Annotated bibliography guide and reference

Lipietz, Alain. (1987). Mirages and miracles. London: Verso, (Chapter 2): 29-46.

During the postwar era, one of the dominant strains of thought to emerge supporting the capitalist ideology was that of 'Fordism,' named after the founder of the Ford Motor company, Henry Ford. Fordism promised the lower and middle classes access to relatively cheap commodities, in exchange for their labor in the service of large, industrialized companies. Ford's model of production can be directly linked to Taylorism, a philosophy of efficiency which stressed breaking worker activities into units, and creating a manufacturing chain that maximized speed and minimized extraneous worker movements. The philosophy of Taylorism was that workers were cogs in a larger industrial machine, and the machine was meant to serve the product and the factory owners, not the worker's needs, much less satisfy a worker's sense of individuality. However, the methods of scientific industrial production created a system that rendered a much wider segment of the consuming public capable of becoming purchasers.

During the Roaring 20s, one of the most frequently-cited causes of the stock market crash was the expansion of production facilities while fewer and fewer Americans could afford to buy goods and services. This was because of the wide discrepancies of income between the haves and have-nots. Ford made it easier and less expensive to buy goods and services. Fordism, critics contended, drained individualism and creativity from American production, and replaced made-by-hand with made-by machine. However, regulations by the state that mandated minimum wages and the availability of credit to make purchasers of items such as cars further drove the engine of American prosperity forward. The dire predictions of Marx regarding the negative effects of capitalism upon workers, in which factory owners exploited workers and made money simply by 'renting' worker labor to produce more goods and services than the worker could possibly use seemed to be undercut by the rapid improvement of the American postwar economy and the improved plight of the average worker.

The rapid expansion of American manufacturing power was not due to purely domestic circumstances. Post-war, because the American economy was so strong relative to Europe and Japan, America had a wide array of venues in which to sell its products. This is why the postwar era is often called a kind of Golden Age of American manufacturing. America dominated all major industries and the dollar was the world standard of currency. However, as Fordist philosophies gradually began to be adopted by other nations, and with the growing prosperity of Japan and Europe, high wages began to have an unfavorable impact upon the prices of American consumer goods.