Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 16:16:44 -0500
From: "Charles Brown" <charlesb-AT-CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
Subject: M-TH: Re: post-Fordism and geographical scattering of the points of



   From ground zero of Fordism here in Detroit, we experienced the last 45 years of change from the classic big industrial plant (such as Ford Dearborn with 100,000 workers)concentration to scattering of the points of production as plantclosings, runaway shops, and white flight to the suburbs. So the transition to socalled post-Fordism got our attention real good and we've been trying to figure it in Marxist political economic terms.

     It occurred to me that the "new global  economy", transnationalization of monopoly capital represents a dialectical qualitative change in the following sense. 
Marx in Capital defines two factors in the
 qualitiative emergence of industrial capitalism over manufacture capitalism. They are the use of machinery
and the concentration of workers in one big factory.
      Thus, the graphic locus of the classic Leninist agitation and propaganda the giant industrial plant.
 The qualitative change of today is the the revolution in science and technology which has begotten a revolution
in transportation and communication, creating such things as just in time delivery, containerization . Thus a revolution in machinery, one of the original two breakthroughs in Marx's analysis of industrialization, has made it possible for the capitalists to decentralize and scatter the points of production. The end of Fordism is the end of the big plant. The capitalist  can move parts etc around so fast that they do not need  the efficiency of concentrating workers in big plants, in ghettoes in the city, the whole ball of wax that gave rise to Leninist tactics in the class struggle by which workers got a sense of their power by their
  great numbers etc.
    I suggest the above infrastructural sketch as
    corresponding to the cultural change now
    named post-Fordism.
     But don't count the proletariat out. The slogan
    workers of the world unite , is more true today
     than when Marx and Engels coined it.  And the
    proletariat is fresher than post-Fordist theory might
    know. In other words, the proletariat knows how to
     go with the new. Detroiters probably could show
     post-ologists a thing or two about what is new.

      from Proletarian Central, Detroit
         Charles
       



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