Post-Fordism

The term Fordism derives from the methods of success of the Ford Motor Company in respect of the mass production and selling of its Model T car in the early decades of the 1900s and is typically understood to originate in the work ethic and labor [Page 1118]organization that was first seen in the car assembly lines. Fordism became the model for mass production—an organizational strategy to meet emergent mass consumerism and the democratization of consumer society that accompanied the emergence of a newly enriched working class. The ideas of Fordist production and consumer culture in the last century are inseparable.

On a microlevel, the worker placed at the conveyor belt and repeatedly engaging in the same activity or drawing on the same area of expertise (even if that particular job requires little expertise) optimizes production. Workers working in unison can maximize speed: distractions and downtime are minimalized; pressure to continue to work is exerted by all on all—an unauthorized break by one worker effectively stops all the other workers on that conveyor belt. The workforce can be easily monitored and the speed of the conveyor belt raised when necessary. Fritz Lang's film Metropolis, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and Jean-Luc Godard's British Sounds all reflect these working conditions as an absolute, unenviable enslavement; the worker is driven by the machine—in a perverse reversal of industrialization. These critiques echo the Fordist prehistory of slave labor and unchecked industrialization: the appropriation of William Blake's term “dark Satanic mills” in the late 1700s to describe early steam-powered factories, Karl Marx's noting of the alienation endemic in capitalist labor as the worker finds ever-greater distance from his work and the products created, and Wilhelm Reich's theorizing of the diminishment of the biological potency of the exploited worker.

These inhuman conditions were eventually deemed mostly unacceptable for the Western worker, and the assembly line factory model was exported elsewhere—to developing countries, where new workers, lacking alternatives, would step up to the job. Apologists for this export, and sympathetic historians of American industry, note that the Fordist regime guaranteed a higher wage—indeed, it struck a bargain with the worker, a capitalist “new deal” that ended the Great Depression. On a macrolevel, the Fordist approach comes to define—in the sense of both structure and characterization—the symbiotic relationship between the individual worker and the nation-state: thus, General Motors's CEO Charles Wilson was reputed to have famously said that “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

The possibility of the export of Fordism can be understood to occur with the increased education and specialization of Western workforces, unionization of labor, and the formalization of demands for safer and nonexploitative workplaces and a reluctance of the Western worker to accept the conditions imposed on his predecessors (with the increased wealth in the West after the years of World War II scarcity). The emergence of new forms of labor in the upwardly mobile working classes strata, forms that could not be exploited on the assembly line, also rendered the factory model inappropriate. The worker demanded freedom both from the conveyor belt and from the factory—to be the master of his own time and to exert creative control over his work.

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