Fordism
Description
Ferruccio Gambino:
"When they use the term Fordism, the regulation school are referring essentially to a system of production based on the assembly line, which is capable of relatively high industrial productivity. The regulationists’ attention is directed not so much to the well documented inflexibility of the Fordist process of production, to the necessary deskilling of the workforce, to the rigidity of Fordism’s structure of command and its productive and social hierarchy, nor to the forms and contents of industrial conflict generated within it, but to the regulation of relations of production by the state, operating as a locus of mediation and institutional reconciliation between social forces. I shall call this interpretation “regulationist Fordism”."
Source: The English version of this paper appeared in 1996 in Common Sense no. 19 and was subsequently published as a chapter in Werner Bonefeld (ed), Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays In Post-Political Politics Writing, New York, Autonomedia, 2003.
Periodization
"In what follows I shall outline briefly the periodisation which the inventors of the regulationist notion of Fordism have given their idea, because this is crucial if we are to understand the ways in which it is semantically distinct from pre-trade union Fordism; I shall then sketch the basic characteristics of the latter. According to the regulation school, Fordism penetrated the vital ganglia of the US engineering industry and became its catalysing force in a period that is undefined, but presumably in the 1920s, delivering high wages and acting as the cutting edge of the mass consumption of consumer durables. Having passed through the mill of the Great Depression and the Second World War, Fordism then provided the basis for the expansion of Keynesian effective demand in the United States, where it provided the underpinning for a “welfare” regime, and thus for a stable global social reproduction, presumably from the end of the 1940s onwards. In the 1950s, this system of production is seen as reaching out from the United States towards the countries of Western Europe, and Japan. According to the regulationist periodisation, therefore, the high season of Fordism actually turns out to be rather brief, since it converges—albeit only on paper—with Keynesianism at about the end of the 1930s; then it becomes a concrete reality at the start of the 1950s, and lasts through to the end of the 1960s, when it goes into irreversible crisis. In their view, that point sees the opening of the period—through which we are still passing—of post-Fordism. The regulation school can justifiably claim credit for the interpretation which associates transformations in the processes of valorisation with changes taking place in the socio-political sphere, and vice-versa. It was to make this position its own, and developed it with contributions on the state apparatus and its relations with modern and contemporary capital, in the writings of Hirsch and Roth in Germany and Jessop in Britain."
More information
"For the regulationist interpretation of Fordism prior to 1991,
- see the fundamental volume edited by Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, PostFordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State, London, Macmillan, 1991, which contains the principal bibliographical references for the debate.
For the regulation school see, among others, the following works:
- Robert Boyer, La théorie de la régulation: une analyse critique, Paris, La Découverte, 1986;
- Robert Boyer (ed.), Capitalismes fin de siécle, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1986;
- Alain Lipietz, “Towards Global Fordism?”, New Left Review no. 132 (March-April 1982), pp. 33-47;
- Alain Lipietz, “Imperialism as the Beast of the Apocalypse”, Capital and Class, no. 22 (Spring 1984), pp. 81-109;
- Alain Lipietz, “Behind the Crisis: the Exhaustion of a Regime of Accumulation. A ‘Regulation School Perspective’ on Some French Empirical Works”, Review of Radical Political Economy, vol. 18, no. 1-2 (1986), pp. 13-32;
- Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: the Crisis of Global Fordism, London, Verso, 1987;
- Alain Lipietz, “Fordism and post-Fordism” in W. Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore (eds.), The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 230-31;
- Benjamin Coriat, Penser á l’envers. Travail et organisation dans l’entreprise japonaise, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1991;
- Italian translation, Ripensare l’organizzazione del lavoro. Concetti e prassi del modello giapponese, Bari, Dedalo, 1991, with introduction and translation by Mirella Giannini.