Review: Behemoth: A Making of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua Freeman

What's really fascinating about this book is how the great factories of the Soviet system relied upon and emulated the factory system created in the west. They had one enormous advantage, however, in that each had a more dedicated workforce, i.e., one supposedly more friendly to the economic system, not to mention a sophisticated system of spies to weed out malcontents. The unions were devoted to the system as well if not arms of the government. Soviet masters even went so far as to copy and employ the designs of Ford's assembly lines, Stalin and his minions believing that industrialization was a tool of class warfare. Were Soviet factories during the thirties any different than their western counterparts in terms of organization and hierarchies. Not much suggests Freeman, except for Soviet use of forced labor and periodic purges of upper management. Both systems bred hierarchical management and conflict-ridden.

The great textile mills of the northeastern U.S. had some environmental advantages over their counter-parts elsewhere. They were mostly powered by water and often entire towns sprang up around the mills with garden lined streets and housing for the workers.*

To some extent it was the rise of unions in the west that spelled doom for the behemoth factory. Owners were anxious to defuse the power of unions and so decentralized the manufacturing process to a point where now only 8% of U.S. labor is employed in a factory of which Trump speaks so nostalgically and erroneously. By the early fifties the age of industrial gigantism was over in the U.S. but continued apace in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with the rise of industrial communities like Stalinstadt (now Eisenhuttenstadt - a town I would like to visit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQpRna3suc) and Nowa Huta in Poland as late as the late seventies.

Freeman suggests that the days of the gigantic factory may be over even as he examines the huge factories of Foxconn in China that produce so much of Apple and other computer manufacturers' products. At its peak Foxconn employed an amazing 300,000 workers (though hardly sweatshops as they have nice facilities, dormitories, swimming pools, and cafeterias,) but the trend is now for robots to take over such jobs. Robots don't need sleep, nor food, nor amenities of any kind and happily work steadily 24/7.

* See Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City by Tamara Hareven for a detailed examination of one textile manufacturing city-factory.