Hence my interest in socialist competition, an arena and a discursive field in which self-organized production communes were confronted by "the imperatives of industrialization"; the ambiguous role of foremen in an increasingly Taylorist industrial system; and
Stakhanovism. I also interested myself in workplace adjudication in the form of comrades-disciplinary courts in the early Soviet years and the coalminers' movement from 1989 across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide.
Among the railroad workers the opinion could he encountered that
Stakhanovism might lead to unemployment: "If everyone becomes a Stakhanovite, overproduction will be the result." (50) A master working at the Khabarovsk railroad car department responded to the statement of a turner that he would begin to work in a Stakhanovite manner that "if you begin to introduce Stakhanovite methods, then we will have nothing to do anymore tomorrow." (51) Shipanov, a deputy master, criticized in a dormitory of the railroads the high wages of the Stakhanovites: "They squander wages....
It's the same paradox as
Stakhanovism: if you don't inflate performance to an absolutely ludicrous level, you are ensuring that you and your subordinates don't get promoted and hence ensuring that those who do will be promoted in their stead and thus continuing the cycle.
Beyond this poisonous mixture of Taylorism and
Stakhanovism, laced with 21st century IT, there is, in Amazon's treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust--for customers, but not for employees.
The Soviet 'consultants' soon practised a wild exploitation of Skoda's industrial resources, proposing labour militarisation or
Stakhanovism as management models.
to permanent and ubiquitous measurement cannot but result in a kind of
Stakhanovism of immaterial labour, which like its Stalinist forebear exceeds all rationales of instrumentality, and cannot but generate a permanent undercurrent of debilitating anxiety (since there is no standard, no amount of work will ever make you safe).
(19) On Stakhanov and
Stakhanovism see Lewis Siegelbaum,
Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge, 1988); and Aleksei Stakhanov, Rasskaz o moei zhizni (Moscow: 1937).
4), in
Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge 1988), 145-78.
Buckley (Cambridge U.) tells the story of rural shock work and
Stakhanovism during the latter part of the 1930s and early 1940s, and analyzes its relevance for Soviet subjects, society, state, and propaganda.
Randall, "'Revolutionary Bolshevik Work':
Stakhanovism in Retail Trade," The Russian Review (July, 2000): 425-41; and Hessler, "Cultured Trade: The Stalinist Turn to Consumerism."
Many others pride themselves on the way they manage to run a home and hold their own job at the same time, accepting the patronizing title of 'working wonders' in a kind of unofficial
Stakhanovism. Some of the experience I have had first-hand of working wives has been dispiriting in the utmost.