Lean Production and Flexibility: The Highest Stage of Taylorism

This chapter aims at a wholesale criticism of the entire set of theories that claimed after the 1980s that the world capitalist economy had entered a new stage that could be characterised as “post-Fordist”, a setup that involved “flexible specialisation”, “Toyotism”, “flexibility”, “total quality management” and a transition towards the “flat organisation”. Being very much in the vogue in the last two decades of the previous century in mainstream business literature, these concepts were taken over by many left-leaning authors together with the ideological baggage they involved, implying that somehow flexibility was equally good for the worker as it was for the capitalist, that the new setup eliminated age-old ills such as deskilling, excessive specialisation, and the division between mental and physical labour, that the new system was good for both classes. The chapter is a systematic attempt to show the vacuity of such ideologically loaded claims. It demonstrates that the present methods of labour process control are but even more brutal forms of the subordination of labour to capital. In the process it demystifies the concept of “flexibility”. It also aims to discard the concepts of “Fordism” and “post-Fordism”, by now almost of axiomatic status, as baseless fictions.