The Rise of a Finance-Driven Accumulation Regime

During the course of the 1970s the Fordist gross domestic product (GDP) and productivity growth model weakened. Aglietta (1987, p. 119) describes this as a consequence of the Taylorist logic itself: ‘the further the fragmentation of individual tasks and integration of jobs by the machine system have already been taken, the more costly in means of production is subsequent intensification of the output norm’. The reason was the great technical rigidity of the mechanised system. Further increases in labour productivity were contingent upon additional investments in fixed capital on an ever greater scale. At the same time, the associated search for increases in productivity via work intensification led to growing alienation on the shop floor. Workers’ protests began to undermine companies’ profitability from the late 1960s on, when the almost total capacity utilisation of fixed capital concentrated great numbers of workers on the same shop floor, carrying out very similar tasks. Hence a numerically growing and relatively homogenous working class emerged as a result of the Taylorist organisation of the work process, which then became the most effective obstacle to Fordist growth (Jessop, 2002, pp. 81–2). This is reflected in Tables 8.1 and 8.2. Labour productivity growth fell in all countries of the Atlantic space, when compared to the levels of the 1960s.