Corinna Schlombs. Productivity Machines: German Appropriations of American Technologies from Mass Production to Computer Automation. History of Computing Series. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019. Illustrations. 368 pp. $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-262-53739-1.
Reviewed by Mario Bianchini (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (June, 2022)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Corinna Schlombs’s Productivity Machines examines the cultural and technological exchange of the concept of productivity between western Germany and the United States both before and after Nazism. The book deftly draws out how the United States sought to imprint itself upon the front lines of the Cold War by exporting technologies, resources, and know-how to West Germany in the hopes of self-replication. Primarily, Schlombs shows the impossibility of successfully grafting one culture onto another and the ways the culture of the receiving country always informs the adaptation of technologies and values.
The story begins with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and their invention of the concept of “objective” measures of productivity in the early 1920s. From there, Schlombs expands to trace the paths of the concept from US factories to West German firms by showing how the United States sought to invite German workers and businessmen to the United States to demonstrate the perceived superiority of the American system to Germans who represented potential new markets for US goods.
The book’s true value is twofold. First, Schlombs challenges the conception of capitalism as a monolithic, anti-communist Western entity during the Cold War. Much in the same way the Eastern Bloc was continually treated as one homogenous entity, the concept of Western capitalism was co-created as the antithesis of that construction. This book shows, however, that this monolith was false. West Germans maintained their own conceptions of how capitalism should be constructed, sometimes in direct opposition to American values. As Schlombs elucidates, the Marshall Plan was not simply an economic aid package designed to kick-start the European economy; it was a project of cultural imperialism meant to remake Europe in the image of the United States. As a result, Marshall Plan aid and its demonstration projects of American business firm values required German adaptation of anti-union firm organization along with rationalization techniques and technologies. German workers, however, in fear of losing their collective bargaining power, largely pushed back against wholesale implementation, even when mostly in favor of the import of productivity machines. Thus, in her foray into German-American debates on how economies should function, Schlombs chips away at the myth of one “Western capitalist” ideal.
The book also raises the important question of who benefits from increased productivity. For the American firms and businessmen pushing the concept of productivity, the answer was, of course, everyone. Looking to Henry Ford’s factories as a model, those pushing for productivity machines and rationalization techniques for workers argued that such measures would increase profits for business owners, ease workloads for managers, and spell higher salaries for workers, so that they too could participate in the American dream. However, American paternalistic company ideals clashed with those of West German unions. Skeptical of the supposedly classless American worker-boss relationships Germans saw when they visited US firms, West German unions felt that the deep class divisions that scarred German history were not so easily uprooted. They instead argued for implementation of productivity technologies without the import of American anti-union business organization. In the end, German cultural foundations did indeed impede wholesale importation of American values.
All of this culminated with the introduction of computer-assisted automation. Any question of automation under a capitalist system necessitates a conversation about jobs lost to machine work, and American-style factory automation was no exception. The question of implementation of automation once again split German and American values across the cultural divide. One exchange between an American industry man and German chief information officer, Walter Reuther, succinctly summarizes the core debate: “A company official proudly pointed to some new automatically controlled machines and asked Reuther: ‘How are you going to collect union dues from these guys?’ Reuther replied: ‘How are you going to get them to buy Fords?’” (p. 237). American entrepreneurs sought to introduce automation to factories, arguing that saved labor cost would inherently trickle down to everyday consumers. The German union association, however, argued that while in “a capitalist economy, replacing humans with machines would lead to persistent unemployment,... [in] a planned, socialistic economy with nationalized core industries ... rationalization would lead to an optimal overall economic performance with the highest-possible productivity, increasing purchasing power and raising standards of living through full employment” (p. 239). Once again, computer automation served to highlight German-American cultural differences and the impact of those cultures on economic decisions.
If there is anything that this book seems to lack, it is a fuller discussion of Nazism. The book treats Germany’s descent into Nazism as a brief interruption to the tale of American productivity exchange, which is perhaps necessary for crafting a cohesive story. Yet I wonder what influence the already-developing exchange between American company values had on Nazi business, and what elements of a so-recent Nazi past had on the desire to implement American values in postwar West Germany. Additionally, I find myself wishing to hear Schlombs's answers to the questions she poses at the end of her book. For example, she asks, “does productivity technology and culture have an inherent logic that causes (or is one cause of) increasing inequality?” and, more importantly, “what kind of capitalism do we want in our globalized world?” (p. 256). Indeed, the story presented in Productivity Machines, in which the notions of productivity often came with little benefit to the worker, causes me to wonder if we want any sort of capitalism in our globalized world, when its logics lead to lust for ever-increasing output with purposeful ignorance toward finite resources, worker health and happiness, and the continued failure of capitalist technology to act as the panacea it so often promises to be.
In all, Schlombs’s Productivity Machines is an extremely interesting and useful addition to the history of capitalism and the history of technology. She traces the advent of the idea of productivity by questioning how its creators saw it as an objective measure of capitalistic successes. In doing so, she also unpacks the monolithic construction of “Western capitalism” in the Cold War into something more nuanced, an idea co-constructed by each culture that housed it. Finally, she coaxes us to think about the question of labor reactions inherent in any call to automation, something, she notes, that becomes more pressing with each passing day.
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Citation:
Mario Bianchini. Review of Schlombs, Corinna, Productivity Machines: German Appropriations of American Technologies from Mass Production to Computer Automation.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57689
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