The Poetics of Labor: Alexei Gastev’s Body-Machine Assemblages

• In Event: The Radical Utopianism of the Soviet Twenties II: Bodies

Abstract

Called sometimes the “Soviet Frederick Taylor,” Alexei Gastev was a Soviet avant-garde poet and the leading advocate of scientific management in the early USSR. Unlike Taylor, however, Gastev’s visions went far beyond improvements in industrial production, as he saw factory work as the best educational experience to forge a new socialist society. The proposed paper will discuss Gastev’s theory, called the “Scientific Organization of Labor,” as a social engineering project aimed at a radical improvement of Soviet bodies and the education of true proletarian consciousness.

Author

• Alexey Golubev, U of Houston