Essay Series #4: FORDISM


I: The Fordist Age

America first! The early phase of the 1920s was a peculiarly ironic age for America. From 1922 to 1924 the United States protected itself against foreign commodities and – a people composed of immigrants- against immigration (Beaud).

American growth during the 1920s was able to take place largely on the basis of American resources and for American markets.


The United States experienced monumental growth during the 1920s. And for this, the American working class bore the major part of the burden. From 1913 to 1919 the real wages of the workers declined and even though the eight-hour workday had been mandated, it was far from being universal. Excessive fatigue had been noticed in workers and the number of injuries on the work floor kept on increasing consistently with the number of fatal injuries progressing in tandem.
During the late 1920s in America, rulings by the court had blocked the application of labor laws which had been voted for (including Child labor laws) and there was apparently an increasing trend of yellow unions controlled by company management. Another kind of a ‘soft approach’ was taken by the management which included provisions like profit sharing and paternalism including schools, canteens, housing, medical assistance, and vacations ‘granted’ by the management which could have been retracted anytime. This led to a fall in the membership of other mainstream trade unions comprising of militant socialists as well as anarchists.

It was precisely in this context that some employers organized the scientific organization of work (Taylorism) and Assembly-line Work (Fordism).
We shall now begin by addressing some of the definitional concerns of Fordism. In simple terms- Fordism was a system of economic production and social reproduction. ‘Fordism’ refers to the mode of industrial organization which came to characterize advanced capitalist economies from the early twentieth century which reached its height in the post-World War-II boom. It also had its counterpart in developed ‘communist’ economies during this period, at least in terms of the technical organization of mass industrial production. As a mode of accumulation however, Fordism can be seen as distinctly capitalist. (Tonkiss)

One of the basic and most distinctive features of Fordism was that mechanized production overshadowed craft production through the advent of assembly lines. This is what Piore and Sabel have called the First industrial divide- the shift from manual or craft production to mechanized production which reached its apex in advanced capitalist economies around the mid-twentieth century.




This Fordist period was marked by the increasingly intensive concentration of the American Corporation. By 1930, 200 of the largest companies controlled half of all non banking wealth. The different aspects of rationalization of production was first put to work in precisely these companies like- Bethlehem Steel, Republic Steel, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Du Pont, General Electric and Westinghouse, Allied Chemical & Dye, and Union Carbide & Carbon.
The major instruments or processes that characterized the Fordist age were: Mechanization, Standardization, Work Planning, and Assembly Line manufacturing and the organization of offices as noted by Michel Beaud.

One of the most important takeaways from the Fordist lesson is that it was not merely a new means of organizing work but was in a single movement both a new means of producing the capitalist commodity and a new model for realizing the value thus created. Mass consumption was seen as the driving force of the Fordist age which resulted in the standards of living of the working classes reaching to almost the levels of the middle strata.

Under the very specific style of work organization of Henry Ford, devices which were never heard or seen before were used to deliver unprecedented results. Each worker occupied a static position from which he could not move because ‘walking’ as Ford noted ‘was not a remunerative activity’. Instead the inevitable movement of component parts’ assembly was facilitated by an ever-moving conveyor belt and each worker carried out only one (sometimes two or three) repetitive action.
The majority of the workers working under the Fordist regime were either ‘unskilled’ or skilled in only one or two activities, the ‘skilling’ of which could be easily achieved in a span of two days.
Two other important technical features of the assembly line were that it divided the work to the smallest possible extent and imposed a certain degree of rigid and uniform speed of production. The direct result of these innovations is sometimes claimed to be the manifold increase in productivity in mass-scale productions (productivity increased by a factor of five).

Another revolutionary method adopted by Ford was increasing the wages in the automobile industry from $2 or $3 a day to $5 a day. It was pragmatically a kind of effective cost cheapening in a Schumpeterian sense. More importantly, its effect was immediate and unambiguous. Absenteeism and turnover fell sharply and long lines of potential workers, waiting to be employed by Ford started forming outside its factories. Production also rose substantially as a result. Ford himself had written afterward –“The payment of five dollars a day for an eight hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made and the six-dollar day is cheaper than the five”. (Beaud)

The genius of Ford’s insight however lies in the understanding of what we might call the ‘consumption multiplier’ today, and that too, years before Keynes general theory could become popularly accepted in mainstream economics. Ford’s major aim was to ‘allow’ his workers to reach higher levels of consumption than before and also of creating ‘sturdy children’ through increased consumption, who could in the future form a steady and healthy labor force in the factories. In Ford’s words
“I believe in the first place, that all other considerations aside, our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay. If we can distribute high wages, then that money is going to be spent and it will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales”.
Thus Ford had effectively embarked on a crusade to ensure higher living standards of the workers who in his words ‘deserved’ to be entitled with the wage scheme of five dollars a day.  And indeed, we can observe empirically, that the quantity of standardized commodities present in the average working household had increased manifold from the five dollar a day wage scheme.



As Michel Beaud notes, “There was at this time, then, the exploitation of a part of the working class using pre-1914 methods (low wages, brutal methods of management and regimentation, the factory system and the sweating system); but there was also mass production, the rational organization of work, and a policy of high wages for a certain group among the workers, and consequently mass consumption reached by a fraction of the working class: these were the bases for the “prosperity” in the United States during the 1920s. One of the observations of the Fordist method of production was that even though the duration of the working day declined, the productivity of the workers increased. In simpler words, the employers got more out of the workers in limited time. Using Marx’s categories, Michel Aglietta (1979) analyses this effect as a shift from the production of absolute surplus value extracted via lower wages and longer working hours to relative surplus value, achieved by increasing labour productivity (Tonkiss).

Another major shift under Fordism can be observed by understanding the fact that before Fordism, the system of mass production of standardized goods was generally carried out for typically capital goods and not consumer goods. However under the era of Fordism the system of mass-standardized production was extended over to consumer goods as well. This shift marks the understanding of the class of industrial owners of the importance of demand side considerations in business. The target group of these mass-produced standardized goods became the masses, the workers, the general populace and not other industrial establishments. As a result, standardization of consumer goods could have been observed as a general phenomenon under the Fordist regime. Moreover the economies of scale generally observed in Fordist factories brought down the production costs of finished goods which were formerly considered as luxury such as the motor car, which became the face of the Fordist revolution. This decline in production costs translated into a decline in the selling prices combined with higher standards of living of the workers resulted in the motor car becoming a commodity owned by the ‘common working man’.

A certain kind of push was delivered to the generalization of the Fordist model of production after the Second World War, because reconstruction on a large scale required the use of standardized mass-mechanized production with the additional benefits of economies of scale thus generated. The emphasis on rationalization through efficiency maximization and zero ‘wastage’ (in whatever sense of the word wastage was contextualized) proved to be well suited for industries that generated the most profits like cars, ship-building, steel, construction and petro-chemicals.

The more or less stable period of post war growth allowed for a settlement to be reached between capital and labour with the State generally being the overseer of the supposed contract. Fordism gradually became embedded in the advanced capitalist countries of the world; the Fordist wage settlement became crucial to the larger stability of the socioeconomic system. The Fordist era was an era of a newly emerging consumerist dream. The connotations of America being the frontrunner of consumerism in the world originated from particularly this era. Thus Fordism, in this context is a shorthand term for an economic system where mass production both fuels, and in turn is fuelled by, mass consumption.

A further boost to domestic, American Fordism was given by the liberalization of trade across nations, as managed by GATT, marking the post-war ‘recovery’ phase of international, advanced capitalist economies. One could make the point that the reproduction of capitalism from America to other nations brought with itself a certain kind of hegemonic cultural apparatus along with the usual technical aspect of it as characterized by mere technological transfers. This Fordist cultural apparatus thus became an important shaping tool in other advanced capitalist economies as well, though for obvious reasons, to a lesser extent than in America.




II: The socio-politics.


One of the key figures on whose insight we must depend on while embarking on our quest of analyzing Fordism is Antonio Gramsci[1]. One of the most detailed critiques of the Fordist regime of accumulation comes from his landmark piece of writing “Prison Notebooks”. It is Gramsci who gives us the precedent of thinking about Fordism as not merely a means of organizing work on the factory level but a comprehensively structured regime shaping economic as well as social relations outside the realm of factory production.  It suggests that the forms in which economies produce goods and services is closely tied to the ways in which they reproduce social relations, institutions and norms (Tonkiss).

A more or less vivid picture of how Fordism governed the sphere of life beyond mere factory production can be very well seen from what Gramsci believed that the modern industry demanded “a rigorous discipline of the sexual instincts (at the level of the nervous system) and with it a strengthening of the ‘family’. . . and of the regulation and stability of sexual relations.”[2] Gramsci very strongly argued that the history of industrialism has been a continual struggle against the element of ‘animality’ in man. He argues that newly increasing and more complex forms of collective life are the necessary consequence of the progressive development of industrialism and improvements in factors of production.

With every new wave of organizational and structural change in the method of production and technical disturbance reveals a deeper level of subjugation of the ‘primitive human animality’ according to Gramsci. The selection of the ‘men’ suited and entitled to the new ‘luxuries’ of continually changing systems of production has always been brutal often eliminating the non-conforming ‘socially weak’ classes or individuals, dispossessing  them of even rudimentary access to forces of production and pushing them further downwards the ladder of distribution. Gramsci writes that the institution of heterosexual relationships, forming the base of the social structure of America had undergone disequilibrium (purely numerical as well as psychosocial) during the inter-War as well as the post-War period since the majority of men were spending their lives on the war-front and the trenches. The advent of Taylorism, Fordism and other Rationalizing Forms of organization of production, according to Gramsci, further exacerbated this disequilibrium of the heterosexual family structure by imposing a constraint-based need of the ‘strong family’ with ‘high moral values’ (however the morality be defined by the industrialists). In order to analyze this point through the lens of class antagonism, Gramsci writes interestingly
     
“It is worth insisting on the fact that in the sexual field the most depraving and ‘regressive’ ideological factor is the enlightened and libertarian conception proper to those classes which are not tightly bound to productive work and spread by them among the working classes.”[3]

Therefore Gramsci has termed this social structure of subjugation of sexual tension under the Fordist regime as “totalitarian social hypocrisy”[4].
He terms it totalitarian because he believes that the popular classes were compelled to practise ‘virtue’ as defined by the capitalist class, because ultimately, their sustenance depended on it. And one can clearly see the social hypocrisy in the fact that even though the working class was compelled to practise ‘virtue’, those who preached seldom themselves did. Moreover, Gramsci comments that such a social structure, as existing under Fordism will succumb to its own tensions and contradictions resulting in a crisis as well as a possible end to the Fordist method.



Gramsci’s criticism of Fordism derived almost entirely from the system’s implementation in a class society. In capitalism, the remaking of industrial man necessitated by modern techniques of production could only ever half-succeed, as it would always be imposed on workers coercively from the outside. Gramsci argued that Fordism could only be completed when the working class took power, and adapted itself by conscious choice to Fordism’s requirements.[5]

Antonio Gramsci was also however highly ebullient of this new wave of the Fordist revolution[6]. He believed that such an advance could not even be completed under capitalism and that only under socialism could such an impulse consummate.

Critics critical of Gramsci’s enthusiasm for a so-called Socialist Fordism, argue that the concerns for efficiency might have become the sole criterion for Gramsci to evaluate social change. They argue that while a Marxian theoretician should have emphasized on technology making socialism a reality, Gramsci performed an unfortunate inversion of calling forth for socialism only as a means of unleashing the full potential of technology.

The Production process under Fordism was broken down or fragmented to the smallest of movements. Each such function was performed by the worker whose physical as well as mental well being underwent changes through such simplified and mind-numbingly routinised work. It is one thing to analyze Fordism as a system of so called pure economics and technicality on one level and another thing to analyze the consequences of such a system on the psyche and the biopolitics of the proletarian classes.

In Ford’s particular case, Gramsci writes “it was relatively easy to rationalize production and labour by a skilful combination of force (destruction of working class trade unionism on a territorial basis) and persuasion (high wages, various social benefits, extremely subtle ideological and political propaganda) (Tonkiss).


The presence of this Fordist technical regime brought about with itself an entirely new dimension of psycho-social ramifications. The most direct and immediate impact was the sheer traumatizing boredom of being reduced to a part of a machine itself, frantically doing about three thousand repetitions of the same mechanical movement throughout the day. A scene in the film Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin accurately captures this image of a worker as nothing but another cog in the gigantic wheel of modernized, standardized Fordist assembly line. Just like the movie, there were many workers in reality who could not keep up with this almost nightmarishly dystopian production regime. Thus, the initial phases of the implementation of the Fordist production system witnessed astoundingly high levels of absenteeism and turnover.

Another important line of argument substantiating the claim that Fordism was not merely a technique of production is the fact that some people argue that the intention of the Fordist regime of production went beyond just ensuring a disciplined and loyal workforce. It was, more consequentially responsible for driving a rift between the working class and widening the differences between workers employed by Ford and other workers. More importantly, not just across the working class but also among the workers of Ford, not everyone was treated or remunerated equally. There were particularly three kinds of workers that Ford employed who were not entitled to the five dollar a day wage. These categories were- workers having less than six months’ tenure, workers less than 21 years of age, and women. And hence, one could argue that a major socio-political consequence of this kind of division was that among the workers who belonged to the five dollar a day as wage category, a false sense of entitlement, a shallow sense of climbing up the societal ladder started creeping in. They thought of their right to the five dollar a day wage as a badge of honor for being worthy in some sense thus further fuelling a baseless sense of superiority towards themselves and a similar sense of inferiority towards workers under Ford being remunerated less than five dollars a day and also towards other workers working elsewhere. Thus, in a significant sense, this measure of discriminatory remuneration was able to divide up the working class segment which could be effectively translated into weaker labor union movements due to a fragmented working class.
The ways in which this Fordist regime tried to extend its control beyond the confinements of the factory were plenty. But one of the most notable among them was the almost explicitly stated and effectively enforced necessity of ‘good morals’. These morals included “Cleanliness and discretion”, the rules of no smoking, no drinking, no gambling, no frequenting the bars. It is easy to see how the extension of the control of capital over labor moved beyond the factory into the social domain as Heilbroner had also pointed out. The morals outlined above can easily be seen to have set forth so that the productivity of the workers remain intact and be constantly beneficial to the employer. But because of their general appeal, these ‘morals’ were easy to be liked and became popular in the guise of preaching for a stable family and a consequently a stable, good, Christian nation. The five dollar day was thus, an instrument of control and in a way of ‘breaking in’ the workers.

Fran Tonkiss notes that “‘Fordism’ in this way refers not simply to what happens inside the factory, but to the larger setting of work, consumption, and the socialization of both workers and consumers”. A unique characteristic under the Fordist regime (and subsequently under various other post-Fordist regimes) of production and accumulation was that the division of labour became further enhanced leading to a re-division within the working class. This unique characteristic was a neat class division between the management which comprised of workers with relatively ‘higher skills’ and the industrial workers comprising mainly of ‘semi-skilled’ workers. The management, though technically being a part of the working class, was seen as that front of the capitalist class that linked the industry-owners and the industrial-workers. This created a rift between the common Laboring class, further becoming an obstacle in the formation of bonds of solidarity of the working class as a whole on the antagonistic front of class struggle and confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Viewed from the point of view of the regulation school, Fordism appears less as a mere system of mass production and more as a total way of life, as emphasized by David Harvey. Gramsci has effectively linked the phenomenon of Fordism to a term which he calls ‘Americanism’, which represents a larger culture and becomes a certain kind of ideology in itself in a very Althusserian sense[7]. Gramsci believes that in an extended sense, the Fordist apparatus wanted to create ‘a new type of worker and man, based on a form of work that was inseparable from a specific mode of living, and of thinking and feeling life”. Thus Hegemony, in this form, according to Gramsci, was born in the factory. (Tonkiss).

III: Fordism’s end?


David Harvey provides a symbolic date, the year of 1973 (the year of the oil crisis) as the beginning of the end of Fordism. As reasons for the apparent ‘collapse’ go, one could safely argue that there was a presence of both internal as well as external pressures with forces working towards restoration of the old class powers which were dampened by the policies during the ‘golden age of capitalism’.
One of the primary factors contributing to the crisis of Fordism was the rise of the multinationals. Multinationals had existed earlier also but gradually a system of critiquing the coherence of domestic markets had been put forth by these firms. And Domestic markets were the core consumer base of the entire Fordist technical as well as cultural apparatus. Once the logic of catering with the main of serving the domestic markets solely, started to disappear, the system of production started losing relevance (at least in opinions manufactured by the multinational agents by then).

Fran Tonkiss argues that the economic problems of the 1970s in part were due to the rigidity of mass production systems which were slow or simply unable to adapt to changing economic and social conditions. It might be said that Fordist production got better and better at what it did but simply proved unable to do much else.


The advent of a new technological wave of computers, robotics, electronics and semi-conductors revolutionized the way production was going to be carried on requiring fewer human workers and creating a paradigmatic shift in the patterns of demand of industrial workers. This led to growing unemployment which further exacerbated the growing recessionary tendencies, creating further falling aggregate consumption expenditure. Moreover, the problem of over-supply at home was made worse by increasing foreign competition and somehow the most viable way for the industrialist class to escape this unanticipated accumulation of inventory was to diversify their products and which, therefore needed to do away with the sclerotic system of Fordist mass production.

The problems of Stagflation created another shift in the school of economic thought which translated into far-reaching political consequences in primarily the advanced capitalist economies and subsequently in the other economies. This was an age of de-regulation and moving away from the conventional Keynesian wisdom of that time. Welfare states were started to being looked down upon and policies with even a modicum of resemblance to anything ‘socialist’ became the anathema of the influential circles of economic academia as well as policy-making.
As Tonkiss argues-
“The early lines of post-Fordism then were visible in the weakening of corporatist consensus-especially the exit of capital not only from three way bargaining but from any primary attachment to domestic investment; the internationalization of corporate investment, ownership and operations, and the rolling back of state intervention into the economy”.
The gradual disintegration of Fordism and newer modes of neoliberal accumulation thus have shaped the political economic realm of today.

During the peak of the Fordist regime, Detroit was made the mecca of Fordism. But the end of Fordism brought about a disastrous capital flight in the city of Detroit[8]. One could very well, after seeing the case of Detroit, write an obituary of Fordism but it becomes important to take along the lessons brought about by it and still ask the questions which contend the end of a Fordist era.
Some critics argue that the post-Fordist era has given rise to a large and growing precariat class. Precariat is a class which is typically the proletariat workforce characterized by uncertainty and unpredictability of their employment[9]. While other critics argue that the usage of the term precariat is disorienting and misguided arguing that it is an odd form of determinism when one makes the claim that the newer labor classes become necessarily more precarious under post-fordist regimes than under industrial employment.


Rather than a “post-Fordist” framework that sees the very real and dangerous shifts underway as the natural outgrowth of a new phase of capitalism, it might be helpful to consider the ways in which the current situation resembles a return to pre-Fordism.[10]


REFERENCES
1.       Tonkiss, Fran: Contemporary Economic Sociology: Globalization, Production, Inequality, Routledge, 2006 (India reprint 2008).
2.       Beaud, Michel: A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000, Aakar books.




















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