#fordism

[probablyasocialecologist]

In contrast to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Juliet Schor writes, rising productivity after the Second World War ceased to be used as a reason to shorten the working day. ‘Instead, growth in productivity was turned into higher income and used towards the expansion of output. Wages and profits rose. Productivity and increases in real wages were even explicitly tied together. This raised the demand for consumption, because money was flowing into people’s pockets.’ People surrendered a potential increase in available disposable time for the opportunity to consume more. That is the essence of the ‘Fordist class compromise’, which became the basis of the comparatively stable development of the capitalist centres after the Second World War.

The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism

[azspot]

Muskism: a book, an economic model, a horror film

Slobodian and Tarnoff's book gives a lot of insight into Elon Musk's machinations and motivations and four dark futures I don't want to come true.

Fordism refers to the interrelated system of culture and political economy that reigned for much of the post-war era in the United States. As many U.S. school children of my generation learned, Ford not only advanced the use of a Taylorized assembly line in order to reduce the costs and increase the production of his Model T cars, he also aspired to give his employees enough wages that they could afford to buy one of these vehicles themselves. He therefore linked the mode of mass production with a mode of regulation centered around mass consumption. This helped to not only create a broad consumer base that would be profitably purchasing the cars, it also encouraged workers to continue to participate in the wage labor force for a reason other than the threats of violence and death that were the main tools of capitalist market discipline up until that point.

After the Great Depression, the labor struggles that followed, and the Second World War, there was a brief consensus in many western countries that capitalism as a political economic system would be better served by this model: expanding the state, taxing the rich, and increasing the social wage (using federal loan guarantees, unemployment insurance, old age insurance and a baseline form of health care) in order to incorporate workers into the system. While this system was far from evenly distributed - particularly in terms of race and ethnicity - it functioned smoothly and produced unprecedented growth rates: the U.S. GDP growth from 1949 - 1973 was generally between 5% and 7% a year (compared to about 2-2.5% or lower for most of the 21st century).

[thoughtportal]

Capitalism produces crises, and crises reproduce capitalism. We need an ecosocialist way out. full video

[quotesfromall]

the worker, who works for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads - etc does he consider this twelve hours' weaving, spinning, drilling turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him when this activity ceases, at the table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours' labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc. but as earnings which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed.

Karl Marx, Estranged Labour

[teachanarchy]

Watch "Is Productivity Killing Us?" on YouTube

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Fifteen minutes for lunch, three minutes to go to the toilet, the Taylorized speed up everywhere, reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, shove in cotterpin, reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, reachunderadjustscrewdownreachunderadjust, until every ounce of life was sucked off into production and at night the workmen went home gray shaking husks.” - John Dos Passos, The Big Money, 1936 p. 75.

[zwischenstadt]

Particularly problematic here is the tendency to see the welfare state as external to the risk dynamics of capitalism and to view its effects in terms of the decommodification of labor.  Conceptually inclined historians such as Ewald (1986) and Castel (2003) have insisted, by contrast, that the midtwentieth-century welfare state was never external to the market but rather central in organizing its risk logic.  The welfare state represented less a "balance" between a capitalist economy and a social-democratic polity than an integration of the population into the mechanisms of capitalism in ways that transformed those mechanisms at their core.  If the work of these authors has focused mostly on Europe, such insights hold a fortiori for the United States, whose welfare state was always a capitalist institution in more overt ways.  Class compromise was brokered not through the suppression of finance but precisely through its state-sponsored expansion.  The most significant aspects of this were the creation of the so-called government-sponsored enterprises, which supported the ability of the financial system to flexibly extend various forms of household credit; and the institution of deposit insurance, which undercut the phenomenon of bank runs and so permitted a normalization of the role of commercial banks in everyday life.  The post-New Deal era saw the progressive socialization of American workers into the mechanisms of credit and debt.  The emergence of a Fordist regime of full employment and a living wage was never the foundation of an unindebted life or the suppression of finance, as many now imagine, but was precisely the basis on which households entered into contracts of consumer and mortgage credit.  In an important sense, the New Deal was a key step in the direction of what under neoliberalism has become more recognizable as "the capitalization of almost everything" (Leyshon and Thrift 2007), the measurement of human capacities in terms of their ability to provide a flow of revenues (cf. Nitzan and Bichler 2009:158).

Martijn Konings, Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason

[miss-radical]

Fordism

P.S. I made up the term fordism.

A fordist is a leftist man who claims to be of progressive ideals yet still harbors sexist opinions.

He will protest the exploitation of all living things -sometimes through ideologies like veganism or pacifism - yet views pornography in his free time. The dehumanization of women doesn’t bother him, he can watch them be degraded and brutalized endlessly in porn, yet swears himself to be against sexual violence. If he is not entirely ignorant then he will agree that the porn industry is not safe for women, and he solves this issue by watching animated porn(hentai) instead. He will condemn wife battery whenever it is mentioned, yet has no problem with bondage and sadism as fetishes and may be aroused by battery himself.

The worst lie the fordist tells however is not directly related to women or pornography - no, his worst lie is that he calls himself a leftist. He does this while demonstrating little understanding of class analysis or basic leftist theory. He wants equality for all people and no sense of the political or economic means of achieving that. Instead he rambles on about how badly he feels for the oppressed and how progressive and open-minded he is.

The fordist is a lazy man trying to absolve his guilt. He will remind those around him of how badly he feels to have privilege, but refuses to think critically about his own choices. To him, misogyny is an individual issue, and he believes this because he does not understand the class analysis involved in leftist theory. Because he does not personally commit misogyny, there is no way he could hold sexist opinions. Until he begins to accept that women are an oppressed class of people, which he will not, he won’t begin to think critically about his choices. But still he does not experience guilt over this because he is not committing a direct act. You may confront him about this, but in his mind he is not guilty and he cannot be swayed.