Abstract
In 1990 Anson Rabinbach published a book called The Human Motor – Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity. A study of productivism, machines and motors as metaphors of the body at work, it became widely recognized as a classic. Now we have a sequel. The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor adds onto and supplements the previous work, taking in new fields and dimensions of this problem-complex. It does so in a slightly more tentative tone, as we are still in process as far as the eclipse and its historic sequels are concerned. We are still in the thrall of the transition to the digital workplace. As Rabinbach puts it, this new study is more provisional in nature, at least as it approaches present and future. It ‘looks at a more complex theatre of operations’. He now divides utopias of labor between three eras: mimetic, transcendental and digital. This involves extending the time frame of The Human Motor both back and forward in time.
First the book looks back to Marx and the establishment and consolidation of productivism. Next it surveys the work of progressive European industrial scientists, together grouped as enthusiasts for ‘social energeticism’. Next, Rabinbach discusses the industrial accident, and then the intense debates on neurasthenia. The establishment of industrial psychology as a discipline in Weimar follows, Taylorism versus social regulation, which bleeds into Nazi utopia, here manifest in Speer’s Beauty of Labour programme. This opens the way to the aestheticization of Nazi labour. Closing discussion shifts into the utopia of post work, as in Gorz, Rifkin and Schor.
Let me focus here on just a few of these themes. Late in the book Rabinbach mentions Marcuse and One Dimensional Man (1964). However we might assess Marcuse today, there was at least one very important textual gesture in that book. This is to be located in Marcuse’s discussion of the Grundrisse, and especially of Marx’s utopia of automation, where the labourer steps aside from the machine, and freedom seems rather to link to non-work than work or labour, as it did earlier, say, in the Paris Manuscripts. Marcuse was a very important source for Marxists trapped within the English language; the Grundrisse finally arrived for us in extenso only in 1973. This difference was later to be continued in the now famous correspondence between Adorno and Horkheimer: Adorno: ‘The idea of freedom from labour is replaced by the possibility of choosing one’s own work’; Horkheimer: ‘Freedom means not having to work’.
Marx was not a Taylorist, but the Bolsheviks were, and enthusiastically so. German Taylorists like Schlesinger and Lipmann, however, sought not to militarize labour but to civilize the workplace. Risk management and welfarism were to ameliorate class struggle and develop the solidarity of the actuarial or providential state. Such developments formed the mass working class, but they also created a new professional middle class of mediators, whose talent it was to identify all manner of new industrial complaints, including ‘fatigue – anesthesia’, here defined as the state of being too tired to remember to feel tired.
Rabinbach discusses psychotechnics and politics, as in the aforementioned Lipmann, where efficiency was only one value among others. But this was Weimar, and the Nazis were soon to be at the door, insisting that whatever passed for industrial psychology must affirm the highest goals of the new Reich. This brings us to what may be the most profound and innovative of Rabinbach’s concerns in this study, the Nazi utopia steered by Robert Ley and then Speer.
The Bureau of Beauty of Labour was established by the Nazis as a branch of the Strength through Joy leisure organization of the German Labour Front. If work were to be a Nazi joy, then Nazi workplaces needed to be joyful. It may sound like something out of Ren and Stimpy, but Rabinbach insists that we take it seriously, and rightly. The social dimensions of this utopia are reminiscent of Ford’s paranoid Brazilian project, Fordlandia: neat, clean, well-tended, sport places and nice gardens alongside the factories. Taylorism met the Garden City. New plant should be efficient, i.e. modern and modernist, but also beautiful. Promotional films and cartoons came to the rescue. Hitler himself referred to the work of the bureau as ‘socialism of the deed’. The historical experience of the proletariat was to be dissolved into the plant and the national community.
This project was something like the total work of art, and as such has parallels in Soviet experience, as essayed by Tijana Vujošević in Modernism and the Making of Soviet New Man (2017). As Rabinbach explains, it involved a selective combination and integration of modern and traditional motifs in thinking and design. This meant that apparently alien influences such as Bauhaus and the Neue Sachlichkeit became ever present. Above all in architecture, the bureau established what Rabinbach suggests might be called Nazi Sachlichkeit. Neoclassical style was not going to carry this industrial impulse. Monumentalism was to remain Speer’s public style, but in the factory it was more like Bauhaus, or Behrens. Its crowning moment was the Volkswagen plant at Fallersleben from 1938, the showpiece of ‘strength through joy’. No Volkswagens were delivered for private use; by now there was a war going on, and Speer’s attention was turned elsewhere.
Rabinbach closes in discussion of what comes after the utopias of labour, Fordism and the postwar boom. Utopia, these days, has been relocated into the suburban private sphere. It is located in consumption, not production, to be found on the Food Channel rather than in past Modern Times. The icon of the algorithm may rule in the West; the mass production of commodities proceeds elsewhere. The utopia of labour has been transformed into the desire to escape from labour. Freedom means not having to work. Utopia is not working.