Post-Fordism
The primary system of production and consumption in most industrialized nations since the late 20th century. Fordism was the industrial era of factory work and mass production, where workers did specialized tasks repeatedly.
Post-Fordism signals a shift to a growth in labor processes and workflows relying on information and communication technologies and data-based decision making.
According to Mark Fisher, flexibility, nomadism and spontaneity are:
the hallmarks of management in a post-Fordist, Control society. But the problem is that any opposition to flexibility and decentralization risks being self-defeating, since calls for inflexibility and centralization are, to say the least, not likely to be very galvanizing.
The new condition is that nothing is long term, which may be seen by the examples of trending away from worker unions over the last several decades, and toward gig work within the last decade. See: the precariat.
Permanent instability through precarity and constant re-skilling.
According to Marxist economist Christian Marazzi, the switch from Fordism to post-Fordism can be given a very specific date: October 6, 1979. It was on that date that the Federal Reserve increased interest rates by 20 points, preparing the way for the 'supply-side economics' that would constitute the 'economic reality' in which we are now enmeshed. The rise in interest rates not only contained inflation, it made possible a new organization of the means of production and distribution. The 'rigidity' of the Fordist production line gave way to a new 'flexibility', a word that will send chills of recognition down the spine of every worker today. This flexibility was defined by a deregulation of Capital and labor, with the workforce being casualized (with an increasing number of workers employed on a temporary basis), and outsourced.
Capitalist Realism, chapter 5