It is suggested that there is something new about today’s consumer culture – several shifts have occurred: from Fordism to post-Fordism, from organised to disorganised capitalism, from modernity to post-modernity.

Marx details the inherent contradictions and crises in capitalist reproduction:

• the imperative for capital accumulation drives capitalists to ever greater productivity and output, resulting in over-production and unsold stocks.
• capitalists’ extraction of surplus value by pushing down wages means that workers’ effective demand is insufficient to purchase the fruits of their labour.
• although the markets mediate between production and consumption, this is an anarchic and irrational process, resulting in both oversupplies and shortages.

Although the minimum consumption norm enters into the negotiation of wage levels, it is not set by the market, so much as by class struggle. Religious institutions, charities and welfare systems also join the struggle to set a (historical) basic standard of living.

While consumption norms are set by a complex of social, cultural, economic and political forces, the French Regulationist School argues that they must be set in such a way that it strikes a balance between the systemic needs of keeping labour costs low enough to maximise surplus value while still reproducing labour, and ensuring that wages are high enough to constitute an effective demand sufficient to realise the value, which labour produces. Failure to achieve the right balance linking production and consumption results in a crisis in economic accumulation. But, as consumption is about the way people live in general, not simply about their technical economic function, this linking involves not merely a regulation of capitalist economy, but of capitalist society. Fordism is one such mode of regulation.

The Regulationist School argues that while the articulation of production and consumption is a functional necessity for capitalist reproduction, it is not automatically secured. Rather it is a historical achievement involving class struggle, there can be a failure to achieve it, and ways of achieving it can reach their limits so that new ways have to be found; i.e. post-Fordism.

But first, let’s examine Fordism. The Regulationist School outlines how high-volume mass production requires the mass consumption of commodities. It is suggested that modern Western consumption was governed by standardised housing and the automobile. It is also that domestic consumption was geared to keeping people mentally and physically fit for work. Three developments were significant:

• ‘a small family + car’ was a primary unit of consumption – it created other wants;
• the logic of Fordist production was subordinated to a ‘functional aesthetic’;
• cultural differentiation of consumer goods were based status positions.

In addition, the Regulationist School provides a political analysis, and importantly, of the national collective bargaining.

• Organised business has to keep wage costs low; it has to ensure that labour is willing to submit to intensive planning and rationalisation in the workplace.
• Organised labour is convinced to give up its workplace power and maintain discipline, in exchange for steadily rising wages.
• Government ensures successful negotiations between business and labour, as the outcome secures political and industrial peace, and reduces the welfare budget.

Thus, consumer culture constitutes a bribe in that workers (skilled and organised only) are offered freedom and relative plenty in the sphere of consumption in exchange for accepting intensive rationalisation, alienation and lack of control over their work life, and for a political democratic, capitalist system.

Interestingly, the Regulationist School offers another way of connecting mass production to mass consumption other than through advertising and manipulation.

A summary of the shift away from Fordism: Up to the early 1970s, consumer society had reached its limits, as the economic system experienced economic crises and trade cycle. The costs and time-scale of investment in Fordist production had become huge, and much efficiency gains had been exhausted. At the same time, consumer markets had ever faster turn-over in fashions, tastes, trends.

The response to this situation is reckoned to be ‘flexibility’ and ‘flexible accumulation’. The aim is now to have a flexible plant and labour that can cost-effectively produce smaller batches of more customised goods. The capability to do this is largely associated with new technologies. Production system is able to change to consumer taste through computer-aided design and manufacturing systems. Benetton, the knitwear company, is cited as an example of this shift, identifying key features such as its just-in-time stock process, information networks, autonomous work units.

Note that the flexibility is not purely production-led, for Fordism has also reached other internal limits, such as the limits of workplace alienation. The steadily rising standards of living were no longer sufficient compensation for the magnitude of alienation in either the workplace or the wider society. Maybe the consumer culture and the ‘hedonistic ethic’ encouraged by Fordism had eroded the work ethic and work discipline, and created a rising expectations of standard of living.

The mode of consumption within post-Fordism has also changed. post-Fordist marketing disaggregates markets and consumption into ‘lifestyles’, ‘niche markets’, ‘target consumer groups’. These are defined by cultural meanings (not by social demographic structures such as class, gender, age and ethnicity) constructed and distributed through design, advertising and the media.

Faced with increasing cost of demand management and welfare obligations, side-lined by the internationalisation of capital, its traditional political support disaggregated into mobile lifestyles and ‘new social movements’, unable to manage the economy, the state entered a period of retrenchment and neo-liberal deregulation. There is a move away from Keynesian welfare demand management to devolution of all social decision-making to the market, emphasising consumer choice and individual responsibility.

It is important to note that arguments about post-Fordism are mixed up with futurology (reading trends). Also, there are questions about the significance of new features - the move from mass to fragmented and social structure to lifestyles may be exaggerated.