| A BRIEF GENEALOGY OF FORDISM IN TWO PARTS PART ONE: (DIS)ASSEMBLING PRODUCTION THROUGH THE MILITARY MACHINE 15 January 2009 by Kevin Douglas Kuswa |
I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but
small enough for the individual to run and care for….it will be so low in price that no man
(sic.) making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his (sic.) family
the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.
-Henry Ford, 1909
Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, quotes Henry Ford in support of the
argument that Ford had a common touch that he converted into a marketable product.
Unlike the people working on new inventions and the next wave of vehicles, Ford
wanted to take the vehicles that he knew how to produce and make them affordable on
a mass scale. In tandem with an affordable automobile that had the potential to
saturate the market, Ford was also instrumental to a new phase of labor politics. Even
though the labor pool may have been in opposition to Ford’s management, the
company decided that cooperation and inducements to ensure compliance were
generally better options to pursue than confrontation and overt exploitation of the
workers. According to Jackson (1985, p160), “Ford’s genius lay in his ability to reduce
the cost of his popular Model T even while increasing the wages of his employees.”
Ford manipulated the market for automobiles in at least three unique ways, bringing
forth a new formation of capitalism and an economic motion of monumental
proportions. The three major manipulations were related to the product itself, the
process of production, and the management of labor.
By reducing the act of producing an automobile to a level of simplicity that permitted
extremely low prices, Ford was able to bring a desirable product to the market that a
large percentage of consumers could afford. In one dramatic example, during a period
of rising wages and price hikes by his competitors, “Ford dropped the price of his Model
T from $950 in 1910 to $290 in 1924” (Jackson, 1985, p161). The process of
production also experienced a transformation under Ford, as workers were objectified
in a paternalistic and suspiciously benevolent way. Ford increased wages in an
attempt to obtain higher productivity and lower absentee rates from his employees. The
process of making cars depended on large numbers of semi-skilled laborers
performing dangerous tasks, and raising wages during tough economic times gave
Ford a potent supervisory grasp on the workforce. Trying to fight worker apathy with the
same determination he used to fine-tune the assembly line, Ford announced the $5 day
during a time when the average worker was making less than half that. By tackling
productivity concerns at the source, Ford “stabilized his work force, increased the pace
of his assembly lines, and created more potential customers for his product” (Jackson,
1985, p161). And, concurrently, the third way Ford manipulated the industrial terrain of
the automobile industry was to develop a firm and aggressive stance against unions or
labor organizations of any kind. Not only were automobiles themselves a luxurious
distraction that gave workers an alternative to attending union meetings, Ford also used
tyrannical tactics to root out union members from the factories. In some instances, the
Ford Company “used spies and armed thugs to resist attempts at unionization”
(Jackson, 1985, p161).
Before getting lost in the minutia of Ford’s labor policy, a number of general questions
present themselves: What context opened the door to these three changes in the
organization of (and demand for) industrial manufacturing? How did the highway
machine provide a backdrop and an implicit place of freedom for the consumption of
automobiles and the rise of an automobile culture? Ford may have formed the Ford
Motor Company in 1903 with the $28,000 he earned through race car victories, but what
else defined the automobile at the turn of the 19th Century? Before 1905, the petrol
engine remained in experimental stages, not really emerging in large numbers until the
United States expanded production and began to supply other parts of the globe with
engines. From 1930 onward, Japan and a handful of other nations began to reduce the
gap in production between the U.S. and the rest of the world. These types of histories
would be incomplete without consideration of Fordism as a program, particularly in the
context of the highway in America.
Fordism not only articulates a unique mode of production, it also marks the intersection
of industrial expansion, large-scale production, distribution, and consumption. Perhaps
more extensive than the mere back-and-forth of transportation, distribution incorporates
circulation, mobility, and speed into its orbit. Thus, Fordism is both the assembly line
and its movement, both the automobile and its path, and both a scheme of production
and the management of consumption.
Fordism goes beyond theories of comparative advantage and national living standards,
as does the highway machine. Nonetheless, this statement demonstrates the types of
threats and fears (loss of security and economic growth) that began to accompany
pleas for highway construction.
In addition, the ever-expanding mileage of paved roads in America, the social prestige
of automobile ownership in some quarters, and the necessity of gasoline-powered
engines to maintain low prices and transport goods to the market in other quarters, all
combined to propel additional public highways and fuel large-scale increases in
automobile manufacturing. It is no coincidence that in 1921 two important events
marked the initial arrival of the highway machine and the ascendancy of Ford’s style of
management. First, a new Federal Highway Act was passed, legislation that began the
numbering of U.S. highways (I-35, I-10, I-95, etc.), and legislation that provided 50
percent of funds for all rural road building (McShane, 1997, p58). The federal matching
funds were excluded from assisting the construction of urban highways, but the
blueprints were firmly in place for a federally-funded (public) highway network that would
link the nation, ensure civil defense and national security, as well as pull the country out
of recession into an era of unprecedented market expansion. Those were the highway’
s aspirations, many of which, if they did appear, came along with equally devastating
social consequences. Also in 1921, in the midst of a major auto recession, Henry Ford
convinced his bankers and dealers to finance the company through the recession, a
safety net that enabled Ford to stay afloat despite a 90 percent failure-rate among
American automobile makers.
This essay continues the Ford narrative, turning to Fordism and mass production as
motions moving in tandem with the highway machine. The motion diagram then moves
from Fordism to the notion of security and Virilio’s military machine. This
reconceptualization of warfare and statecraft concludes with a criticism of Fordism’s
application to conditions after World War II. Instead of trying to adapt or generalize the
vague tenets of Fordism, a more enabling perspective would tie Fordism to the
automobile industry before World War II, primarily in America. As an effectivity of the
highway machine’s arrival, Fordism can also open a path for the articulation of logistics
and the military machine.
1. Massifying Production: Ford(ism) and Henry’s Wild Ride
The historical narrative of Ford himself has been written hundreds of times from
countless angles. Those accounts fill in the context of Ford’s automobile empire, but
they often leave the effects of mass production understated and incidental. Fordism
must tie in and relate to the accomplishments of Henry Ford, but the motion of Fordism--
its particular flow--extends far past the life of any given individual. Most importantly, Ford
and Fordism mark a battleground in an-ongoing war between states and economies,
between positions of privilege and positions of poverty, and between humans and
machines. It cannot be understated that “Ford’s mass production drove the automobile
industry for nearly five decades and was eventually adopted by almost every other
industrial manufacturer” (Dauphinais & Gareffa, 1996, p58) but the effects and
transformations of mass production went far beyond industrial manufacturing, perhaps
beyond the explanatory value of Fordism itself.
Let us travel along on Ford’s wild wide before honing in on a few tropes uniting the
machine: the (dis)assembly line, interchangeable parts, mass production, and the Five
Dollar Day. These tropes are, in part, generated by the arrival of the highway machine
(and vice-versa). Henry Ford entered the market a decade or so after the first
manufactures began in Europe. Taking cue from the successes of Frederick Taylor,
one of the first industrialists to study time and motion in the workplace in relation to a
number of discrete and specialized tasks, Ford also worked to encourage specialized
and skilled labor. He began assigning skilled workers to particular machines,
maximizing efficiency by making individual workers or groups of workers responsible for
specific parts and not others. Rather than devoting the entire crew to the assembly of
one vehicle at a time, Ford established a production process that effectively assembled
multiple automobiles at the same time in successive stages. While the assembly line
was implicit in a continual flour mill used by Oliver Evans in 1787, not to mention the
ways Chicago beef and chicken packers slowly disassembled animal carcasses for
meat packaging as they moved along a conveyor belt (McShane, 1997, p7,15).
Mimicking the disassembly lines common on chicken farms, Ford decided that a
moving belt with chickens being slowly taken apart by lines of workers, each worker
contributing a small act to the overall preparation of the chicken for consumption, would
be ideal for the (re)assembly of an automobile. Especially with the advent of
interchangeable parts, Ford was easily able to compartmentalize the manufacturing
process into thousands of complementary steps. The “progress” of the car along the
assembly line allowed for much greater economies of scale--the belt itself could always
be extended, widened, or regulated by rate (“parts is parts”).
The circumstances of Ford’s short-lived but long-lasting supremacy will help to fill-in a
map of state and economic conflict and fusion. More specifically, Ford’s success
foreshadows the ways state regulation would solidify its alliance with a certain
economic configuration. Eventually, that alliance would dominate the highway as a
mode of circulation in an attempt to polarize society. Elements were cornered into one
of two dichotomies based on producing: “productive” vs. “consumptive” or “productive”
vs. “counterproductive.” State involvement in the economy, particularly through public
works projects influenced by Keynesian economics, propped up the incomes of
consumers to the point where large-scale mass production of consumer durables
would be guaranteed by a large and steady demand. The depression and the following
World War (what Virilio calls the Second Total War) marked high and low points for
production and consumption, but alongside these changes Ford continued to make
tens of thousands of “affordable” automobiles.
marks a primary form of circulation associated with the arrival of the highway. What
takes place between 1903 (the start of the Ford Motor Company) and Charlie Chaplin’s
1936 movie Modern Times, is a revolutionary surge in manufacturing, automation,
market expansion, and mobility on a global scale. More importantly for Fordism,
though, is a post-World War II surge in industrial manufacturing, growth driven by mass
production, the logistics of a permanent war economy, and the politics of labor and
unemployment. In other words, as the highway made an entrance on the American
scene, Fordism was also beginning to emerge as a given trait of the industrial era.
John Allen, an economic geographer at Open University, contends that the main
elements of Fordism--assembly line production, leading industrial sectors transmitting
growth to other areas, a hegemonic or socializing organization of labor, and state-driven
regulations managing production and consumption--were not prevalent until the
1950s. Allen (1996, p288) explains his chronology:
As we shall see, this phenomenal growth was uneven and complicit in the segregation
and exclusion of large pockets of people across the country. It is necessary, in the
meantime, to map the emergence and transformation of security and Fordism as its
motion works to capture the highway machine.
Allen borrows from Sayer (1989) to lay out four aspects of Fordism as an industrial
mode of organization. Once again, these four aspects chart Fordism as, first, “a labor
process involving moving assembly line mass production;” second, an expanding
industrial sector; third, a hegemonic organization of production, work, and labor; and
fourth, a mode of regulation with “political and cultural considerations” (Allen, 1996,
p287). In sum, Fordism marks a period of time late in the industrial era, for Allen, when
“technological progress” began to solidify a normalizing model of manufacturing and
consumption: “Fordism is conceived as an era of mass, standardized goods produced
for mass markets, created by an interventionist state which gave people the spending
power to make mass consumption possible” (Allen, p282). The vision of labor as a
type of motion, a vision most directly related to Ford’s manufacturing processes,
concerns the moving assembly line and mass production. Allen (1996, p283) contends
that “mass production began with the combination of moving assembly lines,
specialized machinery, high wages, and low-cost products.” Where does the worker fit
into the flow? Or, on the contrary, does the laborer provide the flow itself? Does
specialized machinery stand-in for the worker?
Machinery finds a critical niche during this period, but is the machining of production a
sign of modernity? Or, on the contrary, does the combination of social subjection and
machinic enslavement within Fordism mark a moment beyond modernism? Is this a
juncture where the pre-modern enslavement of humans to the machine and the
disciplinary subjection of humans come together? Tying these questions to an
intersection between Fordism, the state, and national security, it becomes evident that a
revolution in circulation rearranged the modern far before World War II, the revolutions of
1968, or any other historical watersheds. If modernism and its aftermath are eras or
conditions, two axioms jump to the forefront: 1. We have no “choice” whether we follow
the postmodern sensibility or perspective--it is a trait of the times; and, 2. The rupture in
modernity was not generated by a series of critical theorists challenging the
Enlightenment project, but rather by a machinic battle with labor in and amidst another
battle between warfare and statecraft. As one way of noting the rupture, Allen (1996,
p283) characterizes the difference between Taylor and Ford: “Whereas Taylor sought to
organize labor around machinery, Ford sought to eliminate labor by machinery.”
Unskilled laborers were the next to hit the chopping block, as family farms and horses
as means of transportation failed the test of efficiency. Flink (1988, p114) contends:
The increase in miles of paved highway and affordable automobiles accomplished
much more than “reaching the rural market.” The same motion of extending access
also promoted white flight--the migration of businesses and professionals--from the
city to the suburb. The farm would also never be the same again as the large industries
slowly extended the economic advantage of mass production to the agricultural sector.
Cycling through the highway machine, a massive change occurs in the distinctions
between rural and urban during the 20s and 30s. A third way, or space, opens up
between the rural and the urban, inverting a normative framework that can be traced
back to feudalism and the Middle Ages. In many ways, the implicit hierarchy between
rural and urban still persists, with the city-dweller assumed to be a “city slicker” and the
country-dweller assumed to be a “hayseed.” This hierarchy has changed its
dimensions, however, as a transformation beginning in the 20s began to divide city-
dwellers into the frequently outnumbered city slickers and a growing number of “inner
city” inhabitants--primarily immigrants, minorities, the under- and unemployed, and the
otherwise contained and overcrowded members of many metropolitan environments.
Likewise, country-dwellers found themselves split into the traditional “hayseeds” or
“hicks” and the emergent corporate farmers and upper middle-class seeking refuge
from the tumult of the city. And, in-between these urban and rural subjectivities, the
suburbanite sought out a middle ground some distance from the central business
district, but still close enough to access the city’s amenities on a daily or weekly basis.
How, then, did the beginnings of the highway machine and the rumblings of Fordism
participate in this transformation? How did circulation between the rural and urban
areas work to bring certain places together and spread others apart? What operates in
tandem with the condition of saturation the automobile experienced among American
families in 1925?
In short, we have to put the car and the road back into Fordism. It simply is not about
linking Fordism to economic configurations, for that only accomplishes another
generalization. The specific and unique attributes of Fordism within the highway
machine must bring us back to, and rescue, a tangible intersection. The concrete
intersection in question is one that diagrams transformations in cities, in rural
communities, and in America as those places experience the motions of the highway
machine. In these ways and others, Fordism contributes to an American national
imaginary of “time over distance” (Virilio, 1989, 1991, 1997a, 1997b).
small enough for the individual to run and care for….it will be so low in price that no man
(sic.) making a good salary will be unable to own one—and enjoy with his (sic.) family
the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.
-Henry Ford, 1909
Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, quotes Henry Ford in support of the
argument that Ford had a common touch that he converted into a marketable product.
Unlike the people working on new inventions and the next wave of vehicles, Ford
wanted to take the vehicles that he knew how to produce and make them affordable on
a mass scale. In tandem with an affordable automobile that had the potential to
saturate the market, Ford was also instrumental to a new phase of labor politics. Even
though the labor pool may have been in opposition to Ford’s management, the
company decided that cooperation and inducements to ensure compliance were
generally better options to pursue than confrontation and overt exploitation of the
workers. According to Jackson (1985, p160), “Ford’s genius lay in his ability to reduce
the cost of his popular Model T even while increasing the wages of his employees.”
Ford manipulated the market for automobiles in at least three unique ways, bringing
forth a new formation of capitalism and an economic motion of monumental
proportions. The three major manipulations were related to the product itself, the
process of production, and the management of labor.
By reducing the act of producing an automobile to a level of simplicity that permitted
extremely low prices, Ford was able to bring a desirable product to the market that a
large percentage of consumers could afford. In one dramatic example, during a period
of rising wages and price hikes by his competitors, “Ford dropped the price of his Model
T from $950 in 1910 to $290 in 1924” (Jackson, 1985, p161). The process of
production also experienced a transformation under Ford, as workers were objectified
in a paternalistic and suspiciously benevolent way. Ford increased wages in an
attempt to obtain higher productivity and lower absentee rates from his employees. The
process of making cars depended on large numbers of semi-skilled laborers
performing dangerous tasks, and raising wages during tough economic times gave
Ford a potent supervisory grasp on the workforce. Trying to fight worker apathy with the
same determination he used to fine-tune the assembly line, Ford announced the $5 day
during a time when the average worker was making less than half that. By tackling
productivity concerns at the source, Ford “stabilized his work force, increased the pace
of his assembly lines, and created more potential customers for his product” (Jackson,
1985, p161). And, concurrently, the third way Ford manipulated the industrial terrain of
the automobile industry was to develop a firm and aggressive stance against unions or
labor organizations of any kind. Not only were automobiles themselves a luxurious
distraction that gave workers an alternative to attending union meetings, Ford also used
tyrannical tactics to root out union members from the factories. In some instances, the
Ford Company “used spies and armed thugs to resist attempts at unionization”
(Jackson, 1985, p161).
Before getting lost in the minutia of Ford’s labor policy, a number of general questions
present themselves: What context opened the door to these three changes in the
organization of (and demand for) industrial manufacturing? How did the highway
machine provide a backdrop and an implicit place of freedom for the consumption of
automobiles and the rise of an automobile culture? Ford may have formed the Ford
Motor Company in 1903 with the $28,000 he earned through race car victories, but what
else defined the automobile at the turn of the 19th Century? Before 1905, the petrol
engine remained in experimental stages, not really emerging in large numbers until the
United States expanded production and began to supply other parts of the globe with
engines. From 1930 onward, Japan and a handful of other nations began to reduce the
gap in production between the U.S. and the rest of the world. These types of histories
would be incomplete without consideration of Fordism as a program, particularly in the
context of the highway in America.
Fordism not only articulates a unique mode of production, it also marks the intersection
of industrial expansion, large-scale production, distribution, and consumption. Perhaps
more extensive than the mere back-and-forth of transportation, distribution incorporates
circulation, mobility, and speed into its orbit. Thus, Fordism is both the assembly line
and its movement, both the automobile and its path, and both a scheme of production
and the management of consumption.
- Without economical and effective transportation the economies of large-scale
production would not be possible. We would not be able to afford the cost of
assembling raw materials at key manufacturing locations nor to bear the
expense of nation-wide distribution. Without economical and efficient
transportation our standard of living would suffer, because the various regions of
the nation would no longer be able to produce those goods for which they enjoy
a comparative advantage (Arbuckle, 1960, p153)
Fordism goes beyond theories of comparative advantage and national living standards,
as does the highway machine. Nonetheless, this statement demonstrates the types of
threats and fears (loss of security and economic growth) that began to accompany
pleas for highway construction.
In addition, the ever-expanding mileage of paved roads in America, the social prestige
of automobile ownership in some quarters, and the necessity of gasoline-powered
engines to maintain low prices and transport goods to the market in other quarters, all
combined to propel additional public highways and fuel large-scale increases in
automobile manufacturing. It is no coincidence that in 1921 two important events
marked the initial arrival of the highway machine and the ascendancy of Ford’s style of
management. First, a new Federal Highway Act was passed, legislation that began the
numbering of U.S. highways (I-35, I-10, I-95, etc.), and legislation that provided 50
percent of funds for all rural road building (McShane, 1997, p58). The federal matching
funds were excluded from assisting the construction of urban highways, but the
blueprints were firmly in place for a federally-funded (public) highway network that would
link the nation, ensure civil defense and national security, as well as pull the country out
of recession into an era of unprecedented market expansion. Those were the highway’
s aspirations, many of which, if they did appear, came along with equally devastating
social consequences. Also in 1921, in the midst of a major auto recession, Henry Ford
convinced his bankers and dealers to finance the company through the recession, a
safety net that enabled Ford to stay afloat despite a 90 percent failure-rate among
American automobile makers.
This essay continues the Ford narrative, turning to Fordism and mass production as
motions moving in tandem with the highway machine. The motion diagram then moves
from Fordism to the notion of security and Virilio’s military machine. This
reconceptualization of warfare and statecraft concludes with a criticism of Fordism’s
application to conditions after World War II. Instead of trying to adapt or generalize the
vague tenets of Fordism, a more enabling perspective would tie Fordism to the
automobile industry before World War II, primarily in America. As an effectivity of the
highway machine’s arrival, Fordism can also open a path for the articulation of logistics
and the military machine.
1. Massifying Production: Ford(ism) and Henry’s Wild Ride
The historical narrative of Ford himself has been written hundreds of times from
countless angles. Those accounts fill in the context of Ford’s automobile empire, but
they often leave the effects of mass production understated and incidental. Fordism
must tie in and relate to the accomplishments of Henry Ford, but the motion of Fordism--
its particular flow--extends far past the life of any given individual. Most importantly, Ford
and Fordism mark a battleground in an-ongoing war between states and economies,
between positions of privilege and positions of poverty, and between humans and
machines. It cannot be understated that “Ford’s mass production drove the automobile
industry for nearly five decades and was eventually adopted by almost every other
industrial manufacturer” (Dauphinais & Gareffa, 1996, p58) but the effects and
transformations of mass production went far beyond industrial manufacturing, perhaps
beyond the explanatory value of Fordism itself.
Let us travel along on Ford’s wild wide before honing in on a few tropes uniting the
machine: the (dis)assembly line, interchangeable parts, mass production, and the Five
Dollar Day. These tropes are, in part, generated by the arrival of the highway machine
(and vice-versa). Henry Ford entered the market a decade or so after the first
manufactures began in Europe. Taking cue from the successes of Frederick Taylor,
one of the first industrialists to study time and motion in the workplace in relation to a
number of discrete and specialized tasks, Ford also worked to encourage specialized
and skilled labor. He began assigning skilled workers to particular machines,
maximizing efficiency by making individual workers or groups of workers responsible for
specific parts and not others. Rather than devoting the entire crew to the assembly of
one vehicle at a time, Ford established a production process that effectively assembled
multiple automobiles at the same time in successive stages. While the assembly line
was implicit in a continual flour mill used by Oliver Evans in 1787, not to mention the
ways Chicago beef and chicken packers slowly disassembled animal carcasses for
meat packaging as they moved along a conveyor belt (McShane, 1997, p7,15).
Mimicking the disassembly lines common on chicken farms, Ford decided that a
moving belt with chickens being slowly taken apart by lines of workers, each worker
contributing a small act to the overall preparation of the chicken for consumption, would
be ideal for the (re)assembly of an automobile. Especially with the advent of
interchangeable parts, Ford was easily able to compartmentalize the manufacturing
process into thousands of complementary steps. The “progress” of the car along the
assembly line allowed for much greater economies of scale--the belt itself could always
be extended, widened, or regulated by rate (“parts is parts”).
The circumstances of Ford’s short-lived but long-lasting supremacy will help to fill-in a
map of state and economic conflict and fusion. More specifically, Ford’s success
foreshadows the ways state regulation would solidify its alliance with a certain
economic configuration. Eventually, that alliance would dominate the highway as a
mode of circulation in an attempt to polarize society. Elements were cornered into one
of two dichotomies based on producing: “productive” vs. “consumptive” or “productive”
vs. “counterproductive.” State involvement in the economy, particularly through public
works projects influenced by Keynesian economics, propped up the incomes of
consumers to the point where large-scale mass production of consumer durables
would be guaranteed by a large and steady demand. The depression and the following
World War (what Virilio calls the Second Total War) marked high and low points for
production and consumption, but alongside these changes Ford continued to make
tens of thousands of “affordable” automobiles.
- The first factory-made Model T appeared in 1908 and sold for $850. Over 17,000
Model Ts were sold during its first year, a phenomenal record. Just four years
earlier, the world’s entire automobile industry produced 22,000 cars; by 1914,
the Ford Highland Park Plant alone produced almost 250,00 Model Ts, and over
700,000 were built in 1917. In 1913, a Model T was produced every 12.5 hours,
after mass production and the assembly line were in place in 1914, a Model T
could be produced every 1.5 hours; and during an intense day in 1925, a Model
T was produced every 10 seconds! Over 9,000 cars were produced that single
day. This ever-increasing efficiency was reflected in the price--an all time low of
$295 for a 1924 Model T. (Dauphinais & Gareffa, 1996, p55).
marks a primary form of circulation associated with the arrival of the highway. What
takes place between 1903 (the start of the Ford Motor Company) and Charlie Chaplin’s
1936 movie Modern Times, is a revolutionary surge in manufacturing, automation,
market expansion, and mobility on a global scale. More importantly for Fordism,
though, is a post-World War II surge in industrial manufacturing, growth driven by mass
production, the logistics of a permanent war economy, and the politics of labor and
unemployment. In other words, as the highway made an entrance on the American
scene, Fordism was also beginning to emerge as a given trait of the industrial era.
John Allen, an economic geographer at Open University, contends that the main
elements of Fordism--assembly line production, leading industrial sectors transmitting
growth to other areas, a hegemonic or socializing organization of labor, and state-driven
regulations managing production and consumption--were not prevalent until the
1950s. Allen (1996, p288) explains his chronology:
- So far, we have loosely referred to a Fordist mode of growth as a feature of the
advanced industrial economies in the 1950s and 1960s. However, in terms of
actual growth rates, a more precise periodization is usually given, starting in the
1950s and tailing off in the early 1970s around the time of the “oil crisis” of 1973
and the economic downturn of 1974. If we look back at that period, it is difficult
not to be impressed by the sheer scale and pace of growth across the
economies of Europe and the US, as well as that of Japan.
As we shall see, this phenomenal growth was uneven and complicit in the segregation
and exclusion of large pockets of people across the country. It is necessary, in the
meantime, to map the emergence and transformation of security and Fordism as its
motion works to capture the highway machine.
Allen borrows from Sayer (1989) to lay out four aspects of Fordism as an industrial
mode of organization. Once again, these four aspects chart Fordism as, first, “a labor
process involving moving assembly line mass production;” second, an expanding
industrial sector; third, a hegemonic organization of production, work, and labor; and
fourth, a mode of regulation with “political and cultural considerations” (Allen, 1996,
p287). In sum, Fordism marks a period of time late in the industrial era, for Allen, when
“technological progress” began to solidify a normalizing model of manufacturing and
consumption: “Fordism is conceived as an era of mass, standardized goods produced
for mass markets, created by an interventionist state which gave people the spending
power to make mass consumption possible” (Allen, p282). The vision of labor as a
type of motion, a vision most directly related to Ford’s manufacturing processes,
concerns the moving assembly line and mass production. Allen (1996, p283) contends
that “mass production began with the combination of moving assembly lines,
specialized machinery, high wages, and low-cost products.” Where does the worker fit
into the flow? Or, on the contrary, does the laborer provide the flow itself? Does
specialized machinery stand-in for the worker?
The impact of Fordism on the worker was debilitating. The individual became
an anonymous, interchangeable robot who had little chance on the job to
demonstrate his (sic.) personal qualifications for upward mobility into the
echelons of management. Thus, the American myth of unlimited individual
social mobility, based on ability and the ideal of the self-made man (sic.),
became a frustrating impossibility for the assembly-line worker. As the job
became a treadmill to escape from rather than a calling in which to find
fulfillment, leisure began to assume a new importance. The meaning of work,
long sanctified in the Protestant Ethic, was reduced to monetary remuneration.
The value of thrift and personal economy became questionable, too, as mass
consumption became an inevitable corollary of mass production. (Flink, 1988,
p119-120)
Machinery finds a critical niche during this period, but is the machining of production a
sign of modernity? Or, on the contrary, does the combination of social subjection and
machinic enslavement within Fordism mark a moment beyond modernism? Is this a
juncture where the pre-modern enslavement of humans to the machine and the
disciplinary subjection of humans come together? Tying these questions to an
intersection between Fordism, the state, and national security, it becomes evident that a
revolution in circulation rearranged the modern far before World War II, the revolutions of
1968, or any other historical watersheds. If modernism and its aftermath are eras or
conditions, two axioms jump to the forefront: 1. We have no “choice” whether we follow
the postmodern sensibility or perspective--it is a trait of the times; and, 2. The rupture in
modernity was not generated by a series of critical theorists challenging the
Enlightenment project, but rather by a machinic battle with labor in and amidst another
battle between warfare and statecraft. As one way of noting the rupture, Allen (1996,
p283) characterizes the difference between Taylor and Ford: “Whereas Taylor sought to
organize labor around machinery, Ford sought to eliminate labor by machinery.”
Unskilled laborers were the next to hit the chopping block, as family farms and horses
as means of transportation failed the test of efficiency. Flink (1988, p114) contends:
- Far from identifying with the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer glorified in populist
rhetoric, Ford looked forward to the demise of the family farm. As a youth he had
hated the drudgery of farm labor, and he longed to rid the world of unsanitary
and inefficient horses and cows. The Model T was conceived as “a farmer’s car”
less because Ford empathized with the small farmer than because any car
designed in 1908 for a mass market had to meet the needs of a predominantly
rural population.
The increase in miles of paved highway and affordable automobiles accomplished
much more than “reaching the rural market.” The same motion of extending access
also promoted white flight--the migration of businesses and professionals--from the
city to the suburb. The farm would also never be the same again as the large industries
slowly extended the economic advantage of mass production to the agricultural sector.
Cycling through the highway machine, a massive change occurs in the distinctions
between rural and urban during the 20s and 30s. A third way, or space, opens up
between the rural and the urban, inverting a normative framework that can be traced
back to feudalism and the Middle Ages. In many ways, the implicit hierarchy between
rural and urban still persists, with the city-dweller assumed to be a “city slicker” and the
country-dweller assumed to be a “hayseed.” This hierarchy has changed its
dimensions, however, as a transformation beginning in the 20s began to divide city-
dwellers into the frequently outnumbered city slickers and a growing number of “inner
city” inhabitants--primarily immigrants, minorities, the under- and unemployed, and the
otherwise contained and overcrowded members of many metropolitan environments.
Likewise, country-dwellers found themselves split into the traditional “hayseeds” or
“hicks” and the emergent corporate farmers and upper middle-class seeking refuge
from the tumult of the city. And, in-between these urban and rural subjectivities, the
suburbanite sought out a middle ground some distance from the central business
district, but still close enough to access the city’s amenities on a daily or weekly basis.
How, then, did the beginnings of the highway machine and the rumblings of Fordism
participate in this transformation? How did circulation between the rural and urban
areas work to bring certain places together and spread others apart? What operates in
tandem with the condition of saturation the automobile experienced among American
families in 1925?
- Not surprisingly, a major theme of rural reformers was the extension of city
amenities to the village, hamlet, and farm, while urban planners and reformers
of the so-called Progressive Era stressed the need to decentralize the city. In
densely populated Western Europe, where no one lived much further than ten
miles from a railroad, this critical American problem of homogenizing space
was not nearly so important. (Flink, 1988, p137).
In short, we have to put the car and the road back into Fordism. It simply is not about
linking Fordism to economic configurations, for that only accomplishes another
generalization. The specific and unique attributes of Fordism within the highway
machine must bring us back to, and rescue, a tangible intersection. The concrete
intersection in question is one that diagrams transformations in cities, in rural
communities, and in America as those places experience the motions of the highway
machine. In these ways and others, Fordism contributes to an American national
imaginary of “time over distance” (Virilio, 1989, 1991, 1997a, 1997b).
2. The Military Machine and Logistics: Putting the Ford Back in Fordism
This history demands an encounter with the genealogy of speed and the diagram of
motion as war coming out of Virilio’s interview with Lotringer in Pure War (1997). Virilio
begins this series of interviews with the declaration that he is an urbanist, an urbanist
that simultaneously becomes a politician through a focus on the city. In a
complementary position with the “city as a place” hinted at in the previous chapter and
diagrammed in the discussion of American suburbia, the “city as motion” ties together
Virilio’s notion of politics with the speed of Fordism and the state’s capture of the
highway machine. The city not only marks a particular motion, it also displaces
ideology from politics in favor of a more immediate connection between politics and
polis. Two concurrent genealogies come into play here, one mapping the city as an
effect of warfare and the other mapping modern warfare as total and spatial. In both
instances, war generates space--often a space at odds with place as physical and
time as memory. For Virilio, war’s spatiality attacks physicality and time through
destruction and consumption.
- I suddenly understood that war was a space in the geometrical sense, and
even more than geometrical: crossing Europe from North to South, from the
shelters of the German cities to the Siegfried Line, passing by the Maginot Line
and the Atlantic Wall, makes you realize the breadth of Total War. By the same
token you touch on the mythic dimension of a war spreading not only throughout
Europe, but all over the world. The objects, bunkers, block-houses, anti-aircraft
shelters, submarine bases, etc. are kinds of reference points or landmarks to
the totalitarian nature of war in space and myth. (Virilio, 1997b, p10)
Bracketing judgment on the ways war works through destruction, it also produces
certain arrangements within and surrounding its space. This move--charting war as
spatial--suddenly allows a project that treats the city as both the logistics and aftermath
of warfare.
Virilio (1997, p11) admits that the “city has existed for a long time,” but he also
positions it as “there to bear witness to the human species’ extraordinary capacities for
concentration.” So the way information circulates, both globally and locally, creates a
humanizing framework that “de-concentrates” the continual reign of state terror and the
literal “disappearance of people.” The torture (during and after Nazi brutalities) is
equally hideous, for the expansion of the markets that followed the Allied victory against
the architects of the concentration camps also ushered in the expansion of state
intrusiveness.
- Until the Second World War--until the concentration camps--societies were
societies of incarceration, of imprisonment in the Foucauldian sense. The
great transparency of the world, whether through satellites or simply tourists,
brought about an overexposure of these places to observation, to the press and
public opinion which now ban concentration camps. (Virilio, 1997b, p89)
As Virilio (1997, p89) comments: “These are qualitative differences....No longer the
practice of the concentration camps, of German-style enclosure, but the disappearance
of people. Sleight of hand. Social magic. It’s the society of disappearance.” This is
not to diminish the significance or magnitude of the concentration camps, but to make
an argument that the dehumanizing and machinic logic of concentration camps shares
a number of traits with the dehumanizing and machinic logic of Fordism and capitalist
exploitation propagated by state regulations and a monopoly of force (the military). In
other words, concentration (as opposed to circulation) occurs alongside warfare, and
both motions have been legitimized by, and assembled into, a state apparatus. When
joined by mass production and globalizing markets, the state apparatus mutates in
and through the military-industrial complex.
None of the characteristics of the military-industrial complex (MIC) in America can be
cleanly separated from the highway machine and its arrival and consolidation,
including the “technical surprise” of World War II and the development of deterrence as
warfare: the nuclear bomb. The highway machine contributes to the production of an
economy that prepares for war even during peace. The line between civilian and
military as well as between peace and war evaporates through Fordism and an era of
logistics. Combined with Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who position the military
machine in opposition to the state apparatus, Virilio explains warfare as a effect of the
constitution of the State. From this perspective, warfare designates the territory of the
state’s economy--its economy of space, capitalization, and technology. The result is a
school of thought that diverges from the urban planning notion that “the origin of the
crystallization of the city, of urban sedentariness, is mercantilism” (Virilio, 1997b, p11).
Instead, Virilio suggests, the city’s origin is warfare and continues to be so, making
commerce a residual effect.
Putting the larger analogy in perspective, then, Fordism finds itself reconstituted as the
product or effect of the state’s generation of militaristic territories (warfare). The
highway machine’s entrance sparked Fordism (and contains Fordism) as another
engine contributing to a “tragic revision of wartime economy” (Virilio, 1997b, p17).
When both sides in World War II realized that more resources were necessary to wage
war than could be produced during the war itself, their mutual response was to extend
war into peace. This became the technical surprise of World War I--the discovery that
the economy could not rest or divert its focus from war preparation even during peace.
Economic and military deterrence joined hands in an attempt to support technological
progress and the dominance of the state system.
- They could no longer simply say that on one side there was the arsenal which
produced a few shells, and on the other civilian consumption and the budget.
No, they noticed that they needed a special economy, a wartime economy. This
wartime economy was a formidable discovery, which in reality announced and
inaugurated the military-industrial complex....I mean in fact that the situation is
no longer very clear between the civil and the military because of the total
involvement of the economy in war--already beginning in peacetime. (Virilio,
1997b, p16-7)
Thus, the many problems with Fordism as a trope, particularly when applied to
industrialized economies following World War II, prevent a more contoured
understanding of the machinic arrangements involving security, warfare, the state, and
the highway machine. If anything, Fordism is, or should be, limited to a specific
expression of manufacturing and labor prior to World War II. The exact chronology or
periodization of Fordism is not as important as the recognition that the war machine
and the state apparatus had already come together as a highway machine in the
United States. The logistics of war planning makes Fordism one effect among many.
This inversion goes beyond the argument that the state regulated Fordism as a mode
of growth, with road-construction being one example. The inversion also places statist
motions of security and warfare prior to a given collection of economic characteristics--
warfare constitutes collective bargaining, monopolistic markets, mass standardized
production (of consumer durables), and economies of scale. That way, Fordism does
not over generalize industrial experiences in Europe, under generalize industrialism in
the Pacific Rim, leave its automobile and highway specificity, confuse American
contexts with globalization, or obscure the operations of statism and the military
machine. As Allen frets about Fordism, he outlines a central weakness in its
application to non-U.S. settings and effectivities outside modes of growth. Allen’s worry
(1996, p296) “is not so much its inability to adequately convey a pattern of national
diversity as its failure to see beyond large-scale mass production.”
Ford assembly line, 1913
3. Warfare: The Peacetime Mandate of the Highway Machine
Some might contend, and they are partially correct, that the initiation of the present-day
interstate system was the first moment a coalition of market forces and state interests
coalesced in opposition to the railroads. Hill (1997) paints an interesting history, pitting
the railroad interests against the newly formed alliance among the oil, trucking,
automobile and lodging lobbies. The contest was fairly tight until the federal
government stepped in with “national security” reasons to support the interstate over
the railroads. Concrete began flowing in earnest after the federal government sold the
machine “on the Cold War inspired theory that such a network of roads would facilitate
evacuation of the cities in case of a nuclear attack” (Hill, 1997, p12). A similar
argument is advanced today by the national government that the highways provide an
indispensable means of transit for hazardous materials, including dismantled nuclear
weapons (Giglio, 1985). Going back to the highway machine’s infancy, though, it was
not solely the development of nuclear weapons that catapulted the highway’s
expansion. Transportation, especially via roadways, has been a driving factor in
countless conflicts, not the least of which occurred in France in the 1800s:
Logistics occurs at the time of the Napoleonic wars because these wars pulled
millions of men onto the roads, and along with them problems of subsistence.
But subsistence isn’t everything: logistics is not only food, it’s also munitions
and transportation. As Abel Ferry said, ‘The munitions problems runs parallel
to the transportation problem.’ The trucks bringing ammunition and the flying
shells bringing death are coupled in a system of vectors, of production,
transportation, execution. There we have a whole flow chart which is logistics
itself.” (Virilio, 1997b, p23).
To detail and diagram the state’s implementation of the highway machine (and vice-
versa), the military and its motions of security must be taken into account. A number of
perspectives aid this effort: Yount (1960) hones in on the truck industry during times of
peace and war, Medaris (1960) targets the mobility needs of advanced missile
systems, and Trudeau (1960) outlines the strategic need for a mobile army.
Paul Yount, a freight ways Vice President in the 50s, uses the word cooperation to
describe the alliance (co-optation) between private industry and governmental
regulation in transportation. For Yount (1960, p43), the transportation revolution of the
20th Century “gives promise of a bright future for our industry, for transportation in
general, and for our nation.” Yount’s main object of concern is the truck, and it does not
take him long to state: “From the German invasion of Poland to the final shot of the war
in the Pacific, trucks played a leading role both of support and of direct action in battle”
(Yount, 1960, p43). It was not just the Panzer division’s blitzkrieg, enabled by trucks,
that connected the highway machine’s arrival to the military machine, for it was also the
assembly lines of ammunition--the railroads, waterways, ships, and planes--that
served as “faithful links in our logistical chain reaching to foreign shores” (Yount, 1960,
p44).
Yount also documents Virilio’s contention that the two World Wars extended war
preparation into peacetime. Yount (1960, p45) posits the consensus: “I think we all
agree that we must prepare in peace against the ever-present threat of war.” In
particular, Yount connects highway regulation to war preparation when he complains of
different taxation schemes and road constraints among the states. Calling for the
highway’s entrance, Yount (1960, p45) proclaims: “Overcoming these obstacles (in
highway regulation) is a matter of education, constant effort, and patience.” Yount
(1960, p46) continues:
- Providing for wartime upkeep and replacement of worn-out equipment is a
matter for mobilization planning....The demand for transportation, fast and
efficient transportation, is growing. And the various forms of the industry are
becoming greatly interdependent. This interdependence is resulting in greater
cooperation among different modes than ever before. It is resulting in a
revolution in transportation.
General Medaris, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Ordnance Missile
Command during the late 1950s, is even more direct than Yount, contending that “the
true history of the United States is the history of transportation” and that, “in time of
emergency, the vast transportation industry has always met the national defense
requirement” (Medaris, 1960, p71). A major variable for defense systems and missile
technology is a functioning highway machine. Access to weapons in an efficient
manner is as important to their deployment as is the operation of the weapon itself.
General Medaris (1960, p74) supports this argument:
Because our present strategy requires the deployment of trained combat forces
in any area of trouble in minimum time, it logically follows that we must have the
capacity to move the weapons with the troops. Immediate availability may be a
matter of national survival. If we cannot accomplish this, we would be limiting
troops to the firepower of shoulder weapons. Thus, we would throw away the
deterrent factor we associate with our modern weapons systems.
Moreover, because these weapons systems are far more valuable than the specific
piece of the highway machine involved, Medaris asserts that an imperative exists to
improve our highway infrastructure beyond the levels needed for civilian speed,
capacity, and passenger comfort. Any delay in the delivery of weapons, for instance,
“has profound effects upon our research and development programs, upon the training
of our troops who will operate the weapons systems, and upon the logistical support of
operational missile units throughout the world” (Medaris, 1960, p75).
Finally, General Arthur G. Trudeau, the Chief of Research and Development for the
Army in 1959, magnifies the links between the state’s preparations for war and the
highway machine. Not only does Trudeau (1960, p12) argue that for the Army, “the
advent of nuclear weapons requires mobility far greater than any we have known in the
past,” he also globalizes the need for security: “We must be able to move our armed
forces and those of the free world rapidly to any part of the world in which they may be
needed.” Emphasizing the impending arrival of the highway machine, Trudeau (1960,
p133), complains that “the speed of movement of the bulk of our ground forces is
limited by that of wheels.” By reiterating Virilio’s geography of warfare, Trudeau (1960,
p114) helps conclude:
- In discussing a more mobile army, it is important to emphasize the importance
of transportation facilities available within our own country. A healthy rail
system, together with adequate inland waterways, pipelines, airways, and
highways, is vital to the Army. Each has its own unique place in our system of
transport. Without any one of them the Army could be handicapped in its drive
for increased mobility.
Of these modes of circulation, it is the highway machine which becomes most
transformative immediately following the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 and into the
early 1970s. Trudeau solidifies the state’s penetration of the highway and the logistical
flows of Fordism and militarism. The nomadic tendencies of entrepreneurship and
warfare were overwhelmed by the state apparatus and concerns of global security,
particularly the motion of capture led by the state’s need for military readiness and an
infrastructure sufficient for national defense. While forcing one mechanism of security,
the United States was simultaneously neglecting the development of an energy policy
that would prevent an over-reliance on oil from abroad, to be discussed in part 2.
Kevin Douglas Kuswa teaches Rhetoric at the University of Richmond.
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