QUESTION 3: Fordism

WHat's up yo... ok so i'm starting with Question 3 (cuz i did 1 and 2 already... but i'll also revisit after i've gone through the others), and i just have to say, Laurie you did an awesome job!! I loved reading this b/c it's full of all the most important points and perfectly succinct with out losing anything! Beautiful! Thanks for doing such a great job

I'm going to go back through the readings also to add any other relevant facts or ideas that can be added. I would imagine that your answer is already an A-level essay, but I always shoot for 150% so by the time I have to recall it on the exam I will only remember 2/3 and I'll get an A... maybe not the best policy for everyone but i find it works for me.

So... can anyone give me a list of the Blackboard readings that were relevant to this question? I have some gaps in my print outs. I'll go through the four books and glean what I can.

I was looking at question 3 about fordism and in part 3 laurie (just so you know which paper i'm referring to) wrote in part 3 -- causes of decline of fordism:

"crisis of fordism occurred in the 70s; led to outsourcing; result of globalization" then "the world experienced a recession that demanded redefinition of capitalist order"

My question is not whether or not that's what the book said or whether laurie is correctly representing the informaiton (i'm sure she is), but I would like to examine whether this is in fact an accurate sequence of events, and this has to do with the "chicken or the egg" argument. Neoliberals would say that fordism caused the crisis, but marxists might say that neoliberals did. The argument I quoted is the neoliberal version, but to me it seems they've put the cart before the horse. the logical sequence to me looks like this:

A. The "economic miracle" was based on the Mass Production/Mass Consumption nexus... one led to the other and created the other
B. This created a SOCIAL CONTRACT between labor/business/government in which labor was protected so that that their consumption could continue to support production
C. However, when companies began to export jobs, consumption was affected
D. Also with the neoliberals taking control of government, labor protection legislation was repealed, leading to a weaker Labor, thus further affecting the ability of Labor to create enough demand to consume all that is produced
E. The cumulative affect on the consumption ability of Labor due to the two causes above (outsourcing and deregulation) caused a significant lag in consumption while production continued as usual
F. The overproduction caused a global recession

In other words, I question whether the crisis of fordism led to outsourcing and global recession. I think, put very simply, outsourcing created the crisis of fordism which created the global recession. I think that the redefinition of capitalism began before fordism faltered, and it is the cause of the its failure.

Also, if indeed the failure of fordism caused outsourcing and the global recession, then what caused the failure of fordism?

Of course i know it's not that simple, and there were many factors in play, but i want to keep this about the broader issues.