Fordism - Fordism in Western Europe

Fordism in Western Europe

According to historian Charles Maier, Fordism proper was preceded in Europe by Taylorism, a technique of labor discipline and workplace organization, based upon supposedly scientific studies of human efficiency and incentive systems. It attracted European intellectuals — especially in Germany and Italy — at the fin de siècle and up until World War I.

After 1918, however, the goal of Taylorist labor efficiency thought in Europe moved to "Fordism", that is, reorganization of the entire productive process by means of the moving assembly line, standardization, and the mass market. The grand appeal of Fordism in Europe was that it promised to sweep away all the archaic residues of pre-capitalist society by subordinating the economy, society and even human personality to the strict criteria of technical rationality. The Great Depression blurred the utopian vision of American technocracy, but World War II and its aftermath have revived the ideal.

The principles of Taylorism were quickly picked up by Vladimir Lenin and applied to the industrialisation of the Soviet Union.

Later under the inspiration of Antonio Gramsci, Marxists picked up the Fordism concept in the 1930s and in the 1970s developed "Post-Fordism." Antonio and Bonanno (2000) trace the development of Fordism and subsequent economic stages, from globalization through neoliberal globalization, during the 20th century, emphasizing America's role in globalization. "Fordism" for Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci meant routinized and intensified labor to promote production. Antonio and Bonanno argue that Fordism peaked in the post-World War II decades of American dominance and mass consumerism but collapsed due to political and cultural attacks on the people in the 1970s. Advances in technology and the end of the Cold War ushered in a new "neoliberal" phase of globalization in the 1990s. Antonio and Bonanno further suggest that negative elements of Fordism, such as economic inequality, remained, allowing related cultural and environmental troubles that inhibited America's pursuit of democracy to surface.