Capitalism as original and ongoing dispossession
Home economics
Capitalism has taken many forms over its history in different places. In many respects, its days of greatest success are over, and we live in a new phase of capitalism.
Fordist production and a Fordist social contract
In the first half of the 20th century in industrialized, affluent, capitalist societies of “the West” (and especially after the second World War), the dominant model of production and consumption created a new structure for society.
Fordism (named for Henry Ford but the product of many) is a model of large-scale production of manufactured goods
Mass production is based on centralized control of manufacture by large firms to achieve the most efficient use of labor.
To be successful, mass production depends on the mass consumption of highly standardized goods, e.g. cars, home applicances.
The Fordist industrial model is also a new social contract, a new normative idea of people’s entitlements and obligations as members of the society.
Mass production also depends on mass employment of low-skill labor, creating opportunities for greater social mobility and wealth accumulation [mostly for whites in the US; see Florida and Feldman (1988)].
Mass employment creates greater collective power for the labor movement, who claim more and more of a share of the profits of Fordist enterprise.
The Fordist social contract is also a specific “sexual contract” between men and women, who must play distinct, interdependent, unequal roles (Wajcman 1998, 38; see also Pateman [1988] 2018).
The husband and father is the sole breadwinner for a family. Men’s wages ideally should support a conjugal heterosexual household, including a spouse and children.
Women as wives and mothers are primarily if not exclusively responsible for childcare and maintenance of the family’s needs.
And then it was over.
What kind of “social contract” have you lived under?
Take a look at this Mentimeter poll.
Go to https://menti.com. Type in code 2944 2797.
You can also go to this URL: https://www.menti.com/alycu4c8bqdb.
Select as many as apply to the household you grew up in.
Hypothesis: Our class is very diverse and the “breadwinner” model only applies to some, but not all of us.
After Fordism, a new kind of global capitalism and a new kind of household
Mass production can only be made so efficient (and consumers can only consume so much stuff). As the economy it sustains continues to grow, the large firms at its heart make less and less profit. The system inevitably falls into crisis.
Wages stagnate, prices rise, families come to depend on two incomes (Harvey 1989, 147–53; see also Fraser [1997] 2013).
Capitalist firms in affluent societies use their economic power to pressure states to eliminate barriers to trade so they can outsource production overseas, i.e. where wages are lower.
Fordist families in a post-Fordist era
Fordism as a social contract institutes a specific kind of kinship based on an absolute division between the public domain of economic activity and the private home.
Kinship in the Fordist “private” domain of the nuclear family is still work; it’s invisible to the rest of the world since the labor of being a family member is seen as strictly women’s work.
Even as the Fordist social contract collapses, people still adhere to this ideological representation of kinship as private. Women who work in dual-income households still do most if not all of the care work; they pull a “second shift” at home (Hochschild 1989).
Small group work
Define neoliberalism
Consider Dawson's critique of Fraser, first on pages 147-149, and especially on p. 153. What is his point, and do you agree?
Assign a spokesperson
References
Florida, Richard L., and Marshall M.A. Feldman. 1988. “Housing in US Fordism*.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12 (2): 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1988.tb00449.x.
Fraser, Nancy. (1997) 2013. “After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment.” In Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, 41–66. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315822174.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home. New York: Penguin Books.
Pateman, Carole. (1988) 2018. The Sexual Contract. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
Wajcman, Judy. 1998. Managing like a man: women and men in corporate management. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. http://archive.org/details/managinglikemanw0000wajc.
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