Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor company in 1903. In 1908 the company initiated the production of the Model-T (of which the company sold 15 million). It was the first car of its kind using a new type of production which involved the mass production of consumer durables which were made on moving assembly live techniques operated with the semi-skilled labor of the mass worker. Before cars were produced by hand which was both time consuming and very expensive. The actual physical production of the car was also a problem due to numerous parts involved, the Model-T took only 12.5 hours per car to build from start to finish, a build time that would have been impossible to sustain on a continuous basis before.

It was from this new process of the production line that Fordism took its name; he had come up with a way of producing cars that broke the overall production process down into hundreds and sometimes thousands of small, individualized, highly-specialized parts. By introducing a complex division of labor, ford reasoned that costs could be lowered and profits

The assembly line, and the mass-production that fordism brought on, led to a dependence on faith and technology that is still very much with us today. We rely on scientists to solve all of our problems. Humans today go around polluting the planet presuming that some day soon technology will be created to clean it up.

It is because of fordism that the world grew. While the assembly line allowed for a reduction in workforce size, far more jobs were created than lost. As more and more cars were produced, there was a need for more and more roads. And with those roads came a need for “roadside” business. Motels, cafes, gasoline stations, these were all natural outgrowths to the increased use of the automobile which Henry ford had created.

Fordism entailed increased mechanization of the labor process and the potential for heightened capitalist control over the pace and intensity of work. Realization of that potential involved bouts of explicit class struggle. Contesting liberal capitalism’s emphasis on private property rights, industrial workers counterpoised conceptions of industrial democracy and collective participation in work life in order to legitimate their new and embattled industrial unions. In the postwar context of Cold War fears, and access to an unprecedented affluence, such challenges were contained within the bounds of a vision of liberal capitalism as the social system best able to secure- on a global scale- individual rights and liberties and a more generalized prosperity. On the basis of union participation in the hegemonic world-vision, the state and capital accepted industrial unions as junior partners in the postwar project of reconstructing a liberal capitalist world order.

According to some, the introduction of information technologies would shift employment from the manufacturing and extractive industries towards the service sector, especially its media and high tequnology companies. As a consequence, assembly line workers would be replaced by white-collar professionals. In parallel, bureaucrats and industrialists would loose there political and economic power to scientists and academics, who had the skills to invent the new information technologies.

increased. The production was a new way of thinking and doing, helped made possible by new advances in machinery.

The assembly line, mass production, and the proliferation of automobiles have also had its negative effects on society. To begin with the assembly line in itself was dehumanizing. Ford himself said “the man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it”. The assembly line turns a human craftsman into part of a machine. This dehumanizing process has also unfortunately greatly affected our society. Each worker on the line has a specific task to perform, repeatedly and monotonously for hours on end. The more specialized each worker becomes, the more efficient the line. Human beings started to loose their freedom and the machines stared taking over. The education act reinforces this idea because the children were being produced for different parts of the factory.

It is generally as

Some topics in this essay:
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