Fordism: mass production system created by Henry Ford

Fordism, a specific stage of economic development in the 20th century. Fordism is a term widely used to describe the mass production system that was pioneered in the early 20th century. by the Ford Motor Company or the typical post-war mode of economic growth and its political and social order in capitalism advanced.

From origins to crisis

Henry Ford helped to popularize the first meaning in the 1920s, and Fordism came to mean modernity in general. For example, writing in prison in the interwar period, Italian communist Antônio Gramsci discussed the economic, political, and social obstacles to transfers. from Americanism and Fordism to continental Europe and highlighted its potential for transformative power when controlled by workers rather than conservative forces. Gramsci's comments inspired research into postwar Fordism and its crisis.

In its second meaning, Fordism was analyzed in four dimensions. First, as an industrial paradigm, it involves mass production of standardized products on a mobile assembly line using dedicated machinery and semi-skilled labor. Second, as a national regime of accumulation (or growth), it involves a virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption. Third, as a mode of regulation, Fordism comprises: an institutionalized commitment between work organized and big business in which workers accept management prerogatives in exchange for wages crescents; monopolistic competition between big companies based on the most expensive price and advertising; centralized finance capital, credit-based deficit financing and mass consumption, state intervention to ensure full employment and establish a welfare state; and incorporation of national economies into a liberal international economic order. Fourth, as a form of social life, Fordism is characterized by mass media, mass transport and mass politics.

The Fordist mode of growth became dominant in advanced capitalism during post-war reconstruction and is often credited with facilitating the long post-war boom. During the 1970s, however, its underlying trends in the crisis became more evident. The growth potential of mass production was gradually exhausted and the resistance of the working class to its alienating working conditions intensified; the market for durable mass consumer goods has become saturated; a declining rate of profit coincided with stagflation; a full-blown fiscal crisis; internationalization made state economic management less effective; clients began to reject standardized and bureaucratic welfare state treatment; and American economic dominance and political hegemony were threatened by European and East Asian expansion. These phenomena have led to a broad search for solutions to the Fordism crisis, either by restoring its typical dynamics of growth to produce a neo-Fordist regime or developing a new post-Fordist accumulation regime and a way of regulation.

The term post-Fordism is used to describe both a relatively durable form of economic organization that has emerged. after Fordism as a new form of economic organization that really solves the crisis tendencies of the Fordism. In neither case does the term as such have any real positive content. That is why some theorists propose substantial alternatives, such as Toyotism, Fujitsuism, seismism and gatesism or, again, informational capitalism, the knowledge-based economy and the network economy. Social scientists have taken three main approaches to identifying the post-Fordist regime: a focus on the transformative role of new technologies and related practices to material and immaterial production, especially new information and communication technologies and their role in facilitating a new and more flexible global economy in network; focus on key economic sectors that enable the transition from industrial mass production to post-industrial production; and a focus on how the main crisis trends of Fordism are resolved through the consolidation of a new and stable series of economic and extra-economic institutions and forms of governance that facilitate the rise and consolidation of new processes, products and markets profitable... However, even decades after the Fordist crisis erupted in the mid-1970s, debates continue over whether an order stable post-Fordism emerged and, indeed, if Fordist stability was a parenthesis in a disorderly capitalist system subject to crises.

See too: Socialism

Those who believe that a stable post-Fordism has already emerged, or at least is viable, seeing its main features such as: flexible production based on flexible machines or systems and a workforce flexible; a stable mode of growth based on flexible production, economies of scope, rising incomes for skilled workers, and class of service, increased demand for differentiated goods and services, growing profits based on permanent and full innovation use of flexible capacity, reinvestment in more flexible equipment and production techniques, and new product sets, and so on. onwards; growing economic polarization between multi-skilled and unskilled workers, along with a decline in national or industrial collective bargaining; the emergence of flexible, lean, and networked companies that focus on their core competencies, build strategic alliances, and outsource many other activities; the dominance of hypermobile, rootless, private banking credit and forms of cybercash that circulate internationally; the subordination of government finances to international currency and foreign exchange markets; a shift from post-war welfare states (as described by John Maynard Keynes) to political regimes more concerned with international competitiveness and innovation, with full employability as opposed to lifelong jobs and with forms of economic governance and social; and growing concern with the governance of local, regional, supranational and even global economies.

These features of post-Fordism are unevenly developed, and there are important continuities with Fordist conditions, even in advanced capitalist economies. Post-Fordism can also take different forms in different contexts. And while some commentators believe that post-Fordism will prove stable, others argue that the inherent contradictions of capitalism mean that it is no more likely to prove stable than Fordism. before him.

Fordism

Henry Ford

Henry Ford was an American entrepreneur and mechanical engineer, founder of Ford Motor Company, author of My Industry Philosophy and Minha life and my work, and the first entrepreneur to apply serial assembly in order to mass-produce cars in less time and at a lower cost. cost.