“Assembly Line” Logic - Amir Hussain

In B. Traven’s short story “Assembly Line,” we encounter an Indian peasant who spends most of his time cultivating crops for himself and his family on his “small property—less than fifteen acres of not too fertile soil.” The property is small, the weather is unpredictable, as are the insects and birds that visit, but he possesses it, meaning that the land is his to produce.

In the little time that remains after he spends his “sweat and labor” and “constant worry” on his small piece of land, he weaves beautiful, intricate baskets to sell for extra income at the Mexican village. Each basket requires painstaking labor. He dries the bast and fiber in specific ways. He finds quality plants and insects to create the richly-colored days. He then weaves stunning pictures into the basket. He puts great care into each crafted basket and “in spite of being by profession just a plain peasant,” despite being in appearance a plainclothes peasant, he is “at heart…an artist, a true and accomplished artist.”

All this we learn of the Indian after first being introduced to one Mr. Winthrop, a New York businessman who, like a “good American citizen,” has traveled to Mexico for vacation. Traveling through remote parts of Mexico, he encounters the Indian selling his baskets and purchases a few of them to take back with him. Upon returning to New York, like a good businessman, he comes up with a profitable scheme: he will sell the striking baskets—thousands of them—to a New York confectionary store that will use them as “wrappings” for its expensive chocolates. Mr. Winthrop knows that the Indian sells one basket at the village for half of a peso, and so he thinks that for a bulk order the Indian would sell even lower. He negotiates a steal-of-a-deal with the store—certain that the Indian would be more than willing to participate in the exchange. What a fine businessman he is, indeed. And not only is he maximizing his profits, he is even helping the Indian escape his unfortunate existence selling baskets door-to-door in the village!

Mr. Winthrop returns a second time to the Mexican village to present the Indian with his business scheme: he would like to buy ten thousand baskets from the Indian. The Indian takes a night to think over the offer, and then responds with his price: ten thousand baskets will cost fifteen pesos each—over fifteen times what Mr. Winthrop had paid for one.

How could that be, thinks the goodly astonished businessman? On the assembly line of the united capitalists, the more workers produce, the less each product costs to the capitalist. Not only this, but workers must be continually made to work more intensely and more rapidly so that as much profit as possible can be squeezed out of their working hours. Faster, faster, faster! More, more, more! The cost to the worker’s existence—what cost is this? Just let them suffer, and when they are spent, when they have produced their wealth for capital, hire another! Quick!

But, alas, the Indian has made his own calculations, and has reached a very different conclusion. He patiently explains that if he were to weave ten thousand baskets, he would have no time to tend to his crops and to his land, and he would have to go to the village to purchase and acquire all of his needs. This would cost money, and this money would have to come from the amount that each basket would be sold to Mr. Winthrop. The Indian possesses a small piece of property on which to produce what he needs, and beyond that, he can make a small income from the sale of his baskets. He sees that Mr. Winthrop’s promise of monetary wealth is empty for him. The grand business scheme is good only for the capitalists!

Mr. Winthrop grows agitated, and continues to try to convince the Indian of his grand business plan. He fervently counts and calculates the numbers that will make him rich—and by the logic of capital, happy. Like all good capitalists, Mr. Winthrop does not meet the Indian for his human self. His sole motivation to have returned to Mexico is to appropriate the Indian’s basket-weaving labor for profit. Beyond that, beyond the numbers and figures that he has woven in his head, the Indian is nothing. The promise of money is the only promise he is good for—but not the promise of friendship or honesty. Such a cultured man is this Mr. Winthrop!

But the Indian is not moved, and at long last, he replies with his final point, “It must be the same price because I cannot make any other. Besides, señor, there’s still another thing which perhaps you don’t know. You see, my good lordy and caballero, I’ve to make these canastitas my own way and with my song in them and with bits of my soul woven into them. If I were to make them in great numbers there would no longer be my soul in each, or my songs. Each would look like the other with no difference whatever and such a thing would slowly eat up my heart.”

The Indian’s experience with his own productive force allows him to recognize the real value of his work. Though he works hard to produce what he needs and he earns little income, his life has a spirit that he would not easily give up. Indeed, even if he were to be paid 15 pesos for each basket, the sheer act of creating thousands of baskets would alter the meaning of the baskets for the Indian. In place of individually expressed art works, they would become uniform commodities.

But for the owners of capital, who can never know a worker’s heart, uniformity is supreme and the assembly line of mass production is one effective tool for achieving this uniformity. The workers are, after all, only for capital, defined solely by the cold terms of employment, and such conditions permit no practical or theoretical consideration to individuality. Devoid as it is of all human consideration and empty of spirit, capital travels to all ends of the earth to extract labor for profit.

In the end of their encounter, the Indian in the story escapes an unpleasant outcome, though it appears that neither the Indian nor Mr. Winthrop experience a change. The Indian simply says goodbye and returns to his simple but demanding labor, while Mr. Winthrop presumably returns to New York to search out new ventures, never having learned what the Indian really weaves into his baskets. The last paragraph of the story ends with depersonalized American trash cans “[escaping] the fate of being turned into receptacles” for the Indian’s colorful baskets, which are the “woven dreams of his soul, throbs of his heart: his unsung poems.”

Yet it remains an ambivalent ending. Dreams, throbs, and poems left unsung—what do these share? The pain of not being realized. A dream is by definition a fantasy or a hope, an unsung poem is one that no one hears, and the throbs of a heart ache for some missing object. In this sense, the story’s ending implies disenchanted life remains outside of the story’s realm. The Indian and Mr. Winthrop are, after all, not meant to be realistic, well-rounded characters—rather they are intended to be figures from which something can be learned for our own world. And if they leave much to be desired, then that desire is ours also.