Lecture 11 - post-fordism

Question 1

Fordism

Answer 1

Fordism was a strategic response to social unrest, offering workers a better deal in exchange for stability and productivity. But it also relied on ideological tools to create consensus and compliance, embedding capitalist values into everyday life.

Question 2

Social Compromise of fordism

Answer 2

Fordism offered higher wages and some political representation to workers.
In return, workers were expected to provide labor discipline, higher productivity, and social peace.

Question 3

Positive Side-Effect of fordism: Mass Consumption

Answer 3

Higher wages meant workers could now afford the products they made, like Ford cars.
This created a consumer society, where mass production was matched by mass consumption—a key feature of Fordist capitalism.

Question 4

Ideological Cooptation

Answer 4

This involved shaping public values and norms to align with the needs of the system.
One example is promoting the breadwinner model of the family: The man works in the factory and earns a family wage. The woman stays at home and takes care of the household. This model naturalized gender roles and helped stabilize the workforce and society.

Question 5

Post-fordism

Answer 5

Post-Fordism is marked by: Flexible labor, outsourcing, and entrepreneurial self-management for workers. Competitive inclusion and identity-based value for the previously excluded. A shift from productive capitalism to financial capitalism for capitalists.

Question 6

3 groups in post-fordism

Answer 6

1. Workers
2. The excluded
3. Capitalists

Question 7

Workers in post-fordism

Answer 7

Fordism offered stable jobs, higher wages, and social peace in exchange for productivity.
Post-Fordism replaces this with:
Flexibility: Jobs are less secure, often freelance or contract-based.
Factories move abroad: To reduce costs, production is outsourced to countries with cheaper labor.
Individual freedom and entrepreneurship: Workers are encouraged to see themselves as self-managing entrepreneurs, responsible for their own success.

Question 8

The excluded in post-fordism

Answer 8

Post-Fordism doesn’t just exclude—it also redefines inclusion:
More people are brought into the labor market, including women, minorities, and migrants. But this inclusion is based on competitive meritocracy—you must prove your worth. Under progressive neoliberalism, people are encouraged to mobilize their “difference” (e.g., gender, ethnicity, creativity) as human capital—a resource to be marketed and monetized.

Question 9

Capitalists in post-fordism

Answer 9

The logic of capital also shifts:
From industrial profit (making and selling goods) to wealth extraction (e.g., financial speculation, rent-seeking).
From retain-and-reinvest (investing in long-term growth) to maximizing shareholder value (short-term financial returns).
This leads to financialization, where the economy is dominated by the interests of investors and markets.

Question 10

Post-fordism new labour regime: immaterial labour

Answer 10

Post-Fordism shifts labor from producing things to producing ideas, symbols, and emotions. It celebrates creativity and flexibility, but also makes labor more precarious and harder to evaluate in terms of fairness or exploitation.

Question 11

Effect of immaterial: Disappearance of Surplus Value Measurement

Answer 11

In classical (Marxist) economics, surplus value is the difference between what a worker is paid and the value they produce. In immaterial labor, value is diffuse, intangible, and hard to measure—it’s not tied to a physical product. This makes it difficult to calculate exploitation in traditional terms, even though it still exists.

Question 12

2 major problems with post-fordism

Answer 12

1. labor precarity
2. the exploitation of the commons

Question 13

Labor Precarity

Answer 13

In Post-Fordism, work is often flexible, freelance, or project-based. While this is framed as “freedom” or “entrepreneurship,” it often comes at the cost of economic security. Social consequence: this insecurity leads to nostalgia for the Fordist era of stable, industrial jobs. That nostalgia can fuel populist movements, which promise to restore lost stability and national pride.

Question 14

Exploitation of the Commons

Answer 14

Commons are shared resources not owned by any one person or institution. Much of immaterial labor (e.g., social media content, open-source software, cultural production) is created through spontaneous human interaction—not in a factory, but in everyday life. These common goods are often privatized through mechanisms like:
Intellectual property rights, Copyrights and patents, Platform capitalism (e.g., social media companies profiting from user-generated content)
Result: The value created by the public is captured by private corporations, without fair compensation or recognition.