New labour and post-Fordist ideology: inherent contradictions?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Lewis, Gavin
• Date: 01 January 2005

'We have abandoned ideology. We simply do what works.' New Labour has made a virtue out of regularly claiming that it has no ideological or philosophical agenda. It has forsaken the politics of the redistributive Left and given the appearance of having deserted the centralizing policies of post-war Labourism. Supposedly, it now solves problems without the burden of 'first principles', philosophical aim or predetermined outcome. Supposedly, its foggy 'third way' does not favour Left over Right or the weak over the powerful. We all know better than that, though, don't we? New Labour does have an ideology; it has simply stopped talking about it. But then post-Fordist managerialism does not have quite the same ring as 'To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities'.

Towards the end of the Left's desperate decade of the 1980s, the magazine Marxism Today launched what it called its New Times Project. (1) Contributing academics pondered the collapse of traditional social solidarity and the rise of a consumer-driven politics of identity. Principal among these were Robin Murray's article on 'Fordism and Post-Fordism' and Stuart Hall's 'The Meaning of The New Times'. These arguments suggested that changes in the way western production systems organized us as social beings were the driving factors behind these cultural shifts. We were no longer uniformly working in mass industries, imbibing mass culture, observing the same hours or taking our leisure en masse. Post-Fordism was viewed as a break with the fixed social relationships and homogenizing conformity of the past; the Left should seize its possibilities.

In the Post-Fordist paradigm the Toyoda production system was held up as a model of efficiency. Toyoda departed from the orthodoxy of mass production by using a just-in-time production system. Because it did not over-produce components that then had to be stockpiled, it was more efficient and even an environmental improvement on the earlier Fordist model. It was also more flexible; in place of a mass workforce it used core and peripheral employment structures and could thus raise or downsize production as needed. Post-Fordism often relied upon a version of modularity. It would have a core product that could be altered according to taste in colour or design need by adding on or subtracting parts. The easiest way to understand this is to think of car or kitchen unit production, although the same principles could be just as easily applied to clothes and other products. The other key feature that gave Post-Fordism its massive flexibility was its advanced computer technology that linked tills directly to stock control systems. This meant that, from the moment of an initial purchase, the entire production and retail distribution system could respond to consumer demand.

In an era in which leftist critics had awoken to the fact that individuals made purchasing decisions in order to signify particular characteristics of their specific identities, this was all very exciting. It meant that western production systems could respond to the desires of those who traditionally would have been regarded as marginal. Production could be geared to the specific tastes of ethnic groups, non-traditional sexual identities and sub-cultural formations. To a leftist/liberal political grouping long exiled from power, this seemed to give some clue to the way forward.

It also offered an answer to a problem this group would have to address--should it ever attain power again--which was connected to issues of globalization and corporate media power. A large part of the British media was foreign-owned and right-wing. Almost every part of its output was geared towards one aim--establishing a culture in which it would have to pay as little tax as possible. In pursuit of this aim it had done significant damage to Labour in the past. New Labour was formed out of a mixture of fear of what this media formation might do again and the hope that limited collusion might stave off more attacks. Consequently, New Labour would not raise the direct tax revenue necessary to refurbish Britain's ailing infrastructure or even to adequately maintain existing policies of equal opportunity. Instead, while concealing its ideological shift and strategic conflict of interest within the ambiguous language of managerialism, it would attempt to use Post-Fordist techniques to make the revenue it did raise work more effectively.

This has been evident in several areas where previous large-scale social provision has been replaced by models...