Flexible Accumulation pt. 1 (vs. Fordism)

According to David Harvey, neither Fordism nor Keynesianism has a containment policy for the “inherent contradictions” of capitalism. On the surface, the problem is “rigidity”: fixed long-term investments that do not take into account inevitable change and possible lack of growth. “Any attempt to overcome these rigidities ran into the seemingly immovable force of deeply entrenched working-class power,” explaining the strike waves and labor disruptions of 1968-1972. (142)

In our capitalist world, time and space have been compressed, a direct threat to Fordism: decisions are made and communicated much more quickly, and have a much wider impact on what has become “variegated space.” (147) Fordist stability has now “given way to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms.” (156)

However, these developments haven’t really diminished corporate power. Rather, “Capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation.” (159) As markets mobilize, there is stronger, not weaker, organization. This is achieved two ways. First, through the commodification of “first, accurate, and up-to-date information” that allows for “instantaneous response” to changes in fashion that are essential to “corporate survival.” (159) Knowledge is a commodity. Second (and much more important) is the “complete reorganization of the global finance system and the emergence of greatly enhanced powers of financial co-ordination.” (160) There is now a “single world market.”

The most sought-after jobs in the US are no longer in production management (the Fordist ambition) but in “legal and financial spheres of corporate action.” (163) Since 1972, the “banking and financial system relative to corporate, state, and personal financing” has been given much more autonomy. (164) The state must become more, rather than less, interventionist due to the exposure of the system to world markets. The state “is called upon to regulate the activities of corporate capital in the national interest at the same time as it is forced...to create a 'good business climate' to act as an inducement to trans-national and global finance capital, and to deter...capital flight to greener and more profitable pastures.” (170)

But in this transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, Harvey sees a conservative countereffect: that fragmentation leads to an equally deep desire for “stable values” and “the authority of basic institutions.” (171)