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Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order
A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar era
As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order.
Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war.
Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post-World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the global spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.
As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order.
Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war.
Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post-World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the global spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.
328 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2020
About the author
Stefan J. Link
1 book1 followerStefan J. Link is associate professor of history at Dartmouth College.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 10, 2021
Fascinating book, one of the more fun reads I’ve had recently. Some complaints but not enough to take off a star - overall excellent book.
March 31, 2023
Immensely relevant to contemporary economic competition between US and China.
February 11, 2022
The city of Detroit, as described in the introduction, is the "capital of the twentieth century". It had one of the highest median incomes in the country from the 1930s through to the 1980s, and had become a symbol for the modern world and mass production. The introduction follows the city in the 1930s, where it became a haven for all sorts of modernizers - both on the far left and the far right. While the story of the years following the great depression may have the impression of a breakup of the liberal international order, Link also emphasizes this was a period of playing catchup, where "insurgents" scrutinized and emulated parts of the industrial development of the United States.
The book starts with the question - Why Detroit? Link starts with a look at the previous administrations of Detroit, with a history of innovative governance with municipal ownership of utilities, before moving to Ford's model focusing on production and higher wages to avoid turnover. His own tendency to retain private ownership (contrast this with say, GM, which stayed with traditional modes of investment). The tasks of both industrialization and political reform had their admirers, including both the far left and the far right. My Life And Work, Henry Ford's own memoir, had both German and Russian editions published.
Following chapters discuss the development of the German and Soviet automotive industries. The Ford Motor Company might be said, using today's terms, to be more 'open-source', with an open-door policy on allowing foreign observers, and signing agreements for technological transfer. The keystone of this cooperation with the Soviets was GAZ, an automobile plant built at the city of Gorky (now Nizhniy Novgorod). The Soviet Union, having inherited a small and dispersed industrial base from the Russian Empire, relied heavily on foreign imports for a program of rapid industrialization. That said, there were clashes in approach - Link points out Soviet leaders who naturally were suspicious of importing capitalist work production methods uncritically, and some clashes in working style - the 'Stakhanovite' campaign of encouraging workers to exceed their quota chafed against the 'Fordist' methods of mass production, which instead valued consistency and 'flow'.
By contrast, Nazi Germany had a different approach. As there was already an established industrial and automotive sector in Germany, their approach relied on hiring foreign experts and capital controls to encourage foreign companies to build in Germany. In the use of capital controls, Link notes that this particular economic approach was used later in the 20th century: in South Korea, in 1950s Brazil, in 1980s China.
Chapter 5 is on wartime production and the use of Ford's technique of "flow production", or continuous production on an assembly line. Where the Germans had to demand each separate firm embrace more efficient methods, the Soviets had already spend the pre-war years emphasizing quantity over quality and the ability to produce war materiel. Here, the Soviet approach was decisive. It was not 'efficient', as command economies tend to be, but efficiency was not the point so much as it was a 'command' economy in and of itself, where it was able to outproduce Germany in almost every measure, and that was a fulcrum in the history of the war.
There's a lot to like in this book - the use of multiple languages of archival sources, and moving back from details to the larger picture. This is an academic text, and I could see it being taught from at the upper undergraduate level, or excerpts going into a 'global history' class.
The book starts with the question - Why Detroit? Link starts with a look at the previous administrations of Detroit, with a history of innovative governance with municipal ownership of utilities, before moving to Ford's model focusing on production and higher wages to avoid turnover. His own tendency to retain private ownership (contrast this with say, GM, which stayed with traditional modes of investment). The tasks of both industrialization and political reform had their admirers, including both the far left and the far right. My Life And Work, Henry Ford's own memoir, had both German and Russian editions published.
Following chapters discuss the development of the German and Soviet automotive industries. The Ford Motor Company might be said, using today's terms, to be more 'open-source', with an open-door policy on allowing foreign observers, and signing agreements for technological transfer. The keystone of this cooperation with the Soviets was GAZ, an automobile plant built at the city of Gorky (now Nizhniy Novgorod). The Soviet Union, having inherited a small and dispersed industrial base from the Russian Empire, relied heavily on foreign imports for a program of rapid industrialization. That said, there were clashes in approach - Link points out Soviet leaders who naturally were suspicious of importing capitalist work production methods uncritically, and some clashes in working style - the 'Stakhanovite' campaign of encouraging workers to exceed their quota chafed against the 'Fordist' methods of mass production, which instead valued consistency and 'flow'.
By contrast, Nazi Germany had a different approach. As there was already an established industrial and automotive sector in Germany, their approach relied on hiring foreign experts and capital controls to encourage foreign companies to build in Germany. In the use of capital controls, Link notes that this particular economic approach was used later in the 20th century: in South Korea, in 1950s Brazil, in 1980s China.
Chapter 5 is on wartime production and the use of Ford's technique of "flow production", or continuous production on an assembly line. Where the Germans had to demand each separate firm embrace more efficient methods, the Soviets had already spend the pre-war years emphasizing quantity over quality and the ability to produce war materiel. Here, the Soviet approach was decisive. It was not 'efficient', as command economies tend to be, but efficiency was not the point so much as it was a 'command' economy in and of itself, where it was able to outproduce Germany in almost every measure, and that was a fulcrum in the history of the war.
There's a lot to like in this book - the use of multiple languages of archival sources, and moving back from details to the larger picture. This is an academic text, and I could see it being taught from at the upper undergraduate level, or excerpts going into a 'global history' class.
December 23, 2021
This is one of the important background stories of history. The author investigates how, mainly in the years leading up to WW2 and during the war itself, the mass-production ideology and technology of "Fordism" spread through the world, and in particular was adopted by the USSR and Nazi Germany.
Stephan Link spends time struggling with Fordism as a concept, because it encompassed both an ideology and a technology. The technological aspect is the easiest to understand, that of factories built around the "flow" of a production line, which required that parts were fed into sub-assemblies and sub-assemblies into an assembly line in a continuous motion, with all operations reduced to steps that could either be executed by advanced machine tools, or broken down into simple actions that unskilled staff could perform reliably. Factories that required a high investment but were capable go huge production runs.
The ideology that flowed from this concept is harder to catch. As it emanated from Henry Ford, mass-production of consumer products had rebellious connotations. It challenged an existing social order, in which bankers controlled industrial investment and high-end products were sold to wealthy customers. Ford turned his back on the bankers to self-finance his growth from profits, and he intentionally cultivated employees into well-paid consumers. However, Fordism had a much darker side, famously lampooned by Chaplin in Modern Times: It turned unskilled workers into mere cogs in a giant machine. Where Ford himself was controlling and paternalistic, the regimes of the USSR and the Reich both discovered that it was an effective way to ruthlessly exploit conscripted or slave labour. Link investigates in much detail how, with the complicity of engineers who strove for wartime efficiency, the factories became brutalising giants. Sadly but unsurprisingly, German engineers such as the American-born William Werner were never brought to justice for their wartime actions.
The most surprising aspect of this story, also the core of Link's research, is how "Fordism" was exported from the USA. If the ideological aspects were merely transported by books (and the notoriously anti-Semitic Ford was popular in Nazi Germany), the technology was spread by a remarkably open exchange of tools and people. Ford opened its doors to both German and Soviet missions. The USSR paid hard cash for the technology transfer, but Germany forced American companies to invest in factories on its territory. Engineers and operators trained in the Mid-West brought their know-how to Cologne, Brandenburg and Gorky. This was not an easy task, and ambitious projects such as the GAZ plant in Gorky had to overcome enormous hurdles to establish sophisticated production methods amidst a backward industrial basis.
This book is academic (about a third of the book is notes and bibliography) and a little dry. For me the dryness is not in the history itself, which has plenty of surprises and interesting discoveries, but in Link's serious attempts to derive some kind of over-arching conclusion from it all, as befits a well-trained academic. In the end he concedes that it may be unwise to look for a grand trend, and teleology of industrial history. This history was instead shaped by the continuous interaction of conflicting claims and purposes.
Stephan Link spends time struggling with Fordism as a concept, because it encompassed both an ideology and a technology. The technological aspect is the easiest to understand, that of factories built around the "flow" of a production line, which required that parts were fed into sub-assemblies and sub-assemblies into an assembly line in a continuous motion, with all operations reduced to steps that could either be executed by advanced machine tools, or broken down into simple actions that unskilled staff could perform reliably. Factories that required a high investment but were capable go huge production runs.
The ideology that flowed from this concept is harder to catch. As it emanated from Henry Ford, mass-production of consumer products had rebellious connotations. It challenged an existing social order, in which bankers controlled industrial investment and high-end products were sold to wealthy customers. Ford turned his back on the bankers to self-finance his growth from profits, and he intentionally cultivated employees into well-paid consumers. However, Fordism had a much darker side, famously lampooned by Chaplin in Modern Times: It turned unskilled workers into mere cogs in a giant machine. Where Ford himself was controlling and paternalistic, the regimes of the USSR and the Reich both discovered that it was an effective way to ruthlessly exploit conscripted or slave labour. Link investigates in much detail how, with the complicity of engineers who strove for wartime efficiency, the factories became brutalising giants. Sadly but unsurprisingly, German engineers such as the American-born William Werner were never brought to justice for their wartime actions.
The most surprising aspect of this story, also the core of Link's research, is how "Fordism" was exported from the USA. If the ideological aspects were merely transported by books (and the notoriously anti-Semitic Ford was popular in Nazi Germany), the technology was spread by a remarkably open exchange of tools and people. Ford opened its doors to both German and Soviet missions. The USSR paid hard cash for the technology transfer, but Germany forced American companies to invest in factories on its territory. Engineers and operators trained in the Mid-West brought their know-how to Cologne, Brandenburg and Gorky. This was not an easy task, and ambitious projects such as the GAZ plant in Gorky had to overcome enormous hurdles to establish sophisticated production methods amidst a backward industrial basis.
This book is academic (about a third of the book is notes and bibliography) and a little dry. For me the dryness is not in the history itself, which has plenty of surprises and interesting discoveries, but in Link's serious attempts to derive some kind of over-arching conclusion from it all, as befits a well-trained academic. In the end he concedes that it may be unwise to look for a grand trend, and teleology of industrial history. This history was instead shaped by the continuous interaction of conflicting claims and purposes.
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November 1, 2022I learned a lot, but found this a slog. I'm not sure if that was actually the book itself, since it seemed readable page to page. Since this might be my personal distractions or state of mind, I'm not going to give this one a negative rating. It's a pretty solid exploration of this subject if you want to get into the nitty gritty.
February 7, 2024
Re-read this after purchasing it and writing a paper on it, and the topic is genuinely fascinating. The book is well researched and Link makes fleshed out connections supported with interesting evidence. However, the biggest downside to me is that it can be hard to get into and is written at a really complex level compared to other non fiction history books I have read in the past year. For someone with a casual interest in this time period or this topic, myself included, the prose is challenging and sometimes confusing in places, though it's not undecipherable.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews