The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

128 Political-economic capitalist transformationFordism in the inter-war years. To begin with, the state of classrelations throughout the capitalist world was hardly conducive to theeasy acceptance of a production system that rested so heavily .u p onthe socialization of the worker to long hours of purely routlll1zedlabour, demanding little in the way of traditional craft skills, ndconceding almost negligible control to the worker over the desl n,pace, and scheduling of the production process. ord had rel edalmost exclusively on immigrant labour to set up hIs ssembly-ḷllleproduction system, but the immigrants learned, and native Amencanworkers were hostile. The turnover in Ford's labour force provedimpressively high. Taylorism was likewise fiercely resisted in the1920s and some commentators, such as Richard Edwards (1979),insist ' that worker opposition roundly defeated the implantation ofsuch techniques in most industries, in spite of capitalist dominationof labour markets, the continued flow of immigrant labour, and thecapacity to mobilize labour reserves from rural (and sometimes black)America. In the rest of the capitalist world, labour organization andcraft traditions were simply too strong, and immigration too w ak,to permit Fordism or Taylorism any easy purchase on productIOn,even though the general principles of scientific management werewidely accepted and applied. In this regard, Henri Fayol's Administrationindustrielle et generale (published in 1916) proved a muchmore influential text in Europe than did Taylor'S. With its emphasisupon organizational structures and hierarchical orering of aut?orityand information flow, it gave rise to a rather dIfferent verSIOn ofrationalized management compared to Taylor'S preoccupation withsimplifying the horizontal flow of produc ion processes . . . Massproductionassembly-line technology, s ott1ly Implanted III heUnited States, was very weakly developed m Europe before the mld-1930s. The European car industry, with the exception of Fiat's plantin Turin, remained for the most part a highly skilled craft industry(though corporately organized) producing up-market .cars for eliteconsumers, and was only lightly touched by assembly-Ime proceduresfor the mass production of cheaper models before World War II. Ittook a major revolution in class relations - a revolution that beganin the 1930s but which came to fruition only in the 1950s - toaccommodate the spread of Fordism to Europe.The second major barrier to be overcome lay in the modes andmechanisms of state intervention. A new mode of regulation had tobe devised to match the requirements of Fordist production and ittook the shock of savage depression and the near-collapse of capitalismin the 1930s to push capitalist societies to some new conception ofhow state powers should be conceived of and deployed. The crisisFordism 129appeared fundamentally as a lack of effective demand for product,and it was in those terms that the search for solutions began. Withthe benefit of hindsight, of course, we can more clearly see all of thedangers posed by national socialist movements. But in the light ofthe evident failure of democratic governments to do anything otherthan seem to compound the difficulties of an across-the-board economiccollapse, it is not hard to see the attraction of a politicalsolution in which workers were disciplined to new and more efficientproduction systems, and excess capacity was absorbed in partthrough productive expenditures on much needed infrastructures forboth production and consumption (the other part being allocated towasteful military expenditures). Not a few politicians and intellectuals(I cite the economist Schumpeter as an example) thought the kinds ofsolutions being explored in Japan, Italy, and Germany in the 1930s(stripped of their appeals to mythology, militarism, and racism) werealong the right lines, and supported Roosevelt's New Deal becausethey saw it precisely in that light. The democratic stasis of the 1920s(albeit class-bound) had to be overcome, many agreed, by a modicumof state authoritarianism and interventionism, for which very littleprecedent (save that of Japan's industrialization, or the Bonapartistinterventions of Second Empire France) could be found. Disillusionedby the inability of democratic governments to undertake what heconsidered essential tasks of modernization, Le Cor busier turnedfirst to syndicalism, and later to authoritarian regimes, as the onlypolitical forms capable of facing up to the crisis. The problem, as aneconomist like Keynes saw it, was to arrive at a set of scientificmanagerial strategies and state powers that would stabilize capitalism,while avoiding the evident repressions and irrationalities, all thewarmongering and narrow nationalism that national socialist solutionsimplied. It is in such a context of confusion that we have tounderstand the highly diversified attempts within different nationstates to arrive at political, institutional and social arrangements thatcould accommodate the chronic incapacities of capitalism to regulatethe essential conditions for its own reproduction.The problem of the proper configuration and deployment of statepowers was resolved only after 1945. This brought Fordism to maturityas a fully-fledged and distinctive regime of accumulation. Assuch, it then formed the basis for a long postwar boom that stayedbroadly intact until 1973. During that period, capitalism in the advancedcapitalist countries achieved strong but relatively stable ratesof economic growth (see figure 2.1 and table 2.1). Living standardsrose -(figure 2.2), crisis tendencies were contained, mass democracywas preserved and the threat of inter-capitalist wars kept remote.