The Death of Fordism

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Clarissa

February 8, 2014

So it turns out that the system whose demise we are witnessing has a name: Fordism. Fordism is

mass production of standardized products, mass consumption, internal job ladders, relative employment security, and a government system of social security and income maintenance (Kitty Calavita, Law & Society Review.)

In place of Fordism, we are getting post-Fordism, which is

an emphasis on “just-in-time” production inputs, labor cost reductions, flexibility in hiring and firing, an increase in contingent or part-time jobs, and gradual retrenchments of the welfare state (ibid).

Michael Moore’s documentaries are finally starting to become comprehensible. I know everybody else already knows all this but I wasn’t born in a capitalist country, so I’ve been mystified by a deep emotional attachment to a system whose name was unknown to me.

On of the reasons for attracting immigrants to first world countries is precisely – as I suspected – because their presence is likely to dilute the resistance to post-Fordism.

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14 responses to “The Death of Fordism”

David Bellamy

February 8, 2014

On of the reasons for attracting immigrants to first world countries is precisely – as I suspected – because their presence is likely to dilute the resistance to post-Fordism.

Then why are Repubenrons trying so fiercely to limit immigration?

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1. n8chz
  
  February 8, 2014
  
  Depends on which Republican you ask. Or which Democrat, for that matter. In the United States, at least, immigration is orthogonal to the left-right spectrum. There is a liberal case for immigration (make America more cosmopolitan, pretty much where I sit), a conservative case for (make America more competitive), a liberal case against (based on protectionism), a conservative case against (based on xenophobia or “occidentalism”).
  
  Concerning immigrants as a wedge (intentional or otherwise) into a society that is moving its goal posts concerning J.O.B. security, an observation by the always-insightful Rebecca Burlingame seems germane:
  
  Prior to working as a bookseller I had several years experience in a large flea market, and learning the process of negotiating prices is quite a workout which can leave you awake at night. But what really stuck out in my mind was a former co-worker from an office, who thought the whole process of negotiating prices was beneath what civil people should be doing and expressed this to her child in no uncertain terms in front of me. One on one buying and selling is not distasteful, the fact that many people do so in informal markets is just one reason why the U.S. is far behind other countries in numbers of self-employment.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    February 8, 2014
    
    I also think that haggling is degrading. Just as making loud statements that include words “rip off” and “bargain.” But it’s a cukture-based class thing.
    
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valter07

February 8, 2014

I guess “attracting” is not the best word… I’d say “admitting”. And to preserve Fordism, one would mainly have to forbid outsourcing, not immigration. There are plenty of places in the world where population is decently educated. Almost any high-tech product can be produced outside of the First World… And low-tech products can be made anywhere. I suspect that the number of actual immigrants to the First World is many times smaller than the number of people producing stuff for the First World in the factories owned by the First World Companies.
Unfortunately, no developed country can suddenly and unilaterally become significantly more socialist than others or return back to Fordism – it will be eaten by competitors before the benefits of more balanced society are felt. Or it will have to completely self-isolate, not letting any competing foreign goods in… The example of SU shows this is unlikely to work.
I am getting more and more pessimistic and in some paradoxial way Marxist about all of it lately… It will be getting worse and worse until having a job will become a privilege available only to minority, and then it all will turn into some form of Communism. If we are lucky – because people, begrudgingly but peacefully, decide that this is the lesser evil. Or, more likely, someone loses patience in the process and we get a bunch of bloody socialist revolutions here and there…

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 8, 2014
  
  “Almost any high-tech product can be produced outside of the First World… And low-tech products can be made anywhere.”
  
  – This isn’t about making products any longer. That’s Fordism speaking, so let’s just let it go. 🙂 I wrote a post in response to this and it will come up a little later. I don’t want to overwhelm people with all this.
  
  “Unfortunately, no developed country can suddenly and unilaterally become significantly more socialist than others or return back to Fordism”
  
  – You seem to be saying that Fordism is inherently better than post-Fordism, but is it? Fordism at the heights of its achievement was the US on the 1950s. And what was so good about that? Fordism makes for a very rigid, hierarchical society where there is little mobility and very little progress in social terms.
  
  I need to run right now but let’s continue discussing this because this is fascinating.
  
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  1. Z
    
    February 8, 2014
    
    Savage capitalism makes for even more rigidity and hierarchy, and even less mobility and progress. And look, in the 1950s there were varius bohemian movements and big time civil rights activity. Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954, for example, the same year McCarthy was finally censured and the red scare died down. Howl is from 1955 and it is a complex text.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      February 9, 2014
      
      “Savage capitalism makes for even more rigidity and hierarchy, and even less mobility and progress”
      
      – Less mobility for whom? Can anybody seriously argue that it was easier for women, immigrants, racial minorities to achieve social and economic mobility for themselves in the 1950s?
      
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      1. Z
        
        February 9, 2014
        
        I favor neither discrimination/1950s style ideals not the Gilded Age situation you seem to be promoting, which was also not good for women/minorities/etc. the last time we had it. Mobility for women/minorities etc. does not come from Reaganism, it was fought for hard by women/minorities themselves, viz. people like MLK working hard in 1950s, and long before that the people who fought and died for the 8 hour day.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        February 9, 2014
        
        I’m not promoting anything. My powers don’t stretch as far as directing the future course of the development of humanity. 🙂 I’m simply analyzing what I see.
        
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2. Clarissa
  
  February 8, 2014
  
  I’m not seeing any potential for social protest. Even in the aftermath of the global economic crisis, all we saw in a variety of countries was a bunch of immature silly kids with zero desire to actually do anything but tweet moronically about the evils of greed.
  
  As long as there are gadgets, Facebook and TV, nobody will get too angry. In Spain 28% of people are out if work but the government pays for their TV watching and there is always free wi-fi, so nobody is doing anything. To the contrary, people go and vote conservative because it’s boring to have to think about anything. Or they channel everything into idiotic nationalistic outpourings (see Catalonia and of course Quebec).
  
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Z

February 8, 2014

I thought Fordism, with all the shopping and security, was in fact what the Eastern bloc types envied. Or is this US propaganda?

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 9, 2014
  
  “I thought Fordism, with all the shopping and security, was in fact what the Eastern bloc types envied.”
  
  – Of course. This is why the advent of capitalism hit those who valued this secure poverty so badly. Our countries modernized and industrialized but did so much later than Western democracies. Stalinism and 2 world wars + a bloody civil war is the price we paid for our modernization.
  
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John Hayden

February 9, 2014

The people who control the Republican Party love immigration because immigration means cheap labor.

The economic trends under discussion here were going full-speed by the late 1970s and early 80s. Some people trace economic decline in the U.S. to a conscious corporate decision, in the early 1950s probably, to stop making “durable goods” and instead make disposable goods, especially in the auto industry.

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1. n8chz
  
  February 9, 2014
  
  The rise of disposable goods in the 1950s is described in some detail in Vance Packard’s book The Waste Makers.
  
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