Article ID: CBB001201851

Assembling Fordizm: The Production of Automobiles, Americans, and Bolsheviks in Detroit and Early Soviet Russia (2014)

unapi

The expansion of the Ford Motor Company into Soviet Russia has been understood as part of a unidirectional spread of American economic power and cultural forms abroad following the First World War. This essay looks beyond the automobiles and manufacturing methods sent from Ford facilities in Detroit to the emerging Soviet automobile industry to examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system. Workers, managers, engineers, and cultural, technical, and disciplinary knowledge moved back and forth between factories in Soviet Russia and the United States. Efforts to define, track, and shape workers in both countries as Americans, Russians, or Bolsheviks were integral to the construction of the products and methods that Ford sold. But many workers fell in between and contested these classifications and they often defied company attempts to create an efficient and homogeneous American workforce. In Russia, too, more than Soviet and American automobiles were produced: people and ideas were created that crossed and blurred boundaries between American and Soviet. There, Fordizm became a popular watchword among Soviet commentators and workers as a near-synonym for industrialization, mass production, and efficiency. Many saw it as a potentially valuable component of a new socialist world. These multidirectional movements, recorded in Ford Motor Company archives and related documents, suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.

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Authors & Contributors
Tedeschi, Paolo
Aleksandŭr Kostov
Elizabeth Esch
Yarnell, Damon A.
Hochfelder, David P.
Ganguli, Ina
Concepts
Cross-national interaction
Technology and economics
Automobile industry
Automobiles
Technology
Technology and culture
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century
19th century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
United States
Russia
Soviet Union
Germany
Europe
Italy
Institutions
Ford Motor Company
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