ABSTRACT
Henry Ford's revolutionary mass-production process for manufacturing automobiles stands as an almost universal symbol for modern industrial capitalism. Both its hitherto unimagined material productivity and its similarly unprecedented impoverishment of the human spirit are simultaneously captured by the contradictory image of the automobile assembly line. Along such lines and in other mechanized processes pioneered by Ford, degraded and dehumanized workers toil to produce the very products that enrich their leisure lives. The incredible productivity of Fordist mass production makes possible, perhaps even necessary, mass consumption. Historians remind us that not only did Henry Ford innovate production methods that steadily lowered the price of a complex, mechanical consumer good, but he also pioneered the transformation of the toiling masses into consumers by raising his workers' wages to an incredible five dollars a day. In liberal ideology, the sins of Fordist mass production against the human spirit are more than atoned for by this rise in the material prosperity of the masses that is its corollary within industrial capitalism.
