Here is another version of Post-Fordism and geographical scattering of the
industrial points of production
Charles Brown charlesb at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Apr 28 19:52: 1998
To: Dave
From: Charles
Here's some more on globalization as
a qualitative shift from what Lenin defined
as imperialism, monopoly capitalism; the
uniting of financial and industrial capital;
export of capital as a shift from export of
goods; the "advanced" European colonialist
countries dividing and redividing the world;
socalled world wars, meaning all European
wars.monopoly concentration; labour aristocracy bought off with
superprofits of booty from colonialism; etc. etc.; electricity, trains,
assembly line as technological innovations
in the means of production.
Gramsciians would say the culture of this
was Fordism, as discussed below.
From ground zero of Fordism here in Detroit, we experienced the last 45
years of change from the classic big industrial plant (such as Ford Dearborn
with 100,000 workers)concentration to scattering of the points of production as
plantclosings, runaway shops, and white flight to the suburbs. So the
transition to so-called post-Fordism got our attention real good and we've been
trying to figure it in Marxist political economic terms.
It occurred to me that the "new global economy", transnationalization
of monopoly capital represents a dialectical qualitative change in the
following sense.
Marx in Capital defines two factors in the
qualitiative emergence of industrial capitalism over manufacture capitalism.
They are the use of machinery and the concentration of workers in one big
factory.
Thus, the graphic locus of the classic Leninist agitation and propaganda
the giant industrial plant.
The qualitative change of today is the the revolution in science and technology
which has begotten a revolution in transportation and communication, creating
such things as just in time
delivery, containerization . Thus a revolution in machinery, one of the
original two breakthroughs in Marx's analysis of industrialization, has
made it possible for the capitalists to decentralize and scatter the points of
production. The end of Fordism is the end of the big plant. The capitalist can
move parts etc around so fast that they do not need the efficiency of
concentrating workers in big plants, in ghettoes in the city, the whole ball of
wax that gave rise to Leninist tactics in the class struggle by which workers
got a sense of their power by their great numbers etc. This allows some undoing
of the revolutionary combination referred to in the “Manifesto of the Communist
Party “
“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital
is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the
labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the
bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by
the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern
Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007
I suggest the above infrastructural sketch as
corresponding to the cultural change now
named post-Fordism.
But don't count the proletariat out. The slogan
workers of the world unite , is more true today
than when Marx and Engels coined it. And the
proletariat is fresher than post-Fordist theory might know. In other words,
the proletariat knows how to go with the new. Detroiters probably could show
post-ologists ( so-called post-modernists , post-structuralists) a thing or
two about what is new.
The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk of Fordism
from Proletarian Central, Detroit
Charles
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#4868): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4868
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79242940/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
