Fordism

But we could not identify each other anymore because the thing about punk was you could identify each other by your individuality.

And then when it becomes marketed and manufactured and mass produced, then you just have the Fordist production line, right? You can't really tell who's

who anymore.

It used to You know where I met Tequila?

In many ways, this is particular to the World War II period or the world wars from World War I to World War II.

Those who analyze political economy sometimes use the word Fordism to describe sort of Henry Ford Motor Company and how its mode of mass society and mass work pervaded the industries of the time from World War I to World War II.

I think that can be thought of as well for the armed forces where you actually had mass draft and conscription as well as mass infantry service and service in other supply and non-combat roles.

This is part of that triumphalist story.

And so World War II is an interesting period because sometimes that critical perspective, certainly a left critique of unions as becoming more bureaucratic and becoming brokers with business and government, it focuses on the Cold War years and later decades.

And so I think one of the reasons I study World War II is because you see a lot of the dynamism in different directions, right? Where some union leaders are navigating being responsive to sort of militant bases or even to civil rights pushes by more militant black workers, while others are finding themselves seeing an opportunity, but also a compromise in being part of what are government planning boards that also are military planning boards.

That raises a bigger question of a sort of welfare warfare state that comes out of the FDR years where social security, the big word of Franklin Roosevelt's welfare and labor state, was tied to national security as well.

And participating in some war planning boards seemed like a social democratic or industrial democratic opening.

They can be used against unpopular minorities to silence their speech, and, you know, that's antithetical to everything they're working for.

And so this is not just when it comes to the NAACP and trying to fight against, um, things like the KKK's resurgence, right? You talk about this in civil society groups that are trying to fight back against sort of Fordist antisemitism roughly in the same sort of time.

Is that right?

Yeah.

And I think there's something important to say about th- going back to, like, the context in which they're operating, which is that none of these people had any proper jobs [laughs].

You know, I'm saying this sounding like a conservative here, but, like, you know, they, it was anti-work politics in a way, and they were able to survive on odd jobs and not, you know, have to have a nine-to-five or kind of, like, fit into that kind of Fordist kind conceptualization of, of what work was.

But that was only possible, I suppose, under certain conditions.

We haven't talked about Lefebvre.

You know, like Marx says, you can be a critic in the morning and a fisherman in the evening.

And it becomes really appealing to people in that post-war context, partly because everyday life becomes so boring.

I mean, this is that great point, you know, by that famous Plan C document that we like to cite about how boredom becomes, like, the dominant affect of the post-war period, because that, that is like the side effect of Fordism, the side effect of the great Fordist social compromise is, right, revolution's off the table now, but you are all gonna have, like, stable jobs, careers, and homes for the rest of your lives.

And it does mean, you know, people feel like something's lost, like a sense of adventure, a sense of danger, and a sense of possibility all seem to be lost compared to the way in which people are experiencing things.

Um, okay, so our thought for the day comes from a gentleman, uh, a great American industrialist and business, um, person and, um, and that is Henry Ford, who was an American industrial and business m- um, person, as I said.

As founder of the Ford Motor Company, he is credited as pioneer in making automobiles affordable, and boy, did he make them affordable, uh, for the middle class Americans through a system he called to be known as Fordism.

And F- and then I don't think that took because, um, I didn't even know what Fordism was until I started doing his quotes.

Um, he is the one that developed, uh, um, the assembly line process, the workflow.

It's a workflow.

And you had a bunch of second international socialists in Europe just infatuated with America back in the day.

They just loved it, right? And even the ones who are very critical of it, like it gets this American, I don't know, like American Orientalism gets inherited by the Bolsheviks even when they start to talk about, well, we need like these Fordist style factories and American style electrification, right? Because they're obsessed with the forward edge of liberalism, right? And so in my opinion, There's absolutely no ambiguity about it.

China is the world leader in reinventing liberalism today.

It calls it socialism or whatever.

It's couched in different language, but in other ways, it's not.

Like you had people talking about Bismarckian Germany as an example of state socialism, right? And the same thing with Meiji Japan.

And you had a bunch of second international socialists in Europe just infatuated with America, right? uh back in the day they just loved it right and even even the ones who are very critical of it like it gets it gets um this american i don't know like american orientalism um gets uh it inherited by the Bolsheviks, even, when they start to talk about, well, we need these Fordist-style factories and American-style electrification, right? Because they're obsessed with the forward edge of liberalism, right? And so, in my opinion, there's absolutely no ambiguity about it.

China is the world leader in reinventing liberalism today it calls it socialism or whatever it doesn't actually call it socialism if you read the theory it's um it's setting the stages for future socialism it's just a market society right uh but it's the leading edge in both ideological and like reinventions of liberalism, and in the actual material experimentation that is what gives capitalism its vitality.

Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979, and that project is an explicit example project to try and dismantle the kind of emancipatory subjects and the life worlds around those subjects that suffused throughout the post-war period.

So the South Yorkshire miner, the Fordist factory worker, the black textile worker, the female domestic laborer, for example, all of these different emancipatory subjects that constituted different social movements and different struggles after the Second World War.

And, you know, like you said, really put the fear into the capitalist class on the one hand, brought down Tory governments, like in 1974, on the other hand.

And for me, there's a kind of rational kernel to all this, which is that you have different types of capitalism throughout the history of capitalism.

So one of the findings is that it's about AI, but it's not about AI.

Effectively, you know, there is lots of different threats in the workplace from technology, from automation, and those are continuous from a lot of prior fights, thinking all the way back to, you know, the factory line and the development of Fordism.

And so thinking about that, it is highlighting not talking about AI threat, but thinking about technological threat and what it means to control that and have some ways in which workers have a say.

So that's number one.