ABSTRACT
Although there are general laws of capitalist development to be identified theoretically, an analysis of contemporary capitalism has to focus on the structure and the specific dynamics of the given historical reality of capitalism. “Fordism” is a descriptive category which summarizes such historical tendencies of capitalist accumulation in the last decades, in particular after World War II.Social and economic development take place within a given institutional, normative, and physical framework, which may be called a “regime” of accumulation: they are linked to the specificities of historical time and determined by the characteristics of geographical and social space. Thus, in order to understand capitalist dynamics it is not sufficient to identify the “general laws of motion” of the mode of production; rather, it is necessary to uncover historical and geographical specificities and particularities of capitalist development. This perspective motivated Aglietta’s (1979) analysis of the “US experience” as well as the efforts of Antonio Gramsci (1967) to understand the impact of “Americanism” and “Fordism” on the growth (and expansion) of capitalist hegemony in the US during the 1920s and its repercussions on the political system in Europe, in particular in Italy.
