#fordism

In contrast to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Juliet Schor writes, rising productivity after the Second World War ceased to be used as a reason to shorten the working day. ‘Instead, growth in productivity was turned into higher income and used towards the expansion of output. Wages and profits rose. Productivity and increases in real wages were even explicitly tied together. This raised the demand for consumption, because money was flowing into people’s pockets.’ People surrendered a potential increase in available disposable time for the opportunity to consume more. That is the essence of the ‘Fordist class compromise’, which became the basis of the comparatively stable development of the capitalist centres after the Second World War.

the worker, who works for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads - etc does he consider this twelve hours' weaving, spinning, drilling turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him when this activity ceases, at the table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours' labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc. but as earnings which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed.

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Particularly problematic here is the tendency to see the welfare state as external to the risk dynamics of capitalism and to view its effects in terms of the decommodification of labor.  Conceptually inclined historians such as Ewald (1986) and Castel (2003) have insisted, by contrast, that the midtwentieth-century welfare state was never external to the market but rather central in organizing its risk logic.  The welfare state represented less a "balance" between a capitalist economy and a social-democratic polity than an integration of the population into the mechanisms of capitalism in ways that transformed those mechanisms at their core.  If the work of these authors has focused mostly on Europe, such insights hold a fortiori for the United States, whose welfare state was always a capitalist institution in more overt ways.  Class compromise was brokered not through the suppression of finance but precisely through its state-sponsored expansion.  The most significant aspects of this were the creation of the so-called government-sponsored enterprises, which supported the ability of the financial system to flexibly extend various forms of household credit; and the institution of deposit insurance, which undercut the phenomenon of bank runs and so permitted a normalization of the role of commercial banks in everyday life.  The post-New Deal era saw the progressive socialization of American workers into the mechanisms of credit and debt.  The emergence of a Fordist regime of full employment and a living wage was never the foundation of an unindebted life or the suppression of finance, as many now imagine, but was precisely the basis on which households entered into contracts of consumer and mortgage credit.  In an important sense, the New Deal was a key step in the direction of what under neoliberalism has become more recognizable as "the capitalization of almost everything" (Leyshon and Thrift 2007), the measurement of human capacities in terms of their ability to provide a flow of revenues (cf. Nitzan and Bichler 2009:158).

Fordism