Justin (converted to plain text from html code): Lenin expressly holds up Taylorism as an ideal for Soviet industry at a couple of points. I could find the references if you wanted. But I think the Bolshies were more impressed with German war planning planning, which was more familiar to them. Gramsci conceived of Fordism not only asa tool of analysis but as containing elements of a Communist society.
----- These passages are commonly cited to show how Lenin was a spawn of the devil. But they probably should be collated with his (half serious) comment that communism was soviets + electricity, and glossed with Tom Walker's signature line, "Wealth is liberty... it is disposable time and nothing more." (I don't know who he was quoting), _and_ with M&E's argument in GI that communism would involve the dissolution of the division of labor. If necessary labor (in Hannah Arendt's sense of _merely_ necessary labor in contrast to work or action) is to be reduced to the absolute minimum, and men/women are to be fishers in the morning and critics in the afternoon, that necessary labor needs to be rationalized and divided into such minute parts that it becomes a trivial part (in terms of time & skill) of human activity, which then can become fully human (work & action in contrast to labor). One of Engels's footnotes in Capital I is also a useful gloss: "The English language has the advantage of possessing different words for the two aspects of labour here considered. The labour which creates Use-Value, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour, that which creates Value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work." The ultimate goal of socialism is to eliminate Labor and replace it with Work -- electricity and taylorism are means to that end. In this light, Lenin's perspective on taylorism might also evoke that passage in _Capital_ where Marx compares the ancient and modern perspective on labor-saving technology, quoting an ancient poet on how the water-wheel could reduce the labor of the servant and contrasting it with the capitalist use of machinery to extend the working day. Carrol
