The Legitimation Crisis of Fordism: Ideological and Cultural Contradictions

Chapter 1 illustrated the centrality of the role of the state in the establishment, organization, and coordination of the Fordist system of regulated capitalism. Before entering its final crisis in the late 1970s, the state was instrumental in fostering the material conditions of an ideology and a culture that legitimated regulated capitalism. This chapter continues the discussion of the conditions that generated the growth, stability, and crisis of regulated capitalism by exploring its salient ideological and cultural characteristics and contradictions. In particular, the chapter probes the ideological and cultural aspects associated with the contradictions engendered by regulated capitalism’s requirement of social inclusion of subordinate groups and the private ownership of the means of production. Fordist regulated capitalism, as the first section in this chapter indicates, required the creation of a new type of will-formation that would contribute to the control of the nascent working class of the Taylorist enterprise. This process is illustrated through a review of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci highlights the cultural requirements of the “new worker” (Gramsci 2011, 1973). He points out that members of the working class adopted a Puritan mentality that consisted of the commitment to discipline, obedience, and abnegation and the elimination of behaviors that did not conform to the new system of Taylorist-intensive production. The creation of this new type of worker was not simply carried out at the factory level. It required the intervention of the state that assisted