ABSTRACT
The 1940s to the 1970s was a specific historical moment in capitalist development during which time an ascendant regime of accumulation, based on intensive capitalist accumulation, was matched with an appropriate mode of régulation to mitigate the capitalist crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. Mass production techniques that utilized Taylorist and Fordist methodologies were matched with the institutionalization of the Fordist (welfare) state. Gramsci referred to this new historical epoch as ‘Fordism and Americanism’.2 I refer to it here as the Employment paradigm.
