Abstract

"“The Shchekino Method: Flexible Production with Socialist Characteristics in the Soviet Union”"

James Nealy, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (james.nealy@duke.edu)

The Soviet Communist Party’s inability, or, perhaps, refusal, to abandon Fordism and respond to the challenge of flexible production is often cited as the central socioeconomic failure of the Soviet system. Unable to compete with “dynamic” liberal economies and unwilling to engage in what would have been an apocalyptic military encounter with the West, the Communist Party, this interpretation suggests, gave up the ghost on socialism and thus the Soviet project itself. To challenge this narrative, this paper explores the evolution of industrial relations in a single Soviet enterprise: the Shchekino Chemical Combine. Located in Shchekino, a small city of 75,000 people about 200 km south of Moscow, the Shchekino Chemical Combine was the site of an important economic experiment – the so-called “Shchekino Method” – that began in 1967 and later spread to more than 11,000 enterprises throughout the Soviet Union. The article argues that many of the phenomena often associated with flexible production in capitalist systems – including multi-task labor, detailed bonus systems, the elimination of clear job demarcations, extensive on-the-job training, horizontal labor organization, increased worker responsibility, and the division of the workforce into groups of high and low job security – were also present in the Soviet Union by the late 1960s.
The Shchekino Method’s constituent elements proved tenacious. Some twenty years later, in a drastically different political environment, these same strategies had been repurposed: once used to benefit state socialism, they now served the needs of an emerging coterie of oligarchs. To the extent that flexible production represents the social corollary of neoliberal political theory, the article demonstrates that the Soviet system created the conditions of possibility for the transition to neoliberal capitalism in post-Soviet Russia.