Fordism

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As Fordism refers to a after the First World War in the United States developed and after the Great Depression established form of industrial goods production. The term was coined, among others, by the Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci . It is named after the industrialist Henry Ford , whose organization of labor and capital is regarded as typical of the entire epoch . With the theory of Fordism, starting from Marxist principles, it should be explained how the development of the welfare state came about instead of the crisis-like collapse of capitalism that was actually to be expected .

characterization

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Fordism is based on highly standardized mass production and consumption of consumer goods with the help of highly specialized, monofunctional machines, assembly line production , Taylorism and the desired goal of social partnership between workers and entrepreneurs. Relatively high employee wages, which drive demand, are also characteristic. In 1914 Henry Ford roughly doubled his workers' daily wages to five dollars. In three months he paid his workers as much as one of his T-model cars cost. These and other measures - combined, however, with strict work discipline and monitoring (abstinence from alcohol!) - should increase the workers' consent to the new production methods. The intention was to promote an instrumental working attitude . The 1970s, in which the wage share as a percentage of GDP began to decline again in most industrialized countries, is consequently seen as a phase of upheaval that marked the end of Fordism and the beginning of post-Fordism .

Fordism is based on the developments of the New Deal or, more generally, of corporatism , " concerted action " and social partnership, that is, on social security systems , lifelong employment with an employer and extensive full employment . The developments of the welfare state are understood as an agreement between workers and capital: the workers share in the prosperity, women do the necessary reproductive work , both of which increase sales and capitalist accumulation can continue.

However, this development had an ambivalent effect on the workers' movement in its various forms of socialist, social democratic or communist parties and trade unions: on the one hand, many of its demands were met, which in some countries led to a veritable hegemony of left parties - on the other hand, Fordism undermined the proletarian ones Milieus as the social basis of the labor movement. The economic crisis of Fordism since the 1960s thus also became a political crisis of the traditional left.

This crisis of Fordism was characterized by the intensification of social conflicts, in particular the trade union movement resisted the dismantling of the welfare state achievements. At the same time, criticism of the bureaucratic welfare state arose in the new social movements - ecological limits of Fordism were emphasized, at the same time new values ​​such as striving for self-realization and individuality were articulated.

In economic terms, too, the standardized product range was unable to satisfy an increasingly individualized demand. On the basis of CNC technology and flexible automation strategies, since the 1980s it has also been possible to satisfy this with smaller production units outside of mass production. Not least because of the 1973 oil crisis , the demand for goods fell in large parts of industry. The rigid Fordist mass production noticed this development too late, which led to overproduction and ultimately falling profits. In many countries the state wanted to counteract this development through deficit spending . The result was increasing indebtedness in many countries (especially in Western Europe and the USA) in the 1970s.

Fordism was followed by developments known as post-Fordism or Toyotism . However, the crisis of Fordism did not lead to the complete abandonment of all of its elements.

Criticism of Fordism as criticism of society

The dystopian vision of the future in the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley builds on the Fordism, into modifications were also made the concept of Fordism for a critique of state socialism to make fruitful: Here essential forms of capitalist commodity production such as wage labor and factory discipline were never overcome.

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ P. Cloke, M. Goodwin: Conceptualizing countryside change: from post-Fordism to rural structured coherence . In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 1992
  2. ↑ Hans-Peter Martin , Harald Schumann : Die Globalisierungsfalle , Hamburg 2003, p. 170.
  3. ↑ See Ralf Hoffrogge : Fordism, Eurocommunism and the New Left. Theses on continuities and discontinuities between the labor movement and the left scene in the FRG , in: Yearbook for historical communism research 2012, pp. 249–264.
  4. ↑ Cf. Ulrich Busch : The GDR as a state-socialist variant of Fordism, in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement , Issue III / 2009.