Meyerhold & Mayakovsky - Biomechanics & the Communist Utopia

Meyerhold's production of The Bathhouse by Mayakovsky, March 16 1930

"The methods of Taylorism may be applied to the work of the actor in the same way as they are to any other form of work with the aim of maximum productivity."

Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, 1922

Contents

1. Experimentation under the NEP2. Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug 3. Taylor's Scientific Management4. Lenin's Appropriation of Taylorism5. Meyerhold's MachinesNotes

Vsevolod Meyerhold

1. Experimentation under the NEPVsevold Meyerhold, Russia’s number one enemy of realism and possibly the most experimental and innovative theatre director to have graced this planet, had absolutely no compunction about working for the Bolsheviks, reporting for duty within three weeks of their seizing power.

In 1917 immediately after the October Revolution, the responsibility for the theatre was assigned to the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, headed by Lunacharsky. In late 1917, he invited 120 leading artists to a conference devoted to reorganizing the arts. There was a cautious reply by the artistic community and only five showed up. These included Meyerhold, Alexander Blok (the symbolist poet, dramatist, and critic) and Vladimir Mayakovsky, leader of the Russian Futurists. Lunacharsky was forced to deal with those very members of the avant-garde that were against the views that he and his government held towards conventional realism. [1]

From 1908 to 1917, Meyerhold had led a somewhat double life, working as the director of the traditional, state-funded Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg whilst simultaneously ‘moonlighting’ “as director and teacher on a range of small-scale, innovative ventures, in conditions which could not be more different from the Aleksandrinsky or Marinsky Theatres: cabaret venues, tiny stages, rooms in his own flat and in others’ houses.” [2]Meyerhold seems to have thrived on playing these contradictory roles: officially a servant of Empire, undercover an experimental pioneer.

However, Meyerhold’s decision to throw his lot in with the Bolsheviks does not appear to have been in any way duplicitous, or to have been mere career opportunism. He saw the October Revolution as part of a progressive change that would end aristocratic privilege and bring about a more egalitarian society. He demonstrated his commitment to the Bolshevik cause in a few ways: by taking the considerable risk of joining the Bolshevik Party in 1918, when the Party’s future was by no means certain; by working within the Bolshevik administration in Petrograd, on the board of The Theatre Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment; and by staging the revolution’s first official theatre production, Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, in November 1918, for the first anniversary of the revolution. His loyalties were also clear enough for him to be imprisoned by the Whites during the Civil War. [3]

After the Civil War, as the Bolshevik Party struggled to impose its dictatorial will on the ravaged country and its brutalized, half-starved populace, capitalism was allowed to creep back in the form of the NEP (New Economic Policy). From 1921 to 1927, the NEP went hand in hand with unprecedented artistic experimentation:

In 1921 the Civil War was drawing to a close and it was obvious that if the Bolsheviks were to retain their power they had to begin creating the new society which they had promised. But the state was on the verge of bankruptcy and financial collapse and Lenin sought to encourage greater initiative through his New Economic Policy (NEP), under which many earlier decrees were rescinded and limited private enterprise was reinstated. Many theatres now reverted to private ownership and Western plays found their way onto the boards. All theatres enjoyed considerable freedom of repertory and production style from 1921 until Stalin began his process of assuming complete control of all theatres in 1927. It was in this atmosphere that Meyerhold blossomed. [4]

Meyerhold’s relationship with the Bolsheviks during this period was anything but cosy, however. The Party criticised his productions for their “lack of realistic clarity and political relevance,” and Meyerhold may have actually been fired from the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Theatre No. 1, in 1921, as a result of criticisms from Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya. [5] For his part, Meyerhold opposed the NEP (as did many hard left communists, who wanted socialism to be implemented immediately and saw the policy as a retreat and a betrayal) and several of his productions subjected ‘NEPmen’ to scathing satire (Lake Lyul (1923) and The Warrant (1925) . This would suggest that official condemnation of his productions was more concerned with their political content than their aesthetic qualities. Being contrary and combative by nature, Meyerhold initially thrived on the antagonism, but he was actually acting against his own interests, by attacking the very policy that enabled him to be so critical with such impunity.

But ironically the NEP created unforeseen problems for Meyerhold. He was fiercely

against the crassness and ethics of NEPmen, those businessmen who ran small businesses and flaunted their new wealth. Meyerhold made the habits and fashions of the NEPmen the target of a series of satirical productions such as Lake Lyul (1923) and The Warrant (1925) which lampooned a group of "internal émigrés" who still dream of the restoration of the monarchy. In his harsh criticism of the NEP, he alienated the government by not supporting their economic policy. He also unwittingly helped strengthen the position of the bureaucrats who were rapidly taking over the administration of the theatre as well as all other aspects of Russian commerce and life. Ultimately this proved to be a fatal mistake. By the early thirties these bureaucrats were to become his most dangerous enemies. [6]

The Bolshevik dictatorship from 1917 to 1927 was a ruthless regime that did not hesitate to imprison, torture, execute, starve and wage war against those who were perceived to be political enemies. But there was also much tolerance of criticism from famous intellectuals and artists who were either ‘on board’ or not allied to serious political rivals. Gorky was allowed to publicly criticize the regime and Lenin. Also, as the Party fought for its life and then tried to find its feet it was also tolerant of internal criticism (e.g. from Alexandra Kollontai) and, with more pressing matters to worry about, had no coherent policy with regard to the arts. Lenin had conservative tastes in art, whereas Trotsky was open to futuristic experimentation. So the artists that were ‘with’ the Party were allowed to experiment in relative peace until the NEP was replaced by Stalin’s democidal five year plans and the murderous orthodoxy of social realism.

The artists who produced the most experimental works under the aegis of the NEP belonged to a small, interconnected circle of committed visionaries which encompassed the following productions: Popova and Stepanova’s Constructivism, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Mayakovsky’s Futurism and Eisenstein’s montage. This period reached a peak with Meyerhold’s production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector in 1926 and Eisenstein’s October (1927). After 1927, as Stalin tightened his grip on the economy and the arts, experimentation began its retreat, making its defiant last stand in Meyerhold’s production of Mayakovsky’s scathing, ominous The Bedbug (1929).

Popova's Constructivist Set for Meyerhold's production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922, from here

Stepanova's Constructivist Set for Meyerhold's production of The Death of Tarelkin, 1922, from here

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2. Mayakovsky’s The BedbugA lively summary of The Bedbug & Mayakovsky's biography

Shostakovich, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky & Rodchenko rehearsing Klop (The Bedbug), 1929

Written in 1928, the year Stalin buried the NEP and introduced the first of his five-year plans, The Bedbug is a bold and deliciously ambiguous satire of Soviet society.

Tambov, 1929

The first four scenes appear to toe the party line, quite unambiguously. Ivan Prisypkin, the main character, is set up as an immediately recognizable villain: a class traitor who is using his proletarian roots to marry into the bourgeoisie (his fiancée’s mother, Rosalie Pavlovna Renaissance seems to have agreed to the match in return for the union card and proletarian status that the marriage will bring). He callously abandons his working class girlfriend, who is pregnant with his child. He pretentiously changes his name to Pierre Skripkin (Pierre Violin). He claims to be above ‘petty bourgeois’ consumerism while taking his future mother-in-law out on a shopping spree. He thinks his deeds in the Civil War now entitle him to bourgeois domesticity:

PRISYPKIN: What did I fight for? I fought for the good life, and now I’ve got it right here in my hands – a wife, a home, and real etiquette. I’ll do my duty, if need be, but it’s only we who held the bridgehead who have a right to rest by the river! So there! Mebbe I can raise the standards of the whole proletariat by looking after my own comforts. So there! [7]

Prisypkin is an example of the vulgar bourgeoisie or ‘NEPmen’ that were seen to have burgeoned under the NEP and that were now being singled out for attack by Stalin’s centrally planned regime.

The actor Igor Ilinsky as Prisypkin, from here

Mayakovsky wrote The Bedbug specifically for Meyerhold, who had been requesting a new play from him for years. During that period, Mayakovsky had closely associated himself with Komsomolskaya Pravda, a government-funded communist newspaper. There had been an increase of bourgeois tastes among the youth and Komsomolskaya Pravda had begun a campaign against these resurgences of the past. This "Philistinism" was blatantly attacked by the newspaper's writers and other journalists. [8]

All is not well in the U.S.S.R circa 1929. The herring sold at the Soviet State Co-op are shorter by a ‘whole tail’s length’ than those sold by private pedlars. The ideals of the revolution have been set aside by a return to the dictates and pursuit of personal gain. In the mouth of Oleg Bayan, house owner and main companion of Prisypkin, revolutionary slogans have become empty boasts to be trotted out at any available opportunity…

He is the victorious class and he sweeps away everything in his path like lava. (Scene 1)

Not only do I understand, but by virtue of that power of imagination which, according to Plekhanov, is granted to Marxists, I can already see as through a prism, so to speak, the triumph of your class as symbolized by your sublime, ravishing, elegant, and class-

conscious wedding! (Scene 1)

A man of such talents just doesn’t have elbow-room in Russia, what with capitalist encirclement and the building of socialism in one country. (Scene 2)

We have succeeded in reconciling, in coordinating the couple’s class and other contradictions. We who are armed with the Marxist vision cannot fail to see, as in a drop of water, so to speak, the future happiness of humanity – or as it is called in popular parlance: socialism… (Scene 3)

… there is a yawning gulf between Oleg Bayan’s words and the surrounding reality. The mechanic suggests that the country has fallen asleep beside the unfinished bridge to socialism. The workers are louse-infested and vodka-soaked. There are clearly those who have done well out of the revolution and those who have lost. There is bitterness, jealousy and rancour. At the wedding, the couple’s class contradictions are far from reconciled and coordinated. The drunken culmination of Scene Three descends into surreal violence (What do you mean by sticking a fish into my wife’s breast? This is a bosom, not a flower-bed, and that’s a fish, not a chrysanthemum!) before everyone goes up in flames.

Fifty Years Later

Except not everyone did go up in flames. Prisypkin was frozen in the water the fire brigade pumped into the house. He is discovered fifty years later and, after an international vote, is resurrected.

Prisypkin, still

wearing his 1920s tuxedo, being unfrozen. From here

The second half of the play, in which Prisypkin operates as an infectious agent in the socially engineered socialist utopia of 1979, is where the twists and ambiguities really kick in.

In 1979 the Soviet Union is now part of a World Federation. Lice, dirty words, alcoholism, sycophancy, obsequiousness, business, sentimental music, dancing and love are all things of the past. People have become machinic cogs in a fully-rationalised, dehumanized collective.

The authorities soon realize that it was a mistake to bring Prisypkin back to life. He is the carrier that triggers an epidemic: after contact with him dogs begin begging, and because he has to be fed a ‘toxic’ and ‘repulsive’ mixture called beer workers at the laboratory are debilitated and start craving the substance. His ‘crooning’ and guitar playing also bring on acute attacks of ‘an ancient disease called love’:

REPORTER: … This was a state in which a person’s sexual energy, instead of being

rationally distributed over the whole of his life, was compressed into a single week and concentrated in one hectic process. This made him commit the most absurd and impossible acts… GIRL [covers her face with her hands]: I’d better not look. I can feel these ‘love’ microbes infecting the air! REPORTER: She’s finished, too. The epidemic is taking on oceanic proportions.

When compared to the re-engineered proletarians of utopia, Prisypkin can no longer be classified as human. He and the bedbug that was frozen with him are put in a zoo and displayed in a special cage that filters his foul breath and language. The director explains to visitors from the Union of Centenarians:

Owing to certain mimetic characteristics, such as its callouses and clothing, our respected professor mistakenly classified the resurrected mammal not only as a representative of homo sapiens, but even as a member of the highest group of the species – the working class… Of course, I immediately established from my knowledge of comparative bestiology and by means of an interrogation that I was dealing with an anthropoid simulator and that this was the most remarkable of parasites… There are two of them: the famous bedbugus normalis and… er… bourgeoisius vulgaris. They are different in size, but identical in essence. Both of them have their habitat in the musty mattresses of time… but of the two, bourgeoisius vulgaris is the more frightening. With his monstrous mimetic powers he lured his victims by posing as a twittering versifier or as a drooling bird…

Prisypkin ignores the director’s taxonomy and assumes the aged audience are just like himself:

Citizens! Brothers! My own people! Darlings! How did you get here? So many of you! When were you unfrozen? Why am I alone in the cage? Darlings, friends, come and join me! Why am I suffering? Citizens! ...

The director ventilates the platform and dismisses Prisypkin’s outburst as a hallucination brought on by exhaustion. The cage is covered.

Disperse quietly, citizens, until tomorrow. Music. Let’s have a march!

Bourgeois Parasite to Bourgeois Hero?

Given that The Bedbug was officially a satire of NEP-era philistinism, what did Mayakovsky achieve by reawakening Prisypkin in 1979?

Meyerhold himself stated that 'The main purpose is to satirize the view of today.... Mayakovsky forces us to examine not the transformation of the world, but that same sickness that we see in our own day.' [9] This could well have been said to keep the censors happy. But it justifies the (Soviet era) reading which suggests that the 1979 utopia is merely there “to highlight the vices of the present by the alienating device of transposing them...to a purely rational world where empty sentimentality is simply not comprehended.” Prisypkin is thrust into a perfect world to make his deficiencies and vulgarity all the clearer.

An alternative reading is that Mayakovsky created a double-edged satire that unambiguously laid into NEP-era philistinism and simultaneously provided cover for a visionary warning of the Stalinist collective-engineering that lay ahead. Without changing his behaviour in the slightest, just by virtue of the social contexts he inhabits, Prisypkin is transformed from an easy-to-despise villain to a hero that audiences can and should sympathise with.

Obviously, as The Bedbug has been transmitted and adapted through time, it has gathered new significance and meanings, particularly thanks to hindsight. While granting that the play is imbued with meanings from different contexts, times and audiences, speculating as to Meyerhold and Mayakovsky’s original intent is far from futile.

Meyerhold was of the school that saw the theatre as having a social function, as a tool for social criticism. The Bedbug was unique among Meyerhold's productions because he abandoned his usual dictatorial control to collaborate closely with Mayakovsky, who was his assistant director. Their production of the play would have been packed with messages targetted at a very specific

audience.

Patricia Blake notes: “… Mayakovsky’s first audiences were not ready to recognize his warning. Then, The Bedbug appeared to be dealing with periods in time which did not exist for the literal-minded… the nature of the Stalinist utopia was as yet beyond the imagination of all but prophets, madmen and poets.” [10]

If The Bedbug was indeed intended as a warning, and has not just come to be seen as a warning, then it was well camouflaged from both its target audience and the censors. If it was a satire of the collectivist utopia, then it amounted to a complete turnaround, as both Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had both invested in the futuristic-Taylorist fantasies that Lenin and Trotsky indulged in.

To criticise, question or satirise the optimistic technological-utopia promised by Lenin’s appropriation of Taylorism was simply not on. Zamyatin brilliantly envisioned a Taylorist dystopia in We (1921) and, as a reward for his efforts and genius, his book was banned until 1988. The freedom granted to Meyerhold in the early twenties has to be put down to his allegiance to the Party’s experimental-conceptual program.

Lenin was very much influenced by F.W. Taylor’s theory of Scientific Management and Ivan Pavlov’s investigations into the reflexes. Meyerhold did not just read and think about Taylor and Pavlov: he applied the obligatory Leninist question to them – what is to be done? – and developed an entirely new style of acting and performance based on their thinking – biomechanics. In contrast to Zamyatin, Meyerhold was, as Slavoj Žižek would have it, 'ultraorthodox': his biomechanics overidentifies with "the core of official ideology" to the point of being subversive.

The arguments put forward for resurrecting Prisypkin have strong Taylorist overtones: “The Institute considers that the life of every worker must be utilized until the last second… For the sake of research into the labour habits of the proletariat, for the sake of comparative studies in human life and manners, we demand resurrection!” If The Bedbug was intended as a satire of Taylorism, then, seeing as it was directed by Meyerhold “in his most controversial style,” [11] then Meyerhold was in the process of using biomechanics to mock the dream of a streamlined biomechanical utopia.

Biomechanics in The Magnanimous Cuckold 1922

As for Mayakovsky, there is evidence that he strongly identified with the Prisypkin of the second part of the play. Mayakovsky started writing the play in the autumn of 1928, just 18 months before his suicide in April 1930. As a result of failures in his personal life and malicious criticism from RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in his professional life, Mayakovsky was increasingly isolated, disillusioned and depressed, very much like Prisypkin at the end of The Bedbug:

He is lost, frightened, utterly deprived of love: in short he is a caricature of his author. To sharpen the resemblance on stage, Mayakovsky took pains to teach the actor who played Prisypkin his own mannerisms. [12]

Oddly, if The Bedbug was intended as a satire of the communist utopia, then there is a potentially optimistic message for those with of a humanistic bent: if even such an ignoble, louse-ridden specimen as Prisypkin is capable of infecting the dehumanized collective with love, dance and other joys of life then the message is that human nature is ultimately irrepressible, no matter what lengths totalitarian visionaries go to turn people into regimented drones.

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3. Taylor's Scientific Management

“Personal ambition always has been and will remain a more powerful incentive to exertion than a desire for the general welfare.” F.W. Taylor

Self-evident facts

The central tenet of F. W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) was that if industrial production were organised rationally and scientifically there would be no conflict of interests between the workforce and management.

The worst type of ordinary management involves:

a) the management ‘exploiting’ the workforce by trying to get as much labour and time as possible for as little money as possible.

b) the workforce ‘soldiering’ or loafing: doing the minimum of work for the maximum amount of money.

According to Taylor, this setup is irrational and contrary to the interests of both parties involved in the production. Common sense says that it is in their mutual interestsfor the other party to prosper as much as possible:

It would seem to be so self-evident that maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with maximum prosperity for the employé, ought to be the two leading objects of management, that even to state this fact should be unnecessary. And yet there is no question that, throughout the industrial world, a large part of the organization of employers, as well as employés, is for war rather than for peace, and that perhaps the majority on either side do not believe that it is possible so to arrange their mutual relations that their interests become identical. (C1 PSM)

Taylor’s argument is that:

1. Improvements in production result in cheaper goods 2. Cheaper goods result in increased demand 3. Increased demand requires greater productivity and thus more employment

To back this up, he provides a solid example (which is still used by bewildered pro-capitalists today)

Take the case of shoes, for instance. The introduction of machinery for doing every element of the work which was formerly done by hand has resulted in making shoes at a fraction of their former labor cost, and in selling them so cheap that now almost every man, woman, and child in the working-classes buys one or two pairs of shoes per year, and wears shoes all the time, whereas formerly each workman bought perhaps one pair of shoes every five years, and went barefoot most of the time, wearing shoes only as a luxury or as a matter of the sternest necessity. In spite of the enormously increased output of shoes per workman, which has come with shoe machinery, the demand for shoes has so increased that there are relatively more men working in the shoe industry now than ever before. (C1 PSM)

So why have these ‘self-evident facts’ escaped both management and the workforce? Taylor’s puts it down to double-sided ignorance:

The workers are “ignorant of the history of their own trade” and labour under the fallacious belief “that it is against their best interests for each man to turn out each day as much work as possible.”

Whereas...

The management are ignorant “as to the proper time in which work of various kinds should be done,” and consequently loafing becomes the rule.

Inefficiency

Even the finest type of ordinary management is woefully inefficient when compared to the potentials of scientific management.

The finest type of ordinary management is the management of ‘initiative and incentive’: “workers give their best initiative and in return receive some special incentive from their employers.” (Ch2 PSM). While more enlightened in terms of both parties cooperating through mutual interest, this kind of management still relies on rule-of-thumb methods. According to Taylor, rule-of-thumb methods are:

• traditional and numerous

• handed down by word of mouth or learned by personal observation

• not systematic, uniform or codified

• the possession of the tradesman

Rule-of-thumb methods keep the responsibility for production in the hands of the workers and inhibits managerial interference:

This mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge may be said to be the principal asset or possession of every tradesman. Now, in the best of the ordinary types of management, the managers recognize frankly the fact that the 500 or 1000 workmen, included in the twenty to thirty trades, who are under them, possess this mass of traditional knowledge, a large part of which is not in the possession of the management. The management, of course, includes foremen and superintendents, who themselves have been in most cases first-class workers at their trades. And yet these foremen and superintendents know, better than any one else, that their own

knowledge and personal skill falls far short of the combined knowledge and dexterity of all the workmen under them. The most experienced managers therefore frankly place before their workmen the problem of doing the work in the best and most economical way. (C2 PSM)

As long as the workmen have the initiative, production will be inefficient because, as another key principle of scientific management states, workmen are incapable of understanding the science behind their trade and thus cannot decide what is the most economical way of doing the job.

Scientific Management

In Scientific Management, the initiative is taken from the workforce and given to the management. Workers are free to comment and make suggestions, of course, it goes without saying, but the whole process is initiated and managed by the employer.

Taylor applied scientific management to such delights as the handling of pig iron, bricklaying, the inspection of ball bearings for bicycles and metal cutting, but claimed that it could be applied to ‘absolutely all classes of work’. He boasted huge increases in productivity, much lower costs and better paid, happier workers.

1. Developing the science

The first stage (and the most relevant to Meyerhold) is to analyse the work and determine the most efficient and economical way of doing it.

The analysis involves breaking the work down into tasks and planning all stages in terms of efficiency. For example:

An analysis of the expedients used by Mr. Gilbreth in reducing the motions of his bricklayers from eighteen to five shows that this improvement has been made in three different ways:

First. He has entirely dispensed with certain movements which the bricklayers in the past believed were necessary; but which a careful study and trial on his part have shown to be useless.

Second. He has introduced simple apparatus, such as his adjustable scaffold and his packets for holding the bricks, by means of which, with a very small amount of cooperation from a cheap laborer, he entirely eliminates a lot of tiresome and time-consuming motions which are necessary for the bricklayer who lacks the scaffold and the packet.

Third. He teaches his bricklayers to make simple motions with both hands at the same time, where before they completed a motion with the right hand and followed it later with one from the left hand.

For example, Mr. Gilbreth teaches his bricklayer to pick up a brick in the left hand at the same instant that he takes a trowelful of mortar with the right hand. This work with two hands at the same time is, of course, made possible by substituting a deep mortar box for the old mortar board (on which the mortar spread out so thin that a step or two had to be taken to reach it) and then placing the mortar box and the brick pile close together, and at the proper height on his new scaffold. (Ch2 PSM)

This application of scientific management to bricklaying increased the average number of bricks laid per hour from 120 to 350.

The analysis also attempts to calculate mathematical laws which will establish, for example optimal ratio of work to rest periods.

For example, when pig iron is being handled (each pig weighing 92 pounds), a first-class workman can only be under load 43 per cent. of the day. He must be entirely free from load during 57 per cent. of the day. And as the load becomes lighter, the percentage of the day under which the man can remain under load increases. So that, if the workman is handling a half-pig, weighing 46 pounds, he can then be under load 58 per cent. of the day, and only has to rest during 42 per cent. As the weight grows lighter the man can remain under load during a larger and larger percentage of the day, until finally a load is reached which he can carry in his hands all day long without being tired out. (Ch2 PSM)

Here scientific management increased the average load of pig iron per man per day from 12 ½ tons to 47 tons.

Scientific Management established what a good day’s work was by experimenting with good workers and paying them double wages while the experiments were conducted.

Another component of the analysis involves testing and identifying the best tools and machinery (and machinery settings) for the specific work at hand. This may range from the fairly straightforward designation of the best size and material for a shovel to be used for handling pig iron, to the extremely complex, such as calculating 11 variables that have an effect on the efficiency of metal cutting. It took Taylor’s team 26 years to come up with formulae like this:

P = 45,000D14/15F3/4

V = 90____T1/8

V = 11.9________________________________F0.665((48 / 3) * D )0.2373 + (2.4 / (18 + 24D))

2. Selecting and Training the Worker

Taylor expressed an obvious truth - that different people are suited to different types of work - in a

very brutal way:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word "percentage" has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful. (Ch2 PSM)

Scientific Management requires the employer to assess an employee or potential employee’s suitability for the job very carefully and to be utterly ruthless with those not suited. For example, scientific management identified that the best people for inspecting ball bearings are those with a low ‘personal coefficient’, meaning ‘quick powers of perception followed by quick responsive action’. Taylor makes no bones about it:

For the ultimate good of the girls as well as the company, however, it became necessary to exclude all girls who lacked a low "personal coefficient." And unfortunately this involved laying off many of the most intelligent, hardest working, and most trustworthy girls merely because they did not possess the quality of quick perception followed by quick action. (Ch2 PSM)

For Taylor, this necessary ruthlessness proves that leaving the initiative with the workers is inefficient. Workers would be unlikely to admit they were unsuited for the job and leave voluntarily.

What likelihood would there be, then, under the old type of management, of these men properly selecting themselves for pig-iron handling? Would they be likely to get rid of seven men out of eight from their own gang and retain only the eighth man?(Ch2 PSM)

But we need not worry about those who are laid off:

With most readers great sympathy will be aroused because seven out of eight of these pig-iron handlers were thrown out of a job. This sympathy is entirely wasted, because almost all of them were immediately given other jobs with the Bethlehem Steel Company. And indeed it should be understood that the removal of these men from pig-iron handling, for which they were unfit, was really a kindness to themselves, because it was the first step toward finding them work for which they were peculiarly fitted, and at which, after receiving proper training, they could permanently and legitimately earn higher wages.(Ch2 PSM)

A crucial part of this selection and training process is to offer incentives for the increased production, which will only be paid when the quota is met. Taylor recommends 60% pay increases. So the pig iron handlers were paid $1.85 a day instead of $1.15. Taylor warns against paying more than 60% because the workers become ‘dissipated’.

3. Supervision and Cooperation

Scientific Management attempts to treat every worker on an individual basis. The main reason for this is that scientific study has shown that workers are far less efficient when they work in gangs or groups:

A careful analysis had demonstrated the fact that when workmen are herded together in gangs, each man in the gang becomes far less efficient than when his personal ambition is stimulated; that when men work in gangs, their individual efficiency falls almost invariably down to or below the level of the worst man in the gang; and that they are all pulled down instead of being elevated by being herded together. (Ch2 PSM)

Taylor took a very dim view of trade unions, as they lower productivity by empowering the ‘herd’ and ultimately operate against the interests of the workers, the management and the consumers who “ultimately pay both the wages of the workmen and the profits of the employers.”

Individual treatment for each worker entails an massive increase in management personnel. Each individual’s work is planned in advance, supervised and timed as it is done, then assessed once it is finished, and different managers are involved in different stages of the supervision. The more complex and skilled the work, the more complex and skilled the supervision needs to be.

Under functional management, the old-fashioned single foreman is superseded by eight different men, each one of whom has his own special duties, and these men, acting as the agents for the planning department are the expert teachers, who are at all times in the shop, helping and directing the workmen.

One of these teachers (called the inspector) sees to it that he understands the drawings and instructions for doing the work. He teaches him how to do work of the right quality; how to make it fine and exact where it should be fine, and rough and quick where accuracy is not required, the one being just as important for success as the other. The second teacher (the gang boss) shows him how to set up the job in his machine, and teaches him to make all of his personal motions in the quickest and best way. The third (the speed boss) sees that the machine is run at the best speed and that the proper tool is used in the particular way which will enable the machine to finish its product in the shortest possible time. In addition to the assistance given by these teachers, the workman receives orders and help from four other men; from the "repair boss" as to the adjustment, cleanliness, and general care of his machine, belting, etc.; from the "time clerk," as to everything relating to his pay and to proper written reports and returns; from the "route clerk," as to the order in which he does his work and as to the movement of the work from one part of the shop to another; and, in case a workman gets into any trouble with any of his various bosses, the "disciplinarian" interviews him.(Ch2 PSM)

The management structure for a workplace run on Taylorist principles is an upside down pyramid. Taylor denies this structure is top heavy because it is not too heavy: the huge increase in productivity more than pays for the predominance of men with stopwatches and clipboards.

Taylor’s account of his successes in implementing Scientific Management paints a very rosy picture. The workers are happy because they earn more while working less hours, and they are continually helped by a supportive, hard-working management has taken full responsibility for production.

These men constituted the finest body of picked laborers that the writer has ever seen together, and they looked upon the men who were over them, their bosses and their teachers, as their very best friends; not as nigger drivers, forcing them to work extra hard for ordinary wages, but as friends who were teaching them and helping them to earn much higher wages than they had ever earned before. It would have been absolutely impossible for any one to have stirred up strife between these men and their employers. And this presents a very simple though effective illustration of what is meant by the words "prosperity for the employé, coupled with prosperity for the employer…(Ch2 PSM)

Taylorism in the office, from here

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4. Lenin's Appropriation of Taylorism

March 13, 1914

Lenin set his stall out with regard to Taylorism as early as 1914, in The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine

The text expresses a section of code at the core of the Marxist-communist genome: the assertion that capitalism exploits the proletariat, through necessity, because capitalism is exploitation; exploitation is what defines capitalism.The moral subtext underpinning this is, of course, that the proletariat should not be exploited, because exploitation is unjust, wrong, evil...

However, capitalism does not just stand accused of exploiting the proletariat; it is also charged with exploiting the Taylor system as well:

Competition, which is keenest in a period of crisis like the present, calls for the invention of an increasing number of new devices to reduce the cost of production. But the domination of capital converts all these devices into instruments for the further exploitation of the workers.

The Taylor system is one of these devices.

After describing the Taylor system in action and the gains in productivity that result from it, Lenin expresses the usual outrage:

What an enormous gain in labour productivity! ... But the worker’s pay is not increased fourfold, but only half as much again, at the very most, and only for a short period at that. As soon as the workers get used to the new system their pay is cut to the former level. The capitalist obtains an enormous profit, but the workers toil four times as hard as before and wear down their nerves and muscles four times as fast as before.

If this were true, and Lenin provides no proof that it is, then it would be an example of an abuse of the Taylor system, the very kind of abuse that Taylor specifically warned against.

Taylor stressed that his scientific management had to be introduced with caution, one step at a time. He cites examples of a rival company that tried to rush his system in but did not put the required effort into supervision, and so which failed miserably.

Increasing the workers pay, permanently, is the key to continued productivity: without this the workers have no incentive to keep them from slipping back into their default loafing. If an employer cut pay back to the former level the workplace would no longer be run according to the principles of scientific management.

Lenin basically misrepresents the Taylor system, not even bothering to deal with Taylor’s attempts to foster cooperation as an alternative to the lose-lose situation of employee-employer conflict. The retort would no doubt be that capitalism is bound to return to its essential motor of exploitation, that capitalism cannot but exploit everything in its path, including the Taylor system itself.

Lenin’s next criticism is that “this rational and efficient distribution of labour is confined to each factory.”

The point here being that capitalism as a whole is inefficient. It is a mode of production that wastes time and energy, particularly on the dreaded ‘middle men’. Eradicating a worker’s superfluous movements only scratches the surface of the problem: the mode of production runs on superfluous movements and purchases.

The conclusion is that the proletariat needs to appropriate the Taylor system and put it in the service of a new organization of social production:

The Taylor system—without its initiators knowing or wishing it—is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers’ committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalizing all social labour. Large-scale production, machinery, railways, telephone—all provide thousands of

opportunities to cut by three-fourths the working time of the organised workers and make them four times better off than they are today.

Lenin’s mistake here was to assume that the Taylor system could be unplugged from one system (capitalism) and plugged into another (communism). The assumption ignored the fact that key components of the Taylor system were essentially capitalist and incompatible with true communism.

For example, Scientific Management:

1. appealed to personal ambition and offered incentive to individuals 2. mistrusted and dismantled the workers as a collective workforce 3. recognized that workers are not equal in terms of skill, intelligence and suitability for certain

types of work, divisions of labour 4. enshrined as a principle that, for the sake of efficiency and productivity, management has

to dictate, not the workers 5. submitted itself to market forces rather than advocating centralised implementation

The consequences of Lenin jettisoning some of these aspects of Scientific Management, while keeping others, had very far-reaching consequences, entailing that the Taylor system as applied in Soviet Russia was ultimately doomed to inefficiency and that his ‘communist’ society would retain many distinctly capitalist components.

The Soviet Union was founded on the eternally deferred promise of proletarian control of the means of production, but with the country run on Taylorist lines the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' never had a chance of emerging. Instead, above each worker and soldier was the vast (and frequently incompetent) Dictatorship of the Party Management.

Once appropriated and adapted to the demands of the Soviet Union's supposedly socialist economy, the Taylor system under the 'iron grip' of the Party's central control was impervious to the demands of evolving markets. This failure to adapt was a chief factor contributing to the Soviet Union's eventual collapse:

...beginning in the 1950s the Weber-Taylor paradigm began to unravel in the United States. Markets became saturated with uniform products designed to satisfy the “lowest common denominator.” To increase production further it was necessary to divide or segment the market into smaller parts. Instead of producing uniform products for the greatest number of undifferentiated consumers, the American economy increasingly produced different products for limited segments of the population which were distinguished by their unique consumer desires. Market segmentation allowed the American economy to continue growing while the Soviet economy never progressed beyond the level reached by the United States in the 1950s. The Soviet Union successfully mastered the techniques of production. But it failed to manage consumption in the way the infotainment telesector would come to do in the United States. While the American economy developed into postmodern consumer capitalism, the Soviet Union remained at the stage of industrial capitalism. [13]

March-April 1918

As Russia continued its inevitable slide into full blown civil war (a war which Lenin had described as inevitable and desirable in 1917 and now blamed on the Mensheviks, Kerensky, the imperialist forces… on anyone and everyone but the Bolshevik party), Lenin wrote The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government.

There are some pressing problems. The basic aim of the text is to inform the Party that it is time to put an end to the chaos and disorganisation that prevail throughout Russia, and to outline the means for doing this.

The easy part of the revolution has been achieved: the bourgeoisie has been ‘conquered’. The ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ has been successfully carried out. But the bourgeoisie has not been ‘utterly broken’: it could rise again. Now it is time to get to grips with the most difficult task: the ‘creative work’ of constructing a new society and constructing it in such a way that the bourgeoisie never rise again. It is time for the peasants and semi-proletariat to start behaving themselves, time for a bit of discipline and organisation.

Keep regular and honest accounts of money, manage economically, do not be lazy, do not steal, observe the strictest labour discipline... The decisive thing is the organisation of the strictest and country-wide accounting and control of production and distribution of goods. And yet, we have not yet introduced accounting and control in those enterprises and in those branches and fields of economy which we have taken away from the bourgeoisie; and without this there can be no thought of achieving the second and equally essential material condition for introducing socialism, namely, raising the productivity of labour on a national scale.

Unfortunately, it is the bourgeoisie who have all the expertise. The help of the bourgeoisie will be necessary to make the transition from capitalism to socialism, and since the bourgeoisie work on a voluntary basis the proletarian state will have to buy their knowledge:

Without the guidance of experts in the various fields of knowledge, technology and experience, the transition to socialism will be impossible, because socialism calls for a conscious mass advance to greater productivity of labour compared with capitalism, and on the basis achieved by capitalism…

... Now we have to resort to the old bourgeois method and to agree to pay a very high price for the “services” of the top bourgeois experts. All those who are familiar with the subject appreciate this, but not all ponder over the significance of this measure being

adopted by the proletarian state. Clearly, this measure is a compromise, a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of every proletarian power, which call for the reduction of all salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker, which urge that careerism be fought not merely in words, but in deeds.

Moreover, it is clear that this measure not only implies the cessation—in a certain field and to a certain degree—of the offensive against capital (for capital is not a sum of money, but a definite social relation); it is also a step backward on the part of our socialist Soviet state power, which from the very outset proclaimed and pursued the policy of reducing high salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker.

In this text it becomes apparent just how important the Taylor system is to Lenin's revolutionary project. Taylorism is the answer to the problem of labour discipline:

The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries. It could not be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in view of the persistence of the hangover from serfdom. The task that the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is—learn to work. The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon 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 and adapt it to our own ends. At the same time, in working to raise the productivity of labour, we must take into account the specific features of the transition period from capitalism to socialism, which, on the one hand, require that the foundations be laid of the socialist organization of competition, and, on the other hand, require the use of compulsion, so that the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat shall not be desecrated by the practice of a lily-livered proletarian government.

One of the key features of the communist adaptation of the Taylor system is made clear here: ‘the use of compulsion’. People will be compelled to work in The Soviet Republic.

Another crucial difference lies in The Organization of Competition. Rather than appeal to personal ambition, people will be influenced by ‘force of example’:

Model communes must and will serve as educators, teachers, helping to raise the backward communes. The press must serve as an instrument of socialist construction, give publicity to the successes achieved by the model communes in all their details, must study the causes of these successes, the methods of management these communes employ, and, on the other hand, must put on the “black list” those communes which persist in the “traditions of capitalism”, i.e., anarchy, laziness, disorder and profiteering. In capitalist society, statistics were entirely a matter for “government servants”, or for narrow specialists; we must carry statistics to the people and make them popular so that the working people themselves may gradually learn to understand and see how long and in what way it is necessary to work, how much time and in what way one may rest, so that the comparison of the business results of the various communes may become a matter of general interest and study, and that the most outstanding communes may be rewarded immediately (by reducing the working day, raising remuneration, placing a larger amount of cultural or aesthetic facilities or values at their disposal, etc.).

While explaining the need to buy the bourgeoisie’s organizational skills, Lenin makes it clear that the bourgeoisie actually thrives on anarchy and disorder:

... The chief organizing force of anarchically built capitalist society is the spontaneously

growing and expanding national and international market.

...All the habits and traditions of the bourgeoisie and of the petty bourgeoisie in particular, also oppose state control, and uphold the inviolability of “sacred private property”, of “sacred” private enterprise. It is now particularly clear to us how correct is the Marxist thesis that anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois trends, how irreconcilably opposed they are to socialism, proletarian dictatorship and communism.

So another crucial difference between capitalist and communist Taylorism is the role of the state. In capitalism, the workplace is a thoroughly planned and highly organised structure adrift in the sea of anarchic, self-organizing markets; in The Soviet Republic, the spontaneous national and international markets will be replaced by the central planning of a coercive dictatorship:

... It would be extremely stupid and absurdly utopian to assume that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without coercion and without dictatorship.

... large-scale machine industry—which is precisely the material source, the productive source, the foundation of socialism—calls for absolute and strict unity of will, which directs the joint labours of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. The technical, economic and historical necessity of this is obvious, and all those who have thought about socialism have always regarded it as one of the conditions of socialism. But how cans strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.

Given ideal class-consciousness and discipline on the part of those participating in the common work, this subordination would be something like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra. It may assume the sharp forms of a dictatorship if ideal discipline and class-consciousness are lacking. But be that as it may, unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry.

... We must learn to combine the “public meeting” democracy of the working people—turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood—with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader,

while at work.

Having, in 1914, criticized capitalist uses of the Taylor system for not increasing wages along with productivity, Lenin now reveals the sacrifice he expects workers to make in The Soviet Republic:

Our aim is to ensure that every toiler, having finished his eight hours’ “task” in productive labour, shall perform state duties without pay; the transition to this is particularly difficult, but this transition alone can guarantee the final consolidation of socialism.

The proletariat have become slaves of the state, labour-soldiers to be conscripted and exploited without recompense. In A Great Beginning, written in June 1919, Lenin expressed his delight that, during the civil war, some railway workers of the Moscow-Kazan railway ‘spontaneously’ resolved to work one hour extra every day and six hours on Saturday, for no pay. He took this to be a momentous event, the proletariat working in a revolutionary way, the beginning of the higher productivity that would replace capitalism:

Communism is the higher productivity of labour—compared with that existing under capitalism—of voluntary, class-conscious and united workers employing advanced techniques. Communist subbotniks are extraordinarily valuable as the actual beginning of communism; and this is a very rare thing, because we are in a stage when "only the first steps in the transition from capitalism to communism are being taken” (as our Party Programme quite rightly says).

Communism begins when the rank-and-file workers display an enthusiastic concern that is undaunted by arduous toil to increase the productivity of labour, husband every pood of grain, coal, iron and other products, which do not accrue to the workers personally or to their "close” kith and kin, but to their "distant” kith and kin, i.e., to society as a whole, to tens and hundreds of millions of people united first in one socialist state, and then in a union of Soviet republics.

Taylorism is frequently (and fairly) criticised for not appreciating the complexities of motivation, for reducing motivation to a purely monetary incentive. However, whilst lacking psychological subtlety,

Taylorism is impeccably realistic. Whereas motivation in the Soviet Union was thoroughly utopian and based on the belief that it is possible to rewire the human being to be more altruistic and generous with its labour. The selfishness and petty-mindedness demonstrated by Mayakovsky's Prisypkin was seen as the result of bourgeois-capitalist conditioning rather than intransigent features of human nature. Lenin thought it possible to remove these features through coercion and appeals to collective altruism.

The enslavement of Russia and the failure of the Soviet Union did not begin with Stalin: the roots of it already lay in Lenin’s coercive, massively centralized dictatorship. In fact, Stalin fully approved of Lenin’s synthesis of ‘American efficiency’ with ‘Russian revolutionary sweep’: Style at Work, from The Foundations of Leninism

[For an alternative take on Lenin's Taylorism, look at this excellent post at The Measures Taken: Art is a branch of Mathematics: Zamyatin and Soviet Socio-Fantasy]

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5. Meyerhold's Machines

The Director as Dictator

Meyerhold was a dictator in his theatre – quite literally. His revolutionary theatre overthrew the rule of the playwright:

After all, naming Meyerhold as the ‘author’ of the production constitutes a massive challenge to the hegemony of the playwright. It is a categorical statement in favour of the ‘theatre theatrical’ as opposed to the literary theatre and it marks in general terms the ascendancy of the director in the twentieth century. [14]

Meyerhold liberated theatre from its slavish reverence to the playwright’s text and instructions; adapting plays to his own visions, changing the structure, genre, settings and characters as he saw

fit.

To tighten his dictatorial grip, Meyerhold had unprecedented control over the movements of his actors, thanks to their rigorous training in his technique of biomechanics, which he developed through synthesizing Taylor’s time and motion studies with Pavlov’s ‘objective’ psychology.

Pavlov

Pavlov’s ‘objective psychology’ was in fact physiology, or the explanation of behaviour through strict reference to observable physiological phenomena. The phenomena which explain behaviour are the reflexes.

Pavlov defines the reflexes as “the inevitable responses of the organism to internal and external stimuli.” Organisms are machines that are constructed to respond to stimuli, and their survival depends on their responses. All behaviour, even seemingly active behaviour, such as pursuing food, is a response to stimuli inside the organism’s body or in the environment it inhabits.

An external or internal stimulus falls on some one or other nervous receptor and gives rise to a nervous impulse; this nervous impulse is transmitted along nerve fibres to the central nervous system, and here, on account of existing nervous connections, it gives rise to a fresh impulse which passes along outgoing nerve fibres to the active organ, where it excites a special activity of the cellular structures. Thus a stimulus appears to be connected of necessity with a definite response, as cause with effect. It seems obvious that the whole activity of the organism should conform to definite laws. If the animal were not in exact correspondence with its environment it would, sooner or later, cease to exist. To give a biological example: if, instead of being attracted to food, the animal were repelled by it, or if instead of running from fire the animal threw itself into the fire, then it would quickly perish. The animal must respond to changes in the environment in such a manner that its responsive activity is directed towards the preservation of its existence…. Being a definite circumscribed material system, it can only continue to exist so long as it is in continuous equilibrium with the forces external to it: so soon as this equilibrium is seriously disturbed the organism will cease to exist as the entity it was. Reflexes are the elemental units in the mechanism of perpetual equilibration. Conditioned Reflexes, Lecture I

Pavlov extended his concept of the reflexes to include ‘instincts’. For Pavlov, there is no essential difference between phenomena such as vomiting, which is considered a reflex, and the instinct for self preservation: both are responses to stimuli.

Reflexes can differ in their complexity and type. A reflex can be part of a complex chain of reflexes which constitute a coordinated response to a stimulus. A reflex can be excitatory or inhibitory, inborn or learned.

If behaviour can be explained as the result of complex chain reflexes, then physiology has done the job of psychology: it is a form of ‘objective psychology’.

Pavlov rejected psychology in favour of physiology because he did not consider psychology to be an exact science: it was not based on observable and verifiable data. He thought that a true psychology would become possible in the future, once physiology had laid ‘a solid foundation’,

but until then he would concentrate on what was possible.

Pavlov was extremely popular in Lenin’s Russia. There was obviously a certain amount of pride taken in the fact that the scientist at the cutting edge of research into the brain and nervous system was actually Russian. More importantly though, his theory also emphasises “the external, material aspects of life. These were the things which could be consciously manipulated, unlike the unknown forces of the ‘unconscious’.” [15]

Pavlov’s placing ‘subjective psychology’ temporarily off-bounds seems to have encouraged various Bolsheviks and behaviourists to assume it did not exist. If the human being was just an organism with a set of inborn and learned responses, then the organism could easily be taught new responses. The organism could also be conveniently treated as raw material without too many pangs of conscience.

Unlike the arrogant pseudo-science of Marxism, Pavlov’s scientific research was motivated by an acute awareness of human ignorance and the limits of scientific knowledge:

Although the investigation of these reflexes by physiologists has been going on now for a long time, it is as yet not nearly finished. Fresh reflexes are continually being discovered. We are ignorant of the properties of those receptor organs for which the effective stimulus arises inside the organism, and the internal reflexes themselves remain a field unexplored. The paths by which nervous impulses are conducted in the central nervous system are for the most part little known, or not ascertained at all. The mechanism of inhibitions confined within the central nervous system remains quite obscure: we know something only of those inhibitory reflexes which manifest themselves along the inhibitory efferent nerves. Furthermore, the combination and interaction of different reflexes are as yet insufficiently understood.

Pavlov did not approve of the huge social engineering experiment that Russian society had embarked on after the revolution and, fortunately for him, he was one of the public figures who could get away with criticizing the Bolshevik regime:

Although he was never a politician, he spoke fearlessly for what he considered the truth. In 1922, during the distressing conditions in the aftermath of the Revolution, he requested permission from Vladimir Lenin to transfer his laboratory abroad. Lenin denied this request, saying that Russia needed scientists such as Pavlov and that Pavlov should have the same food rations as an honoured Communist. Although it was a period of famine, Pavlov refused: "I will not accept these privileges unless you give them to every one of my collaborators!" In spite of many honours granted him by Soviet officials, he upbraided them openly.

After returning from his first visit to the United States in 1923 (the second was in 1929), he publicly denounced Communism, stated that the basis for international Marxism was false, and said that "For the kind of social experiment that you are making, I would not sacrifice a frog's hind legs!" Crystallinks

The Actor of the Future

Meyerhold:

An actor must possess the capacity for Reflex Excitability. Nobody can become an actor without it… From a sequence of physical positions and situations there arise points of excitation which are informed with some physical emotion. [16]

Biomechanics establishes the principles of precise analytical execution of each motion, establishes the differentiation of each motion for purposes of maximum precision, demonstrativeness -- visual Taylorism of motion (Sign of refusal -- the establishing of the start and end points of motion, a pause after each accomplished motion, the geometrization of movement in planes.) We must be able to show the modern actor on stage as a complete automation.

The actor's art is the creation of plastic forms in space. Therefore, the actor's art is the ability to utilize the expressive potential of his body correctly. This means that the route to image and feeling must begin not with experience, not with seeking to plumb the meaning of the role, not with an attempt to assimilate the psychological essence of the phenomenon, in sum, not "from within" but from without; it must begin with motion. This means the motion of an actor excellently trained, possessing musical rhythm and easy, reflectory excitability; an actor whose natural abilities have been developed by systematic training. [17] BioMechanics

Meyerhold’s theatre rejected Stanislavski’s emphasis on the actor’s subjective psychology; their private inner emotions and experience. Instead of connecting with their role and internalizing it on a psychological level, Meyerhold’s actors were expected to externalize their role through rhythmical movements that were planned and drilled until they became second nature. These uniform movements excite emotions, i.e. physical responses triggered by biomechanical chain reflexes. The actor was required to be hyper-sensitive to cues, “reacting almost instantaneously to a given stimulus, as if shocked by an electric charge’[18], and the theatre became a social (and obviously non-bourgeois) space traversed by the collective circuitry of flowing stimuli.

In the early 1920s, Meyerhold's theatre was modelled on industrial lines. Under strict supervision, the actors had no room for initiative because every movement was carefully controlled and supervised by the Managing Director. And while the actors were cogs in the machine managed by the dictatorial Director, the theatre functioned as a cultural machine in the assembly line of imminent socialist hyperproductivity, managed by the Party (on behalf of the proletariat). Though increasingly eclipsed by film, theatre still had a crucial part to play in the construction of "a new industrial man, one who was no longer the old man of sentimental passions and traditions but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial machine."[19]

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[1] Meyerhold and Stanislavsky: Art and Politics in the Russian Theatre (1898 -1940) by G.G. for Russian Theater Website[2] p22-3 Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jonathan Pitches, Routledge Performance Practioners, 2003[3] Meyerhold.org Meyerhold and Stanislavsky: Art and Politics in the Russian Theatre (1898 -1940) by G.G. for Russian Theater Website; [4] Meyerhold in the 1920s[5] Meyerhold.org, but not mentioned by Jonathan Pitches[6] Meyerhold in the 1920s[7] The Bedbug, translated by Max Hayward, The Golden Age of Soviet Theatre, Penguin 1966[8] newmedia[9] ibid[10] Patricia Blake, Introduction to The Bedbug, The Golden Age of Soviet Theatre[11] ibid.[12] ibid.[13] Markets, Bureaucracies and New Economy Management Theory[14] p90 Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jonathan Pitches, Routledge Performance Practioners, 2003[15] p72 ibid.[16] p72 ibid.

[17] BioMechanics[18] p116 Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jonathan Pitches, Routledge Performance Practioners, 2003[19] Slavoj Žižek A Plea for Leninist Intolerance. Critical Inquiry, Winter 2002.

This crafty text, which attempts to rehabilitate Lenin, or certain components of Lenin, hits the nail firmly on the head as far as Meyerhold is concerned:

Russian avant-garde art of the early twenties (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man, one who was no longer the old man of sentimental passions and traditions but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial machine. As such, it was subversive in its very ultraorthodoxy, that is, in its overidentification with the core of the official ideology: the human image that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, and so on emphasizes the beauty of his or her mechanical movements, his or her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to Taylorization, to Fordist ribbonwork, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation. Recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the "behaviorist" approach to acting, no longer advocating emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing but ruthless bodily training aimed at cold physical discipline, at the ability of the actor to perform the series of mechanized movements. This is what was unbearable to and in the official Stalinist ideology, so that Stalinist socialist realism effectively was an attempt to reassert a "socialism with a human face," that is, to reinscribe the process of industrialization into the constraints of the traditional psychological individual. In socialist realist texts, paintings, and films, individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global machine, but as warm, passionate persons.

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