Under the Red Flag: The 1931 Moscow International Conference of Psychotechnics. 1st Part: Psychotechnics and Russian-Style Taylorism

Résumé 0

In the margin of Isabelle Gouarné’s papers (2007, 2011, 2012) about the Moscow International Conference of Psychotechnics in 1931 and of Isaak Spielrein’s speech at this conference (1931b/2012), this paper emphasizes, with regard to the choice of the place of this meeting proposed by Spielrein, the role played by the relations that J.-M. Lahy, influential general secretary of the International Association of Psychotechnics and a sustainer of the dialectic materialism and a critic of Taylorism, had right from the start with the USSR and, among others, with Ossip Arkad’evic Ermanski, who opposed Taylorism and who wrote the preface to the Russian translation of Lahy’s book criticizing the Taylor system and with Isaak Naftulevich Spielrein, main representative of psychotechnics in the USSR, for whom it presented an alternative to Taylorism. Indeed, the application, in the USSR, of the “organization of labor,” was imposed by Lenin and Trotsky in response to the disastrous economic situation of the country. It was personified by the Central Institute of Labor headed by Aleksei Kapitonovich Gastev, which forms the subject of the first part of this paper. This paper also discusses the oppositions to this institute out of which Gastev emerged, temporarily, a winner, whereas psychotechnics and its leader, Spielrein, were more and more criticized.