In his magnum opus on Magnitogorsk, American historian Stephen Kotkin defined Magnitogorsk succinctly as a hybrid Russian company town or ‘a city attached to a factory, from which it derived its purpose and form’. However, it was not just a usual steel town: ‘Part barracks, settlement, part village, part labor camp and place of exile, part elite enclave, and part new city, the hybrid urban form of Magnitogorsk was a microcosm of the Soviet Union during the building of socialism’ (Kotkin, 1997, p. 144).

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Conclusion In this chapter I have considered several Leninist/Stalinist socialist-realist industrial or ‘production’ novels published in the 1920s and 1930s. The main question I tried to answer was how and to what extent Americanism played a role in these novels. It turned out that both Lenin’s NEP and Stalin’s first and second Five-Year Plans were strongly influenced by American ideas with respect to the organization of work. The Soviets copied to some extent Taylorism and Fordism. To enable a rapid industrialization after the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war the Soviets contracted a variety of chiefly American and German firms. Many American and other Western experts went to the Soviet Union. However, this changed fundamentally after the Great Purge, in which Stalin incited a strong anti-American and anti-foreigner attitude. In the 1920s and 1930s Taylorism and Fordism underwent a specif ic Russian translation in the Soviet Union. The ‘Soviet Taylor’ Alexei Gastev and his institute carried out numerous time-and-motion studies, and developed on the basis of this his own biometrics. At the same time, shock brigades and Stakhanovism developed on a large scale. The core difference with Taylorism was not so much the significance of tempo for productivity but, at least initially, a reduced emphasis on the importance of managerial roles. By contrast to Taylorism, this also implied emphasizing the role of the collective of workers and ‘socialist competition’ between worker brigades. This can largely be explained by the completely different economic, social, and political conditions at the time in the Soviet Union: the need and urgency of a rapid crash industrialization in a situation of economic backwardness. All four novels under consideration show significant American influences. Two of them are very critical of Taylorism/Fordism and reject them (Zamyatin and Ehrenburg). Two are more positive (Gladkov and Kataev). The last two obviously had a more propagandistic significance and fitted for this reason very well into the formal canon of Soviet production novels. Most documentary by form are the books of Ehrenburg and Kataev, because these are based also on participatory observation. Moreover, it is important to realize that Americanization in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union encompassed more than mere imitation of American production ideas. As British historian Owen Hatherley has made clear, American culture was mimicked widely, not only in the world of production but also in the realm of film, theatre, and architecture. He speaks in this respect of a Russian ‘Chaplin machine’ (Hatherley, 2016; see also Stites, 1989; Groys, 2011).

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Works cited Alexandrova, V. (1943). America and Americans in Soviet Literature. Russian Review, 2(2), 19–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/125250 Anten, H. (2013). ‘A book such as ‘Automobile’ is only written once in a lifetime’. Ilja Ehrenburg’s The Life of the Automobile as benchmark in the discussion of New Objectivity in Dutch literature. In R. Grüttemeier, K. Beekman, & B. Rebel (Eds.) Neue Sachlichkeit and Avant-Garde (pp. 203–228). Brill. Bailes, K. E. (1977). Alexei Gastev and the Soviet controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24. Soviet Studies, 29(3), 373–394. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668137708411134 Bailes, K. E. (1981). The American connection: Ideology and the transfer of American technology to the Soviet Union. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(3), 421–448. https://www.jstorg/stable/3530865 Bhavsar, K. (2008). ‘Behind the Urals: An American worker in Russia’s city of steel’. Essai, 6(Art. 13), 19–23. http://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol6/iss1/13 Bowlt, J. E. (Ed.). (1988). Russian art of the avant-garde: Theory and criticism 1902–1934. Thames and Hudson. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital. The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press. Carden, P. (1987). Utopia and anti-utopia: Aleksei Gastev and Evgeny Zamyatin. Russian Review, 46(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/130045 Clark, K. (1997). Socialist realism with shores: The conventions for the positive hero. In T. Lahusen & E. Dobrenko (Eds.). Socialist realism without shores (pp. 27–50). Duke University Press. Clark, K. (2000). The Soviet novel: History as ritual. Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1981) Davies, R.W. (1989). Stakhanovism and the Soviet system: A review article. Soviet Studies, 41(3), 484-487. https://www.jstorg.org/stable/152355 Dos Passos, J. (1960). U.S.A. Penguin. (Original work published 1938) Ehrenburg, I. (1983). Das Leben der Autos. Klett-Cotta. (Translation originally published 1930) Filtzer, D. (1996). Labor discipline, the use of work time, and the decline of the Soviet system, 1928–1991. International Labor and Working-Class History, 50, 9–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27672305 Freeman, J. B. (2019). Behemoth: A history of the factory and the making of the modern world. W. W. Norton. Gelb, M. (1981). Roots of Soviet industrial management 1917–1941. Review of Radical Political Economics, 13(1), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/048661348101300108 Gladkov, F. V. (1994). Cement (‘Tsement’). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1925)

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Greenstein, D. E. (2014). Assembling ‘Fordizm’: The production of automobiles, Americans and Bolsheviks in Detroit and early Soviet Russia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56, 259–289. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43908503 Groys, B. (2011). The total art of Stalinism. Avant-garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond. Verso. Grüttemeier, R., Beekman, K., & Rebel, B. (2013). Neue Sachlichkeit and avantgarde: An introduction. In R. Grüttemeier, K. Beekman, & B. Rebel (Eds.) Neue Sachlichkeit and avant-garde (pp. 7–21). Brill. Hatherley, O. (2016). The Chaplin machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the communist avant-garde. Pluto Press. Hellebust, R. (2013). Suffering and seeing in Kataev’s Vremia vpered! Slavoninc and East European Review, 91(4), 703–730. https://doi.org/10.5699/ slaveasteurorev2.91.4.0703 Heller, L. (1997). A world of prettiness: Socialist realism and its aesthetic categories. In T. Lahusen & E. Dobrenko (Eds.). Socialist realism without shores (pp. 51–75). Duke University Press. Hughes, T. P. (1989). American genesis: A century of invention and technological enthusiasm. Penguin. Ings, S. (2016). Stalin and the scientists: A history of triumph and tragedy 1905–1953. Faber & Faber. Kataev, V. (1995). Time, forward! (‘Vremia vpered!’). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1933) Kotkin, S. (1997). Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as a civilization. University of California Press. (Original work published 1995) Kracauer, S. (2013). Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland. Suhrkamp. (Original work published 1930) Lahusen, T. (1997). Socialist realism in search of its shores: Some historical remarks on the ‘historically open aesthetic system of the truthful representation of life’. In T. Lahusen & E. Dobrenko (Eds.). Socialist realism without shores (pp. 5–26). Duke University Press. Rhodes, C. H. (1976). Frederick Winslow Taylor’s system of scientific management in Zamyatin’s We. Journal of General Education, 28(1), 31–42. https://www.jstor. org/stable/27796550 Rogger, H. (1981). Amerikanizm and the economic development of Russia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(3), 382–420. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0010417500013426 Schlögel, K. (2008). Terror und Traum: Moskou 1937. Carl Hanser Verlag. Schlögel, K. (2020). Das Sowjetische Jahrhundert: Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt. C. H. Beck.

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Scott, J. (2016). Behind the Urals: An American worker in Russia’s city of steel. Pickle Partners Publishing. Amazon Kindle E-books. (Original work published 1942) Siegelbaum, L. H. (1988). Stakhanovism and the politics of productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941. Cambridge University Press. Siegelbaum, L. H. (2011). Cars for comrades: The life of the Soviet automobile. Cornell University Press. Smith, T. 1993. Making the modern: Industry, art, and design in America. University of Chicago Press. Sochor, Z. A. 1981. Soviet Taylorism revisited. Soviet Studies, 33(2), 246–264. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09668138108411354 Stites, R. (1989). Revolutionary dreams: Utopian vision and experimental life in the Russian revolution. Oxford University Press. Ter Braak, M. (1980). Ehrenburg maakt school. In M. Ter Braak, Verzameld werk, Vol. 5: Kronieken, (pp. 138–144). Van Oorschot. (Original work published 1949–1951) Todorov, T. (2009). La signature humaine: Essais 1983–2008. Éditions du Seuil. Van Atta, D. (1986). Why is there no Taylorism in the Soviet Union? Comparative Politics, 18(3), 327–337. https://www.jstor.org/stable/421614 Westerman, F. (2011). Engineers of the soul: In the footsteps of Stalin’s writers. Vintage. (Original work published 2002) Wren, D., & Bedeian, A. G. (2004). The Taylorization of Lenin: rhetoric or reality? International Journal of Social Economics, 31(3), 287–299. https://doi. org/10.1108/03068290410518265 Zamyatin, Y. (1993). We. Penguin. Translated and with an introduction by Clarence Brown. (Original translation published 1924)

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New Objectivity industrial novels in Weimar Germany Abstract In this chapter a number of Weimar industrial novels, written in the 1920 and 1930s, are analysed against the background of the Americanization of production in Germany. These novels fit well into the arts and literature of the contemporary neue Sachlickeit (New Objectivity) movement. Nevertheless, there are important differences. These vary from a Marxist approach (Bredel, 1930) to a more neutral stance (Reger, 1931/1992) as well as from a more empirical sociological approach (Kracauer, 1930/2013) to a more historical narrative approach (Reger 1931/1992). The Americanization of production in German industry occurred mainly in the 1920s. By the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s it became more adapted to a more specific German translation of Americanization. Keywords: Industrial novels, Weimar Republic, reportage, New Objectivity/neue Sachlichkeit, Americanization of production, Fordism.

Introduction The Modernist industrial novels I will consider in this chapter were written after World War I in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. This requires the introduction of two interrelated terms: ‘Constructivism’ and ‘New Objectivity’. Both terms are primarily linked with developments in avant-garde visual art in various countries in the aftermath of World War I. Well-known avant-garde movements in the visual arts included German and Russian Expressionism (Kirchne, Nolde, Die Brücke, Dada, Kandinsky, Malewitsch), Cubism, and Italian Futurism (Marinetti) (Bowlt, 1988, xix–xl). It is important to realize that the avant-garde did not limit itself to painting but also encompassed sculpture, architecture, cinema, theatre, and literature. Compared to pre-war artistic movements such

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH05

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as naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism, a new and remarkable characteristic of the avant-garde movement after the war was the idea that art not only had an aesthetic goal, but also had to contribute to societal progress, social change, and even to a new and more just world. FrenchBulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov wrote a penetrating essay about this newly emerging relationship between art and politics between the introduction of Futurism in Italy before the Great War until the rise of dictatorship in Italy, the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s (Todorov, 2009, 193–230). In Germany the armistice of November 1918 was followed immediately by revolution and the abdication of the Kaiser, and the following month a group of artists – called the November Group in honour of these tumultuous events – was founded. Its numbers included the expressionist painters Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, architects Mies von der Rohe and Walter Gropius, writers Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller, and composers Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith. Subsequently, in 1919 the Bauhaus group of architects was founded in Weimar. One of the main principles of the Bauhaus was designing and constructing houses for common people provided with furniture and other necessary utensils. Therefore, it was necessary for Bauhaus to know very well what the would-be occupants preferred. The artist-architects should be ‘les formateurs de l’humanité’ (the constructors of humankind). The New Objectivity movement, resulting from the encounter between Dadaists, Expressionists, and Constructivists, had a comparable objective of linking the world of art with the world of politics. Regarding literature, rather than classical notions of fiction both movements preferred a montage of facts (‘literature factuelle’), drawn from the world surrounding the author (‘tirée du monde qui entourne l’auteur’) (Todorov, 2009, pp. 207–210). In sum, the various avant-garde art forms wanted to ‘construct’ a new ‘objective’ reality. The resulting ‘social reportage’ based on facts and empirical data became the dominant form of the industrial novel in the Weimar Republic.1 In this chapter I will analyse the fundamental transformation of the industrial novel, which took place during the interbellum years in Weimar Germany. I will deal with a few important high-profile authors, namely Egon Erwin Kisch (Der Rasende Reporter, 1924/2006), Franz Jung (Gequältes Volk, 1927/1987), Siegfried Kracauer (Die Angestellten/The salaried masses, 1930/2013), Willi Bredel (Maschinenfabrik N und K, 1930), and Erik Reger (Union der Festen Hand, 1931/1992). 1 There had been some exemplary forerunners of social reportage in 19th-century England and fin-de siècle France (Engels, 1845/1993; Zola, 1885/1991).

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Germany had a rather long history of industrial novels, beginning in the early 19th century when an industrial proletariat emerged. However, it was in the Weimar period between 1918 and 1933 that the Modernist industrial novel flourished. Some of the writers involved, for example Franz Jung and Willi Bredel, also considered literature to be a weapon in the service of socialist ideology. Because of this they aimed to contribute to the emergence of a new classless society, as their counterparts were doing in the Soviet Union. Others, such as Siegfried Kracauer, had a more modest political stance. Also, as in the Soviet Union, large collectivist writers’ groups emerged in Weimar Germany such as the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (BPRS) and the Arbeiterkorrespondenten. Both groups consisted of a number of authors linked with the German Communist Party. They experimented with alternative styles and forms, such as documentary literature and agitprop (Walker, 1986, pp. 65–67). The ultimate objective of this propagandistic literature was the conquest of capitalist industrial enterprises by the working class. The members of these writers’ groups published their work mainly in journals, such as Der Scheinwerfer and the BPRS organ Linkskurve. As with the Modernist industrial novels in the United States and the Soviet Union, the main question I will examine in this chapter is to what extent Americanism (Taylorism and Fordism) influenced both the form and content of these novels from Weimar Germany. Before that, the relevant context will be sketched.

Weimar and Americanism The Weimar Republic was established in 1919 after the end of World War I. As a consequence of the lost war, the country’s economy and political system was in a shambles for several years (Winkler 1993). Before World War I Germany had emerged as one of the most important industrial countries in the world. Mining, steel, machine making, and in particular chemistry and electronics formed the basis for its second industrial revolution. Although the ideas of Taylor and Ford had already trickled down into German industry before the Great War (in companies such as Bosch and Daimler-Benz) an actual extensive Taylorist (scientific management) and Fordist (mass-production) boom developed only in a relatively short period between 1926 and 1928. Ford’s autobiography, translated in German in 1923 as Mein Leben und Werk, became a best-seller overnight. More important was that the Dawes Plan (August 1924) significantly eased the desperate

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economic circumstances.2 The post-war period of hyper-inflation was eventually controlled. German industry was then able to recover quickly and, in this context, borrowed significantly from American ideas. Many industrialists, engineers, academics and journalists visited the United States and American companies (in particular the Ford factories in Detroit as well as the steel mills in Pennsylvania) and brought back American ideas concerning efficiency, work organization, quality control, mass consumption, and the image of the professional American middle-class woman (Nolan, 1994). As a result, Amerikanismus in Germany developed into a practical social and political philosophy supported broadly by a range of interest groups from left to right (Hughes, 1989, pp. 284–294). However, the Taylorist and Fordist boom in Weimar Germany paled from 1929 under the onslaught of the Great Depression. Doubts about the gains of Americanism rapidly arose. Therefore, it is important to realize that Taylorism and Fordism in Weimar Germany were not fully applied or in their pure form. American ideas on work gradually developed a less purely economic application in Germany, whereby contrast they came to be given a more outspoken social translation that prevented or mitigated their negative effects on workers, such as the intensity and monotony of the work. This fitted better in the specifically German corporatist context of organised capitalism at that time. Many companies were linked by cartels and had principled ideas on humane work or ‘quality work’ based on the pre-war ‘science of work’ (Arbeitswissenschaft) (Maier, 1970, pp. 27–61; more extensively in Maier, 1975/2016).3 The German Institute for Technical Labour Training (known by its German acronym, DINTA), established in the mid-1920s, played a significant role. By developing specific worker-training and welfare-work programmes, as well as by publishing a large number of company newspapers, DINTA aimed to contribute to the creation of corporatist factory communities (Betriebsgemeinschäfte) (Nolan, 1994, pp. 21, 193–200). Criticism of a perceived over-rationalization in German industry intensified by the end of the 1920s. For example, in his influential book Rationalisierung und Fehlrationalisierung (Rationalization and Misrationalization), Austrian socialist economist Otto Bauer (1931) claimed that rationalization in German industry had gone too far in the direction of Americanization.

2 American Charles Dawes proposed a plan to ease Germany’s payment of reparations. 3 The notion of Arbeitswissenschaft was already established before World War I. It was a combined, interdisciplinary approach to work developed by industrial psychologists, industrial sociologists and engineers.

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Effectively, the rationalization boom had become a rationalization crisis in Germany, which at that time had dramatically rising unemployment figures. Americanism in Weimar Germany was not a one-sided political and socio-economic affair. As argued by Mary Nolan, it also had a significant impact on mass consumption and images of professional middle-class women. Moreover, Americanism had a remarkable and significant impact on Weimar culture (Kaes et al., 1994; Gay, 1988). For example, sociologist and philosopher Siegfried Kracauer described in his essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ the disciplined and rationalized way the famous ‘Tiller Girls’ danced at the time (Kracauer, 1927/1994). He repeated his argument in an article called ‘Girls and Crisis’ in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 26 May 1931 regarding a Berlin performance of the similar ‘Alfred Jackson Girls’ which Kracauer attended. Their choreography, ‘montaged’ in a Taylorist way and ‘embodying the functioning of a flourishing economy’, was one of the sensations of Weimar Berlin in the mid-1920s (Kracauer, 1931/1994). In addition, in the latter article Kracauer anticipated the negative consequences of the emerging Great Depression and over-rationalization not only for the economy but also for ‘Taylorist dancing’: After the war, in that era in which prosperity appeared unlimited and one retained scarcely a memory of unemployment – in that era the girls were mass-produced in the USA and exported in waves to Europe. They were not merely American products but a demonstration at the same time of the vastness of American production … When they formed themselves into an undulating snake, they delivered a radiant illustration of the virtues of the conveyor belt; when they stepped to a rapid beat, it sounded like ‘business, business’; when they raised their legs with mathematical precision above their heads, they joyfully affirmed the progress of rationalization; and when they continually repeated the same manoeuvre, never breaking ranks, one had visions of an unbroken chain of automobiles gliding from the factory in the world and feeling of knowing that there was no end to prosperity … However, That has all changed today. One market crash after the other has rocked the economy, and the crisis has long since given the lie to one’s faith in never-ending prosperity … And though they still swing their legs as energetically as before, they come, a phantom, from yesterday dead and gone … the crisis to which

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so many factories have fallen victim has also silently liquidated this machinery of girls (Kracauer, 1931/1994 in Kaes et al., 1994: 565-566).

The Tiller Girls’ also appear as an often-used motive in Max Barthel’s novel Das Spiel mit der Puppe (1925). Barthel describes the ‘machine girls’ as the representation of machine rhythm, assembly-line work, and as reconciliation with the world of industry (Muller, 1991: 2).

Neue Sachlichkeit in literature Until 1923 Expressionism was the dominant artistic movement of the Weimar Republic. Then rather suddenly New Objectivism emerged as a new dominant artistic movement, with almost an opposite stylistic sensibility from Expressionism. According to historian Anton Kaes the new style was ‘rooted in a common rejection of Expressionism’ (Kaes et al., 1994, p. 476). 4 New Objectivity in the domain of literature was a literary style in which objectivism, the description of facts, and sobriety of language were primary. The chosen form was very often reportage as well as a montage of facts (Gay, 1988, p. 126). Françoise Muller argues that the Weimar authors of industrial novels in the period of New Objectivity, which flourished between 1923 and 1931, did not represent a purely homogeneous group or movement. Nevertheless, she discerns several significant common characteristics, such as an enthusiasm for technological progress (‘Technikult’), an aversion to psychological introspection, a focus on social questions, meticulous description of work processes and social abuses within companies, a high use value for the readers, and, not least, a constant tendency to aestheticize the sphere of work (Muller, 1991, pp. 1, 11). The New (literary) Objectivism was not limited to industrial novels but was also applied in other literary genres that were fashionable in the Weimar Republic.5 And as previously mentioned, it was a dominant movement of the

4 The term New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) seems to have been coined for the first time by Gustav Hartlaub, historian and museum director during the introduction of the eponymous art exhibition in the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1925. However, according to Kaes the term had been used earlier by Hermann Muthesius, architect and founder of the German Werkbund in the early 20th century (Kaes et al., 1994, p. 475). 5 For example, novels that dealt with the social problems of big cities (crime, poverty, and unemployment) (the so-called grossstadt Roman or ‘big-city novel’), such as Alfred Döblin’s

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time in theatre (Brecht), film (Lang), poems (Tucholsky), art (Grosz), and architecture (Bauhaus) (Kaes et al., 1994; Gay 1988, pp. 125–152; Becker, 2018).

Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter (1924) The first notable example of the New Objectivity industrial novel in the form of reportage in Germany is Der rasende Reporter (The Raging Reporter) by leftist writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), published in 1924 (Kisch, 1924/2006). Influenced by the social criticism of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair and other eminent social critics, Egon Erwin Kisch considered the modern reportage as a form of literary art in which he skilfully mingled eyewitness accounts, interviews and documentary facts. According to his also renowned contemporary reporter Leo Lania, Der rasende Reporter established in Weimar Germany a real standard or ‘paradigm for writing that functioned in intimate knowledge of social relations, institutions and economics’ (Williams, 1990, p. 100). In the significant prologue of the book, Kisch argued about his method of working: Der Reporter hat keine Tendenz, hat nichts zu rechtfertigen und hat keinen Standpunkt. Er hat unbefangen Zeuge zu sein und unbefangene Zeugenschaft zu liefern, so verlässlich, wie sich eine Aussage geben lässt – jedenfalls ist sie (für die Klarstellung) wichtiger, als die geniale Rede des Staatsanwalts oder des Verteidigers …. Nichts ist verblüffender als die einfache Wahrheit, nichts ist exotischer als unsere Umwelt, nichts ist phantasievoller als die Sachlichkeit (Kisch, 1924/2006: 7–8). The reporter has no tendency to promote, has nothing to justify, and has no standpoint. He must be an unbiased witness and deliver unbiased testimony as reliable as testimony can possibly be given – particularly in such cases when testimony is more important ( for clarification) than the brilliant speech of the prosecutor or defense attorney … Nothing is more amazing than the simple truth, nothing is more exotic as our environment, and nothing is more imaginative than objectivity (Translation Kaes et al., 1994, p. 513). Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin, 1929/2020) and Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Fallada, 1932/2017).

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In Der rasende Reporter Kisch presented no fewer than 53 documentary reports on a variety of subjects, such as the well-known Parisian flea market at Clignancourt, homeless people in London, a shipping exchange, a six-day cycling track match, and a Yiddish literary café. Actually, only a small number of these brief essays in Der Rasende Reporter deals exclusively with industry and working life; those that do, focus on the heavy coal and steel industry in the Ruhr region. Subsequently these three reportages offer a concise illustrative impression of the Krupp steel company at Essen and its then-extensive welfare work programme and welfare work institutions, the heavy working conditions and labour relations in a blast furnace and coke factory at Bochum, and finally of a group of important German mining and steel entrepreneurs during an annual gathering of shareholders in a luxury hotel, again in Essen. Essen was then the coal and steel capital of the industrial Ruhr region. In the Krupp-reportage Kisch talks among other things about ‘Reiche … Kr.’ or the ‘Krupp empire’ in Essen, which owned almost everything in the new industrial suburb of Westend, and by this controlled almost the whole life of its inhabitants. In Westend we not only find its cast steel factory, but also a Kr.-churchyard, a Kr.-hospital, a Kr.-consumers’ union, a Kr.-memorial, and so on. Westend, in the eyes of Kisch, was the new Essen, overtaking and dominating the old town from that point on. This reportage breathes a strong tension between the huge weaponry profits of the Krupps during World War I and ‘Essen’s tortuous streets and alleyways, which are ‘engbrüstig und schlotterend’ [‘narrow-chested and trembling’] like the bodies of the workers inhabiting this troglodyte kingdom’ (Williams, 1990, p. 103; see also Muller, 1991, pp. 4–5). In the enormous steel mill at Bochum the workers in the blast furnace were working continually in bad working conditions, three shifts per day, for their whole life. Remuneration was modest – about 120 marks per month in case of the best-performing workers. The third reportage about the heavy-industry-shareholders meeting at Essen is dominated by the prominent and intertwined entrepreneurial ‘types’ who managed the German economy of the day, such as Thyssen, Kirdorf and Stinnes. Although officially the meeting was a democratic public gathering, press was not allowed – the industrialists were not looking for challenge or contradiction from journalists as they undertook the ‘big cumulative undertaking’ of German heavy industry, then responsible for the delivery of electricity and light in a large part of the country. In a fourth reportage related to industry, Kisch describes the working of the steam engines of a large steamship, the Vaterland, in 1914. In this

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essay Kisch also deals explicitly with the difficult working conditions of the stokers and trimmers in the ship’s engine rooms in the lower decks: Keine Nachtruhe gibt es.… Dann begann für zweihundert Heizer und für zweihundert Trimmer das Kesseltreiben, die Arbeit, ihr eigene Werkstätte in eine Höllenlandschaft zu verwandeln.… Die Glocke schrillt. Fünfmal in der Stunde schrillt sie.… Die Gestallten am Ofen sind schwarz, schwarz wie alles ringumher.… Nach je vier Stunden dürfen die Feuermänner aus der Arena treten, von der anderen Schicht abgelöst. Vier Stunden später geht es wieder los.… Es sind Deutsche Arbeiter, keine Neger oder Chinesen, die unten im Kohlenbereich zu Kohlen werden.… Sie spülen den Kohlenstaub mit einem Glase Bier hinunter und schlafen (Kisch, 1924/2006, pp. 153–156). Nights’ rest is missing.… Then the heating of the boilers starts for two hundred heaters and two hundred trimmers. This changes their workplaces into a hellscape… The bell rings. Five times per hour… The creatures alongside the oven are black, as black as all things surrounding them… After four hours the firemen are allowed being replaced by another shift of firemen. After four hours it starts all over… It is German workers, not coloured or Chinese people, who change into coal down in the coal basement of the ship… They rinse the coal dust with a glass of beer and are going to sleep (author’s translation).

Kisch’s method of working was observing and interviewing meticulously on the spot. In Der rasende Reporter this resulted in a cinematographic review of the common and uncommon daily life and working life at that time. According to Dieter Schlenstedt, his first biographer, in the epilogue of Der rasende Reporter two of Kisch’s essential motives for writing the book are revealed: creating an objective time frame, and illustrating the (American) concept of ‘tempo’.6 Tempo is, moreover, mirrored in the person of his literary alias, that is the ‘raging reporter’ (Kisch, 1924/2006, pp. 347–353). 6 Dieter Schlenstedt wrote a first full-lenght biography on Kisch (see Schlenstedt, 1970/1985). A more recent biography is by Marcus G. Patka (2001).

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Kisch lived and worked in Prague, Vienna and Berlin. He travelled to the Soviet Union as well as the United States and other countries. He also participated in the Spanish Civil War. During the Nazi regime Kisch went into exile in Mexico for several years. He wrote many reportages in book form as well as politically engaged travel books, for example about the still-young communist Soviet Union (Zaren, Popen, Bolschewiken, 1927) and also about the capitalist United States in the months just before the Wall Street Crash (Paradies Amerika, 1929). In Paradies Amerika Kisch covered the typical American phenomena at that time, such as Prohibition, gangsters, film studios, the Bureau of Standards, Sears Roebuck, American women, and Ford automobiles. Ward B. Lewis reviewed Paradies Amerika extensively in the German Studies Review. The protagonist and narrator of the book is a ‘Doktor Becker’ (an alias for Kisch), an investigative German reporter who during his visit to the United States also visited a number of factories, among which the Ford Motor Company and the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Additionally, Doktor Becker met and talked with Upton Sinclair and Charlie Chaplin. According to Lewis, Kisch’s ‘indictment of the Ford Motor Company is relentless. Since time on the production line is money, the amount of space accorded the worker for movement at the conveyor belt is severely limited and causes crowding. There is, moreover, little inducement to spend time away from the work area since benches and chairs are not available for use during the lunch period nor are there rooms for changing clothes or a sufficient number of washrooms’ (Lewis, 1990 pp. 254, 259). Lewis concludes that Kisch attacked the inequality in this supposedly classless society and at the same time focused on the overall tendency to standardization that reduced all people into interchangeable units. In the end Kisch’s Paradies Amerika rejected the idea, popular at the time in Germany, that the United States provided a successful example that Germany should emulate (Lewis, 1990, pp. 258, 262).

Franz Jung’s Gequältes Volk (1927) Franz Jung’s Gequältes Volk (Tormented People) is an example of an Expressionist industrial novel that at the same time is a leading example of a New Objectivity industrial novel. It is also very critical industrial novel. Its narrative plays only a minor role, and the various chapters and themes are composed on the basis of montage technique and scientific documentation. The book deals with the coal- and zinc-mining and steel manufacturing in the eastern industrial region of Upper Silesia, and with the living and

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working conditions of the workers and their families. Nationally, this region was a competitor of the Ruhr-valley industries in the west of the country. To understand the content of the book correctly it is necessary to look at the remarkable life-cycle and qualities of its author and also at the historic and economic characteristics of Upper Silesia at the time. Franz Jung was born in 1888 in the Upper Silesian town of Neisse. He studies for short periods at, successively, the universities of Leipzig, Jena, Breslau, and Munich. Afterwards he went to Berlin, where he became an economic and stock trade journalist on various newspapers. Then he founded his own trade journal and became a contributor to a Dadaist journal. In January 1919 Jung participated in the leftist Spartacist uprising, and in 1920 he founded the German communist party, the KAPD. Then in 1921 he went to the Soviet Union and worked there in two different factories as a manager. Jung returned to Germany in 1923 and became an author of books, reports, articles, and theatre pieces. He tried in vain to publish his novel Gequältes Volk, completed in 1927, various publishers refusing it for different reasons. Ultimately, the novel was published posthumously in 1987 by Nautilus publishers in Hamburg as part of Jung’s collected works. In his later years Jung also worked and lived in Prague, Switzerland, Hungary, and the United States. In 1961 he published his autobiography, Der Weg nach unten: Aufzeichnungen aus einer grossen Zeit (The Road Downwards: Records from a Great Era) (Jung, 1961). He died in 1963 in Germany. As far as Upper Silesia is concerned, it is important to realize that this border region between Germany and Poland was divided after World War I as a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles and a subsequent plebiscite in 1921. The western part remained Germany, whereas the eastern part, covering only 20 per cent of the whole region but encompassing the majority of its industrial sites (mines and steel mills) went to Poland. In the epilogue of Gequältes Volk Germanist and literary scholar Walter Fähnders contended that the Polish part contained four/fifths of Upper Silesia’s heavy industry at that time, including 90 per cent of the available coal resources (found in 53 of the 67 mines), five of the eight steel mills, and the whole of the existing chemical industry based on coal mining (Jung, 1927/1987, p. 174). The post-war transitional industrial panorama of this former unified German region, the economic crisis of the early 1920s, the processes of rationalization, and new technological developments set the stage for Jung’s industrial novel. The work consists of four different parts and deals with the following subjects: cartelization of the mines and mills, the role of family owners of the enterprises, technological developments, capital movements, strikes, the history of the region, the living and working conditions of the workers

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and their families, the processes of rationalization and their consequences for the employment of the workers, environmental aspects, and finally also the ambivalent role of the church with respect to class conflict. As Muller argued, the whole of Gequältes Volk is a colourfully composed construction, a mixture of facts and fiction in various styles and story forms such as history, anecdotes, naturalistic description, economic treatises, and detective fiction, all mixed together: Gequältes Volk ist ein bunt zusammengewürfeltes, loses Gebilde, ein Durcheinander von Fakten und Fiktion, in dem die verschiedenartigsten Erzählformen und Stilmittel (Geschichtsschreibung, Anekdote, naturalistische Schilderung, Methoden des Detektivromans, langatmige wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Abhandlungen) neben einander bestehen (Muller, 1991, p. 8). Tormented People is a colourful formation, a mixture of fact and fiction, in which many different forms and styles are applied in a parallel way (historical writing, anecdotes, naturalistic description, methods applied in detective stories, long-breath economic treatises (author’s translation).

The Americanization of production processes as such of the Upper Silesian industry and mines is not an explicit theme in the novel. But in the background of the book, it plays a significant role nevertheless. Important are labour saving technological innovations such as flexibilization of the enterprises causing pay cuts, unemployment and poverty of the workers and their families. This is for example illustrated in the following passages: Zugleich wird bekannt gegeben, dass die Vereinigten Oberschlesischen Hüttenwerke in Gleiwitz, kaum saniert, von neuem ihr Kapital um gleich ein paar Dutzend Millionen erhöhen und dass ein Ausländisches Konsortium zur Durchführung einer Zweckentsprechende Rationalisierung eine erhebliche Anleihe angeboten hat (Jung, 1927/1987, p. 83). It is acknowledged publicly that the just reorganized United Upper Silesian metallurgic plants in Gleiwitz will increase substantially investment of capital and that a foreign consortium has offered a considerable bond for an appropriate rationalization (author’s translation). Ihr Interesse liegt darin, den Arbeiter von der Maschine zu trennen, ihn zu entspezialisieren (Jung, 1987 [1927]: 99).

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For them it matters to disconnect the worker from the machine, to despecialize the worker. (author’s translation) Das oberschlesischese Wirtschaftsgebiet stellt sich um. Es baut sich organisch, in der gegebenen Entwicklung der Jahrzehnte, aus – wie eben die neuen Arbeitskräfte heranwachsen. Das alte ist morsch, es muss aus dem Wege geräumt, bereinigt werden. So waren die Rationalisierung und der Umbau der Industrie gesichert (Jung, 1927/1987, p. 137). The Upper Silesian economic region is changing. It will be developed organically in the coming decades, as will the workforce increase at the same time. The old order is obsolete and rotten. It has to be abolished and cleaned. Only in this way the reconstruction of industry will be safeguarded (author’s translation).

Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (1930) The New Objectivity style in the German industrial novel was also expressed to some extent in Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (literally ‘The Employees’, 1930/2013). In the 1920s Kracauer was a journalist of the renowned Franfkurter Zeitung. He was linked to the so-called Frankfurt School of Sociology through his notable friends Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. His ambitious literary documentary novel Die Angestellten dealt in an ethnographic way with white-collar workers in Berlin offices, banks, and large department stores in the late 1920s. His book may be considered a classic example of the New Objectivity industrial novel or reportage. Kracauer was born in 1889 in Frankfurt and died in New York in 1966. Apart from his journalism for the Frankfurter Zeitung he was a writer, architect, philosopher, social scientist, and film critic. In 1933 he left Germany for France and later for the United States. Apart from Die Angestellten he published other important works, such as his seminal 1947 film study From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.7 Die Angestellten was published f irst in German in 1930 (Kracauer, 1930/2013) and in 1998 in English under the title The Salaried Masses. This relatively small book contains twelve concise essays that impressively describe the transformation of working life and working culture in Berlin in 7 Später 2016 is an extensive recent biography of Kracauer and his work. See also Martin Jay’s biographical sketch (1975/1976).

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the 1920s, when Germany’s capital had become one of its biggest and most industrialized cities. The on-going transformation of working life Kracauer aimed to depict was the revolutionary and rapid increase in the number of white-collar workers, mostly women, in large industrial and financial enterprises and department stores. The book, covering a theme that until then had been more or less a terra incognita for German literature, dealt in particular with the culture and lifestyle of the new upcoming white-collar middle class of the city. This group did not consider itself a part of the traditional working class, but as a new group of aspirational status. The writing modes chosen by Kracauer were reportage and, in this case more appropriately, montage, which he described as ‘a mosaic of photographs or samples of reality’ (Kracauer, 1930/2013, p. 16; see also Später, 2016, p. 230). Various kinds of relevant statistical and documentary data are scattered throughout the book. For example, in the 1920s hundreds of thousands of white-collar workers daily walked down Berlin’s streets, while in Germany as a whole the number of white-collar workers reached 3.5 million, including 1.2 million women. Whereas the increase in blue-collar workers only doubled, the number of white-collar workers at the time was five times higher than before. Half of them were employed in industry, local government, and social-security organizations. The other half were in commerce, public transport, and banking. Most numerous were office workers, workers in commerce, technicians, and foremen. About 30 per cent of the white-collar workers were organized in one of the three white-collar labour unions of the time (Kracauer, 1930/2013, pp. 10–16). The main background characteristics of the transformation of working life and the organization of work were the intensifying processes of rationalization (the introduction of scientific management) and mechanization (the introduction of assembly lines and Hollerith machines, which processed data on punch cards) in the German economy, which was occurring for the first time at full scale in German industry and the new services industries. The rapid increase in white-collar workers in this context, both in industry and services, also resulted in the creation of a new white-collar culture – constructed and perceived by white-collar workers themselves – for example the elaboration of weekend entertainment activities, and active engagement in sports, as new elements of a ‘fashionable life’. According to Kracauer this culture was ‘spiritually empty’, and did not prevent worker alienation and feelings of anomie (geistiger Obdachlosigkeit, literally ‘mental homelessness’) among the new Berlin middle class (Kracauer, 1930/2013: 15; Kaes et al., 1994, pp. 181–194):

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The mass of white-collar employees distinguishes itself from the workingclass proletariat by being intellectually homeless … They are living at present without a doctrine to which they can look up, without a goal to guide them (Kracauer, 1930/2013, p. 91, translation Kaes et al., 1994, pp. 189–190).

As a consequence, the new middle class felt insecure in German society, and particularly after the onset of the Great Depression, they became susceptible to the emerging ideas of national socialism.8 Kracauer was convinced that in comparison with, for example, a hundred separate factory descriptions or reportages, his more comprehensive approach of synthesizing documentary reportage was an eminently more effective means to construct working-life reality. By this he implicitly criticized the mainly inductive New-Objectivity approach of Egon Erwin Kisch. The way Kracauer created his reportage was similar to formal sociological research, usually consisting of both inductive and deductive elements.9 For example, in order to be able to diagnose correctly the reality of working-life changes Kracauer conducted f irst of all a large number of interviews with different types of white-collar workers and their representatives at the company level, and also with entrepreneurs, members of the personnel departments of companies, and representatives of white-collar labour unions. He also carried out participant observations on site, and additionally used relevant social-research citations. Remarkably, Kracauer did not have the explicit intention of formulating practical reform proposals on the basis of his approach. Rather, he considered his cases as exemplary for reality. His main purpose was first and foremost an accurate characterization of the work of white-collar workers and their culture: Die Arbeit ist eine Diagnose und verzichtet als solche bewusst darauf, Vorschläge für Verbesserung zu machen. Rezepte sind nicht überall am Platz und am allerwenigsten hier, wo es zunächst darauf ankam, einer noch kaum gesichteten Situation innezuwerden (Kracauer, 1930/2013, p. 7).

8 This subject is also treated in Hans Fallada’s famous novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Berlin 2017/1932, translated into English as What now, Little Man?, London 1932). 9 Contrary to other New Objectivity industrial reportages, according to Walter Benjamin, Kracauer did not like to see his approach as mere New Objectivity reportage. He preferred to offer something fundamentally different, namely a further-reaching and more in-depth dialectical ‘unmasking’. See Benjamin (1980).

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The work is a diagnosis and as such not intentionally focused on improvement. Clear recipes are not always appropriate, not at all here, where at first it is important to diagnose a hardly known situation (author’s translation).

The results of his efforts were published first (in the late 1920s) as a serial in the liberal but politically independent Frankfurter Zeitung, and later also in book form. Kracauer approached his subject not only from various perspectives (workers, bosses, trade unionists), but also by depicting the new Berlin white-collar culture through a multitude of different aspects, including: the absenteeism of a middle class salaried community, the high incidence of worker alienation in rationalized and mechanized off ice work, lack of work satisfaction, planning of work processes, introduction of welfare work, introduction of ideas-letterboxes, worker participation, career development, the signif icance of worker age, tariffs, internal company papers, educational level of white-collar workers, and their needs as consumers. Also signif icant in the book is the importance of weekend culture and participation in sports by the salaried masses, which Kracauer considered the major means of depoliticization (Hauptmittel der Entpolitisierung) of the Angestellten, rather than as a means of changing social relations (Kracauer, 1930/2013, p. 100). In his approach Kracauer did not shun the use of various illustrative metaphors as well as nicknames for certain workers, such as ‘cyclists’ (Radfahrer), those who are ‘flatterers of chiefs’ or ‘boss around the lower ranks’, ‘slime trumpets’ (Schleimtrompeten), ‘princesses’ (Prinzessinnen), and ‘blood oranges’ (Blutorangen) – hypocrites with ‘yellow skins, and red insides’ (Kracauer, 1930/2013, for example pp. 29, 38, 42, 79, 83). In sum, his book resulted in a comprehensive and succinct description of the new emerging white-collar culture of the 1920s, first in Berlin but also more widely in the Weimar Republic. One could summarize this culture as a new, uniform middle-class mass culture, with comparable uniform labour relations and collective agreements. Compared to the more traditional blue-collar industrial proletariat, the new white-collar proletariat in Berlin of the 1920s was distinct, in Kracauer’s view, because they were ‘spiritually homeless’ as a result of the alienating work they did, finding release only in non-politicized weekend amusements and a fascination with sports.10 10 In a review of Kracauer’s reportage Walter Benjamin judges Kracauer’s approach a form of ‘unmasking reality as a consequent outsider by penetrating deeply into the existence of white-collar workers’ (Benjamin, 1980; author’s translation).

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Willi Bredel’s Maschinenfabrik N. & K. (1930) This novel may be considered an eminent example of the group of propagandistic socialist-realist industrial novels published by writers linked with the BPRS and its organ Die Linkskurve. Bredel (1901–1964) was a communist writer, journalist and in the former East Germany was president of the Academy of Arts. The book was written during Bredel’s two years in prison in the late 1920s and deals with a conflict between the factory management and the workers of the Hamburg machine factory Nagel & Kaemp (in the novel, ‘Maschinenfabrik Negel & Kopp’). The workers were themselves divided into two opposing factions. On the one side was a group of communist workers and on the other a more moderate group of social-democratic workers. In the late 1920s Bredel himself worked for a while in the machine factory as a turner. After 1933 he was imprisoned again, this time by the Nazi regime. The labour conflict in his book is focused on the plans of the factory management to introduce productivity-increasing American working methods without at the same time raising the wages of the workers. A second cause of dispute was the factory management’s plan to extend the number of daily working hours with two extra overtime hours (Bredel, 1930, Episode 10). After a while a wildcat strike breaks out led by the communist faction. The management decides to lock out the strikers. In addition, the socialdemocratic union rejects the legitimacy of the wildcat strike and makes an agreement with the management – actually a continuation of the former agreement (Bredel, 1930, Episode 28). Ultimately, the wildcat strike is broken by police and a number of those willing to work (Bredel, 1930, Episodes 39-45). The protagonist of the novel is a certain Melmster. He is acting as an agitator and strike leader and is ultimately fired by the factory management (Bredel, 1930, Episode 34). The novel, consisting of forty-nine relatively short episodes, written in short sentences, doesn’t go into any more detail about the Americanization of the production process and its consequences for the workers. But in the background it does pay attention to the introduction of modern American production techniques, existing working methods and work accidents (for example in episode 23). Bredel’s main purpose is to create a concise documentary- and reportage-like description of the strike movement and the role of the two opposing factions of workers versus the response from the factory management (see also Muller, 1991: 3). Alfred Melmster (probably a self-portrait of the author), is a young communist turner in the factory. He is considered a good worker, a sort of Stakhanovite for whom the organization of the work in the factory as

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such does not seem to be relevant.11 Increasing productivity is a matter of voluntary motivation of the worker(s). As in the Soviet Union in those years this is primarily considered a question of ‘socialist competition’ (Berman, 1977, p. 159). In the following episode this is illustrated by a discussion between Melmster and some other communist turners on the shopfloor: According to a certain Beckmann (a worker): Die kapitalistische Rationalisierung ist eine verdammt wichtige Angelegenheit der Deutschen und internationalen Arbeiterbewegung. Sie ist ein Generalangriff auf deine, meine und unser aller Lebenshaltung und unsere noch vorhandenen geringe Rechte! (Bredel, 1931, Episode 22). Capitalist rationalization is a very important matter in the German and international labour movement. It is actually a general attack on your, mine and our way of life and on our still prevailing rights! (author’s translation). Siehe Rationalisierung in Russland! Dort wird selbst nach euren eigenen Angaben amerikanisches Tempo überboten! [thus a certain Olbracht] (Bredel, 1931, Episode 22). Look at rationalization in Russia! There even American Tempo is surpassed, according to their own information! (author’s translation). And Melmster concludes: Der russische Rationalisierungsprozess ist das Tempo des sozialistischen Aufbaus … Die sozialistische Rationalisierung in der Sowjetunion bringt höhere Löhne für die Arbeiter und verkürzt die Arbeitszeit. Das ist der Unterschied (Bredel, 1931, Episode 22). The process of rationalization in Russia implies the speed of socialist construction … In the Soviet Union the socialist rationalization affords the workers higher wages and shortens working time. That is the difference (author’s translation).

As Berman has argued, this conviction with respect to the organization of work and productivity would actually be against the more common 11 According to Melmster ‘Every communist should exert himself to be a good worker’ (Quoted in Berman, 1977).

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workers’ ‘alternative’ interest, which implies resisting rationalization only because of the risk of job losses and unemployment (Berman, 1977, p. 161). Nevertheless, the workers in the novel do turn effectively against the factory managements’ plans, at least as long as they are not compensated by higher wages.

Erik Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931) The fifth and last example of the New Objectivity industrial novel in Weimar Germany concerns Erik Reger’s Union der festen Hand (Literally, ‘Union of the Firm Hand’, 1931/1992). This book is generally considered one of the best and most comprehensive industrial novels of Weimar Germany. Overall, it is more akin to reportage than a solely literary novel. Writer and historian Erik Reger (the pen-name of Hermann Dannenberger, 1893–1954) worked for the Krupp Company at Essen as a press officer and administrator between the end of World War I and 1927, getting to know the company well from the inside. His extensive book of almost 700 pages is a concise and objective non-partisan reconstruction of the labour struggle and labour relations inside Krupp, as well as in the wider Ruhr coal-mining region, over five successive episodes in the decade following the war, encompassing the 1918 socialist uprising following the German defeat of World War I, the Kapp-Putsch of 1920, the hyperinflation of 1921–1923 and subsequent French Occupation of the Ruhr region in 1923–1925, the relative economic stability of the mid-twenties, the rise of mass unemployment by the end of the 1920s, and the rise of Hitler and Nazism from the mid 1920s. The book also deals with the internal rivalries among the big Ruhr-region industrialists. Reger offers a concise impression of Krupp’s extensive and encompassing welfare work policy at the time. The Krupp Company, led by Baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, is represented in the novel as the ‘Risch-Zander’ steel company, controlled by the character Freiherr von Zander. Its workforce is named the ‘Rischianer’, similar to the actual ‘Kruppianer’. Jointly the workers and the entrepreneur and his family constitute ‘one big family’. The owner lived in the monumental Villa ‘Zandershöhe’ (based on Krupp’s Villa Hügel). The worker families lived in a large number of sometimes romantic worker colonies and settlements constructed by the company. The settlements were provided with a grocery (Konsumanstalt) and a variety of other facilities, all part of the larger company town of Essen in the Ruhr region in the west of the country. Celebration of the first centennial of the ‘Risch-Zander’/Krupp steel works in 1928 forms the narrative conclusion to the work.

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Though in its expansive form and style – not at all similar to Kracauer’s more compact book, for example – Reger’s novel may likewise be considered at its core a ‘vivisection’ of the Weimar period, dealing with the class struggle between entrepreneurs and workers as well as with worker alienation (Hermand, 1965, p. 114; Muller, 1991). In fact, there are two intertwined storylines. The f irst concerns the mutual power struggle, as well as cartelization, between the key industrial players of the region, who include not only steel magnate Krupp (in fictional guise) but also the bosses of the coal mines, blast furnaces, the electro-technical industry and the chemical industry. Soon after the end of the war they constituted a powerful industrial trust, called in the novel the Union der Festen Hand (literally the ‘Union of the Firm Hand’) (Reger, 1931/1992, p. 261). Its main objective was to improve the national and international competitive position of the cartel’s partners, but it also represented a united front of employers with which they could confront the trade unions and syndicalists on the one hand and the state on the other. As the book’s decade unfolds, the ‘Union der Festen Hand’ becomes a very successful union of employers. It succeeds in quelling the many labour and tariff conflicts of the first half of the decade. More importantly, by widely introducing the processes of rationalization and American production techniques, while at the same time expanding the number of daily working hours, the productivity of the workers increased significantly (Reger, 1931/1992, pp. 385–424). By 1928 the Ruhr industrial region is renamed in the novel the ‘Gigant im Westen’ (‘giant in the west’), employing no fewer than 1,200,000 blue-collar workers and 378,000 white-collar workers (Reger, 1931/1992, pp. 606, 609, 615). The protagonist on the employers’ side is Freiherr von Zander, owner of the steel company Risch-Zander. He plays the role of the enlightened patriarchal proprietor who wanted to remain ‘Herr-im-Hause’ (sole boss and proprietor of the company) on the basis of principles of Gemeinwirtschaft (corporatism). The protagonist on the blue- and white-collar workers’ side is crane operator Adam Griguszius, who during the decade undergoes a transition from a rebellious communist worker towards an adapted, conformist worker. He is eventually dismissed and ends like many others as unemployed because of the replacement of workmen by machines. In contrast to the employers’ goals after the war, Reger represents the workers’ goal as nationalization, or at least co-determination, of the businesses. One of the remarkable means the employers use to pacify workers is the foundation by the ‘Union der Festen Hand’ of two work-related institutions: ‘Ida’ and ‘Ifa’. ‘Ida’ stands for ‘Institut für Deutsche Abeitsbeseelung’ and was set up as a sort of lab to creating a profit-supporting treatment for workers (gewinnbringende

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Menschenbehandlung) (Reger, 1931/1992, p. 622). At the institute’s opening in 1928, Freiherr von Zander emphasized the need to liberate the workers from the crowd (Masse) by improving the quality of German work (Deutsche Arbeit): Das Materielle sei also begrenzt, aber das Ideelle sei unbegrenzt, und es sei an den Menschen, die seelische Verbundenheit zu schaffen, durch Heimatpflege, durch Kunstempfinden. ‘Der Mensch lebt nicht vom Brot allein’. … Im Stahl verbinden sich Kopf und Herz, Geist und Seele. … Darum ist zweierlei notwendig: die Berufsschulung und die Menschenschulung (Reger, 1931/1992, pp. 624–626). The material is limited, while the ideal is without limits, and it is up to the people to create the spiritual connection by caring for home and feeling for art … Man does not live for bread alone … Steel connects head and heart, spirit and soul … To realize these two things are necessary: professional education and general education (author’s translation).

‘Ifa’, by contrast, is the abbreviation of ‘Arbeitsphysiologisches Institut’. This institute carries out psychotechnical studies as well as research and experiments on the interaction between man and machine, such as on the assembly line. By developing educational and training programmes for workers, undertaking work experiments, and publishing a large number of propagandistic company newspapers, ‘Ida’ and ‘Ifa’ are portrayed as delivering a substantial contribution to the resolution of the inherent class conflict between employers and blue- and white-collar workers by the end of the decade.

Conclusion The main question in this chapter on Modernist industrial novels in the Weimar Republic is to what extent Americanism had an impact on the content of these novels. Rationalization, tempo, and worker alienation were important themes of all the industrial novels dealt with here, albeit in a critical way. There are variations in the extent to which Americanism was supported or criticized. In the majority of cases dealt with here rationalization is set in the wider context of changing industrial and labour relations. The same applies to the chosen New Objectivity novel form: reportage, documentation, practical use value, brief accessible sentence structure.

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As trendsetters for the industrial novels in particular, three authors stand out. First is the extremely inductive approach of Egon Erwin Kisch, who chooses the mere reproduction of facts. The opposite approach is taken by Siegfried Kracauer, who mingles inductive and deductive elements more explicitly, coming close to formal sociological research in Die Angestellten. Erik Reger in Union der Festen Hand is somewhere in the middle, with an approach that is predominantly historical and descriptive. Some of the authors of Weimar Modernist industrial novels remain wary of making prescriptive reform proposals (in particular Kracauer and Reger), whereas others like Franz Jung and Willi Bredel have a clear stance of advocating for social change. Although there is a focus on Americanism, the US is not the only guiding example to be fully or partly criticized. The Soviet Union and Stakahnovism are also sources of inspiration, or alternatives to some extent to Americanism for the more leftist writers. Kracauer and Reger explicitly deal with the emerging class of white-collar workers and their new culture, and with working and living conditions. And finally, both Kisch and Reger deal with labour relations at the gigantic Krupp steelworks, as well as with the union of employers in the Ruhr region.

Works cited Barthel, M. (1925). Das Spiel mit der Puppe. Gutenberg. Bauer, O. (1931). Kapitalismus und Sozialismus nach dem Weltkrie. Vol. 1: Rationalisierung und Fehlrationalisierung. Wiener Volksbuchandlung. Becker, S. (2018). Experiment Weimar: Eine Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1918–1933. WBG Academic. Benjamin, W. (1980). Ein Aussenseiter macht sich bemerkbar. In W. Benjamin. Gesammelte Schrifte, Vol. 3 (pp. 219–225). Suhrkamp. Berman, R. (1977). Lukacs’ critique of Bredel and Ottwalt: A political account of an aesthetic debate of 1931–1932. New German Critique, 10, 155–178. https://doi. org/10.2307/487677 Bowlt, J. E. (Ed.). (1988). Russian art of the avant-garde: Theory and criticism 1902–1934. Thames and Hudson. Bredel, W. (1930). Maschinenfabrik N und K. https://nemesis.marxists.org/bredelmaschinenfabrik-n-k1.htm Döblin, A. (2020). Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. Fischer Taschenbuch. (Original work published 1929) Engels, F. (1993). The condition of the working class in England. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1845)

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Fallada, H. (2017). Kleiner Mann, was nun? Aufbau Verlag. (Original work published 1932) Ford, H. (1923). Mein Leben und Werk, translated by Curt and Marguerite Thesing. Amra Verlag. Amazon Kindle E-books Gay, P. (1988). Weimar culture: The outsider as insider. Penguin. (Original work published 1969) Hermand, J. (1965). Erik Reger’s ‘Union der festen Hand’ (131): Roman oder Reportage? Monatshefte, 57(3), 113–133. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30161440 Hughes, T. P. (1989). American genesis: A century of invention and technological enthusiasm. Penguin. Jay, M. (1975/1976). The extraterritorial life of Siegfried Kracauer. Salmagundi, 31/32, 49–106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40546882 Jung, F. (1961). Der Weg nach unten: Aufzeichnungen au seiner grossen Zeit. Luchterhand. Jung, F. (1987). Gequältes Volk: Ein oberschlesischer Industrieroman. Nautilus. (Original work published 1927) Kaes A., Jay, M., & Dimenberg, E. (1994). The Weimar Republic sourcebook. University of California Press. Kisch, E. E. (2006). Der rasende Reporter. Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag. (Original work published 1924) Kracauer, S. (1927). ‘The mass ornament’. In A. Kaes, M. Jay, & E. Dimenberg (Eds.) (1994). The Weimar Republic sourcebook (pp. 404–407). University of California Press. Kracauer, S. (1931). ‘Girls and crisis’. In A. Kaes, M. Jay, & E. Dimenberg (Eds.) (1994). The Weimar Republic sourcebook (pp. 565–566). University of California Press. Kracauer, S. (2013). Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland. Suhrkamp. (Original work published 1930) Lewis, W. B. (1990). Egon Erwin Kisch beehrt sich darzubieten: Paradies Amerika. German Studies Review, 13(2), 253–268. https://doi.org/10.2307/1430707 Maier, C. S. (1970). Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 27–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947000500202 Maier, C. S. (2016). Recasting bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the decade after World War I. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1975) Muller, F. (1991). Neue Sachlichkeit und Arbeitswelt. Germanica, 9, 55–70. https:// doi.org/10.4000/germanica.2382 Nolan, M. (1994). Visions of modernity: American business and the modernization of Germany. Oxford University Press. Patka, M. G. (2001). Egon Erwin Kisch. Stationen im Leben eines streitbaren Autors. Boehlau.

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Reger, E. (1992). Union der festen Hand. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. (Original work published 1931) Schlenstedt, D. (1985). Egon Erwin Kisch: Leben un Werk. Rütten & Loening. (Original work published 1970) Später, J. (2016). Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Biographie. Suhrkamp. Todorov, T. (2009). La signature humaine. Essais 1983–2008. Éditions du Seuil. Walker, W. (1986). German worker’s literature: A classroom approach. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, 19(1), 65–74. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3530865 Williams, K. (1990). The will to objectivity: Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter. Modern Language Review, 85(1), 92–106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3732798 Winkler, H. A. (1993). Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten Deutschen Demokratie. C.H. Beck. Zola, É. (1991). Germinal. Fasquelle (Le Livre de Poche). (Original work published 1885)

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Neo-realist industrial novels in postwar Italy: The Olivetti case Abstract This chapter deals with the remarkable number of neo-realist industrial novels written during the post-war economic boom in Italy. This period was characterized by a wide-ranging second industrial revolution in the country. Italian industry introduced modern American production techniques on a larger scale than before the war. As a consequence, worker alienation became a prominent issue. This was aggravated by the rapid transition of the large traditionally agrarian workforce into a modern industrial proletariat adapted to efficiency-based industrial circumstances. The focus is on the emblematic Olivetti typewriter and calculator company and its idealistic owner Adriano Olivetti, who intentionally employed two renowned professional writers, Ottiero Ottieri and Paolo Volponi. Both authors published significant industrial novels on the Olivetti company and its workers. Keywords: Olivetti, communitarism, neo-realist industrial novels, Taylorism, Fordism, worker alienation

Introduction Italy underwent a remarkable economic boom in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s marked by a forceful industrialization (Ginsborg, 1989, 283–343). Italians themselves speak of a ‘second industrial revolution’ after the first one between the end of the 19th century and the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. In a quick pace and relatively short time the country made a transition from a still mainly agricultural nation towards one of the most important industrial economies of the world of that time. This transition required the recruiting of many new industrial workers from the ranks of agricultural workers and artisans in a rather brief timespan. This caused

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH06

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large migrant streams from the south of Italy to the north, as well as a rapid urbanization of the north. The majority of important industrial enterprises such as Fiat, Pirelli, and Olivetti were concentrated in the so-called industrial triangle between Milan, Turin, and Genoa. Another relevant factor in this context was the broadly supported will in the country to overcome the political and moral deficit of the Fascist regime of Mussolini (1922–1943). This, among other things, motivated a limited number of enlightened and reformist entrepreneurs to experiment with modern American production techniques, industrial democracy and extensive social policies inside their companies. One of the most remarkable reformist entrepreneurs in this respect was Adriano Olivetti, the owner of the eponymous typewriter and office machinery company, first in its main factory at Ivrea near Milan, and then also in the new factory in Pozzuoli near Naples. Adriano Olivetti believed strongly in the application of social-scientific knowledge at the entrepreneurial and factory level as well as in a close collaboration between entrepreneurs, engineers, and intellectuals (social scientists, writers, poets) (Ferrarotti, 2015; Ochetto, 2013). In this respect Olivetti was certainly not unique – a number of enterprises started to publish externally oriented company journals, for instance, in which renowned scientist, designers, architects, philosophers, writers, poets and art critics were actively involved. One of the most notable examples in this respect was the journal Civiltà delle Macchine (1953–1979) founded by well-known writer-engineer Leonardo Sinisgalli and engineer Giuseppe Eugenio Luraghi on behalf of Finmeccanica. This enterprise, a post-war conglomerate of several big Italian manufacturing industries like car producer Alfa Romeo, Ansaldo, and Cantieri Navali dell’Adriatico, was founded in 1948 with the aim of contributing actively to the reconstruction of manufacturing industry in the country.1 Civiltà delle Macchine and other comparable company journals dealt with subjects like technical innovations, product development, the economic boom of the 1950s, entrepreneurial welfare work policies, and the marketing of products. The particular intention of Civiltà delle Macchine was bringing together in debate-form two contrasting cultures in industry: the technical and the humanistic. This resulted in a number of remarkable narrative and descriptive articles on the cultural role of post-war Italian enlightened capitalism, partly based on factory visits (‘visita in fabbrica’), and observations and reports of working life and working conditions by writers, social scientists, designers, and other intellectuals. This approach 1 Other examples of such journals include Comunità (Notizie Olivetti), Pirelli (Pirelli), Il Gatto Selvatico (Eni), and Rivista Italsider (Italsider).

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was previously unknown in Italy (Di Nardo, 2009; Bigatti & Lupo, 2013; Alberini, 2014). The factory visits resulted in articles such as the following: ‘Un poeta e un pittore in visita ai cantieri dell’Ansaldo’ (A poet’s and painter’s visit to the Ansaldo works) by Giorgio Caproni (1953), ‘La centrale di Cornigliano’ (The power plant of Cornigliano) by Carlo Emilio Gadda (1953), and ‘Ritorno alla Sant’Eustacchio’ (Return to the machine factory Sant’Eustacchio) by Emilio Tadini (1956) (these can be found in Bigatti & Lupo, 2013, pp. 115–140 and 297–318; see also the additional bibliographic overview there by Silvia Cavalli). Apart from the company journals, another significant literary development was a remarkable initiative taken by two high-profile post-war literary writers, Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino. In September 1961 they published a special number of the new important neo-realist literary journal Il Menabò (founded in 1959), which was completely devoted to the Italian industrial novel.2 The journal’s objective was, like that of Civiltà delle Macchine, to anticipate, describe, and analyse the profound economic and social transformation of Italy during the economic boom by paying attention to the spectacular growth of the chemical, automobile, and domestic electrodomestic consumer goods industries; to the need for social reform at the entrepreneurial level; and to social inequality, the rapid urbanization of the north caused by emigration from south to north, the construction of motorways, and real estate speculation. In the background, the Italian communist party (PCI) also played a significant and influential role; a number of intellectuals such as the authors Italo Calvino and Paolo Volponi were active members. The PCI’s cultural department tried to influence directly the writers’ debate, initiated by Vittorini and Calvino, concerning the industrial novel, which gave for the first time in the history of the Italian industrial novel a direct voice to the worker. In line with the ideas of famous Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned in the 1930s by Mussolini, Calvino took the stance that an intellectual should come as close as possible to the people in order to be able to produce a letteratura nazionale populare (popular national literature), whereas the PCI by contrast maintained a more rigid and propagandistic position based on Soviet socialist realism and Zhdanovism (Fioretti, 2013, p. 13).3 2 ‘Neo-realism’ in this context is a term borrowed from Italian cinema, where it described the location-shot films with contemporary, gritty settings that emerged at the end of the war from directors such as De Sica and Visconti. In time, parallel movements emerged in other art forms in Italy, including literature. 3 About Zhadanovism see also Chapter 4 on Soviet industrial novels.

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By dedicating a special issue of Il Menabò to industrial novels, Vittorini and Calvino wanted to give the industrial novel, which already existed in Italy in a realistic form since the 1930s, a new neo-realistic boost. Similar to Civiltà delle Macchine and the other company journals mentioned, both writers still considered the factory an institution that was closed to the external world. Opening the factory windows to the outside world was urgently needed to make a critical sociological and anthropological examination of the new Italian industrial reality and the changing world of work (Vittorini, 1961, p. 19). As a consequence, the Italian literary world linked to Il Menabò actively contributed to the renewal of the industrial novel in Italy. In this chapter I will focus on one remarkable big Italian enterprise in particular, Olivetti and the more specific ideas of its owner Adriano Olivetti on what a ‘good factory’ should be. The Olivetti enterprise was founded by Adriano’s father Camillo Olivetti in 1908. The company introduced Taylorism (scientific-management-based work methods) and Fordism from the 1930s until the late 1950s in its factory in Ivrea near Turin, and in the 1950s also in its new factory in Pozzuoli near Naples. These methods were embedded in extensive welfare work programmes. From the moment that Adriano Olivetti assumed full command of the firm in 1932, industrial democracy also became a main theme of welfare work in the firm until Adriano’s early death in 1960. In the years thereafter the Olivetti Company gradually lost much of its economic and social momentum, and eventually lost its autonomous status in 2003, becoming a part of the Telecom Italia group. ‘Olivettism’, as Adriano Olivetti’s social utopia has come to be known, had a strong attraction to two eminent literary writers who both became deeply involved in the company’s social policies. These are Ottiero Ottieri (1924–2002) and Paolo Volponi (1924–1994). In fact, both Ottieri and Volponi were the first Italian neo-realist authors of emblematic industrial novels to take up the challenge to intellectuals – formulated most clearly by Vittorini and Calvino in Il Menabò – to write industrial novels as physically and mentally close as possible to the workers themselves in the workplace. Although the first industrial novels in Italy date back to the end of the 19th century, the genre became really important during the second industrial revolution in the country, roughly the period between the mid-1930s and the 1960s. In this period naturalism was succeeded by realism and neo-realism, which coincided with the economic boom (‘il miracolo economico’) of the 1950s and 1960s and the wider spread of Taylorism and Fordism in Italian industry. Mass production grew. As a consequence, worker alienation became a serious issue. From a chronological viewpoint Giuseppe Lupo, one of the

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editors of an extensive anthology on Italian industrial novels, considered the beginning of this blooming period to be 1934, when Carlo Bernari, a self-taught writer of French origin, published Tre Operai (‘Three Workers’) and its conclusion to be 2002, when Armanno Rea, a journalist and militant member of the PCI, published Dismissione (‘Dismissal’) (Bigatti & Lupo, 2013, p. 6; Fioretti, 2013, p. 11).

The Italian context of welfare work capitalism in the 1950s Welfare work in Italy was introduced in particular in the big family-owned industries of the north, in the so-called industrial triangle between Turin, Genoa and Milan, during the first half of the 20th century. This occurred often in combination with the introduction of scientific management (Taylorism) and Fordist work methods aimed at mass-production of consumer goods. 4 Within the wider Italian context this region developed its own distinctive so-called ‘Turin social model’. This model was based on several elements, implying a certain convergence between liberals and socialists, industrial democracy and the so-called ‘Einaudian’ lesson of belezza della lotta (‘the beauty of struggle’).5 Additionally, a meaningful distinction can be made between the Fiat company model and the Olivetti company model. Both car producer Fiat in Turin (led by Gianni Agnelli and Vittorio Valetta) and typewriter producer Olivetti (successively led by Camillo and his son Adriano Olivetti) introduced extensive welfare work programmes in their enterprises, such as good worker payment, workmen’s housing, sports activities, and holiday colonies for children. However, there was one striking difference between the two companies. Whereas Fiat, with its ‘linea Valetta’, remained a pure capitalist enterprise primarily focused on profits, (Adriano) Olivetti chose a different, ‘communitarian’ approach primarily based on industrial democracy and active worker participation (Berta, 1978b, p. 547). As regards the wider relevant context of welfare capitalism in Italy in the first half of the 20th century it is important to emphasize again that by the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s Italy as a whole was still an 4 About the reception of Taylorism in Italy and some other European industrialized countries in the 1920s, see Maier, 1970, p. 27–61. 5 Giuseppe Berta, while referring to renowned economist and later (1948) president of Italy, Luigi Einaudi, calls the presence of antagonisms and tensions as an essential driver for progress in Piemonte, the region of north-west Italy where the first wave of Italian industrialization was centered (Berta, 1978a, p. 206).

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overwhelmingly agrarian society. In many aspects it was also an underdeveloped country, in particular in the south (the region known as il mezzogiorno). As far as there was economic progress it remained limited to the north and to sectors such as automobiles, electrical energy and artificial fibres. Only after World War II did the country leave behind its traditional economic protectionism. As a consequence, international trade started to bloom. In addition, Italy’s participation in the Marshall Plan helped to create the socalled ‘miracolo economico’ of the country from the late 1950s to about 1963. In this short period Italy succeeded in transforming its agrarian economy into one of the most important competitive nations of post-war Europe. Key corporate players in this transition included not only Olivetti and Fiat, but also companies like Eni (energy), Edison, Montecatini (synthetic fibres), and domestic electrical goods makers like Candy, Ignis, and Zanussi (Ginsborg, 1989, 283–292). The economic boom caused a major stream of internal migration from the poor ‘mezzogiorno’ towards the wealthier industrializing north of Italy. On a large scale, former traditional agrarian workers had to switch almost overnight into modern industrial workers. In many individual cases this was a painful matter, often causing feelings of social as well as psychological alienation (Ginsborg, 1989, 283–343). Another relevant factor was the post-war euphoria felt by many intellectuals (writers, poets, scientists and reformist entrepreneurs like Adriano Olivetti) as regards the need for moral recuperation of the nation after the political and moral defeat of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Again Turin, and in particular the renowned Turin publishing house Einaudi, became the epic centre of the moral rearmament of Italy (Bonura, 1972, p. 25).

Welfare work at Olivetti From the outset, paternalistic welfare work became an important issue for Olivetti. When a distinction is made between traditional, authoritative paternalism on the one side and modern, democratic paternalism on the other, welfare work at Olivetti definitely belongs to the latter (Ferrarotti & Gemelli, 2015, loc. 226). First, company founder Camillo, and later his son Adriano (born in 1901), went more than once to the United States to study modern American manufacturing techniques.6 In 1925 Adriano stayed in the United States for six months and visited over a hundred factories, among them the Ford Motor Company. In admiration he called the workshops at 6 For his biography see Ochetto, 2013, and Maffioletti, 2016.

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Ford ‘un miracolo di organizzazione’ (Peroni, 2018, p. 23). These techniques (Taylorist and Fordist work methods) were introduced at Olivetti when the company increased in size in the decades after its foundation, with the aim of rationalizing and boosting productivity. Adriano officially started working in his father’s factory in 1924, first as an unskilled worker and eventually (from 1932 onwards) as managing director. It was in particular Adriano in particular who developed Olivetti’s welfare work programmes in a more substantial way. For example, workers received payment above average and employment was guaranteed. Also, workmen’s housing, sickness benefits, medical provision, pensions, educational provision (including a kindergarten), cultural provision (including an extensive library, theatre, concert hall, cinema, courses, book presentations, lectures, and sports facilities) became part of Olivetti’s welfare work.7 Likewise, the unique and active support of quite a number of well-known social scientists, writers, and artists as for example authors Paolo Volponi, Ottiero Ottieri, and poet Leonardo Sinisgalli, was an indispensable element of Adriano Olivetti’s welfare work policies. Also, worth mentioning in this respect are Franco Ferrarotti (an Italian sociologist and at the time temporary personal counsellor of Adriano Olivetti8), who published several books and articles on Olivetti and his communitarian ideas (Ferrarotti, 2015; 2016) as well as journalist Bruno Segre (Segre, 2015). Finally, a number of famous designers, such as Carlo Scarpa and Ettore Sottsass, belonged to Adriano’s extensive support network. Their primary role with respect to the company was contributing to the construction of a ‘workers’ aristocracy’ and a ‘class of managers’ being able ‘to develop themselves through their quality of work’ (Peroni, 2018, p. 123). One of the main goals of Adriano Olivetti as regards welfare work was to humanize work and working conditions with the aim of preventing worker alienation. His final objective was to realize a state of entrepreneurial autonomy (autonomia aziendale). This implied a socialized autonomous enterprise, ultimately to be owned by both management and workers. With respect to combatting worker alienation Adriano felt akin to ideas of French sociologist and philosopher Simone Weil.9 All in all, in close collaboration with intellectuals, Olivetti’s main preoccupation was to prevent worker 7 An ambitious circular dance hall, also designed by Figini and Pollini, was never realized (Bonifazio & Scrivano, 2001, p. 25). 8 Ferrarotti became Adriano’s special counsellor for the development of communitarian policies. 9 See also Chapter 7 on France.

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alienation by means of transforming the factory into an inspiring human space and working community (Diazzi & Sforza Tarabochia, 2019, p. 8). Mastering worker alienation was not his only objective. Influenced by ideas of the French personalist philosophers Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, Adriano Olivetti developed a comprehensive reformist political and social philosophy in which the firm and the region would become agents of change for the whole of Italy.10 In order to be able to shape both welfare work in the company and social and political change in Italy Adriano Olivetti initiated a communitarian political movement (Movimento di Comunità) in 1948 in Turin, with its own journal (Comunità) and publishing company (Edizioni di Comunità). In 1934 and 1939 new Modernist factory buildings designed by architects Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, with large glass windows, were opened in Ivrea’s Via Jervis.11 These two architects also designed the nursery school (1939–1941) and the important Social Services Centre building (1954–1958).12 Figini and Pollini, as well as some other architects designed the modernist residential area, Quartiere Castellamonte, to accommodate Olivetti’s workers with apartments provided with gardens and greens in between. After some time, ownership in the apartments was transferred to the inhabitants. The residential unit called ‘Talponia’, consisting of 82 dwellings at the west side of the factory premises, overlooking surrounding green hills and meadows, is particularly remarkable. Designed as a half circle by architects Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Oreglio d’Isola, the two-storey building has a total length of 300 metres. Apart from Castellamonte, the company constructed many other workmen’s rental dwellings nearby the factory and in the city of Ivrea, a number of three-storey apartments for larger families, as well as a number of separate apartments for managers, in collaboration with public housing associations. Alternatively, workers could borrow money from the company on favourable terms to construct their own house. In these cases, the company offered support from renowned architects. 10 Another significant inspirational source for Adriano Olivetti’s communitarian thinking was Walther Rathenau, an important industrialist (owner of AEG) and minister of foreign affairs in the German Weimar Republic. Rathenau published several sociological/philosophical books on a future ideal society (Rathenau, 1964; Berta, 1978b, p. 560; also, De Gier 2018). 11 According to famous Modernist French architect Le Corbusier, this was the most beautiful street in the world. In July 2018 via Jervis, with the former Olivetti factory and surrounding buildings, were inscribed on the World Heritage List of UNESCO as Ivrea, ‘Industrial city of the 20th century’. On the modern architecture in Ivrea, see Bonifazio & Scrivano, 2001 and Peroni, 2018. 12 In addition, an impressive separate canteen building was designed by Ignazio Gardella and constructed between 1953–1959 in the style of famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Next to the extensive welfare work programmes, the Modernist, NewObjectivity-style factory buildings, as well as the carefully designed Olivetti typewriters and office machines themselves, contributed to the welfare and well-being of the Olivetti employees.13

Adriano Olivetti’s communitarian utopia: Humana Civilitas Escaping from Mussolini’s Fascist regime, Adriano Olivetti went in the fall of 1943 to Champfèr (Engadin) in Switzerland. There he started writing about his reformist political and social ideas.14 He continued his writing efforts after World War II when he resumed the management of the firm. According to Italian historian Davide Caddedu, three summarizing publications are particularly crucial in correctly understanding Adriano’s political and social utopia, which can also be considered an alternative to the sclerotic centralized political system of Italy at the time. These are: L’Ordine Politico delle Comunità (Olivetti, 1945/1946), already mentioned; a collection of writings, Società Stato Comunità (Olivetti, 1952), and finally, Città dell’Uomo, a collection of essays published in 1959 a few months before he died (Olivetti, 1959) (see Caddedu, 2012, see also Zaccaria in Volponi, 2015, p. 261). The ideas included in these writings already took shape in the period between the world wars, when Adriano, like his father, actively supported reformist third-way debates in Italy (Maffioletti, 2016, pp. 25–115). Key elements of Adriano Olivetti’s communitarian philosophy can be summarized in the following way. The ultimate goal was the creation of a new decentralized political, social and cultural order in Italy based on a vertical structure, built from the bottom-up, of a number of autonomous but interlinked building blocks: first the factory and the surrounding economically self-sufficient and culturally homogeneous community; then the region(s); and finally, at the level of the nation a federated community of autonomous regions. The factory as such constitutes a critical economic

13 Historian Giuseppe Berta remarks in this respect: ‘Il fine estetico che l’architettura industriale doveva perseguire appariva strettamente correlato all’intento della restituzione della dignità culturale e civile, alla manualità del lavorò (Berta, 1978b, p. 562). (The aesthetic goal of industrial architecture should be connected closely with the intention of restoring cultural and civic dignity to labour and workers [author’s translation].) 14 In particular L’Ordine Politico delle Comunità (Olivetti, 1945/1946). This book already contains Adriano Olivetti’s principal ideas about social justice. It was published in Switzerland in 1945, and then in Italy (1946) by his own publishing company, Edizioni di Comunità.

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and cultural part of the community.15 At all levels, experts had to be actively involved. They should also play an important role in the legislature and councils of the regional government, as well as in one of the legislative houses at the national level. Traditional political parties should not play a decisive role in this structure anymore. Olivetti himself speaks of a ‘socialization of Italy’ or ‘socializzare senza statizzare’. Idealistically a community would consist of a number of smaller, mainly rural, communities of 500–5,000 inhabitants on the one hand and larger industrialized secondary communities of 100,000–150,000 on the other.16 This size he considered to be a human measure (Brilliant, 1993, p. 105). The communities are the organic cells of the regions. Within a community the factory has a certain responsibility. It is a ‘place of work where justice arises, where progress is dominant, where beauty is created and in the surroundings of which love … tolerance … have a real meaning’ (Olivetti, 1952, p. 41; Brilliant, 1993, p. 106). Fundamental at the factory level is worker representation in the form of organized voting power as well as profit-sharing. In 1947 Olivetti introduced a management council (Consiglio di Gestione), a sort of works council over which he presided himself. This was followed by the creation of a company union, the Comunità di Fabbrica-Autonomia Aziendale, in 1955. According to Adriano Olivetti, the new federated society of Italy should be constituted of autonomous regions with legislative and executive powers. Based on the principle of subsidiarity, the regions should play an intermediary role between the state and the communities. This would guarantee a decentralized government system. In sum, Adriano Olivetti not only strove for a decentralized state system but also for a harmonious balance between industry and agriculture with the intention ‘to return to man the lost harmony’: ‘Un originale rapporto tra agricoltura e industria è in solo capace di ridare all’uomo la perduta armonia’ (quoted in Peroni, 2018, p. 136). His personalist communitarian utopia may be considered a sort of ‘third way’ between liberalism and communism, as well as a more equal balance between agriculture and industry. Although mainly inspired by ideas of 15 As about 10 per cent of Ivrea’s 50,000 inhabitants were employed at Olivetti in the 1950s, the construction of community services in the city, as well as the organization of the community movement, became intertwined with the welfare work programmes at Olivetti (Bonifazio & Scrivano, 2001, p. 30). 16 Olivetti’s practical translation of communitarism has some striking similarities with the ideal garden city of Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928). Like Olivetti, Howard wanted to link the rural countryside with upcoming new industrial towns by creating garden cities of a certain limited size (30,000 inhabitants at a maximum), surrounded by a network of smaller satellite cities (Howard, 1902).

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renowned French philosophers of that time (Maritain, Mounier, Weil)17, Adriano Olivetti’s third-way thinking was not unique in Italy between the world wars. On the liberal side, renowned Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and critical journalist and intellectual Piero Gobetti wanted to bridge individualism with social justice, and the leftist philosopher Antonio Gramsci had similar intentions. He, along with anti-Fascist intellectual Carlo Roselli, proposed that the two opposite ‘trajectories’ should be recombined into a ‘socialismo liberale’ (Adelman, 2013, p. 117; Maffioletti, 2016). Olivetti founded community centres in Ivrea and the surrounding Canavese province from 1949 onwards. These centres offered both cultural and educational activities, including lending libraries. By 1956–1957 the Canavese region had 76 community centres. From 1953 the Community Movement was listed as a political party at the local level and participated with success in local elections. Adriano Olivettti himself was elected Mayor of Ivrea in 1956 (Brilliant, 1993, p. 108).18 Another practical initiative of Olivetti was supporting community development programmes in Italy in the mid-1950s. These included a rural-industrial development project in the Canavese and community development projects in Sardinia, Sicily, the Abruzzo and the Molise (Brilliant, 1993, p. 109). One of Adriano Olivetti’s major objectives was to humanize work inside his company and to create at the same time an external image of a company which was culture- and art-minded. In order to enable this, he created in 1931 a department of Development and Publicity (l’Ufficio Svilupo e Pubblicità), initially managed by the renowned poet and engineer Leonardo Sinisgalli (1908–1981).19 Sinisgalli involved other writers, journalists and designers in developing creative publicity campaigns as well as cultural events with the aim of developing ‘lo stile Olivetti’ (Olivetti style). The factory library (‘la biblioteca di fabbrica’) occupied a special place in this context.

Ottieri’s and Volponi’s neo-realist (Olivettian) industrial novels It was remarkable that Adriano Olivetti, albeit in line with his ideas to involve intellectuals in his enterprise, employed two young literary writers 17 All three French philosophers favored in their works bridging the contradictions at that time between communism, Protestantism and Catholicism by propagating an alternative third-way. See equally Chapter 7 on modernist industrial novels in France. 18 From 1958 the Community Movement acted for a while as a national political party and participated with minor success in national elections (receiving 1 per cent of all votes). 19 And in 1956 also the Ufficio Pubblicità e Stampa.

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who after some time published critical novels about labour relations and working conditions inside Olivetti. Nevertheless, like Olivetti himself, both authors considered the Olivetti factory in principle as a ‘good factory’ that could definitely solve the problem of worker alienation caused by American production techniques. In their ‘romanzi di fabbrica’ they disputed the adverse worker-control aspects of the company’s welfare work system. The benefits of welfare work at Olivetti were at the same time ‘affected by a more subtle and ambiguous form of alienation in that the “nanny factory” was perceived as a safe space, which impeded the development of political agency and class-consciousness’ (Diazzi & Tarabochia, 2019, p. 14). In 1954 Olivetti hired Ottiero Ottieri, a professional writer trained as a sociologist and psychologist, and then from 1956 he also employed writer Paolo Volponi.20 After a conflict with Adriano’s successor Bruno Visentini, Volponi transferred to Fiat in Turin in 1971 after a personal request of Umberto Agnelli (Fiat’s CEO at that time).21 In 1983 Volponi was elected as a senator for the Italian communist party (PCI). Ottieri got a job as a personnel manager in the new office machines factory in Pozzuoli in southern Italy. After a time, he moved back to the Olivetti headquarters at Ivrea, where he remained until 1965. He wrote about his Olivettian experiences in his three industrial novels Tempi Stretti (Ottieri, 1957/2012), Donnarumma all’Asalto (Ottieri, 1959/2018) and La Linea Gotica (Ottieri, 1963/2012). Volponi was asked by Adriano Olivetti to manage the important Social Affairs Department (I Servizi Sociali Aziendale) of the Ivrea factory. Volponi, nicknamed ‘il romanziere sociologo’, published two critical novels based on his personal experiences in the company: Memoriale (Volponi, 1962/2015) and Le Mosche del Capitale (Volponi, 1989/2010). Both Volponi and Ottieri – like Adriano Olivetti himself – were captivated by the idea of solving the problem of worker alienation.22 20 Volponi started working for Olivetti in Rome in 1950. 21 Bruno Visentini (an Italian industrialist and politician) who became president of Olivetti in 1964, offered Paulo Volponi the position of CEO of the entire company in 1970/1971. Volponi refused because he would have been seconded by a conservative former admiral, Ottorino Beltrami. Volponi left Olivetti in 1971 and moved to the Fondazione Agnelli of Fiat in Turin. After three years at Fiat Volponi was fired after he made public his intention to vote for the CPI in the next elections (Fioretti, 2017, pp. 167, 193/n 21). See also Le Mosche del Capitale (Volponi, 1989/2010). 22 Worker alienation is a form of social alienation ‘which separates the individual from the products of his labour, from the process of work, from the fellowship of mankind, and, ultimately, from himself’ (quoted in Diazzi & Tarabochia, 2019, p. 3).

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Ottieri’s first ‘Olivettian’ industrial novel is Tempi Stretti (literally, ‘Tight deadlines’, Ottieri, 1957/2012). The setting is not the Olivetti company in particular, but Ottieri’s personal experiences at Olivetti are nevertheless used as an inspirational background.23 The story is set in Sesto San Giovanni, at the time an important company town near Milan and base to a number of industrial enterprises, among which the most significant in the book are the printshop Alessandri, the Olivetti-like company Zanini, and a company called Smai. Ottieri paints the ugly and boring atmosphere of Sesto at the time as follows: Non è terminata Milano, che comincia Sesto … Un paese, una citta, un villaggio massiccio, non si capisce. Chi è forestiero o chi vi passa veloce in auto no si accorge nemmeno della terribile Sesto…. Al di la questo nocciolo, si estendono le catene montuose degli stabilimenti delle Ferriere e lo accerchiano con fasce di strade asfaltate e piatte, di capannoni e di muri (Ottieri, 1957/2012, p. 159). Milan is not finished, but Sesto begins … A village, a town, a massive whole, one does not understand. A stranger, or someone who passes by rapidly by car, does not even remark the ugliness of Sesto…. Beyond [Sesto] loom the mountainous rows of the Ferriere factories, and one approaches bands of asphalted streets and open spaces, sheds and walls (author’s translation).

The protagonists are several workers among whom are Giovanni Marini (technical manager of the Alessandri), Paolo (foreman at the Alessandri), Emma (Marini’s girlfriend and assembly line worker at the Zanini), Aldo Comolli (skilled mechanic at the Zanini), engineer Alessandri (owner of the Alesandri), and engineer Zanini (owner of the Zanini, presumably based on Adriano Olivetti). The Alessandri is a traditional paternalistically managed and organized enterprise with one powerful CEO, also the owner of the company. In contrast, the Zanini is a more modern metal mechanics company with some form of worker participation by means of a commissione interna (works council). The enterprise introduces and constantly refines Taylorist working methods as well as the assembly line during the 1950s. 23 The identification is confirmed in Fioretti’s book on Italian industrial novels. See Fioretti, 2013, p. 116 (n. 265).

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Major recurring issues in these never-ending efforts are the increase of working speed, improvements to efficiency, and increases in productivity. Piecework is dominant. Workers demand higher production premiums, which are eventually awarded. Zanini also introduces a human resources assistant (assistente sociale) as well as a personnel department, which play an important role in the internal labour relations, in particular regarding the ‘problematic’ role of in the novel of Emma, the least willing to accept the changes to working practice (Ottieri, 1957/2012, pp. 235–247). Of the Smai factory not much detailed information is given. The working conditions there are very bad, and the workers feel exploited: La disgrazia della Smai significa la disgrazia di ognuno; ecco il pensiero politico, teorico-pratico, ciò che bisogna capire; ecco il famoso materialismo storico (Ottieri, 1957 2012: 165). The disgrace of Smai implies disgrace for all; this is the political thought, theoretical-practical, that you need to understand; this is the famous historical materialism (author’s translation).

Smai is also confronted with the challenge and need to increase productivity. Therefore, it decides to rationalize the firm, and because of that to dismiss a number of workers. This incites a syndicalist strike supported by a number of its workers, as well as by some from the adjacent companies, including Alessandri and Zanini. Both Giovanni Marini and Aldo Comolli play a key role in the strike. As a consequence, Aldo is dismissed at Zanini. On the intercession of Giovanni, Aldo is offered, and takes, a job at Alessandri, though a minor and less prestigious one compared to his previous role as a skilled mechanic: an internal company postman. After various threats of liquidation by the owner of the company, Alessandri is finally taken over by another company, with an owner named Minerbi. Emma, Giovanni’s girlfriend, has difficulties adapting to the requirements of the increasing work speeds, which are regulated by tight deadlines (the tempi stretti of the title) set by the chrono-metrists who control the assembly line at Zanini. Of all four worker characters featured in the novel, she seems to be the most unhappy and alienated. Several times in the book it is hinted that she is on the verge of committing suicide because of this, although this does not happen. The novel was very widely discussed at the time of its publication, as it was one of the first and most high-profile examples of the post-war golden age of the Italian industrial novel. The narrative remains, in the end, rather

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traditional, mixing a number of common elements in industrial novels such as activism and syndicalism, different types of workers, a strike, and managerial paternalism. Although Italo Calvino mentioned the book to Vittorino as ‘un documentario di vita industriale’ (see Giuseppe Lupo’s preface in Ottieri, 1957/2012, p. 17), Giovanni, l’intellettuale f iducioso nello sviluppo industriale; Aldo, l’operaio buono e generoso ma impulsivo, che viene licenziato perché si espone troppo in occasione di uno sciopero; Emma, l’operaia schiacciata del sistema è vittima del taglio dei tempi di produzione (Fioretti, 2013, p. 115). Giovanni, the reliable intellectual in the industrial development; Aldo, the good and generous, albeit impulsive worker, who is dismissed because he plays an important and much visible role in a strike; Emma, a worker squashed by the system and clear victim of the tightening of production deadlines (author’s translation).

Tempi stretti is not in principle a neo-realist reportage or documentary, in the sense of Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten, for example. Although an ambitious and critical novel, also Fioretti does not consider Tempi stretti a neo-realist industrial novel. Nevertheless, the book gives an interesting insight in the problematic labour relations and hegemonial power of even the most well-meaning industrialists during the economic boom of the 1950s in northern Italy. Ottieri’s second, and most important, industrial novel, Donnarumma all’Asalto (literally, ‘Donnarumma on the attack’), is his most explicitly Olivettian novel (Ottieri, 1959/2018). The book is written in the form of a personal diary and contains many autobiographical elements. Ottieri borrowed the idea of a personal diary from the Journal d’Usine of French philosopher Simone Weil.24 24 La Linea Gotica (Ottieri, 2001/1963) is also written in diary form, called a ‘quaderno aziendale’ (company notebook). Like Adriano Olivetti, Ottieri was strongly influenced by Simone Weil’s Journal d’Usine, written in 1937 and published as part of her La Condition Ouvrière (Weil, 1951/2002, pp. 77–204). According to Fioretti, as Adriano Olivetti, Weil did not consider industry primarily as a monster that had to be combatted, but as a system that can be applied to realize social goals. As such the diverse interests of both employer and workers could be harmonized in a sort of third-way-like industrial humanism. Intellectuals could play an important role in this when they contribute to the realization of social goals from within the company, instead of being ‘non-committed’ outside observers (Fioretti, 2013, p. 113).

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Donnarumma is not exclusively an industrial novel about the Olivetti plant at Pozzuoli, where Ottieri worked when writing it. It is also a novel about the wider questione meridionale (Fioretti, 2013, p. 118) – the complicated and intractable social question concerning the large group of non-working poor in the south of Italy.25 The novel’s main themes are the structural unemployment and poverty of southern Italy and the problem of worker alienation once they are employed in a modern, bureaucratically organized enterprise such as Olivetti. The book’s narrator is the young company psychologist (seemingly a selfportrait by the author) charged with the psychotechnic testing of the many potential new factory workers applying for jobs at the new model factory in Pozzuoli (called Santa Maria in the novel). The Pozzuoli/Santa Maria Olivetti plant, designed by famous Italian architect Luigi Cosenza, produced calculating machines (see also Corratelli, 2012). The psychotechnics testing job ultimately turns out to be impossible because of the many conflicts and tensions between the company management and the testing department on one side and the many unemployed aspirant workers wanting to work in the new model factory on the other side. The biggest problem of the testing is its lack of objectivity, though the testing department constantly tries to refine and apply improved and validated methods. Also, the number of available unemployed in Santa Maria is so large that the Olivetti plant is not in a position to solve the persistent unemployment problem of the area in a significant way. Many applicants are rejected after failing the testing procedures. They do not fit well enough in the modern rationalized company culture as it has developed in the mother factory at Ivrea in the industrialized north of Italy. Unemployed, semi-literate and rebellious Antonio Donnarumma is one of the workers, after whom the novel is titled. 26 Donnarumma emblematically embodies the typical traditional disordered mentality of the agrarian workforce, suddenly confronted in Pozzuoli with the 25 With the new factory of Olivetti in Pozzuoli, near Naples, the company’s intention was to make a substantial contribution to the solution of the meridional problem. With the same intention other new factories were established in the south by other large industrial enterprises (such as Fiat and Ansaldo). But in the end these initiatives remained rather isolated ‘cattedrali nel deserto’, only being able to employ a relatively small fraction of the army of non-working poor (Fioretti, 2013, pp. 118–120). 26 Donnarumma does not enter the narrative until the novel is halfway through: ‘Ma Donnarumma Antonio, l’ultimo f inalmente, parecchio dopo mezzogiorno, non era mai venuto’ (Ottieri, 1959/2018, p. 120). But Antonio Donnarumma, the last one, finally appeared after noon, never showing up before (author’s translation).

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rationalized bureaucratic company culture of a modern and progressive industrial company. Several times Donnarumma tries in vain to get a job in the company. Over time his attitude becomes more negative and he starts to intimidate both the director of the company and the head of the personnel department. At some point the director’s car is hit by a f ire cracker, and Donnarumma is immediately considered a serious suspect. Although it cannot be proved that Donnarumma was the real offender he is arrested, and has to stay a fortnight in prison. From that time onwards the factory is guarded by a policeman (Ottieri, 1959/2018, pp. 233–239). Apart from being a personal diary, the book is written as a reportage based on many observations by the psychologist-narrator (who is also the head of the personnel and testing department) as well as on the basis of many interviews the narrator carries out with the aspirant workers. The book starts with the arrival of the narrator at Santa Maria in 1955. It ends with his premature departure in 1957. The novel contains many descriptions of the working and living conditions of the workers and unemployed, and their often-large families. Work processes are described in some detail. Important elements concern the introduction of scientific management and the assembly line in the Olivetti plant, as well as the theme of work tempo. About the fragmentation of work caused by rationalization and automation the narrator contends for example: Nella nostra fabbrica l’automazione si intravede; ma intanto vi domina la fase dell’automatismo, quella che ancora non reintegra i lavori parcellari (a ognuno un frammento di lavoro e sempre il medesimo), che anzi, dopo aver fatto esplodere l’antico posto di lavoro unitario, lo polverizza sempre di più (Ottieri, 1959/2018, p. 171). In our factory automation can be glimpsed; but in the meantime, the phase of automatism dominates, that is, the phase which still does not integrate the various piecemeal work activities ( for anyone, one single work task, and always the same, which contributes to an even further atomization of work and to the exploding of formerly integrated and unitary work-tasks (author’s translation).

In the background, the tension between the humanistic ideals of Adriano Olivetti regarding social policy in a modern industrial enterprise and the daily distressing reality of the impoverished life and lethargic attitudes of the unemployed of the south is constantly apparent. This brings the narrator

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to the conclusion that worker alienation as a problem is only secondary to the problem of not having a job at all: La disoccupazione cronica, invece, muta davvero la prospettiva delle condizioni alienate: l’alienazione vera storica, qui a Santa Maria è la disoccupazione, la quale precede ogni problema industriale, pur essendo contemporanea di una civiltà industriale (Ottieri, 1959/2018, pp. 173–174). Instead, chronic unemployment really changes the perspective of alienated conditions: the real story of worker alienation here in Santa Maria is unemployment, which precedes each industrial problem, while being contemporary with industrial civilization (author’s translation).

In this context Ottiero is citing, but at the same time also explicitly criticizing, what he calls ‘la famosa scrittrice operaia’ Simone Weil. According to the narrator, before solving the unemployment problem definitively, she favours the liberation of workers by overcoming worker alienation inside companies (Ottiero, 1959/2018, p. 173). Ottieri’s third and last industrial novel considered here is La Linea Gotica (Ottieri, 1963/2012).27 Like Donnarumma this book is written in the form of a personal diary, which spans the period 1948–1958. And like Tempi stretti it does not deal exclusively with Olivetti but more in general with the rapid industrialization of the north of Italy and its consequences in that period (‘il mondo del dover esser, del lavoro, dell’impegno civile, della fatica morale e del collettivismo’: the world of having to be, of work, of civil commitment, of moral fatigue and of collectivism, author’s translation) which is contrasted with the perhaps still-idyllic, uncomplicated, and unalienated life of the farmers in the south (‘il mondo dell’essere, della gioia di vivere, della mancanza di responsabilità, della natura’: the world of being, of joy of living, of lack of responsibility, of nature, author’s translation) (Ottieri, 1963/2012, p. 82). The title of the book refers symbolically to the defence line, the Gothic Line, that the German occupation forces built during World War II, splitting Italy in two halves, the (industrial) north and (agricultural) south. Ottieri, born in Rome but whose family was of Tuscan origin, crossed this line literally by living and working alternately in the culturally very different industrial north, the agricultural south and the in-between Rome in the centre of the country. The book has fewer characteristics of a novel and is 27 La Linea Gotica is a further elaboration of the taccuino industriale (industrial notebook), which was published in Vittorini, 1961.

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more a documentary or reportage. It also includes a number of reflective aphorisms. Several voices speak up in the book. Apart from the authorial voice these are workers, managers, trade unionists and experts. For this reason, La Linea Gotica may be considered an important access point to Ottieri’s other two industrial novels written during the Italian ‘miracolo economico’ of the 1950s. An important theme in the book are the difficulties Ottieri perceived as a writer or social scientist in getting a proper grip on the reality of being a working man, and the realities of the factory floor. He argues for example that writing an industrial novel is a hard task because bluecollar and white-collar workers, as well as the entrepreneur, usually keep silent to the outside world, whereas the writer, the movie director, or the sociologist remain by def inition outsiders and so are not properly able to talk for them: L’operaio, l’impiegato, il dirigente, tacciono. Lo scrittore, il regista, il sociologo, o stanno fuori e allora non sanno, o, per caso, entrano, e allora non dicono più (Ottieri, 1963/2012, p. 185). The blue-collar worker, the white-collar worker, the manager, all keep silent. The writer, the film director, the sociologist, all stand outside the factory floor and as a consequence don’t know, or if they get into the factory, they no longer speak (author’s translation).

To capture the industrial reality of the world of workers as closely as possible, Ottieri visited several factories in both the north and south, such as Alfa Romeo, Pirelli, Breda, Falk, and Olivetti. He carried out many interviews, which led him to the conclusion that worker alienation and work tempo were the key problems of modern industrial workers as compared to traditional agricultural workers. As previously mentioned, among his most important sources of intellectual inspiration in this respect were the observations on worker alienation by Simone Weil. In contrast to Weil, Ottieri however does not believe strongly in the possibility of mastering the worker alienation problem in a satisfying way. While reading Weil, Ottieri concludes: Leggo La Condizione Operaia della Weil, si, è masochistica; ma è onesta’ (Ottieri, 1963/2012, p. 112). I read Weil’s La Condition Ouvrière, yes, she is masochistic; but honest (author’s translation).

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When visiting Milan’s important company town Sesto San Giovanni, nicknamed ‘Stalingrado’, Ottieri observes critically a small road that forms a sort of borderline between two big ugly company buildings of Breda and Pirelli: Fra I muri della Breda e della Pirelli, come linea di conf ine, c’è una stradetta solitaria, vuota, da innamorati. Si chiama via Chiese. Quali chiese? (Ottieri, 1963/2012, p. 78). Between the walls of the Breda factory and the Pirelli factory there is as a sort of borderline, a lonely empty road, just for lovers, called Church street. Which churches? (author’s translation).

He ultimately defines the risk of unemployment and a lack of paid work in this book as the bigger problems for the well-being of workers than alienation on the factory floor: La fabbrica è un luogo di delizie, in confronto alla disoccupazione … Luogo di dignità, onore e ricchezza. Fa ridere parlare di alienazione a chi darebbe l’anima per diventare operaio (Ottieri, 1963/2012, p. 187). The factory is a place of delight contrary to unemployment … Place of dignity, honour, and richness. Those who have the luck and soul to become a worker should laugh about alienation (author’s translation).

In Adriano Olivetti, Ottieri met someone in the industrial world who was succesful in breaking with the still insufficient provincial morale in industry by enriching it with urban spirituality and without creating in the end a whole new world. Ottieri met Olivetti for the first time during an interview in 1953, and was soon discussing the possibility of working for him (Ottieri, 1963/2012, pp. 85, 132). This comes to pass in 1954 when Ottieri, after a start in the Ivrea factory, is employed in the personnel department of the new Olivetti factory in Pozzuoli: Andro a lavorare nello stabilimento del Sud di una grande industria settentrionale (Ottieri, 1963/2012, p. 185). I went to working in the factory, part of a big northern industry, in the South (author’s translation).

Ottieri becomes responsible for the psychotechnic testing of job applicants. In this capacity he interviewed many new aspirant workers, both

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male and female. He discerns quickly the differences between the culture of the industrial workers of the north and that of the former agrarians and artisans of the south who apply for a job at Olivetti, although the latter are less critical and less emancipated. Ottieri also clashed with the technical and rational culture of the Olivetti engineers. This can be seen for example in 1955, when the need arises at the Pozzuoli plant to introduce the idea of ‘job enlargement’, imported from the UK. This was an attempt to remediate the over-fragmentation of the work on the assembly line. Even so, some engineers of the working methods and time-measurement department – but also a substantial number of workers –keep praising the benefits of the assembly line: Allora, toccata il fondo del taylorismo, si comincia a pensare che sia più produttivo ridare un po’di spazio all’operaio (job-enlargement) … I lavoratori sono adatti al lavoro che fanno e non si trovano male nelle fabbriche (Ottieri, 1963/2012, pp. 211–213). Having pursued Taylorism to its extreme point, one starts thinking it might be more beneficial to give the workers more room for manoeuvre ( jobenlargement) … [According to a group of engineers] The workers are adapted to the work they carry out and they are feeling well in general (author’s translation).

The main message of this book, and Ottieri’s other two industrial novels, is that in the context of rapid urbanization and social uprooting of entire families, new modes of working, and new products, increasingly penetrated the sphere of workers’ private lives, touching their intimate emotions (Cascione, 2017). Paolo Volponi published several industrial novels, of which the most important is Memoriale (Volponi, 1962/2015). From the beginning, Volponi was fascinated by Adriano Olivetti’s industrial utopian idea in terms of his enterprise and Italian society and the role industry should play in bringing this about. In almost all his novels, according to Fioretti, there is some relationship to Adriano Olivetti’s utopia (Fioretti, 2017, p. 14).28 Thus ‘it is not surprising that Volponi became fascinated by the industrial utopia of Adriano Olivetti. The beautiful Olivetti factories, designed and built to be harmoniously integrated with the landscape around them, together with 28 On Volponi’s biography, his works, and his professional experiences at Olivetti and Fiat, see also Knapp, 2010 and Ercolani, 2019.

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the social services provided to the workers and the investments in the surrounding territory, became the symbol of a new interpretation of the Renaissance utopian spirit’ (Fioretti, 2017, p. 198). However, after Olivetti’s premature death in 1960 Volponi gradually became more pessimistic about the possibilities of realizing Adriano’s industrial utopia. His definite and somewhat disillusioned goodbye to the utopian thinking of Adriano Olivetti took place in his last novel, Le Mosche del Capitale (literally, ‘The Flies of Capital’, Volponi, 1989/2010). Le Mosche del Capitale, dedicated to ‘Adriano Olivetti, maestro dell’industria mondiale’, dealt with the triumph of neo-capitalism from the 1960s onwards and its effects on working life – that is, the rise of consumer society and the implicit historical defeat of the working class. Memoriale is Volponi’s first and most important industrial novel (Volponi, 1962/2015). In this book the problem of worker alienation and its psychological consequences is central. The protagonist, Albino Saluggia, is also the first-person narrator of the book. He is a sickly youngster, born in 1919 in Avignon to Italian parents who return to the Canavese region of Piedmont. During World War II Saluggia becomes for a while a German prisoner of war, working in a radio factory. After the war’s end, living in Candia near Turin, in June 1945 he finds a job as a miller in factory X in Ivrea – clearly the Olivetti factory, although not mentioned by name. His workplace consists initially of 27 millers and a foreman, though after a reorganization a substantially smaller number. Being already somewhat neurotic, Saluggia experiences the bureaucratically well-organized factory (based on scientific management and assembly lines) as an alienating system. He perceives the factory’s medical service as operating against his personal interests. Saluggia becomes paranoid and sees a company plot emerging against him. This prevents him living a normal working life. More than once in the novel he laments the nature of factory labour and lauds the health benefits of being a farmer in the countryside: Se avessi fatto il contadino e fossi rimasto a Candia, pensavo, non mi sarei ammalato … Avrei potuto vivere per conto mio e decidere ogni giorno il mio lavoro libero per I campi. … Invece ho accettato il lavoro della fabbrica…. Lavorare a ore, un minute dietro l’altro, una mano dietro l’altra, una schiena dietro l’altra, nelle grandi officine. Dipendere da altri, senza nemmeno conoscerli ed essere confuso tra tutti gli altri. Tutti I conforti della fabbrica diventano alla fine, come per me, dei motivi di pena (Volponi, 1962/2015, p. 177).

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If I had become a farmer and had remained in rural Candia, I thought, I would not have not become ill.… I would have lived on my own and deciding each day on my work on the fields … Instead, I accepted doing factory work …. Working for hours, one minute after another, one hand after another, one back after another, in the big workshops. Being dependent on others, without really getting to know them and being confused between all others. All factory comforts become, to me, causes of pain (author’s translation).

After a period of tuberculosis, a nervous breakdown, and an initial recovery following a stay in a sanatorium, Saluggia returns to work. He is transferred to another department. But his health and well-being problems remain. During his second stay in a sanatorium, where he remained for two years: Pensavo molto a casa mia, al lago, alla campagna …. Pensavo alla campagna con dolore e nostalgia (Volponi, 1962/2015, p. 228). I thought a lot of my home, the lake, the countryside … I thought of the countryside with pain and nostalgia (author’s translation).

After this long sanatorium stay, he finally becomes a sort of factory guard. In the meantime, he gradually develops a rebellious attitude towards the factory. When eventually a syndicalist strike breaks out, Saluggia actively supports it by distributing strike bulletins. A fellow guard takes Saluggia to the factory’s personnel department where, after a short talk, he is suspended for three days and receives a formal written warning. After that, Saluggia leaves the factory and turns homeward to the countryside of Candia in Canavese, still feeling marginalized: A quel punto io era già all’altezza dell’orto di casa mia, quando finisce la salita e restano venti metri in piano per arrivare alla porta. A quel punto ho capito che nessuno può arrivare in mio aiuto (Volponi, 1962/2015, p. 247). At this point I was already near the garden of my house, where the climb ends and only twenty metres remained to the gate. At that point I understood that no one could arrive to help me (author’s translation).

Although Volponi wrote Memoriale at a time when he still fully supported Adriano Olivetti’s utopia, the novel already echoed his later disillusion

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concerning neo-capitalism. Alberto Sallugia, the protagonist of the book, is the opposite of a working-class hero who could contribute to the realization of Adriano’s utopia. Instead, Volponi shows the limits of the game-changing capacities of communitarism as they play out in an individual working man’s behaviour (see also Knapp, 2010, pp. 93–104). Volponi’s (last) novel, Le Mosche del Capitale (Volponi, 1989/2010) is largely a biographical novel. It took Volponi about 14 years to complete this rather complicated book, which may be considered the author’s personal narrative testament. Its main protagonist is the manager Bruto Saracinni, who embodies and reflects the ultimately disappointing personal experiences of Volponi himself at Olivetti and later at Fiat. Volponi portrays Bruto Saracinni as a (human resources) manager and intellectual who also represents a typical ‘mosca del capitale’ (‘fly of the capital’), or servant of capitalist power. They are attracted by capital. The alter ego of Saracinni at the fictive MFM factory (again based on Olivetti in Ivrea) is Antonino Tecraso (an anagram of Socrates), a migrant worker from the south of Italy. After literally swinging a hammer against a wall in the factory by way of protest against the changing labour relations, he is accused by the company of left-wing extremist terrorist activities. Tecraso is fired. He is subsequently imprisoned for 18 years because of a lack of productivity, a lack of discipline, and connections with the Red Brigades terrorist group (Volponi, 1989/2010, p. 331). A third and fourth protagonist are respectively Ciro Nasàpeti, the CEO (embodying Adriano Olivetti’s successor Bruno Visentini) and donna Fulgenzia (based on Gianni Agnelli), CEO of a large enterprise in Bovino (Fiat in Turin). The book contains two interwoven storylines. One line tells the fortunes of Bruto Saracinni at Olivetti and then at Fiat. Saracinni, a convinced supporter of Adriano Olivetti’s humanist ideas, is offered the position of amministratore delegato (general director) of Nasàpeti’s enterprise. But he has to accept at his side a technical director, Sommersi Cocchi, with equal responsibilities. Because Sommersi Cocchi (modelled on ex-admiral Ottorino Beltrami),29 does not support the Olivettian ideals of Saracinni that a large industrial enterprise should contribute to the public affairs of regional development and social change, Saracinni refuses. He decides to leave Nasàpeti’s enterprise and to exchange it for Donna Fulgenzia’s enterprise in Bovino. The second storyline concerns the fortunes of the workman Tecraso, mentioned above. A turning point in the book is its representation of the historical 35-daylong syndicalist strike and factory occupation at Fiat in the autumn of 1980, which ended following a protest-march of 40,000 Fiat white-collar workers 29 On Le Mosche del Capitale see also Knapp, 2010; Fioretti, 2017; Wataghin, 1994.

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and managers on 14 October (‘La marcia dei quarantamila’) demanding the right to return to work in defiance of the union. This march successfully broke the strike and factory occupation at Fiat. According to Volponi the failure of this strike emblematically signalled the demise of Adriano Olivetti’s reformist ideas in post-war Italy. Volponi considered it a victory of neo-capitalism and its successor financial capitalism in the decades after Olivetti’s death. The main goal of neo-capitalism as well as of financial capitalism was not primarily to benefit the worker or serve the common good but a sole focus on making profits. The novel ends with the decisive change of leadership at Nasàpeti’s enterprise. Nasàpeti dies of cancer. As his successor a new ‘strongman’ and ‘mosca del capitale’, Sommersi Cocchi, is appointed. He will be seconded by a certain Dr Lanuti (Nasàpeti’s former medical doctor). According to Fioretti, Volponi considered Italian entrepreneurs after Olivetti to be greedy, shortsighted individuals (‘mosche del capitale’), who were not interested in research or social innovation, but cared only about immediate profit. ‘They make others work in order to become rich and to grab as much as they can’ (Fioretti, 2017, p. 182). From the 1970s onwards workers gradually lost their central position in the factory by the introduction of new and automated machines: ‘Instead of working near to each other, and being able to talk and socialize, in the new factory the workers are isolated and unable to communicate with one another’ (Fioretti, 2017, p. 185; also, Fioretti, 2013, pp. 209–230). Not being an industrial novel in a strict sense, Le Mosche del Capitale is primarily a novel about the victory of financial capitalist power during the economic crisis of the 1970s. Banks and multinational capital gained more power in Italian industry at the expense of the influence of trade unions and factory workers.30 According to Ottieri the essential protagonist of the novel is, in fact, ‘power’: L’unico personaggio, è banale dirlo, e il potere. (Volponi, 1989/2010, p. 186). The only character, it is banal to say, is power (author’s translation).

Also, automation and robotization contributed to a further alienation and loss of power by industrial workers. 30 An extensive in-depth analysis of Le Mosche del Capitale is also given by German scientist Lothar Knapp (Knapp, 2010, pp. 321–387). Knapp refers several times in his discussion to the important work of Emanuele Zinato, who collected and re-edited Volponi’s work in Italy.

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Conclusion Undoubtedly Adriano Olivetti’s company belongs to one of the most interesting enlightened welfare work experiments in the history of industrial capitalism, in particular in the 20th century. The uniqueness of Olivetti’s welfare work lies in the fact that Olivetti not only introduced an extensive encompassing welfare work programme in his company, but also undergirded welfare work with an intelligent reform-oriented personalist social philosophy. To a large extent Adriano Olivetti was guided by a combination of the principles of American Taylorism and Fordism as well by ideas of French personalist philosophers. Time and place were decisive for his successes during the economic boom in Italy in the 1950s. Post-war Italy needed to overcome the moral deficit of the Mussolini regime. At the same time there was a real possibility that a communist government might be elected in Italy directly after World War II – the Italian communist party was very powerful at that time, receiving firm support from the leftist Italian intelligentsia. In this context Olivetti’s welfare work policies and related communitarism may primarily be considered as a challenging third-way alternative both to fascism and communism in Italy in the decades after World War II. On the other hand, Olivetti’s heritage has a broader significance as it fitted with an important segment of enlightened entrepreneurs who connected their welfare work reforms with possible alternatives to industrial capitalism. Olivetti stood at the forefront of post-war Italy with regard to welfare work reforms. The company was famous for these programmes, which encompassed a number of social services, health care provisions, community centres and a famous company library. Adriano Olivetti also founded the Olivetti company journal Comunità, as well as a publishing company (Edizioni Comunità) and a political movement (Il Movimento di Comunità) to promote work and industry not only as means for gaining profit and earning a living, but also as a humanistic means of personal self-development, spiritual enrichment, and social innovation. Across time his ideas and policies became threatened by changing economic conditions in Italy. Also, his early death prevented the further success of Olivettian ideas. In Le Mosche del Capitale Volponi problematized the international neo-capitalist tendencies getting a strong footing in Italian industry in the 1970s. Its attractiveness can be explained partly by the fact that even the Olivettian utopian communitarian concept could not prevent or solve the problems caused by the introduction of Taylorism and Fordism in the workplace. As the character Albino Saluggia demonstrated in Volponi’s Memoriale, worker alienation remained a major problem even

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at Olivetti, one that could not be solved by the company’s social and health policies, and which was made worse by ever-increasing work tempo, the fragmentation of tasks, and automation in the workplace. Syndicalist power also weakened significantly over time. Contrary to Simone Weil’s conviction, neither intellectuals like Ottieri, Volponi, or Adriano Olivetti on the one hand, nor social scientists on the other, were able to solve the problem of worker alienation. Even worse, according to Ottieri in his industrial novels, intellectuals by definition are not able to understand fully the culture and psyche of industrial workers. By def inition they remain at a distance. Additionally, Volponi’s Memoriale devoted attention to the remaining contradictions between city and countryside with respect to worker well-being and mental health. In particular in Italy this contradiction was worsened by the questione meridionale, for which Ottieri extensively sought attention in his Donnarumma all’Assalto. This novel also put into perspective the issue of worker alienation. To Ottieri, in both Donnarumma all Assalto and La Linea Gotica, structural unemployment in the south of Italy is the greater problem to be solved first, not worker alienation. As he contends, the unemployed simply ridicule the notion that worker alienation is an important issue. They long intensively for a fixed paid job.

Works cited Adelman, J. (2013). Worldly philosopher: The odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. Princeton University Press. Alberini, L. (2014). ‘Civiltà delle Macchine’ 60 years later. Lettera Matematica, 1, 157–159. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40329-014-0037-1 Berta, G. (1978a). Lavoro e capitale nella storia del Piemonte. Studi Storici, 19(1), 205–216. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20564544 Berta, G. (1978b). Fra centrismo e centro sinistra: Olivetti e il Movimento di Comunità. Studi Storici, 19(3), 545–587. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20564570 Bigatti, G., & Lupo, G. (2013). Fabbrica di carta: I libri che raccontano l’Italia industriale. Laterza. Bonifazio P., & Scrivano, P. (2001). Olivetti builds: Modern architecture in Ivrea. Skira Editore. Bonura, G. (1972). Inivitto alla lettura di Calvino. Mursia Editore Brilliant, E. L. (1993). Theory and reality in the vision of Adriano Olivetti. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 4(1), 95–114. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27927363

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Caddedu, D. (2012). On the political project of Adriano Olivetti. Springer Science and Business Media. Cascione, A. (2017) Temi e problemi della letteratura industriale nei romanzi di Ottiero Ottieri. https://www.docsity.com/it/analisi-del-libro-donnarumma-allassalto-di-ottiero-ottieri/2739471/ Corratelli, G. (2012). La disciplina di fabbrica: Un studio tematico. Analisi di Donnarumma all’assalto di Ottiero Ottieri e Vogliamo tutto di Nanni Ballestrini. Impossibilità, 4, 138–155. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/51823 De Gier, E. (2018). Modernist industrial novels & industrial sociology: A comparison between Weimar Germany and Post-WWII Italy. Przeglad Socjologiczny/Sociological Review, 67(3), 179–196. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=718121 Diazzi A., & Sforza Tarabochia, A.S. (Eds.). (2019). The years of alienation in Italy: Factory and asylum between the economic miracle and the years of lead. Palgrave/ Macmillan. Di Nardo, E. (2009). Impresa e cultura: ‘Civiltà delle Macchine’ e la letteratura industriale. PhD thesis, Università degli Studi di Bologna. https://www.tesionline.it/ default/tesi.asp?idt=36584 Ercolani, M. L. (2019). Paolo Volponi. Le sfide del novecento. L’industria prima della letteratura. Franco Angeli. Ferrarotti, F. (2015). Un imprenditore di idee. Milano: Edizioni di Comunità. Amazon Kindle E-books. Ferrarotti, F. (2016). La concreta utopia di Adriano Olivetti. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane. Amazon Kindle E-book. Ferrarotti, F., & Gemelli, G. (2015). Un imprenditore di idee. Comunità Editrice. Fioretti, D. (2013). Carte di fabbrica: La narratiale in Italia (1934–1989). Edizioni Tracce. Fioretti, D. (2017). Utopia and dystopia in postwar Italian literature: Pasolini, Calvino, Sanguinetti, Volponi. Palgrave Macmillan (E-book). Ginsborg, P. (1989). Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi. Einaudi. Howard, E. (1902). Garden cities of to-morrow. S. Sonnenschein & Co., Amazon Kindle E-book. Knapp., L. (2010). Paolo Volponi – Literatur als Spiegel der Geschichte: Italien von den nationalen Einigung bis zum Ende der Ersten Republik. Transcript Verlag. Maff ioletti, M. (2016). L’Impresa ideale tra fabbrica e comunità: Una biografia intelletuale di Adriano Olivetti. Fondazione Adriano Olivetti. Maier, C. S. (1970). Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 27–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947000500202 Ochetto, V. (2013). Adriano Olivetti: La biografia. Comunità Editrice. Amazon Kindle E-books.

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Olivetti, A. (1946). L’ordine politico delle comuntià: Le garanzie di liberta in uno stato socialista. Edizioni di Comunità. (Original work published 1945) Olivetti, A. (1952). Società stato comunità: Per una economia e politica comunitaria. Edizioni di Comunità. Olivetti, A. (1959). Città dell’uomo. Edizioni di Comunità. Ottieri, O. (2012). Tempi stretti. Kindustria. (Original work published 1957) Ottieri, O. (2018). Donnarumma all’assalto. Garzanti. (Original work published 1959) Ottieri, O. (2001). La linea gotica: Taccuino 1948–1958. Ugo Guanda. (Original work published 1963) Peroni, M. (2018). Ivrea: Guida alla città di Adriano Olivetti. Comunità Editrice. Segre, B. (2015). Adriano Olivetti: Un umanesimo dei nostri tempi. Imprimatur. Amazon Kindle E-books. Vittorini, E. (1961). Industria e letteratura. Menabò 4. Einaudi. Volponi, P. (2015). Memoriale. Einaudi. (Original work published 1962) Volponi, P. (2010). Le Mosche del capitale. Einaudi. (Original work published 1989) Wataghin, L. (1994). Le mosche del capitale di Paolo Volponi. Rivista de Italianìstica, 11, 113–119. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2238-8281.v2i2p113-119 Weil, S. (2002). Journal d’usine. In S. Weil. La condition ouvrière, pp. 77–204. Gallimard. (Original work published 1951).

7

Simone Weil and Modernist industrial novels in France Abstract French Modernist industrial novels are considered in this chapter in the context of the large-scale introduction of American production techniques in French industry between the world wars. Another important factor was two significant successive waves of migration, one inside France from the south to the north and one from abroad, mainly from (former) colonies to France to fulfil the growing need for unskilled workers in industry. One signif icant consequence of the introduction of American production techniques was the issue of worker alienation. Another issue was the unequal treatment of immigrant workers as compared to workers of French origin on the shopfloor. Both problems play a significant role in the industrial novels dealt with in this chapter written after World War II. Keywords: Taylorism (OST), Fordism, worker alienation, working conditions, immigration, French neo-realist industrial novels

Introduction A few years after World War II the collected writings on La Condition Ouvrière (‘The Condition of the Worker’) by French philosopher Simone Weil were published (Weil, 1951/2002). Although the author herself had died in exile in southern England in 1943, her ideas concerning overcoming worker alienation strongly influenced not only Italian entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti and Italian writer Ottiero Ottieri, as we saw in the previous chapter, but also French authors of post-war industrial novels. In France, the genre of the naturalist or realist industrial novel had been known for quite a long time since Emile Zola’s seminal industrial novel Germinal, written in the 1880s. And as in the United States and Weimar

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH07

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Germany, there were also some workers themselves who published novels or poems. Industrial sociologist Georges Friedmann mentions in his Traité de Sociologie du Travail the following authors and books: G. Navel, Travaux (1945); D. Mothé, Journal d’un Ouvrier 1956–1958 (1958), and A. Andrieux & J. Lignon, L’Ouvrier d’Aujourd’hui (1960) (Friedmann & Naville, 1962, pp. 384, 423, 425, vol. 2). Other notable proletarian writers include Eugene Dabit, Henry Polaile, André Philippe, Maurice Lime, and Jean Pallu (Friedmann, 1947, p. 90). It is in particular Georges Navel’s novel that may be considered among the first post-war neo-realist French industrial novels. As Simone Weil did in a more analytical and philosophical way in La Condition Ouvrière, Navel expressed in his novel Travaux his personal experiences as a worker. It is remarkable that in France the genre of the Modernist industrial novel remained popular in the decades thereafter. To some extent this is comparable to Italy, where after World War II the industrial novel, written by professional writers, attempted to give a voice to the worker at the shop floor. In France there was also some pressure, in this case from the side from government, to stimulate secondary school teachers (among others) to accept temporary internships in factories (Mas, 1982, pp. 12–19).1 This was preceded by the group of intellectuals of the 1968 student movement (the so-called ‘établis’) who went to work temporarily as workers in industry with the aim of making capitalism more human. Notable examples of French industrial novels in the mould of Weil and Navel that appeared in the decades after World War II include: Claire Etcherelli’s Élise ou la Vraie Vie (1967/1985), Robert Linhart’s L’Établi (1978/1981), Leslie Kaplan’s L’Exces – l’Usine (1982/2020), François Bon’s Sortie d’Usine (1982/2011), and Joseph Pontus’s À la Ligne: Feuillets d’usine (2019). In this chapter, as examples of neo-realist French industrial novels, I will discuss first Navel’s Travaux, published in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The scope of this novel is fully in line with Simone Weil’s philosophical ideas as well as with her practical experiences on the shop floor concerning the rationalization of work and worker alienation. This will be followed by discussion of the other industrial novels mentioned above.

1 A remarkable example in this respect is the personal experience of secondary school teacher Raymond Mas who, between 5 January and 14 February 1981 carried out an unskilled job in the Alsthom heavy machine factory in Tarbes with some 2,000 other workers. About his experiences he published a detailed reportage in The French Review (Mas, 1982).

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Taylorism in France In France, Taylorism, Fordism and the so-called Bedaux system of payment, the combination of which is usually called the organisation scientifique du travail or OST, got a firm footing in industry between 1906 and 1931, in particular in the automobile industry. In this period some two million workers were added to the industrial workforce (Noiriel, 2002, p. 128). A large proportion of these new workers were women, and/or of immigrant background.2 The decade between 1920 and 1931 was decisive for the introduction of OST on a larger scale. The post-World War I economic boom generated a massive introduction of scientific management and the assembly line in the automobile industry (Renault, Citroën), iron and steel (Schneider), the electrical industry, the chemical industry, mining (Anzin), building, and cement. The French industrial growth rate surpassed in this decade even Weimar Germany and the United States (Kedward, 2005, p. 120). The rationalization wave mainly inspired by American ideas implied the wide application of time-and-motion studies and the stopwatch (chronomètre). Production processes were split up into small detailed tasks, creating dehumanized and boring work. Americanization of production was experienced to some extent as un-French. Yet a substantial part of industrial work, some 60 per cent, was carried out in small firms with fewer than a hundred workers, and 34 per cent in workshops with fewer than ten workers (Kedward, 2005, p. 124). Between 1945 and 1960 the composition of the French workforce changed again dramatically, caused in this case by the need to rebuild the economy after World War II and the subsequent economic miracle of the 1960s. As before the war, many immigrant workers – again more than two million, originating from the (former) French colonies in Africa, mainly Algeria, as well as from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Yugoslavia – were absorbed into the industrial workforce, most often in menial jobs with low pay and bad working conditions. Next to this, as in Italy, there was a strong internal migration from the non-industrialized regions to the industrial hotspots such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Lille, and the Lorraine region (Roach, 2005; see also Gay, 2021). This boom period, lasting until 1974, is usually called ‘Les trentes glorieuses’.3 2 A first wave of immigrant workers from abroad occurred during World War I, and continued into the 1920s. It was an active policy initiative of the government and big enterprises to import foreign workers on a temporary basis. They came for the most part from China, the French colonies, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Belgium (Kedward, 2005, pp. 116–119). 3 A term coined by Jean Fourastié in 1975 to encompass the thirty years of economic expansion and mechanization between 1945 and 1974 (Kedward, 2005, p. 375).

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Simone Weil and Georges Navel French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) spent about a year as an industrial worker in several French companies in 1934–1935. 4 There she kept a diary, Journal d’Usine, filled with detailed figures, drawings, and personal impressions, which were published together in the posthumous collection La Condition Ouvrière (Weil, 1951/2002, pp. 77–204).5 Her Journal may be considered a reportage, meticulously describing her life as a factory worker at the Alsthom steel factory, the Carnaud forge, and the Renault car factory. Based on her experience as a factory worker Weil developed critical ideas with respect to Taylorism, Fordism, and the living conditions of industrial workers (‘la condition ouvrière’) in France in the 1930s. At a conference in February 1937, she laid out her ideas on rationalization, which she considered a refinement of industrial production by using human labour in a scientific way (Weil, 1951/2002, pp. 302–326). According to Weil the introduction of scientific management and the assembly line implied the oppression and servitude of the working class. It also split the traditional link between work preparation and work performance. The real power in the production process was from now on in the hands of a new professional group of engineers and technicians. To solve the resulting problems work had to become more joyful for workers again: La solution idéale, ce serait une organisation du travail telle qu’il sorte chaque soir des usines à la fois le plus grand nombre possible des produits bien faits et des travailleurs heureux (Weil, 1951/2002, p. 307). The ideal solution would be a healthy and happy worker leaving the factory after each working day having produced the maximum number of highquality products (author’s translation).

In fact, Weil favoured a conciliatory reform strategy that could resolve the contradiction between the economic interests of capitalist production and the interests of workers. This implied a recovery of the link between the preparation and the performance of work, the improvement of working 4 For her biography and works see Hourdin, 1989. 5 During her lifetime Simone Weil did not publish her ideas and experiences of factory life in book form. Instead, she published a large number of articles and letters. After her death these articles were collected, edited and published in book form as La Condition Ouvrière. Also, her complete works were edited and published in six volumes between 1989 and 2002 (Devaux & Lussy, 1989–2002).

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conditions by humanizing work, and training and education of workers. Only in this way could a further degradation of industrial work be prevented. Ultimately, ‘la condition ouvrière’ would be improved in a sustainable way. Both capitalist owners of industrial enterprises and workers would benefit from it (see also Decreus, 2022). George Navel (1904–1993) was both a worker and a writer. He was born in the north-eastern industrial and mining region of Lorraine. His father, as well as his many brothers and sisters, all worked in the regional industries. Navel published several largely autobiographical, books. His first novel, Travaux (Navel, 1945/1995), was published at the age of 41 and a few years before Weil’s posthumous collection La condition ouvrière appeared. Published by the prestigious Parisian publishing house Gallimard, Travaux became an instant literary success (Aubery, 1963, p. 417). Like Weil’s work, the subject of Navel’s novel is the ‘condition ouvrière’. The novel, which may also be considered a personal memoir, meticulously describes Navel’s fluctuating fortunes in a wide variety of jobs across several years, including earth worker (‘terrassier’), agricultural worker, gardener, painter of buildings, and fitter (‘ajusteur’) in industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Always searching for satisfying work, Navel moved from job to job. In fact, in his industrial jobs he experienced some appalling working conditions, mirroring the rationalization boom in French industry in the 1930s and which are largely in conformity with Weil’s industrial experiences and observations. The book consists of 25 short episodes or chapters, each describing Navel’s family’s fortunes and successive work experiences. As far as it concerns big industry and the unfolding rationalization of production, the chapters on the Berliet automobile works in Vénissieux, the Citroën automobile works in Saint-Ouen, and an unnamed aircraft factory are particularly interesting (Navel, 1945/1995, chapters 6, 10 and 25 respectively). In 1947 renowned French industrial sociologist Georges Friedmann gave a laudatory book review to Travaux in the journal Annales. He considered Navel’s novel, beyond its literary significance, as one of the most important documents on the psychology of workers and professional experiences to have been published in France ‘in ages’. Friedmann cites extensively Navel’s observations and experiences at Berliet, Citroën, and as an earth worker in the south of France (Friedmann, 1947). Navel was mostly attracted to earth work and its free-spirited working conditions, and less to alienated work and working conditions in big industry. In contrast to automated work at Berliet, Citroën and the aircraft factory, Navel considered earth work as the kind of labour that generated pure solidarity and authentic camaraderie between workers.

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He was also struck by the boredom caused by the simplified industrial work based on Taylorist and Fordist methods: … que l’ennui, l’état de sécheresse intérieur, encore plus que la faim, est le vrai mal des hommes; qu’au travail, sauf dans les durs métiers du feu, la souffrance n’est pas la douleur musculaire, mais l’ennui; que des milliers d’hommes, dans le travail moderne, robots de la série et de la chaine, s’ennuyaient avec plus ou moins patience (Navel, 1945/1995, p. 205). … that boredom, a state of inner drought, even stronger than hunger, is the real evil of men; at work, except the hard jobs of fire, the real suffering is not muscular pain, but boredom; that thousands of men, in modern work, actually being serial robots riveted to the assembly line, boring themselves with more or less patience (author’s translation).

Another alarming working condition in industry was the omnipresence of noise on the shop floor and in industrial halls, sometime pleasant like music, but often unpleasant and physically unbearable. Also, work in industry required complete obedience and adaptation of workers. Like school or a military barracks, Navel detested the factory as a closed system: J’ai détesté cette école avec la même intensité que tous les lieux où il m’a fallu vivre enfermé, école, usine, caserne (Navel, 1945/1995, pp. 36, 69). I hate this school with the same intensity as all places which forced me to live imprisoned, school, factory, and barracks (author’s translation).

The application of the Taylor system and the stopwatch implied a continuous increase of work speed and further rationalization of the work carried out by both non-specialized as well as specialized workers: Tout leur travail était chronométré. Chronométreurs, démonstrateurs luttaient contre l’ouvrier (Navel, 1945/1995, pp. 64–65).6 All their work was measured by the stopwatch. Time controllers, demonstrators battled against the workman (author’s translation). 6 About the aspect and signif icance of (working) time and (work) speed in the novels of Georges Navel see also Myers, 2018.

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And in addition, with respect to ‘working time and tempo’: Huit heures d’usine suffissent pour absorber l’énergie d’un homme. Ce qu’il donne au travail c’est sa vie, la fraicheur de ses forces, ce n’est pas seulement son temps (Navel, 1945/1995, p. 246). Eight successive hours in a factory will do to absorb a man’s energy. What he actually offers to his work is his life, the freshness of his forces, it is not only his time (author’s translation).

To conclude, what Navel had in mind with his novel Travaux was not communicating only some important elements of his biography, but like Simone Weil he was also trying to make understandable the negative aspects of ‘la condition de toute une classe sociale’ during the economic and social transition of France between the world wars (Aubery, 1963, p. 419).

Other notable French neo-realist post-war industrial novels In this section I will analyse briefly five other notable French neo-realist industrial novels. The first is Claire Etcherelli’s Élise ou la Vraie Vie (Etcherelli, 1967/1985). Etcherelli was born in Bordeaux in 1934 and went to Paris in the late 1950s to work for a while at the assembly line in the Citroën plant at Porte de Choisy. She remained there nine months. Based on her experiences at Citroën she wrote Élise ou la Vraie Vie. Though politically controversial the book won wide acclaim.7 The novel was an immediate success and in 1967 the author received the prestigious ‘Prix Fémina’; a film of the novel followed in 1970. Although Etcherelli’s book may be considered mainly an industrial novel it is also a political one, about the immigration of Algerians and other North Africans to the industrial regions of France set in the context of the Algerian War of Independence between 1954 and 1962. French society was full of racial prejudice towards Algerians at that time.8 The story line of the novel is quite straightforward. In the first part of the book the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Élise Letellier, moves with her brother Lucien from the provinces to Paris to work at Citroën. The 7 The extreme right considered the book as anti-French because of its open sympathy for Algerians. The left, on the other hand praised the novel because of its sketching of racism and the dehumanization of work in mass-production sites (Roach, 2005). 8 For an extensive text analysis and contextual setting of Etcherelli’s novel see Roach, 2005.

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purpose of their emigration is not only earning money, but also to rebel against the ongoing Algerian War. Élise and Lucien consider working in industry and agitation as the real life or ‘la vraie vie’: Qu’était-ce, la vraie vie? Plus d’agitation? (Etcherelli, 1967/1985, p. 49). What was this, the real life? More agitation? (author’s translation).

In the second part of the book Élise and Lucien’s work and working conditions at the Citroën car works (in the so-called ‘atelier 76’) are carefully reproduced. Élise’s assembly line team of consists of five to seven workers (ouvriers specialisés), all Arab immigrants save a Hungarian and Élise herself. All surrounding foremen and bosses are of French origin. Élise’s task is quality control: tracking down production faults on the vehicles and reporting them to the responsible foreman. Some remarkable observations of this part of the novel are the following: First, the permanent noise at the assembly line turn out to be almost unbearable for the workers: J’étais dans l’atelier 76. Les machines, les marteaux, les outils, les moteurs de la chaîne, les scies mêlaient leurs bruits infernaux et ce vacarme insupportable, fait de grondements, de sifflements, de sons aigues, déchirant pour l’oreille, me sembla tellement inhumain que je crus qu’il s’agissait d’un accident (Etcherelli, 1967/1985, p. 76). I was in workshop 76. The machines, the hammers, the tools, the assembly line drivers, the saws, all mixed, made an infernal and hardly bearable noise, sharp whistling, and roaring, ear-devastating noises, it seemed to me so inhuman that I believed an accident was occurring (author’s translation).

Another significant observation by Élise during an interaction with one of the foremen is that according to him the workers on the assembly line do not necessarily need to understand the totality of the production process of cars. They only have to focus on their specific task, by which they are dependent on the other team-members: On ne comprend rien au travail que l’on fait. Si on voyait par où passe la voiture, d’où elle vient, où elle va, on pourrait s’intéresser, prendre conscience du sens des efforts (Etcherelli, 1967/1985, p. 94).

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One does not understand at all the sense of the work one carries out. When one looks through or beyond the passing of a car on the line, one could become interested, become aware of the sense of the effort (author’s translation). Mortel réveil, Porte de Choisy. Une odeur d’usine avant même d’y pénétrer. Trois minutes de vestiaire et des heures de chaîne. La chaîne, ô le mot juste … Attachés à nos places. Sans comprendre et sans voir. Et dépendant les uns des autres. Mais la fraternité, ce sera pour tout à l’heure (Etcherelli, 1967/1985, p. 98). Mortal awakening, Porte de Choisy. A factory smell even before getting inside. Three minutes in the changing room and then hours on the assembly line. The assembly line [chaîne], oh the right word! … chained in our places. Without understanding and without seeing. And dependent on each other. But fraternity is something for later. (author’s translation). Quand tu auras pris la cadence, tu deviendras une mécanique bien réglée qui ne verra plus loin que le bout de la chaîne. Tu seras classée bonne ouvrière et augmentée de trois francs de l’heure … La chaîne est un grand boa qui se déroule le long des murs. Une immense bouche qui vomit les carrosseries de l’atelier de peinture, étuve située à l’étage au-dessus qui, par un ascenseur, déverse sept voitures à l’heure (Etcherellie, 1967/1985, p. 120). When you have taken the rhythm, you will become a ‘good’ worker who does not need to look further than the end of the line. You will then be classified as a good worker and receive a three-franc wage increase per hour… The line is a large boa that unrolls itself alongside the walls. A huge mouth that vomits the bodyworks of the cars from the painting workshop, a drying room located on the floor above, which through an elevator pours out seven cars per hour (author’s translation). Le chrono, le chrono, attention! Le chrono était là. C’était un homme en blouse grise auprès duquel se tenait le chef d’atelier, chapeau sur la tête selon son habitude. Le chrono avait un gros cahier, deux crayons dans la main et, bien entendu, un énorme chronomètre. Qu’il tenait dans sa paume ouverte. Il se planta à mon côté et m’observa … Son passage était le signal d’un proche changement (Etcherellie, 1967/1985, p. 121).

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The time controller, the time controller, attention! The time controller was there. It was a man in a grey shirt, next to him the workshop’s foreman, usually wearing a cap. The time controller had a fat notepad, two pencils in his hand and obviously a big stopwatch in his open hand palm. He moved alongside me and observed me meticulously. His passage always signalled the arrival of some sort of change (author’s translation).

The third and last part of the book deals with the unfolding love between Élise and Arezki, an Algerian worker and colleague. The novel ends with the death – or perhaps intentional suicide – of Lucien in a road accident while on his way from a sanatorium in Aincourt (where he was recovering from pneumonia) to a big demonstration of industrial workers against the Algerian War. Arezki is fired by Citroën and then arrested as an illegal immigrant without paid work by the police during one of many raids on North African workers on the streets of Paris at that time. Élise is also fired, and returns to the countryside to live with her grandmother. All in all, by giving many details about car production, working conditions, noise, smell, and so on, Etcherelli’s novel contrasts the ‘powerful and gigantic car production factory’ with ‘vulnerable and subservient human beings’. In this specific case Citroën’s assembly line in Porte de Choisy symbolizes ‘the wider social and political organization of society’ (Roach, 2005). Robert Linhart’s L’Établi was published in 1978 (Linhart, 1978/1981).9 The title of the book has a double significance. First, L’Établi refers to a selective group of a few hundred militant intellectuals who, after the student revolt of 1968, went to work in industry and shipyards with the aim of contributing to the betterment of the work and working conditions of industrial workers. More importantly, the wider objective of the group was to enlarge the class consciousness of industrial workers. American historian Donald Reid summarized the history of the Maoist Établi-movement in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Linhart, who in 1978 became an economics professor, played a leading role in this movement, alongside philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévi (Reid, 2004).10 9 In 2023 Mathias Gokalp turned Linhart’s novel into a feature film. 10 Next to Linhart also a number of other ‘établis’ wrote memoirs or novels about their experiences in factories. Reid mentions Nicolas Dubost, Claudie Broyelle, François Baudin, Jean Rolin, Pierre Martin, and Marnix Dressen among others. Referring to Dressen, Reid def ines ‘Établissement’ as ‘a phenomenon among those of whatever class origin whose education did not prepare them for a career in manual labor, but who made the choice to work as manual laborers for political reasons’ (Reid, 2004, pp. 83–111, 86).

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The second (and more common literal) meaning of the word établi is workbench, or a spot where the still unautomated work of workers is carried out with the help of tools. In the last part of the book (pp. 158–187) this meaning of the word établi is central. There, the work of one of the last remaining highly experienced – and for that reason most respected – workers in the factory, called Demarcy, is described, when the factory management is trying (unsuccessfully) to rationalize it. As a result, Demarcy calls in sick. Robert Linhart was an Établi who worked for about a year as an ouvrier specialisé 2 (O.S.2) (a classification for unskilled workers of French background) in the Citroën factory at Porte de Choisy in Paris. In this factory Citroën applied a hierarchy of six different workerqualification levels, with a further division by racial background: Il y a six catégories d’ouvriers non qualifiés. De bas en haut: trois catégories de manœuvres (M. 1, M. 2, M. 3), trois catégories d’ouvriers spécialisés (O.S. 1, O.S. 2, O.S. 3). Quant à la répartition, elle se fait d’une façon tout à fait simple : elle est raciste. Les Noirs sont M.1, tout en bas de l’échelle. Les Arabes sont M.2 ou M. 3. Les Espagnols, les Portugais et les autres émigrés européens sont en général O.S.1. Les Français sont, d’office. O.S. 2. Et on devient O.S. 3 a la tête du client, selon le bon vouloir des chefs (Linhart, 1978/1981, p. 24–25). There are six categories of non-qualified workers. From bottom to top: three categories of manual work (M.1, M.2, M.3), three categories of specialized workers (O.S. 1, O.S. 2, O.S. 3). As for the distribution, this occurs in a simple way: it is racist. All coloured workers are M.1, down at the bottom of the hierarchy. The Arabs are M.2 or M.3. The Spaniards, the Portuguese and the other European immigrants are in general O.S.1. The French are white-collar O.S.2. And one becomes O.S.3 arbitrarily, depending of the good will of the foremen and managers (author’s translation).

Linhart describes in detail the alienating work and working conditions on the assembly line for 2CV cars. He also tells the story of the refined methods of control and surveillance by the factory management and the foremen. The difference in working conditions of the many immigrant workers (O.S.1) at Citroën and the O.S.2 is particularly striking. On the assembly line, called the 85 or ‘la grand chaîne’ (Linhart, 1978/1981, p. 30), the author befriends – among a group of other workers all of different national origins – three Yugoslavian workers, George, Stepan, and Pavel, who by

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contrast with Linhart succeed in diminishing the time pressure of their part of the assembly line (Linhart, 1978/1981, pp. 34, 129), though they give every appearance of working in strict conformity with the factory rules. The middle part of the book is dedicated to a spontaneous strike which broke out after a further rationalization and work intensification programme introduced by the factory management, without any increase in wages, called ‘la récuperation’ (Linhart, 1978/1981, pp. 78, 85–86 and so on). This involved an increase in the working day of 45 minutes, half of it unpaid. The strikers succeed in shutting down the assembly line and the production of 2CV cars. As a consequence, not only are some of the striking workers fired instantly, but others are replaced. Intimidation techniques are also applied by the foremen and the factory management with the aim of ending the strike. After participating in preparations for the strike and distributing strike bulletins on the factory floor, Linhart himself is bullied by the foreman and removed for a while to another meaningless job elsewhere in the factory, before finally he is fired too. In the end the factory will not survive either, and the work formerly done at Porte de Choisy is redistributed among other Citroën production sites. Linhart’s book may be considered primarily as a reportage or memoir. The book delivers a detailed insight into the rationalization process at that time in a specific Citroën production site in Paris and the acceptance or non-acceptance of this by the workers concerned. It also demonstrates that processes of rationalization are embedded in the factory’s social policies, focused in this specific case on accepting managerial rationalization and intensification measures without protest. The next French industrial novel I consider, is Leslie Kaplan’s L’Excès – l’Usine (1982/2020). This book is also based on her personal experiences as a blue-collar worker in 1968, and was republished in 2020. In writing this novel Kaplan, a French-American author born in 1943, was inspired significantly by Linhart’s l’Établi (as she stated in an interview with Marguerite Duras in 1982) (Kaplan, 1982/2020, p. 113).11 Like Joseph Ponthus’s later work À la Ligne (2019), Kaplan wrote L’Excès – l’Usine in poetic verse form. She applied compact, expressive poetic phrases describing the permanent time pressure experienced when working on the assembly line, such as for example: (a) De la chaîne, on voit tout. Tout rentre, tout rentre sans cesse. 11 Kaplan studied philosophy and psychology, and before writing L’Excès – l’Usine worked for two years in a factory as a blue-collar worker.

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Innocence forcée. La douleur est sans profit. On a ses dix minutes de pause, on descend aux cabinets (Kaplan, 1982/2020, p.23). (a) On the assembly line, one sees everything. Everything goes in, everything goes in constantly. Forced innocence. The pain is without profit. One has a ten minutes break; one goes down to the bathrooms (author’s translation). (b) On est debout devant une chaîne de biscottes. L’atelier est a côté du four, il fait très chaud. On ramasse une rangée de biscottes, on l’empile dans un sac. La chaîne passe. On remplit le sac. Les doigts sont écorchés par le grain des biscottes (Kaplan, 1982/2020: 35). (b) One stands upright before an assembly line of biscuits. The workshop is next to the oven, it is very hot. One picks up a row of biscuits, one puts them in a bag. The assembly line moves forward. One fills the bag. The fingers are flayed by the biscuit grain (author’s translation).

Her book encompasses about a hundred pages. Nevertheless, it took her some ten years to write, trying to avoid the risk of becoming anecdotal: C’est-a-dire que j’ai mis très logtemps a pouvoir mettre des mots sur cette experience, très très longtemps, il m’a fallu dix ans pour pouvoir dire quelque chose qui n’était pas anecdotique, qui n’était pas misérabiliste (Kaplan, 1982/2020: 111). Frankly I must say, that it took me a very long time to find the proper words for this experience, a very very long time, I needed ten years before I could say something that was not anecdotal, that was not miserabilist (author’s translation).

The book is set up in nine consecutive ‘circles’, or brief chapters. Like Linhart, Kaplan may be considered an Établie. Although Kaplan carried out her manual jobs in different factories (among them a biscuit factory and a factory producing headlights) her novel deals more with ‘la condition ouvrière’ in general, and worker alienation of a kind that could be found in the majority of industrial factories in France at the time. She focused in particular on female workers. Kaplan replicated

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her work-experiences and observations in a realist, almost cinematic way. Unlike Linhart, she considers the factory as a sort of closed institution or ‘lieu infini’ (Kaplan, 1982/2020, p. 112) which makes it impossible to talk of a personal ‘je’. She prefers instead a more impersonal ‘on’ (‘one’ or ‘people’) (Lefort-Favreau, 2015, p. 60): On est dedans, dans la grande usine univers, celle qui respire pour vous (Kaplan, 1982/2020, p. 11). One is inside, in the big factory universe, that breathes for you (author’s translation).

Sortie d’Usine by François Bon was published in 1982 (Bon, 1982/2011). Originally, Bon (born in 1952) was trained as an engineer, and before becoming a writer worked in the steel factories of Longwy in the 1970s (Inkel, 2012, p. 10). Bon published a number of novels and other texts. Two of his works belong to the genre of the industrial novel, Sortie d’Usine and Daewoo, the latter published in 2004 and whose narrative covers some two decades (Bon, 2004). Although both novels have much in common, Daewoo deals with the closure of a few Daewoo factories (producing microwave ovens and other related products such as TV screens) in the north of France.12 It is much more a reportage than Sortie d’Usine, which by contrast is a rather abstract novel that reconstructs in a cinematic way various aspects of the last four weeks of the protagonist’s five-month stint of factory work. The protagonist is simply called ‘Je’ (‘I’). To the nameless ‘Je’ the factory seems to have a lot in common with Kafka’s famous novel The Castle, which he read in his adult years (Bon, 1982/2011, pp. 164–165). ‘Je’ experiences the factory as Kafka’s protagonist experienced the castle – as a place of alienation. The factory seems to ‘Je’ a closed world in which he will remain eternally an outsider. After an accident in the fourth week of the narrative ‘Je’, after recovering, attempts in vain to reintegrate into the factory, and failing to do so, quits his job. In the chapter on the first week the reader is told about ‘Je’s ‘routinized’ work experiences on the shop floor (in an unspecified factory in the Paris region), which is full of overwhelming noise, incessantly moving forklift trucks, machines, and a number of quite well-adapted workers who passively accept the oftenboring, alienating working conditions. A work accident is described (29–32). 12 Daewoo is a Korean industrial group that had three factories in the ‘Vallée de la la Fensch’ in north-east France (Inkel, 2012, p. 11).

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In the chapter on the second week the reader is given some more detail about various workmen in the factory. Many of them have an immigrant background, like Paul Ravignani or ‘Ravi’, and Gnagna: Un Africain ils aiment bien prendre pour ces petits boulots-là. Tout comme c’est des Portugaises ou des Algériennes qu’on a pour les bureaux, des Italiens pour la peinture, et des Turcs ou des Yougos pour la maçonnerie (Bon, 1982/2011, p. 49). An African, they like to take them for the odd jobs there. As with the Portuguese or the Algerian female workers they hire for the offices, the Italians for the painting, and the Turks or Yugoslavs for the masonry (author’s translation).

In the chapter on the third week the author’s attention moves to a strike breaking out, followed by a factory occupation. The strike is worsened by a violent act by a member of the factory management (the chef de l’hygiène et de la sécurité) (Bon, 1982/2011, pp. 106–107). A committee representing the workers, the C.E. or comité d’entreprise plays a key role in the strike. In 2019 Joseph Pontus (1978–2021) published À la Ligne: Feuillets d’Usine. Ponthus studied literature and worked as an educator in the Paris region (Ponthus, 2019). In 2015 he moved to Brittany, following his beloved wife. Not finding paid work easily he accepted, just ‘pour les sous’ (for the money), temporary work (intérimaire) as an unskilled worker in the agri-food industry over two years, first in a conserverie de poissons (a fish cannery) and next in an abattoir. À la Ligne is based on his personal work experiences in Brittany: Je n’y allais pas pour faire un reportage Encore moins préparer la révolution Non L’usine c‘est pour les sous Un boulot alimentaire Comme on dit (Ponthus, 2019, p. 13). I did not go to make a reportage Even less to prepare a revolution No The factory is there for the money A food job As they call it (author’s translation).

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The book was honoured with various prestigious literary awards (Ponthus, 2019; Lansmans, 2019, 236–238). The form of the book is unusual. It is not presented as reportage but as free verse. The cadence of the verses is intentionally similar to the cadence of an assembly line: J’écris comme je pense sur ma ligne de production divaguant dans mes pensées seul determiné J’écris comme je travaille À la chaîne. À la ligne (Ponthus, 2019, p. 17). I write in the same way as I think about my production line Wandering in my thoughts alone determined I write in the way I use to work On the assembly line On the line (author’s translation).

Ponthus’s remarks about his work and working conditions are mingled throughout the book with a multitude of references to French poetry, literature, chansons, related documentary movies, and books. For example, referring to Zola and Sinclair: Ce n’est pas du Zola mais on pourrait y croire (Ponthus, 2019, p. 20). It is not Zola-like but one could believe it is (author’s translation). Upton Sinclair toi l’immortel auteur de la fabuleuse Jungle de 1905 sur les abattoirs de Chicago je suis là J’arrive (Ponthus, 2019, p. 247). Upton Sinclair you the immortal author of the fabulous Jungle of 1905 about the slaughterhouses of Chicago I am there I arrive (author’s translation).

The second part of the book, dealing with his time in the abattoir, is especially impressive. As in the fish cannery, Ponthus carries out here a number of tasks varying from cleaning the abattoir to operating as a butcher

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of carcasses on the line. He makes clear that in comparison with Upton Sinclair’s experiences in Chicago’s meat industry in the beginning of the 20th century, or the work and working conditions in the Paris abattoirs by the end of the 1940s, almost no significant improvements have occurred in the work and working conditions.13 In general, the working conditions in both the fish cannery and the abattoir are physically heavy and mentally monotonous. The assembly lines dictate the work tempo. The work in the abattoir is carried out in rooms without no natural light. The noise of machines, humidity, and low temperatures are permanent. In the fish cannery the work is less heavy, but as in the abattoir, repetitive: Le travail dans sa plus banale nudité Répétitive Des gestes simples Durs Des mots simples (Ponthus, 2019, p. 152). The work in its most banal nudity Repetitive Simple gestures Hard Simple words (author’s translation).

In sum, Ponthus may be considered an intellectual who carried out unskilled work not because of his interest in coming as close as possible to the real workmen’s experiences at the factory floor – as social researchers, philosopher Simone Weil, or the Italian post-war literary authors did – but simply out of economic necessity: he did it just for the money. Nevertheless, his direct observations are in particular valuable, such as the following one: L’usine bouleverse mon corps Mes certitudes Ce que je croyais savoir du travail et du repos De la fatigue 13 With respect to the work and working conditions of Parisian abattoir workers by the end of the 1940s Ponthus refers to the impressive documentary of the French filmmaker Georges Franju, Le Sang des Bètes. The documentay was shot in the Parisian slaughterhouses of la Villette and Vaugirard in 1948 (Ponthus, 2019, p. 218).

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De la joie De l’humanité (Ponthus, 2019, p. 166). The factory upsets my body My certainties What I believed to know about what work and rest mean Of tiredness Of pleasure Of humanity (author’s translation).

Conclusion In considering French industrial novels from the 1930s and after World War II, an initial conclusion is that although all of them have specific settings, they all generalize readily about the larger ‘condition ouvrière’ in the country. In almost all of them several issues recur, varying from noise, boredom, alienation, and fatigue to surveillance, control, work speed, intimidation, and racism. Whereas Simone Weil in the 1930s still believed in the possibility of solving the problems of rationalization and worker alienation caused by OST by reforming capitalism from within, the later authors are more pessimistic about the prospects. This is partly because post-World War II labour relations became more complicated in France compared to the 1930s. Not only the rationalization of work strained labour relations but also a strong influx of foreign workers, to a large extent North Africans as decolonization progressed during the 1950s and 1960s. These immigrants, as ‘ouvriers specialisés’, were assigned the worst jobs on the assembly line, where workers of French origin were usually better off. Also, racism between different groups of workers and between bosses and workers on the shopfloor was increasing rapidly at that time. Perhaps most radical in diagnosing these problems were the authors who were part of the Établi movement (Linhart, Kaplan and to a lesser extent Etcherelli). A second conclusion is that the authors discussed carried out industrial work for widely varied durations, from a few months to several years. They based their novels on their personal experiences and tried to give a voice to the industrial workers and to describe their working conditions. A third and last conclusion is that some of the authors also foresee more or less explicitly the later de-industrialization process of the French economy from the 1960s onwards. The Citroën factory of Porte de Choisy, the scene

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of both the novels of Etcherelli and Linhart, would eventually be closed. Bon describes in his second industrial novel the closure of several Daewoo plants in the north-east of the country.

Works cited Aubery, P. (1963). Regards sur l’oeuvre de Georges Navel. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 78(4), 417–421. https://doi.org/10.2307/461254 Bon, F. (2011). Sortie d’usine. Les Éditions de Minuit. (Original work published 1982) Bon, F. (2004). Daewoo. Livres de Poche. Decreus. T. (2022). Weil en de zoektocht naar collectieve vrijheid. Filosofie-Tijdschrift, 32(1), 5–9. www.https://filosofie-tijdschrift.nl/nummer/jrg-32-nr-1-simone-weil/ Devaux, A. A., & de Lussy, F. (Eds.). (1989–2002). Simone Weil: Oeuvres complètes. 6 vols. Gallimard. Etcherelli, C. (1985). Élise ou la vraie vie. Denoël/Folio. (Original work published 1967) Friedmann, G. (1947). Un travailleur, un homme. Annales, 2(1), 90–94. https://doi. org/10.3406/ahess.1947.3266 Friedmann, G., & Naville, P. 1962. Traité de sociologie du travail. 2 vols. Librairie Armand Colin. Gay, V. (2021). Pour la dignité: Ouvriers immigrés et conflits sociaux dans les années 1980. Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Hourdin, G. (2019). Simone Weil. La Découverte. Inkel, S. (2012). Archéologie du politique chez François Bon. @nalyses: Revue des littératures franco-canadiennes et québécoise, 7(1), 8–28. Kaplan, L. (2020). L’èxces – l’usine. P.O.L. (Original work published 1982) Kedward, R. (2005). La vie en bleu: France and the French since 1900. Alan Lane/ Penguin. Lansmans, A. (2019). Joseph Ponthus: À la ligne. Feuillets d’usine. Revue Générale, Autumn(1), 236–238. https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/250948/1/RG Automne 2019 28 – Lansmans note Ponthus.pdf Lefort-Favreau, J. (2015). Les communautés littéraire de Leslie Kaplan: De l’usine à l’atelier d’écriture, l’égalité des intelligences. Tangence, 107, 55–72. https:// journals.openedition.org/tangence/1117 Linhart, R. (1981). L’Établi. Les Éditions de Minuit. (Original work published 1978) Mas, R. (1982). Du lycée à l’usine. The French Review, 56(1), 12–19. https://www.jstor. org/stable/392278 Myers, S. (2018). Temps de travail, temps du récit, et subjectivations dans les écrits romanesques des ouvriers: L’exemple de Travaux (1945) de Georges Navel. Les Dossier du Grihl, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.4000/dossiersgrihl.7054

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Navel, G. (1995). Travaux. Gallimard. (Original work published 1945) Noiriel, G. (2002). Les ouvriers dans la société Francaise, XIXe-XXe siècle. Éditions du Seuil. Ponthus, J. (2019). A la ligne: Feuillets d’usine. Table Ronde. Reid, D. (2004). Etablissement: Working in the factory to make revolution in France. Radical History Review, 88, 83–111. www.https://muse.jhu.edu/article/50935 Roach, J. (2005). Introduction. In Etcherelli, Élise ou la vraie vie, loc. 65-320. Amazon kindle edition. (Original work published 1967) Weil, S. (2002). Journal d’usine. In S. Weil. La condition ouvrière, pp. 77–204. Gallimard. (Original work published 1951).

8

Transnational comparison and concluding reflection Abstract In this chapter the balance of this study of Modernist industrial novels and the sociology of work is drawn by making a transnational comparison of the five countries under regard in the American Century: the United States, the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, post-war Italy, and France. A common thread in the cross-comparison is the introduction of modern American production techniques (Taylorism and Fordism) and their consequences for workers, first in the United States and then subsequently in somewhat adapted ways in the other four countries. The chapter ends with a reflective conclusion with respect to the application or use of Modernist industrial novels as a research source in the context of the sociology of work. Keywords: Transnational comparison, American Century, Taylorism, Fordism, modernist industrial novels, industrial sociology

Introduction In this chapter I will compare the five country cases described in this book. The main question is, can or do Modernist industrial novels written in different countries in various time periods (mostly between 1900 and the 1980s) spanning the so-called ‘American Century’, offer new or additional insights to academic industrial sociology? In other words, does it make sense to bring together the fields of literature and (industrial) sociology? When taking the dual transnational and longitudinal perspective, one development stands out that influenced both industrial sociology and Modernist industrial novels more or less equally. That is the Americanization of production processes by introducing scientific management and Fordist work methods, first in the United States and then in more or less adapted forms in the other countries.

De Gier, Erik: Documentary Industrial Novels and the Sociology of Work in the Twentieth Century. The United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023 DOI: 10.5117/9789463721943_CH08

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This implied a focus on the content of the modernist industrial novels dealt with, set in diverse national and time-specific contexts. Apart from that, the ways the underlying empirical research for the novels was carried out by its authors are also relevant, as too are the various ways the results are processed in these novels (See Table 1, Chapter 1).

Cross-country comparison The flowering of the Modernist industrial novel covers more or less a century between 1900 and the 1980s. In the background of this long period there existed a successive tension in these novels between utopian and dystopian elements. In the first decades of the century utopian view prevailed, perhaps most importantly the shared belief – among entrepreneurs, managers, and workers – in the benefits of efficiency or the Americanization of production processes. In the United States it was supposed that the application of Taylorist and Fordist methods of production could solve the class struggle between capital and labour and ‘remake America’ into a just and wealthy society. Modernization of production along these lines was generally considered by reformers and muckrakers as a crucial condition of social reform. It could also contribute to the creation of a wealthier middle class in the country. In other words, modernization of production contributed also to the realization of the American dream. It was believed that the negative consequences of modernization that emerged should and could be diminished or neutralized by means of social reform. Social critic Upton Sinclair and other muckrakers clearly belonged to the group of optimist social-reform-oriented writers of industrial novels in the United States. Sinclair still strongly believed in the possibilities of a better ‘socialist’ or progressive world. In his opinion America could be remade into a middle-class paradise. This was not the case for John Dos Passos. In his trilogy U.S.A. (Dos Passos, 1938/1960), Dos Passos, whose view was more pessimistic, forecast the end of the American dream at the time of the Great Depression. He finally also lost his progressive stance, in the end preferring the lost American pastoral idea (‘Back to the land that gave me birth. The grandest place on God’s green earth. California That’s where I belong’, Dos Passos, 1938/1960, p. 962) to the increasingly materialist, consumer-oriented industrial capitalism of the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. In the Soviet Union the objective of Americanization of production in the 1920s and early 1930s was also considered an essential condition for realizing communist utopia or socialist society. The intention of Lenin and

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Stalin was, by emulating the Americanization of production the Soviet Union would catch up, and might eventually even surpass, the US economically. The Soviet authors of industrial novels were required to contribute to this as ‘engineers of the soul’. What their novels nevertheless make clear, despite their propagandistic, system-affirming character, is that the forced pace of crash industrialization in a traditional agricultural society like Russia’s caused numerous social and economic difficulties. American production techniques were introduced and subsequently adapted widely to the specific Soviet situation in the form of shock brigades and Stakhanovite workers. After a while the Soviets came to view these adaptations as superior to the original American Taylorism and Fordism. In the German Weimar Republic, American production techniques (Amerikanismus) were adopted on a large scale in industry and mining. This led to a Taylorist boom in German industry and mining between 1926 and 1928. The modernist industrial novels written in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and early 1930s were linked directly to the principles of the avant garde in the arts and the New Objectivity movement (Muller, 1991). One of the main intentions of the avant garde and New Objectivity was to contribute actively to social progress and a better world. Modernist Weimar industrial novels were partly very critical, sometimes echoing the propagandistic socialist-realist novels written in the Soviet Union at that time (Jung, 1927/1987; Bredel, 1930). Other industrial novels were less pronounced in a political sense, such as Siegfried Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (Kracauer, 1930/2013) and Erik Reger’s Union der festen Hand (Reger, 1931/1992). All Weimar Modernist industrial novels and reportages gave a meticulous impression of the specific Weimar context in which Americanism was introduced and adapted, as well as of its negative consequences for workers. Kracauer’s Die Angestellten also described the transformation of an advanced industrial economy into one in which white-collar work became more and more significant. Kracauer’s approach, described as a mosaic of ‘in-depth dialectical unmasking’ by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1980), was based on a ‘montage’ of observation, interviewing, and document study, and resulted in a sharp diagnosis of the ‘spiritually empty’ new white-collar mass culture in Berlin and Germany of that time. As it did in the Soviet Union, in the Weimar Republic Amerikanismus lost its momentum at the onset of the Great Depression. This ‘spiritual emptiness’ of the Weimar white-collar workers had much in common with the worker alienation of the blue- and white-collar workers at Olivetti, extensively described in the important Italian industrial novels of Paolo Volponi and Ottiero Ottieri in the 1950s and 1960s.

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In the Italian case however, worker alienation was not mainly caused by a new white-collar worker culture as such, but by the clash of traditional family values firmly grounded in a still overwhelmingly traditional, agrarian society on the one hand and, on the other, the introduction of the assembly line and Fordism in Italian industry in the 1950s and 1960s in a context of rapid urbanization and industrialization. It was in particular the remarkable entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti who wanted to restore the balance between traditional social values of an agrarian society and industrialization in his enterprise – and in Italy as a whole – by means of his communitarian utopia. Inspired by the ideas of French philosophers Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain, and Emmanuel Mounier, Olivetti intended to overcome worker alienation in his business by means of third-way-like social reforms. In order to realize his utopia, Olivetti collaborated in his policymaking with a large number of engineers, scientists, designers and notable literary writers. His final objective was a socialization of his enterprise – joint ownership by both workers and managers. As the industrial novels of Ottieri and Volponi illustrate, this remained unachievable in Italy at that time. Despite all the good intentions of Olivetti and his supporters, these novels show that worker alienation remained a persistent problem in his company. What is more, Americanization of production processes was accepted uncritically even by a substantial part of his workforce. Over time Paolo Volponi gradually lost his faith in the reformist Olivettian utopia, taking a more pessimistic view in his Le Mosche del Capitale (Volponi, 1989/2010). In the decade after Adriano Olivetti’s death, Volponi experienced a fundamental transition at both Olivetti and Fiat as well as of the Italian economy as a whole, from a system still recognizably based on the values of family capitalism into a more international neo-capitalist society that gave less importance to the interests of workers. In this changed context, Olivetti’s ‘good factory’ seemed obsolete. Finally, France. In this country, Americanization of production became prominent from the 1930s onward. It was Simone Weil who first recognized and described the processes of worker alienation and the monotony of industrial work. In her important writings published in the posthumous collection La Condition Ouvrière (Weil, 1951/2002), she described the negative effects of work on the assembly line in meticulous detail. Like Adriano Olivetti in Italy, she still believed in the possibility of overcoming these effects by a reformist social and labour policy. She saw the restoration of the natural link between preparation and execution of work as being key to this. The Modernist industrial novels written in France in the decades thereafter show that such a restoration remained utopian thinking there too.

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Beginning with the industrial novel of Navel in 1945 and ending with that of Ponthus in 2019, the Americanization of production processes in these novels was detrimental for blue-collar workers (‘OS’), in particular for the many immigrant workers who usually had to carry out the most menial jobs. From the 1970s onwards an increasing number of factory closures occurred in the context of de-industrialization. This caused new problems, such as large-scale unemployment and social tensions in the former industrialized regions and cities. When creating a continuous timeline spanning the flourishing of Modernist industrial novels between 1900 and the 1980s one constant element jumps to the fore. That is the initial enthusiasm for Americanized production processes in all five countries in this study. However, the thoroughness and extensiveness with which scientific management, Fordism and the assembly line were adopted in businesses varied from decade to decade and from country to country. American production methods outside the United States were adapted promptly to more specific national circumstances, like Stakhanovism in the Soviet Union, Amerikanismus in the Weimar Republic and communitarian welfare policies in case of the Italian Olivetti enterprise. A second additional development is the fundamental tilt that took place in all five countries over time from utopian thinking concerning Americanism towards dystopian thinking. This transition is mirrored in the corpus of industrial novels discussed. The tilt was caused by various factors, such as the Great Depression from 1929 onwards, and the post-war economic booms in Italy and France. American historian and political scientist Charles S. Maier concluded in his in-depth essay on Taylorism in the United States and Europe that the conditions of the Great Depression undermined all Americanist industrial utopias. Also, ‘economic contraction destroyed the postulates for class collaboration …’ (Maier, 1970, p. 61). Another crucial factor in this respect was the changing nature of capitalism in this century in the countries studied, as the family capitalism of the early part of the century transformed into the large-scale, more impersonal neo-capitalism of the 1960s onward. The main workers’ issues arising from the Americanization of production processes that are addressed in the Modernist industrial novels in the five countries studied are listed in Table 3.

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Table 3: Listing of workmen’s issues related to the Americanization of production processes in modernist industrial novels in the US, Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, Italy, and France in the American Century – Separation of preparation and execution of work (fragmentation of work tasks) – Feelings of worker alienation – Boredom – Noise – Physical exhaustion – Increase of work tempo (work speed) – Waste of materials – Deterioration of the general ‘condition ouvrière’ – Lack of wage compensation in case of extra working hours – Worker participation/ socialization of the enterprise – Unemployment – Worker control

With respect to the ‘form’ of the Modernist industrial novels chosen, a variety of modes and registers have been used by the authors of these novels, ranging from narrative to experimentalism to verse (see Table 4). Also, all these novels are based on their authors’ own experiences in the enterprises described, as worker, managerial executive, participant observer, or factory visitor. Some authors also carried out interviews with workers and/or managers. The common aim shared by all these authors was to give workers their own distinctive voice, which had not happened in national literatures before. A remarkable inspirational factor in this respect was the important New Objectivity art and fiction movement, which emerged in the 1920s in Weimar Germany and subsequently in the other countries. This current emphasized the significance of facts in writing industrial novels. Table 4: Diversity of forms and empirical methods applied by authors of modernist industrial novels Diversity of forms:

Methods employed:

– Facts and fiction (all except Kracauer (1930)) – Reportage (Kisch (1924), Reger (1931)) – Memoir (Scott (1942), Navel (1945), Ottieri (1969), Linhart (1978), Ponthus (2019)) – Experimentalism (Dos Passos (1938): newsreels, biographies, camera eye) – Montage, mosaic, cinematic (Dos Passos (1938), Kracauer (1930)) – Verse (Gastev (Carden, 1987), Kaplan (1968)), Ponthus (2019) – Essay (Weil 1951)

– Participant observation/ factory visits – Temporary employment as a worker or management executive – Interviews – Documents, statistics

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Surplus value of Modernist documentary industrial novels for the sociology of work Returning now to the main research question of this book, could Modernist industrial novels add surplus value to the knowledge store of mainstream industrial sociology? If sociologists are willing to utilize the content of industrial novels as a relevant secondary research source, and in some cases even as a primary source, in addition to their own research (See Jackson, 1969; Penadés, 2019), there seems no reason why it should not form a valuable resource for them. In other words, by combining literature based on empirical facts and sociology, social research will also enable serendipity, a quality that according to American sociologist Robert Merton should be inherent in social research (Merton, 1968; Penadés, 2019).1 Serendipity is also inherent in another related term in this context, the so-called ‘sociological imagination’, a term coined by American sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959 (Mills, 1959/1970). In the sociology of work, a more systematic application of insights from Modernist industrial novels could contribute to an interesting increase in sociological imagination. According to Wright Mills, sociological imagination is needed urgently in our ‘Age of Fact’. It is ‘a quality of mind that will help [people] to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called sociological imagination … I believe, that the social sciences are becoming the common denominator of our cultural period, and the sociological imagination our most needed quality of mind’ (Mills, 1959/1970, pp. 11, 20). The sociological relevance of industrial novels rises if these novels are based on the empirical and/or desk research of their authors, as well as on documents, statistical facts and figures. This is the case with Modernist industrial novels. In addition to taking seriously the content of these novels, industrial sociology could also take advantage of them by borrowing or applying certain elements of the forms and methods applied by their authors. An 1 Merton defines serendipity as ‘the discovery, by chance or sagacity, of valid results which were not sought for’. Serendipity ‘may lead to an unexpected and anomalous finding elicited by the investigator’s curiosity, and conduct him along an unpremeditated by-path which led to a fresh hypothesis’ (Merton, 1968, pp. 157, 162).

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example might be to make a more extensive use of small empirical case studies or reportages, as Kisch did in Der rasende Reporter (Kisch, 1924/2006), or of Dos Passos’s experimental cinematic method using ‘camera eyes’ and small succinct biographies of key entrepreneurs, trade union leaders, and other important personalities in the field of work and industry (Dos Passos, 1938/1960). Also, Kracauer’s innovative montage technique deserves serious attention by the industrial sociologist. This technique made Kracauer’s Die Angestellten (Kracauer, 1930/2013) a path-breaking ‘reportage’ on the alienation of the emerging new middle-class white-collar culture of 1920s Berlin. On the other hand, social researchers have to keep in mind that industrial novels have almost all been written from a personal, subjective perspective, usually from a left, progressive angle. The perspective of their authors varied from spectateurs engagés or engaged spectators (Kracauer, Kisch, Reger) to mere socialist-realist propaganda in case of Soviet authors. 2 Therefore, it is also important to consider industrial novels against the wider historical context in which they were written. For example, in the case of the early-20th-century United States, the context was strong rates of urbanization, immigration, economic growth, and industrialization, as well as social reform arising from the social and economic crisis of the 1930s. In Italy of the 1950s it was the crash transformation of an agrarian economy to one of the most advanced industrialized countries in the world in a short period. In Chapter 1, I argued that in principle both authors of Modernist industrial novels and industrial sociological researchers aimed to come as close as possible to the real subjective working life of their research subjects. After surveying a substantial number of novels in this book my conclusion is that as far as the life and working world of workers in the five countries studied is concerned, the authors of these novels have in general succeeded better than industrial sociologists in coming close to the life and working world of workers. In almost all cases, even when sociologists themselves had worked for a while in the factories or workshops they researched, they remained at a larger distance from their subjects than the novelists do. As English industrial sociologist Huw Beynon sharply observed in the 1970s in the preface of his remarkable industrial sociological book Working for Ford, sociologists, ‘at best have written with “the profession” over their right shoulder, and produced sociology for sociologists; an absurdity which cuts 2 Originally the term spectateur engagé was coined by French sociologists Missika and Wolton referring to the life and work of the renowned French sociologist Raymond Aron. This book is based on conversations with Aron’s co-authors (Aron, 1981).

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the writer off from the subject of his writing’ (Beynon, 1973/1984, p. 9).3 Taking a closer look at some classic publications in the field of industrial sociology, Beynon’s exclamation turns out to be more than true. Harry Braverman’s important book Labor and Monopoly Capital is an example. Despite spending a substantial period as a blue-collar worker in various industrial enterprises, Braverman’s ‘study of the labor processes of capitalist society, and the specific manner in which these are formed by capitalist property relations’ remains, when viewed from the bottom-up perspective of workers, a rather abstract theoretical study directed primarily at sociological professionals (Braverman, 1974, p. 24).4 Therefore, what is missing in general in industrial sociology is to some extent a form of sociological imagination that adequately enables the proper ‘voice’ of their research subjects. In conclusion, the content as well as certain form aspects of Modernist industrial novels are without doubt of interest to industrial sociology and could possibly lead to new insights as well as the mutual enrichment of social novels and sociology through various forms of cross-fertilization. As a result, the sociology of work could become a more encompassing (sociologically imaginative), and thus persuasive, sociological subdiscipline.

Works cited Aron, R. (1981). Le spectateur engagé: Entretiens avec J. L. Missika & D. Wolton. Gallimard. Beynon, H. (1984). Working for Ford. Penguin. (Original work published 1973) Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press. Bredel, W. (1930). Maschinenfabrik N. & K. Nemesis (Sozialistisches Archiv für Bellestrik). https://nemesis.marxists.org/bredel-maschinenfabrik-n-k1.htm

3 In his book Beynon explicitly deals with the experience of working in an automobile factory in the words and perceptions of the workers themselves. According to the preface to the second edition of his book (1984), his study ignited a fierce debate in the UK about his supposed research methods, based on observations and interviews on site with the workers and shop stewards at Ford, which some critics characterized as too subjective (Beynon, 1973/1984, pp. 11–23). 4 This applies equally to another classical industrial sociological study, Michael Burawoy’s book Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy, 1979). A recent study with strong anthropological aspects, Benjamin Snyder’s The Disrupted Workplace (Snyder, 2016), suffers much less from this problem: Snyder examined three groups of American workers (truck drivers, financial professionals and unemployed job-seekers) in the context of present-day flexible capitalism, and described how flexibility disrupted their lives and careers.

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Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent. Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. University of Chicago Press. Dos Passos, J. (1960). U.S.A. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1938). Jackson, J. A. (1969). Sociology and literary studies I. The map of society: America in the 1890s. Journal of American Studies, 3(1), 103–110. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0021875800021769 Jung, F. (1987). Gequältes Volk: Ein oberschlesischer Industrieroman. Nautilus. (Original work published 1927) Kisch, E. E. (2006). Der rasende Reporter. Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag. (Original work published 1924) Kracauer, S. (2013). Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland. Suhrkamp. (Original work published 1930). Maier, C. S. (1970). Between Taylorism and technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s. Journal of Contemporary History, 5, 27–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200947000500202 Merton, R. (1968). Social theory and social structure. The Free Press. Mills, C. Wright. (1970). The sociological imagination. Penguin. (Original work published 1959) Muller, F. (1991). Neue Sachlichkeit und Arbeitswelt. Germanica, 9, 55–70. https:// doi.org/10.4000/germanica.2382 Penadés, A. (2019). Sociologia y literatura: invitación a una amistad. Letras Libres, 213(June). https://www.letraslibres.com/revista/sociologia-y-literaturainvitacion-a-una-amistad/ Reger, E. (1992). Union der festen Hand. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. (Original work published 1931) Snyder, B. H. (2016). The disrupted workplace: Time and the moral order of flexible capitalism. Oxford University Press. Volponi, P. (2010). Le mosche del capitale. Einaudi. (Original work published 1989) Weil, S. (2002). Journal d’usine. In S. Weil. La condition ouvrière, pp. 77–204. Gallimard. (Original work published 1951).

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Weil, S. (2002). Journal d’usine. In S. Weil. La condition ouvrière, pp. 77–204. Gallimard. (Original work published 1951). Westerman, F. (2011). Engineers of the soul: In the footsteps of Stalin’s writers. Vintage. (Original work published 2002) Wilentz, S. (1992). A triumph of the Gilded Age. New York Review of Books, October 22. Williams, K. (1990). The will to objectivity: Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter. Modern Language Review, 85(1), 92–106. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3732798 Williams, R. (1963). Culture and society 1780–1950. Penguin. (Original work published 1958) Winkler, H. A. (1993). Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten Deutschen Demokratie. C.H. Beck. Wren, D., & Bedeian, A. G. (2004). The Taylorization of Lenin: rhetoric or reality? International Journal of Social Economics, 31(3), 287–299. https://doi. org/10.1108/03068290410518265 Zamyatin, Y. (1993). We. Penguin. Translated and with an introduction by Clarence Brown. (Original translation published 1924) Zola, É. (1991). Germinal. Fasquelle (Le Livre de Poche). (Original work published 1885)

Index Abbott, Andrew 17 n.3, 25, 171 ACW, Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union 64 Adelman, Jeremy 121, 137, 171 Agee, James, & Evans, Walker 38, 56 Agitprop 60, 60 n.1, 89 Agnelli, Gianni 115, 134 Agnelli, Umberto 122 Alberini, Luca 113, 137, 171 Alexandrova, Vera 78 n.14, 83, 171 All Union Congress of writers 67 Alstohm 142 n.1, 144 American Century 25, 35 n.6, 51, 57, 161, 166, 178 American Dream 37, 51, 56 American empire 24-26, 24 n.9, 175; see also machine age Americanization (of production) 5, 19, 23-25, 29-34, 59, 61, 61 n.10, 82, 87, 90, 98, 103, 143, 161-66 Americanism 6, 62, 65, 69 n.10, 74, 82, 89, 90-91, 107-08, 163, 165 American temp(o), Amerikansky temp 59, 62, 104 see also Taylorism, Fordism, assembly line American pastoral Idea 56, 162 Amerikanismus 90, 163, 165 Arbeitswissenschaft 90, 90 n.3 Amtorg 64 Anten, Hans 74-75, 83, 171 Arbeiterkorrespondenten 89 Aron, Raymond 168 n.2, 169, 171 Arthur, Anthony 44, 156, 171 assembly line 31-32, 34, 48, 54, 62-63, 75-76, 92, 100, 107, 123-24, 127, 131-32, 143-144, 146-53, 156-57, 158, 164-65 see also Fordism, Americanization (of production) Aubery, Pierre 145, 147, 159 backward induction 22 Bailes, K. E. 61 n.2, 63 n.5, 83, 171 Barnes Jensen, Billie 49, 56, 171 Barthel, Max 92, 108, 171 Bauer, Otto 90, 108, 171 Bauhaus 77, 88, 93 Becker, George T 48, 56, 171 Becker, Sabina 93, 108, 171 Beekman, Klaus 83, 84, 171, 175 Behrman, Greg 35 n.6, 36, 171 Bellamy, Edward 16, 25, 39-40, 48, 56, 171 Bellamy Societies 39 Belomor canal 68 Benjamin, Walter 99, 101 n.9, 102, 108, 163, 169 n.4, 172 Berliet automobile works 145 Berlin 74, 91, 92-93 n.5, 96-97, 99-100, 101 n.8, 102, 108, 163, 168, 174

Berman, Russel 104-05, 104 n. 11, 108, 172 Berta, Giuseppe 115, 115 n. 5, 118 n. 10, 119 n. 13, 137, 172 Betriebsgemeinschäfte 90 Beynon, Huw 168-69, 169 n. 3, 172 Bhavsar, Kavita 80, 83, 172 Bigatti, Giorgio 113, 115, 137, 172 Bloch, Ernst 74 blue-collar workers 100, 102, 106, 129, 152, 152 n. 11, 165, 169 Bochum 94 Bogdanov, Alexander 70 Bon, François 21, 142, 154, 159, 176 Bonifazio P. 117 n. 7, 118 n.11, 120 n.15, 137, 172 Bonura, G. 116, 137, 172 Bourke-White, Margaret 60 Bowlt, John E. 67, 83, 87, 108, 172 BPRS, Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller 89, 103 Bradbury, Malcolm 22, 25, 172 Brandes, Stuart D. 22, 25, 172 Braverman, Harry 18, 25, 62, 83, 169, 172 Bredel, Willie 6, 21, 87-89, 103-04, 108, 112, 163, 169, 172 Brewster Folsom, Michael 48, 56, 172 Brilliant, E. L. 120-21, 137, 172 Brown, J 58, 180 Burawoy, Michael 18, 26, 169 n.4, 170, 172 Caddedu, Davide 119, 138, 172 Canavese, Piedmont region 121, 132, 133 Cartels, industrial, cartelization 90, 97, 106 Calvino, Italo 23, 23n.8, 113-14, 125, 137-38, 172, 174 capitalism enlightened 112 family 164-165 flexible 27, 169 n. 4, 170, 181 industrial 19, 56, 136, 162 neo- 132, 134-35, 165 welfare (work) 5, 6, 11, 19, 25, 29-30, 115, 172 Carden, Patricia 63, 69-70, 69 n. 11, 70, 83, 166, 173 Cascione, Alberto 131, 138, 173 Central Labour Institute 62 Chaplin Machine 82, 84, 176 Chicago 17, 31, 42, 45-46, 46 n. 3, 48, 48 n. 11, 96, 156 Churchill, Winston 48, 57, 173 Citroën, André 55, 77 Citroën automobile works 63, 75, 143, 145, 147-48, 150, 152 Porte de Choisy 147, 149-52, 158 Saint-Ouen 63, 75, 145, 147-48, 150-52, 158 Civiltà delle Macchine 112-114, 137-38, 171, 174 Clark, Katerina 67-68, 71, 74, 77, 83, 173 class conflict 20, 33-35, 42, 98, 107

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Coketown, Manchester 16 comités d’entreprises 155 communitarism 111, 12o n. 16, 134, 136 Comunità 112 n. 1, 118-20, 119 n. 14, 136-39, 172, 178-79. condition ouvrière, la 21, 125 n. 24, 129, 139, 141-42, 144-45, 144 n. 5, 153, 158, 160, 164, 166, 170, 182 Constructivism 60 n.1, 87 Conroy, Jack 38, 56, 173 Conroy, Stephen S. 26, 43, 57 corporate welfare work 25, 29-30, 32, 35-36, 173, 184 corporatism, see also Gemeinwirtschaft 106 Corratelli, Giorgio 126, 138, 173 Croce, Benedetto 121 cross-fertilization 169 Cubism 52, 60 n.1, 87 Cultural Front 51, 51 n. 17, 57, 173 Dada 87-88, 97 Daewoo 154, 154 n.12, 159, 172 Dahrendorf, Ralf 18, 26, 173 Davies, R.W. 67, 83, 173 Dawes Plan 89 Dawson, Hugh T. 48 n. 10, 57, 173 Debs, Eugene V. 53 Decreus. Thomas 145, 159, 173 De Gier, Erik 3, 11, 13, 19, 23, 26, 36, 51 n.15, 57, 118 n. 10, 138, 173 De Lussy, Florence 159, 173 Denning, Michael 38, 51-53, 51 n. 17, 52 n. 20, 53, 57, 173 De Sica, Vittorio 113 n. 2 Detroit 34, 50, 54-55, 60, 64, 84, 90, 175 Devaux, André A. 144 n. 5, 159, 173 Diazzi, A. 118, 122, 122 n. 22, 138 D’Isola, Aimaro O. 118 Dickens, Charles 11, 16, 26, 93, 174 Di Nardo, Emmanuele 113, 138, 174 Disraeli, Benjamin 16, 26, 174 Döblin, Alfred 92-93 n. 5, 108, 184 Dos Passos, John 5, 21-22, 37-39, 43, 50-58, 50 n. 14, 51 n.15-17, 52 n. 19, 52 n. 21, 63, 74, 83, 162, 166, 168, 170, 174-75, 170, 181 Düll, Klaus 18, 26, 174 Duras, Marguerite 152 Eggers, Dave 39-40, 39 n. 5, 57, 174 Ehrenburg, Ilja 21, 56, 61, 74-76, 82-83, 85, 171, 174, 181 Einaudi 115-116, 115 n. 5, 138-39, 170, 175, 181 Eliot, George 16, 26, 174 Engels, Friedrich 16, 26, 88 n. 1, 108, 174 engineers of the (human) soul 59-60, 67-69, 85, 131, 163, 182 Ercolani, Maria L. 131 n. 28, 138, 174 Essen 94, 105 établis 142, 150-51, 150 n. 10, 153, 158 Établi-movement 158

Etcherelli, Claire 21, 147-49, 158-60, 174, 179 Expressionism 87-88, 92, 98 Fallada, Hans 92-93 n. 5, 109, 174 Ferrarotti, Franco 112, 116-17, 117 n. 8, 138, 174 Fiat automobile works 18, 24, 112, 115, 122, 122 n. 21, 126, 131, 134-135, 164 Linea Valetta 115 La marcia dei quarantamila 134-35 Figini, Luigi 117 n. 7, 118 Filler, Louis 45, 57, 174 Filtzer, D. 62, 83, 174 Fine, Gary. A. 17 n. 3, 26, 174 Fioretti, Daniele 113, 115, 122 n. 21, 123 n. 23, 125-126, 125 n. 24, 126 n. 25, 131-32, 134 n. 29, 135, 138, 174 fiziki 68; see also liriki Flivver king (Henry Ford) 21, 45, 49-50, 58, 180 Ford, Henry 24 n. 10, 31-34, 36-37, 44-45, 49-50, 53-54, 64, 77, 89, 109, 175 Forditis 34 Fordizatsia, Soviet Fordism 34, 62 Fordism 5, 19, 29, 31-34, 37, 55, 59-63, 65, 69, 69 n. 10, 82, 84, 87, 89-90, 111, 114, 136, 141, 143-44, 161, 163-165, 175 Mass-consumption 19, 23, 31, 55, 90-91 Mass-production 19, 24 n. 10, 31, 31 n. 3, 32, 36, 55, 62, 89, 114-15, 147 n. 7, 176 see also Taylorism, Americanization (of production), American temp Ford motor company 31-32, 34, 45, 49-50, 54, 58, 64, 75-76, 90, 96, 116-17, 168-69, 169 n. 3, 172, 180 Highland Park 34 Kahn, Albert 34, 64 River Rouge 34, 64 Foster, Gretchen 51, 52 n. 21, 57, 175 France 6, 11, 17-21, 24-27, 30, 33, 35-36, 51, 75-76, 88, 99, 109, 117, 121, 141-161, 164-166, 173, 177-79 Franju, Georges 157 n. 13 Frankfurt School of Sociology 99 Freeman, Joshua B. 19, 24 n. 9, 26, 31-34, 36, 59-60, 61 n. 2, 62, 83, 175 Friedmann, Georges 142, 145, 159, 175 Futurism; see Marinetti Gabetti, Roberto 118 Gardella, Ignazio 118 Gary (US Steel) 34, 65, 77, 80; see also Magnitogorsk iron and steel Works Gaskell, Elisabeth 16, 26, 175 Gastev, Alexei 21, 62-65, 63 n. 5, 66 n. 8, 69-70, 69 n. 11, 82-83, 166, 171, 173 Soviet Taylor 63, 82 Ovid of engineers 62-63 Gay, Peter 91-93, 109, 184 Gay, Vincent 143, 159, 175 Gelb, Michael 73, 83, 175 Gemelli, G. 116,138, 174

Index

Gemeinwirtschaft 106; see also corporatism Genoa 112, 115 German Communist Party 89, 97 Germany 6, 13, 17-21, 24 n. 10, 26-27, 30, 33, 35-36, 51, 56-57,59, 74, 87-91, 93, 96-97, 99-100, 103, 105, 109, 138, 142-43, 161, 163, 166, 173, 178; see also Weimar Republic Gilded Age 22, 39-42, 58, 182 Robber barons 41-42, 77 Ginsborg, Paul 11, 116, 138, 175 Gladkov, Fyodor V. 21, 60-61, 68, 71-73, 77, 82-83, 175 Gobetti, Piero 121 good factory 13, 114, 122, 164 Gorky, Maxim 21, 60, 67-68, 72 Maxim Gorky Literature Institute 72 Gorky, Nizhny Novgorod 30, 34, 60, 64 Gorky automobile works 30, 60 Soviet Detroit 60, 64, 64 n. 6 Gothic Line 128; see also Linea Gotica Gramsci, Antonio 32, 36, 113, 121, 175 Great-Britain 11, 26, 36, 173; see also UK Great Crash 43; see also Great Depression Great Depression 19, 22, 33, 37-38, 38 n. 3, 43, 51, 58, 61, 65, 77, 90-91, 101, 111, 162-63, 165, 179; see also Great Crash Great Terror, Great Purge; see Stalin, Josef Greenstein, D. E. 62, 84, 75 Groys, Boris 82, 84, 175 Grüttemeier, Ralf 74, 83-84, 272, 175 Hardwick, Elisabeth 43, 75 Hatherley, Owen 82, 84, 176 Hellebust, Rolf 78 n.18, 80, 84, 176 Heller, L. 68, 84, 176 Hermand, Jost 106, 109, 176 Highland Park 34; see also Ford Motor Company Hofstadter, Richard 41, 57, 176 Homestead Steel Works and lock out 41, 57, 117 Hounshell, David A. 31, 36, 176 Hourdin, Georges 144 n. 4, 159, 176 Howard, Ebenezer 120 n. 16, 138, 176 human resources (management), HRM 15, 17-18, 124, 184 Hughes, Thomas P. 32-34, 36, 61 n. 2, 63, 84, 90, 109, 184 IDA, Institut für Deutsche Arbeitsbeseelung 106-107 IFA, Arbeitsfysiologisches Institut 106-107 (im)migration 20, 38 n.3, 42, 51, 65, 113, 116, 141, 143, 147-48, 168 immigrants 41, 46, 48, 72, 141, 148, 150-51, 155, 158, 165 immigrés 159, 175 industrial democracy 114-15 Industrial novels, documentary cinematic 16, 60, 75, 80, 95, 154, 166, 168 essays 51-53, 83, 85, 88, 91, 94-95, 99, 119, 165-66, 172

185 form and content of 25, 55-56, 89, 166, 169, 184 memoirs 6, 16, 51, 61, 74, 77, 145, 150 n. 10, 152, 166 modernist 5-6, 11, 13, 15-19, 16 n. 2, 21-23, 25-26, 30, 37, 55, 57, 59, 87, 89, 107-08, 121 n. 17, 138, 141, 161-169, 173 montage technique 16, 51-52, 52 n. 21, 56, 75, 88, 92, 96, 100, 163, 166, 168 neo-realist 6, 19, 111, 113-14, 121, 125, 141-42, 147 reportage 16, 19, 24, 38, 51-52, 56, 74, 87-88, 92-94, 99-101, 101 n. 9, 102 n. 10, 103, 105, 107, 109, 125, 127, 129, 142 n. 1, 144, 152, 154-156, 166, 168, 176 traditional 16, 17, 25 verse 152, 156, 166 see also production novels, factory novels Industrial revolution 16, 16 n. 2, 19, 25 n. 11, 29, 89, 111, 114 machine age 15, 19, 32, 55, 56 industrial sociology 5, 11, 13, 15, 15 n. 1, 17-18, 20-21, 26, 49, 57, 138, 161, 167, 169, 173; see also sociology; sociology of work industrial triangle 112, 115 industrialism 16 Ings, Simon 63-64, 84, 176 Inkel, Stéphane 154, 154 n. 12, 159, 176 Italian Communist Party (PCI) 13, 23, 122, 136 Italy 6, 13, 19-20, 21, 23-27,33, 35, 57, 88, 109, 111-139, 113 n. 2, 115 n. 4, 115 n.5, 119 n. 14, 135 n. 30, 142-43, 143 n.2, 161, 164-66, 168, 173, 178 Ivens, Joris 60 Ivrea 112, 114, 118, 118 n. 11, 121-22, 126, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 172, 179 Jackson, John A. 22, 26, 91, 167, 170, 176 Jaffee, D. 58, 180 Jay, Martin 99 n. 7, 109, 176-77 John Reed Clubs 38, 38 n. 2 Judd, Tony 19, 26, 176 Jung, Franz 21, 88-89, 97-99, 108-09, 163, 170, 176 Kaes, Anton, Jay, M., & Dimenberg, E. 91-93, 92 n. 4, 100, 105, 109, 176-77 Kafka, Franz 154 Kanigel, Robert 31 n. 4, 36, 176 Kaplan, Leslie 21, 142, 152-54, 152 n. 11, 158-59, 166, 176-77 Kataev, Valentin 6, 21, 61, 68, 77-80, 78 n. 18, 82, 84, 176 Kedward, Rod 143, 143 n. 2-3, 159, 176 Kennedy, David M. 44, 57, 157 Kershaw, Ian 19, 24 n. 10, 26, 177 khozraschet 67 Kingsley, Charles 16, 26, 177 Kisch, Egon E. 6, 21, 88, 93-96, 95 n. 6, 101, 108-10, 166, 168, 170, 177-80, 182 Knapp, Lothar 131 n. 28, 134, 134 n. 29, 135 n. 30, 138, 177

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kombinat 65 Komsomol 66 Kotkin, Stephen 65 n. 7, 81, 84, 177 Koziol, Kenneth G. 57, 57n. 177 Kracauer, Siegfried 6, 21, 56, 74, 84, 87-89, 91-92, 99-102, 99 n. 7, 101 n. 9, 102 n. 10, 106, 108-10, 125, 163, 168, 170, 176-77, 181 Krause, Paul 41, 57, 177 Kroes, Rob 24, 27, 32-33, 36, 177 Krupp steel works 30, 94, 105-06, 108 Lahusen, Thomas 72 n. 14, 83-84, 173, 176-77 Lallement, Michel 18, 27, 177 Lansmans, Alexandre 156, 159, 177 Lefort-Favreau, Julien 154, 159, 177 Lenin, Vladimir 33-34, 59, 61 n. 3, 62, 68, 72, 82, 85, 182 Lewis, Ward B. 96, 109, 178 Lichtenstein, Nelson 58, 180 Linea Gotica 21, 122, 125 n. 24, 128 n. 27, 129, 137, 139, 179; see also Gothic line Linhart, Robert 21, 142, 150-54, 150 n. 10, 158-59, 166, 178 liriki 69; see also fiziki London, Jack 47, 48 n.10, 57, 178 Lupo, Giuseppe 113-15, 125, 137, 172 Lynd, R. S. & Lynd, H. M. 23 n. 7, 27, 178 machine age 15, 19, 32, 55-56 Maffioletti, Marco 116, 119, 121, 138, 178 Magnitogorsk iron and steel works 6, 30, 34, 60-61, 62 n. 4, 64-65, 65 n. 7, 77-81, 78 n. 19; see also Gary US Steel Maier, Charles S. 19, 27, 33, 35-36, 90, 109, 115 n. 4, 138, 165, 170, 178 May, Ernst 77 Manchester, Coketown 16 Marinetti, Filippo T., Futurist Manifesto 87, 52 Maritain, Jacques 118, 121, 164 Marshall Plan 1948 35-36, 35 n. 6, 116, 171 Mas, Raymond 142, 142 n.1, 159, 178 Mattson, Kevin 44, 46 n. 9, 48, 48 n. 11, 50, 57, 178 Mayo, Elton 18, 27, 178 Hawthorne studies 18 McGerr, Michael 39, 41-42, 57, 178 Menabò, il 113-14 mezzogiorno, il 116, 126 n. 26 Merton, Robert 167, 167 n. 1, 170, 178 middle class 37, 39, 41-44, 50, 55-56, 90-91, 100-02, 162, 168 Milan 112, 115, 123, 130 Sesto San Giovanni 130 Mills, Charles Wright 27, 167, 170, 178 Miracolo economico, Italian economic boom 23, 25, 111-14, 116, 125, 129, 136 modernist, description of 15-16, 16 n.2 Mounier, Emmanuel 118, 121, 164 Muller, Françoise 92, 94, 98, 103, 106, 109, 163, 170, 178

mushroom-mags 38 Mussolini, Benito 112-113, 116, 119, 136 Myers, Samira 146 n. 6, 159, 178 Naples 112, 114, 126; see also Pozzuoli Naturalism 11, 16, 48, 50, 88, 98, 114, 141 Navel, Georges 6, 21, 142, 144-47, 146 n. 6, 159-60, 165-66, 171, 178 Naville, Pierre 142, 159, 175 (neo-)realism 11, 16, 57, 68,74, 113 n. 2, 114, 173; see also socialist realism NEP, New Economic Policy 61-62, 64, 82 Neue Sachlichkeit 6, 16, 20, 51 n. 16, 74, 87, 83-84, 92, 92 n. 4, 109, 170-71, 175, 178; see also New Objectivity New Deal 22, 37, 40, 43-44, 51 n. 17, 58, 60, 179 FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt 43 First 43 Second 43-44 CVC, Civilian Conservation Corps 44 FERA, Federal Emergency Relief Administration 44 National Labor Relations Act, Wagner Act 44 NLRB, National Labor Relations Board 44 NRA, National Recovery Administration 44 WPA, Works Progress Administration 44 New Objectivity 6, 20, 51 n. 16, 56, 74, 83, 8788, 92, 92 n. 4, 93, 96, 99, 101, 101 n. 9, 105, 107, 119, 163, 166, 171; see also neue Sachlichkeit Nizhny Novgorod 34, 64; see also Gorky Noble, David 32, 34, 36, 64, 178 Noiriel, G. 143, 160, 178 Nolan, Mary 90-91, 109, 178 November Group 88 Ochetto, Valerio 112, 116 n. 6, 138, 179 Ogden Armour, J. 48 n. 10 Olivetti, Adriano 13, 35, 111-12, 114-123, 119 n. 14, 125 n. 24, 127, 130-34, 136-39, 141, 164, 172, 174, 178-79, 180 autonomia aziendale 117, 120 consiglio di gestione 120 Comunità, Edizioni di 118, 119 n. 14, 136 Comunità, company journal 112, 118, 136 Comunità, movement and political party 118-19, 119 n. 14, 136-39, 172, 178-79 Comunità, (company) union 120 Humana civilitas, communitarian utopia 120 Olivetti, Camillo 114-16 Olivetti, company 111, 114-15, 123, 136 Quartiere Castellamonte 118 Talponia 118 Via Jervis 118, 118 n. 11 Olivettism 114; see also Adriano Olivetti and Humana civilitas O.S., Ouvriers Specialisés 151, 165

Index

OST, Organisation Scientifique du Travail 41, 141, 143, 158 Ottieri, Ottiero 6, 21, 111, 114, 117, 121-31, 135, 137-39, 141, 143 Owen, John E. 49, 57, 179 Paris 9, 63, 70 n. 12, 75, 143, 147, 150-55, 157 Pastorello, Karin 23 n. 7, 41, 41 n. 6, 42-43, 42 n. 7, 45-47, 57, 179 paternalism 30, 116, 123, 125 Patka, Marcus G. 95 n. 6, 109, 175 Penadés, Alberto 22, 27, 167, 170, 179 Peroni, M. 117, 118 n. 11, 120, 139, 179 Pizer, Donald 52, 52 n. 20, 58, 179 Pollini, Gino 117 n. 7, 118 Ponthus, Joseph 17 n. 4, 21, 27, 155-60, 157 n. 13, 165-66, 177, 179 Porte de Choisy 147, 149-52, 158; see also Citroën automobile works Pozzuoli 112, 114, 122, 126, 126 n. 25, 130-31; see also Naples production novels 20 n. 6, 61, 68-69, 71, 77, 78 n. 17, 82 Progressive Era 22, 37, 40-44, 41 n. 6 Hull House 42, 48 n. 10 Muckrakers 45-46, 49 n. 13, 57, 162, 174 Social Gospellers 42, 42, n. 7 proletarian literature 38 Proletkult 60, 60 n. 1 Questione Meridionale 126, 137 RAIC, Russian-American Industrial Corporation 64 Rathenau, Walther 118 n. 10, 179 rationalization, of production 33, 39, 69 n. 10, 66, 70, 76, 78, 90-91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104-08, 117, 124, 126-27, 142-46, 151-52, 158, 171 Rauchway, Eric 44, 58, 179 Rebel, B. 83-84, 171, 175 Reger, Erik 6, 21, 87-88, 105-10, 163, 166, 168, 170, 176, 179 Reid, Donald 150, 150 n. 10, 160, 179 Renault automobile works 143-44 Revolution 1917, Russian 38 n. 2, 60 n. 1, 61, 85, 181 Rhodes, Carolyn H. 71, 84, 179 Roach, J. 143, 147 n. 7, 150 Rockefeller, John D. 41, 44, 49, 49 n.13 Rodschenko, Alexander 60 Rodgers, Daniel T. 30, 36, 43, 58, 180 Roethlisberger, F. J. & Dickson, W. J. 18, 27, 180 Rogger, Hans 62, 69 n. 10, 84, 180 Roselli, Carlo 121 Rosenzweig, Roy 49, 58, 180 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 43; see also New Deal Roosevelt, Theodore 42, 45-46 Ruhr, region 94, 97, 105-06, 108

187 Saint-Ouen 63, 75, 145, 147-48, 150-52, 158; see also Citroën automobile works Scarpa, Carlo 117 Schlenstedt, Dieter 95, 95 n. 6, 110, 180 Schlögel, Karl 18, 21-22, 27, 61 n. 2, 62, 64, 80, 84, 180 Schmidt, Gert 18, 27, 180 Scientific management 23-24, 29, 31-34, 36, 42, 53, 55, 62-64, 69 n. 10, 76, 79, 84, 89, 100, 114-15, 127, 132, 143-44, 161, 165, 179, 181; see also Taylorism, Fordism, Americanization of production, OST Scrivano, P. 115 n. 7, 118 n. 11, 120 n. 15, 137, 172 Segre, Bruno 17, 139, 180 Scott, John 21, 61, 78, 80-81, 85, 166, 180 Segre, Bruno 117, 139, 180 serendipity 167, 167 n. 1; see also sociological Imagination; spectateurs engagés Sesto San Giovanni 130; see also Milan Sforza Tarabochia, A. S. 118, 122, 122 n. 22, 138 Siegelbaum, Lewis H. 62, 64 n. 6, 66-67, 85, 180 Sinclair Lewis, H. 26, 43, 57-58, 180 Sinclair, Upton 5, 21-22, 37-39, 42, 44-46, 50, 55-58, 93, 96, 156-57, 162, 171-73, 178-79, 181 Sinisgalli, Leonardo 112, 117, 121 Smith, Terry 18 n. 5, 19, 27, 32, 36, 62, 85, 175, 185 Snyder, Benjamin H. 18, 27, 169 n. 4, 170, 181 Sochor, Zenovia A. 63 n. 5, 64, 85, 181 Social Engineering Machine 63 social inequality 113 socialist realism 6, 20, 59-61, 60 n. 1, 67-68, 83-84, 113, 173, 176-77; see also (neo)realism social research 15, 18-19, 22, 48, 56, 101, 167 sociological imagination 18, 26-27, 57, 167, 169-70, 173, 178; see also C. Wright Mills; serendipity; spectateurs engagés sociology Chicago’s urban 17, 17 n. 3 history of 15 industrial 5, 11, 13, 15, 15 n. 1, 17-18, 20-21, 26, 49, 57, 138, 161, 167, 169, 173 of organisations 18 of work 6, 15 n. 1, 17, 21-24, 37, 161, 167, 169 Sommervill, Barbara A. 45-46, 58, 181 Sottsass, Ettore 117 Sotsgorod, Socialist city 77, 80-81 Soviet Union 82-85 Bolsheviks 33-34, 62, 73, 84, 96, 175 Civil war, Russian 61-62, 72-73, 82 First Five-Year Plan 1928 60-62, 61 n. 5, 62 n. 4, 64-65 Revolution, Russian 33, 38 n. 2, 60 n. 1, 61-62, 66, 72-73, 82., 85, 180-181 Second Five-Year Plan 1933 62 n. 4, 65-66, 80, 82 Third Five-Year Plan 1938 65-66 spectateurs engagés 168-69, 168 n. 2, 171; see also serendipity; sociological imagination

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Später, Jörg 99-100, 110, 181 Stakhanov 66 n. 8 Stakhanovism, Stakhanov movement 5, 59, 66-67, 81-83, 85, 103, 163, 165, 173, 180 shock brigades 5, 59, 66, 79-80, 82, 163 Stalin, Josef 34, 60-62, 61 n. 3, 62 n. 4, 65-68, 72, 77-78, 80-82, 84-85, 163, 176, 182 Great Terror, Great Purge 34, 61, 65, 67, 80, 82 Stalingrad 34, 60, 64, 69 n. 10 Steinbeck, John 38 n. 3, 58, 181 Stites, Richard 61 n. 2, 63 n.5, 70-71, 74, 82, 85, 181 Tarbell, Ida 45, 49 n. 13, 58, 181 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 24 n. 10, 31, 36, 39, 53, 84, 176, 179 Taylorism 5, 6, 19, 27, 31-34, 36-37, 60-67, 63 n. 5, 69, 69 n. 10, 70, 73-74,78-79, 82-83, 85, 89-91, 109, 111, 114-115, 115 n. 4, 117, 123, 131, 136, 138, 141, 143-44, 146, 161-63, 165, 170-71, 178, 181-82 OST, Organisation Scientifique du Travail 141, 143, 158 see also Scientific management, Fordism, Americanization of production Technikult 92 Ter Braak, Menno 75, 85, 181 Telecom Italia 114 third way 35, 119-21, 121 n. 17, 125 n. 24, 136, 164 Thomas, W.I. & Thomas, D.S. Thomas theorem 22, 27, 181 Tichi, Cecelia 39, 39 n. 4, 43, 52, 52 n. 19, 55, 58, 181 Tiller Girls 91-92 Todorov Tzvetan 67, 85, 88, 110, 181 tractorstroi 60, 64 Trentes Glorieuses, les 143 Trombold, John 55, 58, 181 Trotsky, Leon 61 UAW, Union of Automobile Workers 50 Reuther, Walter 50 UK, United Kingdom 18, 19, 25 n.11, 30, 48 n. 10, 131, 169 n. 3; see also Great-Britain Upper Silesia, region 96-99 USA, United States of America 3, 5, 13, 15, 17, 18 n. 5, 19, 20-24, 24, 24 n. 10, 26-27, 29-30, 32-34, 36-59, 35 n. 6, 39 n. 4, 41 n. 6, 51 n. 17, 52 n. 21, 61-62, 64-65, 76-78, 80, 90-91, 96-97, 99, 108, 116, 141, 143, 161-63, 165-166, 168, 173, 180 utopias 5-6, 13, 26, 32-33, 37, 39, 70, 83, 114, 119-20, 131-34, 138, 162, 164-65, 173-74 utopianism 40, 70 Van Atta, Don 66, 85, 181 Valetta, Vittorio 115

Veblen, Thorstein 17 n. 3, 42, 52-53, 58, 181 Visconti, Luchino 113 n. 2 Visentini, Bruno 122, 122 n. 21, 134 Vittorini, Elio 113-14, 128 n. 27, 139, 181 voice 23, 44, 113, 129, 142,158, 166, 169 Volponi, Paulo 6, 21, 23, 111, 113-14, 117, 119, 121-22, 122 n. 21, 131-39, 131 n. 28, 135 n. 30, 163-64, 170, 174, 177, 181 Walker, William 38, 89, 110, 181 Wataghin, Lucia 134 n. 29, 139, 181 Weil, Simone 6, 21, 47, 121, 125, 125 n. 24, 128-29, 137, 139, 141-42, 144-45, 144 n. 5, 147, 157-60, 164, 166, 170, 173, 176, 182 Weimar Republic 6, 13, 19-21, 24, 24 n. 10, 26, 33, 51 n. 16, 56-57, 59, 74, 87-110 welfare work 5, 6, 13, 19, 23, 25-26, 29-30, 30 n. 1, 32, 35-36, 40, 42, 90, 94, 102, 105, 112, 114, 115-19, 120 n. 15, 122, 136, 173 Westerman, Frank 60, 67-69, 85, 182 white-collar workers 99-102, 102 n. 10, 106-08, 129, 134, 151, 163-64, 168 White Sea-Baltic Canal 65, 68 Wilentz, Sean 41, 58, 182 Williams, Keith 93-94. 182, 193 Williams, Raymond 16, 25 n. 11, 27, 182 Winkler, Heinrich A. 89, 110, 182 worker alienation 20, 62, 100, 102, 106-07, 111, 114, 116-18, 122, 126, 128-30, 132, 135-38, 141-42, 153-54, 158, 163-64, 166, 168, 173 worker participation 20, 29, 30, 102, 115, 123, 166 works councils 120, 123 consiglio di gestione, see also Olivetti, Adriano 120 comités d’entreprises 155 see also communitarism working class 16, 20, 26, 37-38, 41-42, 48-49, 60, 83, 89, 100, 108, 132, 134, 144, 174 working conditions 16, 17, 20, 37-38, 45-46, 48, 50, 94-95, 97, 112, 117, 122, 124, 141, 143, 145-46, 148, 150-51, 154, 156-57, 157 n. 13, 158 World War I 27, 31, 33, 55, 87, 89, 90 n. 3, 94, 97, 105, 109, 143, 178 World War II 5, 19-20, 23-24, 29, 33-34, 35 n. 6, 36-37, 116, 119, 128, 132, 136, 141-43, 158, 178 work satisfaction 102 Wren, Daniel, & Bedeian, Arthur G. 63 n. 5, 66 n. 8, 85, 182 Zamyatin, Yevgeny 6, 21, 61, 69-71, 70 n. 12, 71 n. 13, 82-85, 173, 182 Zhdanov, Andrey 13, 60, 67-68 Zinato, Emanuele 135 Zola, Émile 11, 16, 27, 48, 88 n. 1, 93, 110, 141, 156, 182 Germinal 11, 16, 27, 110, 141