Introduction

Americanism and Fordism – and Chaplinism

Let’s examine Lenin’s views (in a London music hall) as reported by Gorky. ‘Vladimir Ilyich laughed easily and infectiously on watching the clowns and vaudeville acts, but he was only mildly interested in the rest. He watched with special interest as workers from British Columbia felled trees. The small stage represented a lumber yard, and in front, two hefty fellows within a minute chopped down a tree of about one meter circumference.

‘Well, of course, this is only for the audience. They can’t really work that fast,’ said Ilyich. ‘But, it’s obvious that they really do work with axes there, too, making worthless chips out of the bulk of the tree. Here you have your cultured Englishmen!’

He started talking about the anarchy of production under capitalism and ended by expressing regret that nobody had yet thought of writing a book on the subject. I didn’t quite follow this line of reasoning but he switched to an interesting discussion on ‘eccentrism’ as a form of theatre art. ‘There is a certain satirical and sceptical attitude to the conventional, an urge to turn it inside out, to distort it slightly in order to show the illogic of the usual. Intricate but interesting’ [. . .] Let’s analyse this extremely important excerpt.

1. Lenin is interested in eccentrics.

2. Lenin is watching the demonstration of real work.

3. He evaluates this first class work as senseless and wasteful: he talks about the anarchy of production and the necessity to write about it.

4. Lenin talks about eccentrism in art, a sceptical attitude toward the conventional, and the illogic of the usual.

The transition which Gorky missed is that the wastefulness, and so to speak, the absurdity of the capitalist world could be shown through methods of eccentric art with its sceptical attitude toward the conventional.

Viktor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle (1940)1

Pick Up Your Pig Iron and Walk

In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, the American industrial theorist and engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor recounts how he managed to make an ox-like Dutch immigrant called Schmidt carry a seemingly impossible quantity of pig iron in his job at the Bethlehem Steelworks. Taylor has already outlined how the precise measurement and recording of a worker’s most minute physical actions by specially trained overseers can be collated, and calculated so as to plan the most efficient series of movements for the purposes of production. When the worker is trained to use these techniques in their work, the result is massive increases in productivity. The problem is that ‘it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this kind of work to understand the principles of this science.’² So, Schmidt is teased by Taylor into increasing his workload by asking him repeatedly if he is a ‘high-priced man’, and dangling the possibility of a pay rise in front of him, if only he will follow very precisely the dictates of the supervisor:

Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will do exactly as this man tells you to-morrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what’s more, no back talk. Do you understand that? When this man tells you to walk, you walk. When he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don’t talk back at him. Now you come on to work here to-morrow morning and I’ll know before night whether you are really a high-priced man or not.3

Barely able to speak English, as Taylor carefully records (‘Vell – did I got $1.85 for loading dot pig iron on dot car to-morrow?’), Schmidt is nonetheless able to understand eventually what a pay rise means, largely via the harshness of the instruction and the focus on the money at the end of it, as:

with a man of the mentally sluggish type of Schmidt it is appropriate and not unkind, since it is effective in fixing his attention on the high wages which he wants and away from what, if called to his attention, he probably would consider impossibly hard work.⁴

‘This goes on,’ writes Bernard Doray in his study of ‘Taylorism’, ‘until Schmidt “sees”, and deluded by his desire to be well-thought-of, agrees to accept a fool’s bargain which will allow him to make $1.85 by handling 48 tons of pig iron a day rather than making $1.15 by handling thirty tons.’ Doray continues: ‘There is something masterly about this. Were it not for the context, we might be dealing with a stage hypnotist or a circus act.’⁵ This book is about people who imagined turning industrial labour into a circus act.

In the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary wave of 1917–19, there was perhaps a rather unexpected rise in enthusiasm among the revolutionary leaders for the seemingly oppressive and anti-worker methods being developed in the industrial north of the United States of America, particularly by Taylor and the ‘time and motion’ theorists that came after him, and their apparent application in the immense, integrated car factories of Henry Ford. This reached its greatest extent in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where a former metalworker, trade union leader and poet in the Proletkult (‘proletarian culture’) movement named Alexei Gastev founded a Central Institute of Labour to train workers in the new socialist state in accordance with Taylorist principles, which had now been taken to the level of being applied even outside of the factory and in everyday life. At the same time, there was a massive rise in the distribution of American cinema and other forms of mass culture, particularly the ‘slapstick’ comedy of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, along with great adventurers and stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. As a rule, these are treated as rather separate phenomena. At moments they clash, entirely by accident. In their work on the creation of the Soviet ‘planned economy’, E.H. Carr and R.W. Davies notice a critique of the new focus on the scientific management of labour, technocracy and assembly line production, summed up by Gastev in Pravda as accepting that:

the time has gone beyond recall when one could speak of freedom of the worker in regard to the machine [. . .] Manoeuvres and motions at the bench, the concentration of attention, the movement of the hands, the position of the body, these elementary elements of behaviour become the cornerstone.6

At a conference of the Komsomol in 1928, we find a sharp reaction to this among young Communists. ‘Chaplin, speaking for the Komsomol, fiercely attacked Gastev’s “anti-Marxist” platform (which makes) the worker an adjunct of the machine, not a creator of socialist production. Gastev in his understanding of the new worker is indistinguishable from Ford.’7

Here, Charles Chaplin’s otherwise unknown namesake in the Young Communist League has prefigured the critique of Fordism and Taylorism that the man himself would make in his 1936 film Modern Times. But what if scientific management and slapstick comedy were not actually antipodes at all, but instead were closely linked and complementary phenomena?

The Other American Dream

The setting for this book is an unplanned cultural exchange that took place between three poles. Two of these consisted of the Trans-European route that stretched from Weimar Germany to the USSR; a route common both to the Third International and the international Constructivist movement – which, in a nod to the Comintern itself, described itself in the early 1920s as the Constructivist International⁸ – moving between Moscow and Berlin, with various stopping points in between – but with a difficult and ambiguous relationship with Paris, and a practically non-existent one with London and New York.⁹ The two countries which are the poles of this movement, the Weimar Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, were both the ambiguous product of socialist revolutions, largely administered by self-proclaimed Marxists, both using some form of mixed economy throughout the 1920s in the absence of the World Revolution which was seemingly in the offing between 1917 and 1923. The third entity is ‘America’. This should not necessarily denote the actual political space of the United States of America, but a collection of ideas, technologies, mass produced art objects and archetypes. The United States is the home of the Ku Klux Klan, of the Pinkerton strike-breaking gangs, of the Red Scare and the mechanisation of labour; but ‘America’ is also the home of Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, awe-inspiring industrial monuments, mass abundance – and the mechanisation of labour.10

Soviet Poster for Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, 1934

‘America’ was the place where humankind had begun to shape nature to its will, ‘the Motherland of Industry’, a land of social peace and astounding technological dynamism, and occasionally our protagonists had to remind themselves that it was also a political adversary. Yet the fact that very few of the figures who will populate this book actually visited the United States, and that even those who did formulated their ideas about ‘America’ beforehand, meant that for them America was a dream, not a place. It was, in fact, the locus for a gigantic act of collective dreaming on the part of both political activists and politicised aesthetes, as well as a focal point for the populations they attempted to mobilise (or whose mobilisations they were forced to respond to). ‘America’ was, then, for the political aesthetics of the Moscow–Berlin axis in the 1920s, a series of dream-images – fantasy projections conveyed in architectural projects, in poetry, in advertising and propaganda posters, attempts to will an Americanised communism into being via imagination and reverie.11

To a large degree, previous analyses of these dream-images, such as Richard Stites’ Revolutionary Dreams,¹² Susan Buck-Morss’ Dreamworld and Catastrophe and Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain, have focused on the element of industrial dreaming that is common throughout the period. For all its virtues, this can lead to neglect of the popular, collective and directly political elements in this dreaming. Accordingly, it is necessary to discuss Chaplin and Ford and Lenin, to connect Edison and Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Rathenau – to discover a more conflicted, comic, collective form of American dreaming. The deep involvement in ‘American’ popular culture on the part of the Constructivist avant-garde does not fit with the occasionally still prevalent notion of an elitist high modernism aloof from popular forms and mass culture. Yet, what took place in the 1920s was a reciprocal process, a tense and ambiguous dialogue. In this, the Constructivist obsession with American mass media could not be further from the more recent celebration of popular culture as consisting in little ‘resistances’ against sundry ‘totalising’ forces, whether state power, class analysis, economic planning or modernism itself. This was one of the central claims of postmodernism in the 1980s, emerging at a couple of removes from the notion of popular subcultures as a form of ‘resistance through rituals’, developed by the likes of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall at the Birmingham School of Sociology. By contrast, the 1920s largely didn’t see an uncritical celebration of popular culture, or a patronising elevation of an undialectically formulated ‘popular taste’ above the efforts of intellectual avant-gardes. Rather, there were a series of critical engagements, where certain elements in a given object or form would be borrowed, some emphasised, while others were rejected as reactionary or not politically useful.13

These dream-images are not purely celebratory, and nor are they purely Fordist and Platonic – they are thoroughly historicised, and they undergo a series of morphings and warpings depending on place and politics. The same photograph – and it is usually a photograph of ‘America’, rather than a first-hand experience – becomes a multitude of different images. The parameters of the present work are, as we have noted, summed up in a series of proper names: Ford plus Chaplin plus Lenin. This work aims to give all three equal emphasis, displaying and analysing in its fullness the interplay between industrial organisation, comic entertainment and socialist politics in the aesthetics of the avant-garde. This is in order to treat the political aesthetics of the time in immanent terms, welding each element together, rather than imposing a Cold War (or post-Cold War triumphalist) grid on them. If at one point histories of the avant-garde were criticised for emphasising aesthetic affinities and alliances rather than political affinities, it seems that now the reverse move must be made – to emphasise the concrete centrality of the political context.¹⁴

Bertolt Brecht claimed in 1932 that ‘photography is the possibility of a reproduction that masks the context. The Marxist (Fritz) Sternberg [. . .] explains that from the (carefully taken) photograph of a Ford factory no opinion about this factory can be deduced.’¹⁵ This is no doubt true of the industrial propaganda and Neue Sachlichkeit industrial photography he was referring to, and while a single photograph of a factory can tell us very little about the direct relations of production inside, it can communicate an enormous amount of political– aesthetic information when placed in historical and political context, and when arranged in contrast with other images – a montage principle favoured by Brecht himself. So, here, we put into juxtaposition particular images and objects from the Berlin–Moscow–‘America’ axis as political and aesthetic dream-images. The various dreams are not, however, considered to be of equal political value. The dreamers range from industrialists to aesthetes, from proletarians to bureaucrats, from architects to propaganda designers, and the oneiric energies they convey with each image shift each time that it is morphed and adapted.

It is important to tie this closely to the processes of revolution, reaction and reform that link the revolutionary period of 1917–23 with the consolidation of Stalinism and Nazism in 1933–36. We must not patronise Constructivism as a kind of aestheticism of politics and machinery that only affixes itself to politics through an aesthete’s fetishisation.16 A generation which battled through civil war, revolution and the privations of what can now be seen as an abortive attempt at creating socialism, does not deserve to be treated as naive and unworldly. In addition, while I will be careful not to present an avant-garde that corresponds with my own political predilections, and have no intention to ignore domination when I see it, the present work takes particular issue with Boris Groys’ view of the Constructivist avant-garde as a proto-Stalinist experiment in Hegelian totalisation; this is buttressed by a reading of the particularly extravagant writings of Kasimir Malevich and, more seldom, of a couple of writers from LEF, in The Total Art of Stalinism.¹⁷ It is a smart work of satire and an insightful attempt to inhabit the Stalinist mindset, but it is a book which should never have been taken seriously as a work of avant-garde scholarship, so flagrant is it in its extrapolation from minimal sources into the description of a large and multivalent political– aesthetic movement.

The ‘dream-images’ discussed in this book consist mostly of mass-produced forms like cinema and poster design, which are discussed both through direct analysis and via the contemporary observations of both Soviet contemporaries and the international visitors that Trotsky contemptuously described as the ‘flâneurs’ of the Soviet Union.18 The accounts of travellers between America, the Weimar Republic and the USSR are sporadically used, both as a means of delving directly into the atmosphere of the period, and to comment on the sometimes remarkable, often disastrous geographical reach of the Comintern. These accounts often stress a choice between competing ‘new worlds’; the reformed capitalism of post-war Central Europe, the Bolshevik experiment, and nascent Fordism in the USA. Ernst Toller’s posing of this wager is typical:

both [the USSR and USA are] young and with unimpaired belief in their own strength. But the America of today, controlled by a small section of callous financiers, was the Land of the Future. Russia is the Land of the Future.¹⁹

Life Slap-Up

Let’s begin with an ‘obvious’ example, one where ‘America’ appears to be attacked by the moralising Soviets. Dziga Vertov’s 1926 documentary film One Sixth of the World is a panoramic picture of the industries and peoples of the Soviet Union, composed as a publicity film for Gostorg, the USSR’s foreign trade corporation, and it begins with an image of that which the Soviet Union is not. A black American jazz band²⁰ plays furiously, with the players losing themselves in their gestures and emphases, while affluent whites shimmy and foxtrot with similar abandon. This, Vertov’s intertitles unambiguously declare, is the decadence of a dying class, the dance as the system goes down; and it is immediately contrasted with images of share-cropping, and of black labourers in Europe’s African colonies, linking the bourgeoisie’s enjoyment of jazz to their exploitation of Africans and African-Americans.

The ‘Chocolate Kiddies’, One Sixth of the World

‘Colonialism’, One Sixth of the World

Yet there is something more complex at work than a mere juxtaposition of bourgeois leisure and exploited labour. Elizaveta Svilova’s fast-cut editing picks up the pace of the dancers, cuts precisely to their rhythmic movements, creating a pace and pulse which continues through the rest of the film. The American pop-cultural form may seem like the opposite of the gigantic revolutionary enclave, but this is deceptive. Instead, the avant-gardist Vertov takes what he requires from it – the metropolitan dynamism of its rhythm and pace – while refusing to ignore the networks of exploitation of which it is a part. Vertov and Svilova’s sect, the ‘Kinoks’, were at the edge of the Soviet avant-garde that was most critical of American importations, with Vertov’s frequent blasts against the fiction film, whether it be ‘Dostoevsky or Nat Pinkerton’. However, even the famous slogan of the Kinoks, usually translated as ‘life caught unawares’, has resonances which suggest comedy as much as revolutionary high-seriousness. Ben Brewster translates the phrase as ‘life slap-up’.21 Post-revolutionary life slipping on a banana skin, a pratfall, as a vertiginous and hard-to-negotiate new space – the world turned upside down.

Life slap-up can not only be seen in the unexpected corners of the urban environment captured against their will by Vertov and the Kinoks’ Kino-Eye, but it can also be found in imaginary, prospective space. After Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, the first major Constructivist environments are sets for theatrical comedies. Liubov Popova’s set for Meyerhold’s 1922 production The Magnanimous Cuckold or Alexander Vesnin’s for Alexander Tairov’s The Man Who Was Thursday are the exemplars; their open-frame, industrial scaffolds and moving parts create a comic environment where the ground can be literally moved from under your feet, inspiring as a means of dealing with a new kind of physical movement. It is these alignments – the political critique of, and dynamic sympathy for, American mass culture; the conception of contemporary urban life as necessarily comic, as ‘slapstick’, containing plenty of ‘new stupidities’ as well as revolutionary new forms; the creation of a new comic space, via both architectural and directly physical means – that will run through this book. Americanism here is Chaplinism.

American Montage and Comic Geography

One of the most complete statements of Chaplinism is in Lev Kuleshov’s Art of the Cinema, published 1929 in Moscow. He describes the birth of the Soviet filmic avant-garde as the result of a critical laboratory analysis of the American film and its component parts.

We began to analyse not only separate shots of a film but studied its entire construction. We took two films, for example – an American one and a comparable Russian one – and we saw that the difference between them was enormous. It became apparent that the Russian film was constructed of several very long shots, taken from one given position. The American film, on the other hand, at that time consisted of a large number of short shots taken from various positions, since it can be explained that for the price of admission the American viewer pays at the theatre, above all else, he wants to receive the maximum degree of impressions, the maximum degree of entertainment, and the maximum degree of action in return. [Italics mine] 22

This sense of maximised sensation, of an overwhelming on-rush of impressions, is the direct effect of the American film, one which can then be adapted for the purposes of Soviet left art. Kuleshov continues:

thus, thanks to the commercial determinant of the American film, thanks to the very tempo of American life, much more accelerated than the tempo of Russian or European life, thanks to all this, what struck the eye watching the American films is that they consist of a whole series of very short shots, of a whole series of short sequences, joined in some determined order of priority – as opposed to the Russian film, which at that time consisted of a few very long scenes, very monotonously following each other. Working further, on comparing an American film to a Russian one in order to test its effect on the viewer, we became convinced that the fundamental source of the film’s impact on the viewer – a source present only in cinema – was not simply a showing of the content of given shots but the organisation of these shots among themselves, their combination and construction, that is, the inter-relationship of shots, the replacement of one shot by another. This is the fundamental means of the impact of film on the viewer.23

This was internalised by the Soviet directors to the point where, when he writes in 1929 that ‘short montage was then called American montage; long montage – Russian’, he knows that at the time of writing the order has been reversed.

All that is well done in Soviet cinema is done by this method [. . .] But while the Americans were the originators of it, now we, having developed and used that which was conceived by the Americans, are carrying the work to a new frontier [. . .] what I am going to deal with now will, I think, appear simply amusing to everyone. It is so naïve, so primitive, and so obvious. But at that time (and that time was rather recently) it seemed to be such ‘incredible futurism’ that a bitter battle was waged against it.²⁴

But most fascinating for our purposes, Kuleshov describes, as his exemplar of the possibilities inherent in this Soviet– American montage, the use of tricks to create an imaginary, comic geography.

The primary property of montage, which is now perfectly clear to everyone, but which had to be defended rabidly and with inordinate energy then, consists in the concept that montage creates the possibility of parallel and simultaneous actions: that is, that action can simultaneously be taking place in America, Europe and Russia: that three, four or five story lines can be edited in parallel, and in the film they would be gathered together.²⁵

So, for example,

Khoklova is walking along the Petrov street near the ‘Mostorg’ store. Obolensky is walking along the embankment of the Moskva river at a distance of about two miles away. They see each other, smile, and begin to walk toward one another. Their meeting is filmed at the Boulevard Prechistensk. This boulevard is in an entirely different section of the city.26

This much is simple enough, and would only strike a Muscovite as strange. But then,

they clasp hands, with Gogol’s monument as a background, and look – at the White House! At this point, we cut in a segment from an American film – The White House in Washington. In the next shot they are once again on the Boulevard Prechistensk. Deciding to go further, they leave and climb up the enormous staircase of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. We film them, edit the film, and the result is that they are seen walking up the steps of the White House.²⁷

In this sense, ‘America’ is suddenly enormously close – but the dream is parodic.

However, the ‘Americanism’ of Kuleshov’s theory does not end there – it continues into an incorporation of Taylorist Time and Motion study into acting. First, it is for the sake of clarity, perhaps in order to restore some sort of visible order via the human body, in a context of fast-cut near-chaos. ‘If a person is to move on all these fundamental axes of his bodily parts, and their combinations of axial movements, they can easily be apprehended on the screen, and a person working can take his work into account at all times and will know what he is about.’28 These new movements must be incorporated to the point where they are no longer even thought about:

the whole secret to driving a car lies in its being driven automatically: that is, one doesn’t consciously think about when it is necessary to shift gears, as all of this done mechanically and instinctively [. . .] the qualified film actor, whose entire technique is calculated to give a comfortable reading of his screen performance, is the result of exactly this same sort of training.²⁹

It is enormously telling that Kuleshov uses these Fordist metaphors in describing the movement of the human body in the new Constructivist comic film. Comedy and scientific management, defamiliarisation and discipline are inextricable.

Chaplin versus Ford

Ironies abound in the transmission of American forms, and those Kuleshov points out are not the least of them. It is interesting, although perhaps not surprising, that dissections of the 1920s cult of Americanism concentrate on that element which is most amenable to the ‘totalitarianism’ thesis. That is, the notion current during the Cold War and given an enthusiastic reinvigoration by Boris Groys in the last couple of decades: that most if not all elements in early Bolshevik culture pointed towards an inevitable expansion of domination and total control over every element of life. Certainly, there are many elements which support this thesis. Taylorism and Fordism – notwithstanding the arguments for their usefulness to the cause of working-class advancement in the corpus of Lenin or Gramsci, either as labour-saving methods or as a destroyer of the remnants of craft traditions and peasant mentalities30 – are clearly practices which lead to the precise managerial control of the worker; and as Doray points out, this over-determines their ‘scientific’ nature. Writing in the 1980s, he stresses that:

scientists regard (Taylorism) as a perversion of the scientific approach because it bears the scars of the social violence that characterised the society that gave birth to it. Aspects of reification which the scientist would regard as normal in the experimental context become unbearably offensive when they are blatant indications of a certain style of social life.³¹

This would seem to be an incontrovertible point. Scholars of Taylorism and Fordism such as Mary Nolan put the interest in it on the part of the post-revolutionary European left as a sign of deficient political imagination: ‘the shared productivism and technological determinism of the Second and Third Internationals led to a shared inability to imagine any forms of production other than highly rationalised ones.’³² In the process, they participated in enforcing forms of work that workers found depressing, tedious and physically painful, and accepted only when the trade-off was higher wages and consumer goods – and sometimes, not even then.

The deployment by Constructivists of these ideas and techniques in areas that are not directly productive, such as film and cinema, as described above by Kuleshov, but most famously in the biomechanics of Vsevolod Meyerhold, would seem to involve extending that domination to the sphere of entertainment and contemplation. This in turn apparently links up with Leninist, vanguardist politics to the point where a technocratic theory of total control becomes a Bolshevik gesamtkunstwerk; where culture, like scientific management is imposed upon the worker, with the avant-garde (in the sense of the various collectives of ‘Left’ artists, whether those associated with the Bauhaus and the Ring in Germany or the circles around LEF and October in the Soviet Union) playing at being cultural Leninists, fighting over which of them gets to dominate the benighted (but ever more valorised) proletariat. This argument has some truth, but conspicuous is the tendentious removal or downplaying from the historical record of a major component of (principally Soviet) Americanism as it was formulated by the various (anti-)artistic avant-gardes. The texts of Americanism are often based on a litany of proper names: Lenin, Taylor, Ford, Edison – and more often than not, Griffith, Fairbanks, Pickford, Keaton, and most of all, with references in texts of the periods rivalling perhaps only Taylor in their frequency – Chaplin.33 Americanism was a modernity not only of technological advancement, advanced tempos and Taylorist regimentation of the worker’s body, but also of an unprecedented engagement on the part of those allegedly representing ‘high art’ – experimental, ‘leftist’ film-makers, designers, theoreticians – with ‘popular’ forms of art, whether it was the imported ‘vulgar’ comic cinema, the circus, the burlesque or jazz. In all of these, the body’s mechanisation is the generator of pleasure, not merely a conduit to the increased production of pig iron.

However, there is very little in English on the obsession with comedy on the part of the Modernists of the 1920s. Nor is there any serious discussion of why Chaplin was such an obsession for the avant-garde – for everyone from Adorno to Brecht, from Meyerhold to Tretiakov – or of what his example, and attempts to emulate, adapt or mutate it did to art and aesthetics in the period;34 not to mention the other American comedians such as Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, who can also be found as objects for intense dialectical argument at that time. This is absent from even the most intelligent, least Cold War-tainted works which touch on the conjunction of Socialism and Americanism. Richard Stites’ Revolutionary Dreams has a wealth of hugely important, fascinating information on Americanism as Taylorism, as Fordism, or as earnest science fiction, but absolutely nothing on Americanism as comedy, either in the sense of popular consumption or avant-garde fixation and adaptation; and Susan Buck-Morss’ Dreamworld and Catastrophe, even while discussing the motif of the Circus in the mass art of the 1930s as a mass ornament common to Busby Berkeley and the Stalinist musicals of Alexandrov, fails to notice the far more disruptive, far more emancipatory (in the sense of being both individualistic and egalitarian) uses of exactly the same form in the early 1920s. Chaplin only features as a minor walk-on part in the biography of Sergei Eisenstein.³⁵

This makes it easier to dismiss or patronise the conjunction of Socialism and Americanism as a merely positivist, technocratic phenomenon, driven by Russian industrial immaturity or a cultural fixation on hygiene and the aestheticisation of technology and, by association, politics. A particularly fine example of this argument can be found in the criticism of Peter Wollen, specifically in the collection Raiding the Icebox. The most extensive treatment is in the essay ‘Modern Times: Cinema/Americanism/The Robot’. Wollen is undoubtedly erudite on the subject, referencing Alexei Gastev’s Proletkult-Taylorist experiments and some Soviet experiments in slapstick, so giving at least some attention to the other Americanism. However, it is merely as a cursory mention in amongst a parade of quickly dismissed Fordists, describing and then dismissing as bounded by a limited technocratic notion of rationality first ‘Gramsci, the Vienna Circle and the Stalinist productivists’,36 and later Benjamin and Brecht. The argument runs that Americanism leads to Taylorism, which leads to automation, all of which leads to a fixation on what is not only a superseded form of capitalism, but one which merely extended domination. So Chaplin features only as the anti-Fordist of 1936’s Modern Times, but certainly not as what we will argue he was to the 1920s’ avant-garde: a mechanised exemplar of the new forms and new spaces enabled by the new American technologies, and one who promised a liberation that was decidedly machinic in form. Where Wollen does discuss the avant-garde’s actual engagement with popular forms, for him it somehow still remains technocratic positivism. So, for instance, on jazz, in an essay titled ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art’, he writes:

Constructivism was closely linked to the Americanism that swept Europe in the twenties, the so-called jazz age. Jazz was perceived as both stereotypically primitive and ultra-modern, machine-like [. . .] as Le Corbusier put it, with shameless projection [. . .] ‘the popularity of tap-dancers shows that the old rhythmic instinct of the virgin African forest has learned the lesson of the machine and that in America the rigour of exactitude is a pleasure’ – and the jazz orchestra in Harlem ‘is the equivalent of a beautiful turbine’ playing a music that ‘echoes the pounding of machines in factories’(!) [. . .] in this racist vision, black America was taken to be a fascinating synthesis of the ‘primitive’, and the ‘futuristic’, the body and the machine.37

Popular form is inevitably exoticised, patronised and mythologised when the Constructivists attempt to engage with it. Perhaps it would be better left alone. But irrespective of the patronising hauteur and hint of colonial fantasy in Le Corbusier’s argument, he appears to have had a far more insightful take on black music of the twentieth century as actually described by its practitioners, than does Wollen. Not only are there the innumerable records that describe the jazz, rock and roll or funk band as a machine (unsurprisingly, most often a train), or phenomena such as the video to Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Nowhere to Run’, where the clang of the beat is synchronised with the machines in the Ford factory in Detroit, there is also James Brown’s definitive coinage, which essentially reduces Corbusier’s florid prose to two words: ‘Sex Machine’.³⁸ The central problem of the dialectical tension between Chaplinism and Fordism, or Slapstick and Biomechanics, is exactly the one Wollen haughtily considers racist. That is: what happens to ‘popular’ forms when they become mechanised? What in the advanced mass-produced culture of the present can possibly presage the culture of the communist future, if anything? Can anything be learned from these phenomena, or are those ideas and forms so scarred by the brutalities of the society that produced them that they could not possibly be useful for a better society? Specifically in this case, does any of it promise a world in which the machine can be reconciled with a pleasure in excitement, movement, and participation, or is such a reconciliation impossible?

The Americanist Surplus

In strictly political and historical terms, the conception of ‘America’ in the 1910s–1920s, and especially in terms of Taylorism and Fordism, was predicated on a fiction, a kind of productive misunderstanding, and a susceptibility to industrial public relations. Few serious analyses of Ford and the period he named concur with the idea held by some in the avant-garde that Fordism was part of the same emancipatory movement as socialism and Chaplinism. On one level, this was a matter of simple invention; John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out that, with respect to Ford’s self-lauding writings, ‘immodesty should not be hinted, as [Ford’s books] were written to the last paragraph by Samuel Crowther.’39 The awe his factories elicited in its many flâneurs had more to do with their own inexperience of industrial production rather than the advancement of the technology itself.

Authors visited Highland Park, where the moving assembly line was born [. . .] and thereafter the vast plant on the River Rouge, and their only problem was to find adjectives to fit the marvels. For many, the wonder was unquestionably heightened by the fact that these were the first manufacturing plants they had seen.⁴⁰

But most important, there was a fundamental misunderstanding about Ford, and the new mass-production economy he embodied, and its workers. The ‘Five-Dollar Day’, the high wages which were the ‘carrot’ to the assembly line’s ‘stick’, and the affordable car were highly praised on the European left in the 1920s. Few noticed how these were achieved and maintained, and how this oppression actually increased in parallel with the intensity of interest in Fordism:

[the price of the Model T] was brought down by taking it out of the men. [The supervisors] were masters of the speed-up. In 1914, the Highland Park plant was no doubt a pleasant and remunerative place to work. By the mid-twenties the River Rouge, by even the most friendly evidence, was a machine-age nightmare.41

To a socialist historian such as Mike Davis, in his working-class history Prisoners of the American Dream, this misunderstanding had dramatic consequences, largely predicated on the failure to notice how the development of the new productive technologies were combined by a relentless assault on labour:

the new mass production technologies (advanced) side-by-side with the new forms of corporate management and work supervision. The totality of this transformation of the labour process – first ‘Taylorism’, then ‘Fordism’ – conferred vastly expanded powers of domination through its systematic decomposition of skills and serialisation of the workforce.⁴²

Yet at the same time, it was achieving genuinely remarkable technical feats. He notes that: ‘The productivity revolution represented by the new labour processes resulted in an almost 50 per cent increase in industrial production between 1918 and 1928, while the factory workforce actually declined by 6 per cent.’⁴³ It is this ability to produce on an untold scale that attracted those who were considering how to organise a post-capitalist economy.

It was at the same time the very thing which caused, eventually, militant opposition and resistance. Davis notes that the upsurge in union activity in the 1930s, which fed into the Committee for Industrial Organization’s (CIO) split from the craft and business unionism of the American Federation of Labour (AFL), was predicated on the new technologies of production and control themselves.

When the industrial uprising finally began in 1933, it was not primarily concerned with wages or even working hours [. . .] in a majority of cases the fundamental grievance was the petty despotism of the workplace incarnated in the capricious power of the foremen and the inhuman pressures of mechanical production lines.44

Fordism meant not just monotony, machinic repetition and the elimination of thought in labour, but also a physically violent regime of enforcement.

It must be recalled that in 1933 the typical American factory was a miniature feudal state where streamlined technologies were combined with a naked brutality that was the envy of fascist labour ministers. In Ford’s immense citadels at Dearborn and River Rouge, for example, security chief Harry Bennett’s ‘servicemen’ openly terrorised and beat assembly workers for such transgressions of plant rules as talking to each other on the line.⁴⁵

Yet at the same time, the new unionism of the Committee for Industrial Organization was industrial in nature – unlike the American Federation of Labour, it did not appeal to craft tradition or to the dangers of deskilling, and it was subject early on to marked Communist influence. It accepted mass production in principle, but not its application as a tyrannical system of discipline.

However, when it comes to the travels of this Americanism abroad, certain things are missed in this account. Davis writes that:

the first crusade to mobilise Americanism as a countervailing world ideology was sustained, after the signing of the Dawes Plan, through the brief but extraordinary Weimar boom of 1925–9, which prefigured many of the ideological and political relationships of the 1950s. As American loans put German workers back to work, there was a naïve and euphoric celebration of Henry Ford’s Brave New World across the Atlantic. However, with the collapse of the American economy in 1929 – largely as a result of the all-too-successful anti-labour drive of 1919–23, which halved the AFL’s membership and froze mass incomes – the temporary honeymoon of German social democracy and the export sector of German industry also broke down. In the wake of Americanism’s failed promise, brutal homegrown idylls replaced the flirtation with jazz and the Model T.46

This is true enough, but it misses the sheer breadth of the enthusiasm for this Brave New World, which encompassed the Second and Third Internationals and even more libertarian left circles, and actually predates the Weimar boom. Soviet Taylorism begins as early as 1919, with Lenin and Gastev’s first attempts to ‘adapt’ it; and in Germany, it coincides, in the same year, with the moment of Expressionist, Spartacist fervour. The Berlin architect Bruno Taut’s magazine Frühlicht imagined that the crystal cities on mountains serving a new working-class community might be built with an adaptation of the Taylor system. The architect and trade unionist Martin Wagner even envisaged Taylorism being implemented by the workers’ councils that emerged in the aftermath of the November 1918 revolution.47 Why did this occur? Why was a system of evident capitalist domination so popular among Marxists and a Marxian avant-garde?

Here, we’ll come up with two explanations for this apparent paradox. First, the political and aesthetic avant-garde were dedicated to taking whatever was the most advanced technical form – what was producing the most advanced machines, what was achieving feats of mass production – and assessing it and finding out how it worked; and this was then melded with an appreciation of American popular culture, all of it linked in some manner to the new industrial methods, whether skyscrapers or slapstick. Second, it most often involved a form of anticipatory thinking. In short, this can be summed up by the rhetorical question – in the light of the proletarian revolution, what can we, the dictatorship of the proletariat, do with artefact or method ‘x’ of advanced capitalism? As a result, their works created a socialist surplus, through the dreaming that the Americanist form of domination unintentionally created. The intention was to take America and make it better, make it more equal, make it socialist. This was not a naive or unworldly project, but a serious and revolutionary one.

It is in this sense that we should read what two of the more famous sympathetic analyses of Americanism from the Marxist left – both from observers who were also sympathetic to modernist aesthetics – have to say about where ‘America’ does not go far enough. Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Americanism and Fordism’, for instance, makes a link that is central to this thesis, between Trotskyism, Americanism and the transformation of everyday life. But he then goes on to write something that embodies the practically limitless tensions, the potentials and threats, in any socialist adaptation of these American models. Gramsci argues that the new mass-production American capitalism represented ‘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 of man’. He can clearly tell how outrageous this might sound to an active fighter against the ‘rationalisation’ imposed by business – for instance at the Fiat plant where Gramsci was embroiled in a near- insurrection in 1920, which took place in the most complete example of American industrial architecture in Europe.48 So he continues,

the expression ‘consciousness of purpose’ might appear humorous to say the least to anyone who recalls Taylor’s phrase about the ‘trained gorilla’. Taylor is in fact expressing with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society – developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanised attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect.⁴⁹

What he is saying here is strikingly counter-intuitive: what is of value in the new productive forms is precisely the obliteration of craft and thought in work, in favour of literally machine-like labour. Why does he argue this?

These things, in reality, are not original or novel: they represent simply the most recent phase of a long process which began with industrialism itself. This phase is more intense than preceding phases, and manifests itself in more brutal forms, but it is a phase which will itself be superseded by the creation of a psycho-physical nexus of a new type, both different from its predecessor and undeniably superior. A forced selection will undoubtedly take place; a part of the old working class will be pitilessly eliminated from the world of labour, and perhaps from the world tout court.50

The ‘new kind of man’, which generations of Cold War or post-89 triumphalist commentators have posited as the malevolent innovation of Bolshevism, is for Gramsci an American, not a Soviet product; he even welcomes its ‘elimination’ from the proletariat of its older elements, the ballast left to it by history. And he agrees that this man is better, because he is more precise, because the archaisms of craft have been eliminated, because he is capable of an ‘equilibrium’ and organisation that gives him a clarity that will be the element of a new society, when he begins to utilise it in his own interest. This is an extreme position, and accordingly, it couches itself as anti-humanist, even to the point of subscribing to the Fordist regulation of sexual and personal life. Like Martin Wagner, he imagines this somehow combining with workers’ control.

This equilibrium can only be something purely external and mechanical, but it can become internalised if it is proposed by the worker himself and not imposed from the outside, if it is proposed by a new form of society, with appropriate and original methods.⁵¹

Gramsci does not believe that capitalism will create this by itself, but imagines it becoming useful to a proletarian regime. One suspects that if the example of the autoworkers revolting against scientific management was produced, he would see in industrial unionism something which was as founded in mass production and seriality as the tyranny they were revolting against.

However, Americanism and its European satellites are incapable of using their ‘rationalism’ to genuinely rational ends. The major statement of this position is still Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament, where in 1927 he notes that the new, fast, precise process masks something more fundamental.

The ratio of the capitalist economic system is not reason itself but a murky reason. Once past a certain point, it abandons the truth in which it participates. It does not encompass man. The operation of the production process is not regulated according to man’s need, and man does not serve as the foundation for the structure of the socioeconomic organisation.52

This emphatically does not mean calling for a return, for an abolition of the ratio, of mass production, rationalisation, technology and the landscapes it creates. Rather, the incredible things that the system has brought carelessly, accidentally into being, the dreams it has both inadvertently created as a utopian surplus and those it has specifically manufactured, must be used, taken hold of, made conscious.

The ‘basis of man’: this does not mean that capitalist thinking should cultivate man as a historically produced form such that it ought to allow him to go unchallenged as a personality and should satisfy the demands made by his nature. The adherents of this position reproach capitalism’s rationalism for raping man, and yearn for the return of a community that would be capable of preserving this allegedly human element much better than capitalism. Leaving aside the stultifying effect of such regressive stances, they fail to grasp capitalism’s core defect: it rationalises not too much but rather too little. The thinking promoted by capitalism resists culminating in that reason which arises from the basis of man.53

The Constructivists’ America was exactly such an attempt; to take the Ratio and make it genuinely rational, to consciously use, manipulate, adapt and when necessary oppose the forms that it has brought into being. Here we will see them at the cinema, wondering how to create a Communist Chaplin; we watch them trying to Bolshevise the architecture of industrial America; and finally we find them immolating themselves in the contradictions of trying to serve a Soviet state which somehow managed to replicate in even more brutal form the American combination of archaism and futurism. The notion of ‘surplus’ is key to this partly because it denotes the unintended products of artefacts and techniques intended merely to make profit as quickly and efficiently as possible; it indicates that technology and industry created a supplementary dreamlife, an inadvertent proliferation of fantasy that was enriching, developing technologies beyond utilitarian horizons. It also indicates that the avant-garde itself was surplus to politics, no matter how much it threw itself into everyday life and agitation. They could not change this by themselves, even in those cases where they were fully conscious of and committed to the redress of these contradictions. They constantly negotiated an unstable, fissile dialectic of opposition and identification. Both of these poles would become far less productive when separated, losing their electric charge. They looked at the world around them and willingly subjected themselves to – enjoyed, even – the bad new things, whether art forms, technologies or industrial techniques. They submerged themselves in early forms of pop culture and aimed to turn it to communist ends; they gazed at, then forensically investigated, a landscape of industrial domination, pondering what of it could be useful after they had destroyed it. They did so not because they thought that the society capitalism had created in the United States of America represented the peak of human achievement – they did so because they knew full well that they could better it.

Making America Strange

This book attempts to highlight these arguments, questions and contradictions, giving fair due to the too often expunged elements of Socialist Americanism. We will frequently return to the problem, formulated most persistently by Viktor Shklovsky, of defamiliarisation, ideas which would underpin Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Montage of Attractions’,54 and later (via Sergei Tretiakov) come to provide the foundation of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. Defamiliarisation – or making strange, ostranenie – is commonly thought to be a solely avant-gardist technique, one in which the spectator has their (usually political) certainties thrown into confusion and dispute. However, the earliest formulations of this idea by Shklovsky – who had no particular political intent for them – derive precisely from attempts to theorise popular forms: film, comedy, circus. However, the principal difference between the two versions of making-strange lies in their particular attitude towards what is on the stage, or in the ring. The spectacles of the Epic Theatre intended to use shock and disjunction in order to make the audience think in ways to which they were not accustomed. The circus, meanwhile, uses shocks, tricks, disjunctions (in size, in species, etc.) for the purposes of – indeed – a total spectacle, one by which the spectator is merely to be awed, no matter how much that awe might be expressed through close attention to detail and veracity.

The risks of the use of the cinema and the circus by the avant-garde are alternately the cult of the body and the spectacularisation of the mass, in which the audience’s role is always delimited by the stage or the screen. In this sense, the processes of making-strange and making-popular could perhaps have been said to serve an anti-socialist purpose, but the diversity and complexity of the strategies employed in the period make any glib dismissal seem driven principally by the smugness of postmodernist, post-historical distance. This book is as disjointed as the montages it charts, going from a discussion of Chaplin as seen through the eyes of the avant-garde, to a critical examination of American comedy of the late 1910s and early 1920s, to readings of the various attempts at syntheses by (mostly Soviet55) theoreticians, directors, film-makers, designers and architects. Our first encounter will be with the figure who always lurks, with his hat, cane and bandy legs, behind all these discussions: Charlie Chaplin.