The fetish of Fordism - Henry Ford's economic ideas

Monthly Review, March, 1988 by Bellamy Foster

At a deeper level, radical analysts of Fordism also refer to far-reaching changes in the underlying structure of the economy, stemming from technological change, that have supposedly reinforced the current tendency toward slow growth. Fordism, by deskilling labor to an unprecedented degree, created mass discontent on the job (threatening productivity) and hence required the compensatory payment of higher wages. The result was a two-pronged attack on the economic basis of this "regime of accumulation." This has served to accelerate, according to Aglietta, the changeover to a new "principle of mechanism": "neo-Fordism" or the automation/information economy. What remains to be seen, however, is whether such a technological environment is viable economically for capitalism; that is, "whether the change in work organization made possible by the introduction of automatic production control can canalize the class struggle into forms compatible with the law of accumulation."

Aglietta and others of this school prophesy that the new technolo"neo-Fordism" will demand a very different, more "flexible" labor process conducted by "semi-autonomous units," as well as extended forms of "collective consumption" and further socialization of wage costs. According to Harrington, Fordist mass-production technology is in the process of being replaced with "new much more flexible technology and the need for specialty products," resulting in the need for a reskilled workforce to replace the older deskilled workers of the Fordist era.(19)

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a certain technological and institutionalist determinism underpins this analysis. A new "principle of mechanism" is introduced, which requires for its realization a new principle of consumption, and a new "canalization" of class struggle. But missing in such descriptions is any direct, historical consideration of capital accumulation. Indeed, radical Fordist theorists, in this respect, seem to have taken over some of the failings of the old institutionalist economics of the New Era, which based its analysis both on the mystique of a new technological order and on an implicit "underconsumptionist" frame of reference, without directly addressing the problem of investment. Indeed, it was only after Keynes and Kalecki demonstrated, in reaction to the Great Depression, that investment, in an advanced capitalist economy, was not a simple byproduct of the savings/consumption relationship, but the major direct determinant of economic growth, that the fallacy of all approaches that tried to deal with realization crises (or the problem of effective demand) by focusing merely on consumption and savings was revealed. A complete understanding of the laws of motion of advanced capitalism requires that one deal not only with the way in which the surplus product of society is generated, but also with the degree to which it is actually utilized to reproduce and expand the basic character of the system through new capital formation.