The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Political “Reform” Drives Out the Producers
The next paragraph applies to Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia) every bit 
as much as it did to the Soviet Union. Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe 
forced the country’s land owners off their farms in a move similar to 
Soviet collectivization. Mugabe soon discovered, however, that his gov-
ernment and the people to whom he gave the farms could not operate 
them. Meldrum (2005) reports that Zimbabwe then, like the former Soviet 
Union, attempted to get these productive elements of its society to return. 
The lesson is that when a society expropriates the property of its produc-
tive members, whether in terms of their wages in the Soviet Union or their 
land in Zimbabwe, they have no incentive to produce for the society in 
question.

---

xxxiv  •  Henry Ford’s Introduction
* * *
Russia could not get along without intelligence and experience. As soon 
as she began to run her factories by committees, they went to rack and 
ruin; there was more debate than production. As soon as they threw out 
the skilled man, thousands of tons of precious materials were spoiled. 
The fanatics talked the people into starvation. The Soviets are now offer-
ing the engineers, the administrators, the foremen and superintendents, 
whom at first they drove out, large sums of money if only they will come 
back. Bolshevism is now crying for the brains and experience which it yes-
terday treated so ruthlessly. All that “reform” did to Russia was to block 
production.
There is in this country a sinister element that desires to creep in between 
the men who work with their hands and the men who think and plan for 
the men who work with their hands. The same influence that drove the 
brains, experience, and ability out of Russia is busily engaged in raising 
prejudice here. We must not suffer the stranger, the destroyer, the hater of 
happy humanity, to divide our people. In unity is American strength—and 
freedom.
* * *
The “sinister element” refers to opportunists who produce nothing 
while they seek to enrich themselves at the expense of those who do. 
These include what Ford (1922, p. 250) called the “[union] spokesperson 
who does not work in the shop, who does not work in any shop, whose 
sole ambition perhaps is to never again have to work in a shop.” Ford dis-
liked unions, but he also recognized unionization as a natural reaction 
to “bosses who never did a decent thing for their employees until they 
were compelled” (Chapter 18). This is simply the behavioral element of 
Ford’s universal code at work.
Ford’s contemporary Frederick Winslow Taylor meanwhile acknowl-
edged soldiering (marking time, or deliberately limiting productivity) 
as a natural and reasonable response to cuts in piece rates when workers 
improved their productivity. Capitalism is therefore almost as futile as 
Communism and Socialism if workers do not receive the wages to which 
their productivity entitles them. 
The “influence” to which Ford refers is Communism (“the Bolshevist”), 
which had by 1922 clearly become an international movement, and the 
next section discusses this further.

---

Henry Ford’s Introduction  •  xxxv