In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

24 ARRAYS
efficiently the world of business and industry uses labor, the greater the
chance that the working class and the lower middle class will be able to
participate in the material blessings of capitalist production.
Rather than being divided (or at least ambivalent), opinions on such
forms of "rationalized labor" are almost unanimously positive across the
entire political and ideological spectrum. Socialists and industrialists
mostly concur in their rhetorical efforts to minimize the alienating effects
of the assembly line, such as the reduction of each worker to one and
only one function within the production process, or the utilization of the
worker's body for one and only one movement: "When the worker looks
upstream and downstream from his point on the shore of the assembly
line, he sees himself participate, through his meaningful limited role, in
a colossal collective work" (Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, 17). As a politicized
author with a proud revolutionary past and as an overly enthusiastic
traveler in the Soviet Union, Ernst Toller is at first surprised to see similar
methods pushed to their extreme by the self-declared Communist society.
In an "experimental factory" in Moscow, the workers' bodies are literally
attached to the machines-with the obvious goal of completely
eliminating the mind as a potential obstacle to the standardization of
their movements: "A machine teaches the correct position for hammering.
The worker's arm is attached to a mechanical hammer which grasps
his hand. The arm reproduces the hammer's movements for half an hour,
until it becomes completely readapted to this mechanical rhythm"
(Toller, 122). Though it is Toller's initial impulse to protest such "mechanization
of man," such "stifling of all human creativity," he soon gratefully
accepts an interpretation from the director of the experimental
factory [see Engineers] according to which extreme rationalization of
labor will be the necessary condition for higher productivity and, above
all, for increased leisure time in the socialist future. [see Present = Past
(Eternity)] "Through our research we hope to ensure that a particular
job, which formerly took a worker eight hours to accomplish, will in the
future require only two or three" (123).
Although similar opinions have been canonized in the Soviet Union
since Lenin first formulated the project of integrating the assembly line
into the emerging socialist system (Die wilden Zwanziger, 162-163),
some observers remain skeptical. After less than a month in Moscowand
despite his desperate desire to be impressed by the new society (a
desire which, if nothing else, he shares with Ernst Toller)-Walter Ben-