Fordism
포드주의
A system of production and society in which standardised goods are mass-produced on assembly lines by unskilled labour at low cost, and workers are paid enough to buy them, so that mass production meshes with mass consumption. It is named after Henry Ford's car factories. Gramsci developed it as a concept in "Americanism and Fordism" (1934), and in the 1970s the French regulation school explained the post-war golden age as a "Fordist regime of accumulation" in which productivity, wages and demand pulled one another up.
In depth
The Ford Motor Company was one of several hundred small car makers founded between 1890 and 1910. The Model T, launched on 1 October 1908, was simple and light yet sturdy enough for primitive country roads, and its price, $825 in the first year, fell every year; by 1918 half the cars in the United States were Model Ts. Ford's most original contribution was breaking complex tasks into simpler ones done with specialised tools. The assembly line itself had already been used in slaughterhouses, but Ford combined it far more effectively. The result cut the manpower a factory needed and deskilled labour, lowering production costs.
The broken-down tasks were gruelling and monotonous, and turnover approached 400 percent a year. On 5 January 1914 Ford announced that he was raising the minimum daily pay of qualifying male workers from $2.34 to $5, more than double what most of his workers earned. The best mechanics flocked to Ford, productivity rose, training costs fell, and workers could afford the cars they made. Ford, however, called labour unions "the worst thing that ever struck the earth", and on 26 May 1937 company security men beat organisers of the United Automobile Workers with clubs in the "Battle of the Overpass".
The term Fordism gained prominence when Antonio Gramsci used it in his 1934 prison notebook essay "Americanism and Fordism", and it has since been used mainly in the Marxist tradition. For Gramsci it meant routine, intensified labour to promote production. In 1918 Lenin, in "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government", called the Taylor system "a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements", yet wrote that the Soviet Republic must adopt all that was valuable in it. In Europe after 1918, Fordism, the reorganisation of the entire productive process by the moving assembly line, standardisation and the mass market, also attracted intellectuals.
In the 1970s the French regulation school made Fordism a concept for an era. In its account, after 1930 and above all after the Second World War, mass production was paired with mass consumption: rising productivity raised wages, and rising incomes raised demand and investment, a "virtuous circle of growth". It was sustained by institutions, a mode of regulation, such as collective bargaining and wage setting, the Keynesian state and the Bretton Woods international regime. The crash of 1929 is explained as the crisis of a regime of accumulation with mass production but without mass consumption. For the period after the system faltered in the 1970s, the term "post-Fordism" is used, marked by information technology, niche markets, the predominance of services, globalised finance and the end of jobs for life.