Abstract

"“The Shchekino Method: Flexible Production with Socialist Characteristics”"

James Nealy, Harvard University (james.nealy@duke.edu)

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. Succinctly, the Shchekino Method gave managers the power to reorganize the shopfloor as they saw fit: thousands of workers were subsequently shuffled around, retrained, or even laid off in pursuit of enterprise profitability (rentabel’nost’). The article argues that, in doing so, the Shchekino Method normalized in the Soviet Union many of the many of the phenomena often associated with flexible production – including multi-task labor, detailed bonus systems, and the elimination of clear job demarcations – in the capitalist world.
But the Shchekino Method was no mere replication of capitalist managerial practices. First, even in the context of economic experimentation, dismissed workers were guaranteed work. Second, in the Soviet Union, profit was used not to line the pockets of a select few elites, but to provide workers with “material incentives” – including cash bonuses and social services – to improve labor discipline. To account for both differences in and similarities between capitalist and socialist production regimes, the article introduces the analytical category “flexible production with socialist characteristics.”
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.