Posted by R Feurer on March 1, 2006, 5:20 pm, in reply to "should they have blamed Ford?" Both of these were severely questioned and contested questions during the 1930s. The ideals and perspectives that drove a significant part of the population suggested that the responsibility for the collapse of the economic system DID rest with the capitalists who had the control. Ford had set up a system that gave him the power to produce, as we saw in the Thursday segment, at incredible rates. But it also gave him the power to set wages and conditions too low to sustain the system. To them, he and the other capitalists were to blame, and contesting that power was at the heart of what many "radicals" did in the 1930s.
24.14.119.53
Ryan, if I get what you are saying correctly, you are asserting some ideas that have not been timeless assumptions, but have rather been challenged on a number of occasions, esp. during the Great Depression.
1) that under our "system" unlimited wealth is natural.
2) that those who have acquired wealth have no responsibility to those who are jobless
For Ford workers, they were lured to Detroit with promises. The idea was that if they turned over their control to Ford, he and the capitalist system would provide for them. The capitalist system and Ford had collapsed and its revival was nowhere in sight. Their question they asked: why were Ford and the capitalists still in charge? How were they going to eat? Should they starve in the midst of plenty? They felt Ford had created the conditions of capitalist collapse. The assumption that money is made magically by Ford genius was not part of their worldview at this time, an assumption that many students seem to think is the case today. They were closer to a period that saw that it was their sweat and labor that produced the goods. Farmers produced food, workers produced products, managers used by Ford simply made them work harder and harder so that more and more cars were produced, there wasn’t much more magic to it than that. The more radical among them suggested that the wealth was extracted from them, from their overworked bodies, and now they were starving or facing poverty because that overwork had produced overproduction and a new term “underconsumption.”
The fact that they knew: Ford did not invent the assembly line, nor did he invent the car. What he invented instead was a way of organizing the global assembly of cars at an unprecedented pace, a pace that promised abundance for all. He had promised that if workers gave up control, they would lose their skills, their control, their dignity, but they might get a car and a home. Now that was going down the tubes. In that sense, they were completely justified to thing he was fully responsible, because he had the power to help drive wages. If he and capitalists weren’t responsible, who was?
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