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”."

(https://thecommoner.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Gambino-A-critique-of-Fordism-and-the-Regulation-School.pdf)

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.

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:

1. Robert Boyer, La théorie de la régulation: une analyse critique, Paris, La Découverte, 1986;
2. Robert Boyer (ed.), Capitalismes fin de siécle, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1986;
3. Alain Lipietz, “Towards Global Fordism?”, New Left Review no. 132 (March-April 1982), pp. 33-47;
4. Alain Lipietz, “Imperialism as the Beast of the Apocalypse”, Capital and Class, no. 22 (Spring 1984), pp. 81-109;
5. 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;
6. Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: the Crisis of Global Fordism, London, Verso, 1987;
7. 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;
8. Benjamin Coriat, Penser á l’envers. Travail et organisation dans l’entreprise japonaise, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1991;
9. Italian translation, Ripensare l’organizzazione del lavoro. Concetti e prassi del modello giapponese, Bari, Dedalo, 1991, with introduction and translation by Mirella Giannini.