From this time, Taylorism, a scientific approach to management which emerged alongside Fordism also went as far as to pick through employees' trash in order to monitor their behaviors and ensure they were conforming to the kind of persona that the production process required (Fuchs, 2012).
Moreover, Fordism coincided with McCarthyism, an ideological war intent on snuffing out political radicals that might threaten the balance. In fact, much of Ford’s ideological engineering of his employees happened under the banner of promoting “American Values.” Meanwhile, although much of this industrial labor force was heavily unionized during this time, enabling major concessions of the class compromise, these institutions were also subject to depoliticization, bureaucratization, and a staunch pressure to stamp out their more radical roots of labor organizing (Harvey, 1990).
Race, class, and gender under Fordism
Finally, while this period is subject to much nostalgia today – particularly in the rightwing discourse of slogans like MAGA (Make America Great Again) – the affinity of certain white nationalist groups reflects that during this time, the beneficiaries of the class compromise were highly stratified.
For one, labor itself was segmented between blue collar factory workers and white collar middle management. Within the ranks for the blue collar, there were often tensions brewing along racial and ethnic lines. For example, the immigrant labor force was often subject to much nativist strife and suspicion. Moreover, the processes of suburbanization associated with this period were highly racialized, barring access to African Americans and other minority groups who, due to redlining, were all but sequestered in cities despite an exodus of an emergent white middle class (Smith, 1996). Finally, the role of women during the era of Fordism as good homemakers and – by extension – consumers was notoriously an oppressive one that relegated them to the home and conditioned them to conform to strict gender roles as mothers, wives, and homemakers.
Therefore, despite efforts to create and maintain the kind of disciplined labor force required to meet the demands of the Fordist production process, there were often cracks in the seams. From this era, for instance, the Second Wave Feminist movement emerged as women challenged their place in the social milieu. For instance, Betty Friedan’s Feminist Mystique published in 1963 was a direct indictment of women’s place in the home during the Fordist years. It also coincided with the Civil Rights Movement and other forms of social unrest surrounding the free love and other nonconformist movements of the 1960s. While each of these movements are complex and multifaceted, Fordism’s decline was marked, among other things, by the resistance and disenchantment of the working class with the way life was structured during the decades following WWII.
What happened to Fordism? The Crisis of 1973
The delicate balance between different actors (state, capital, and labor) as summarized in the class compromise was a defining feature of Fordism, and scholars chart this era’s decline to when its market-constraining effects were no longer compatible with the ever-changing requirements of capitalism. Specifically, the Fordist mode of production – particularly in its nationalist, Keynesian iterations – began to recede when the economy went into crisis in 1973.
In fact, some of the very same qualities that enabled the economy to flourish under Fordism ultimately generated new problems over time. For instance, the more efficient industrial processes that enabled mass production created a market that was oversaturated with consumer products. This led to a decline in profit rates as commodity production began to outpace consumer demand. By the 1970s, the economy was also plagued by “stagflation,” thanks to an overaccumulation of wealth generated from the post-war economic boom.
As Alan Blindly defines it in his book, Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation (2013),
