You’ve probably heard of Fordlandia – it crops up again and again on the internet’s “weird things” zones.
Even jóhann Jóhannsson, the brilliant musician who did the theme music for Arrival, Sicario, and The Theory of Everything, has gotten into it, producing an album of found sounds and music performed in the abandoned factories. [wik] I have it. It’s OK. There is something undeniably weird about a factory town in the middle of nowhere in Brazil, built there by the hubris of Henry Ford.
This article at The Guardian goes into its history in a bit more detail, and has some nice pictures. [guard] I find it odd and a bit off-putting that most of the discussion about Fordlandia is “it’s weird and it didn’t work because of the economics of rubber production and the invention of synthetic rubber.” Yes, that’s true. But the story is not merely that Ford made a mistake. Omitted from that version of the story is the history of Henry Ford’s racism, and his relationship with labor.
Since I’ve been writing about labor and labor unrest, it would be inappropriate for me to omit mention of the great ‘riot’ at the Ford plant at The Rouge in Dearborn in 1937. Fordlandia was built in 1932. Ford was already having difficulty with unrest at his factories and it’s impossible to imagine that Ford wasn’t looking at Fordlandia as an opportunity to implement a vertically integrated employee economy, like the mine bosses in West Virginia built to trap their mine workers. Another piece of the puzzle (I will do a whole posting on the topic, if I have the stomach for it) is Pullman, and the town of Pullman which was built in 1880 and the great Pullman strike of 1890. Fordlandia and Pullman were both way-points on the american anarcho-capitalist dream world in which the entire economic output of labor was captured from birth to death, except workers’d be fired and evicted when they got too old to work anymore.
Accounts of Fordlandia often omit the totalitarian overtones of the anarcho capitalist dream. Like Hobby Lobby and other modern corporate totalitarians, Ford had a specific cultural and social agenda, as well. From Wikipedia [wik]:
The town had a strict set of rules imposed by the managers. Alcohol, women, tobacco and even football were forbidden within the town, including inside the workers’ own homes. Inspectors would go from house to house to check how organised the houses were and to enforce these rules. The inhabitants circumvented these prohibitions by paddling out to merchant riverboats moored beyond the town jurisdiction, often hiding contraband goods inside fruits like watermelons. A small settlement was established 8 kilometres (5 mi) upstream on the “Island of Innocence” with bars, nightclubs and brothels.
Ford prohibited “outside influences” including religion from the plantation. I suspect union organizers weren’t welcomed, either, but I have never found any mention of union activity at Fordlandia. Surprised? I read about these things and I think that George Orwell didn’t have to stretch his imagination that hard; 1984 is a brilliant book in every way, but it’s not really a great extrapolation of a dystopian future: it was life for a West Virginia miner or a Ford plant worker.
Even Fordlandia had labor unrest, though it was minor:
In 1930, the native workers grew tired of the American food and revolted in the town’s cafeteria. This became known as the Breaking Pans (Portuguese: Quebra-Panelas). The rebels proceeded to cut the telegraph wires and chased away the managers and even the town’s cook into the jungle for a few days until the Brazilian Army arrived and the revolt ended. Agreements were then made on the type of food the workers would be served.
It does occur to me that Ford probably thought Brazilian laborers were more inclined toward servitude than Americans, because of some racist theory or other, but it wasn’t explicitly said. It was wrong, of course. The histories of Fordlandia are written that the place was shut down because the development of synthetic urethane rubber made rubber farming superfluous, but I wonder if the other aspect that didn’t work was a captive labor pool.
This is all “right to work” stuff, remember: when corporate capitalists talk about “right to work” what they mean is that a company can employ whoever they want, however they want, and govern the entire relationship contractually. Which means, of course, that they can have racist or sexist hiring practices, use the threat of termination and destitution as a negotiating lever, and there is no regulation preventing them from running the place like a slave plantation. That’s the model they wanted, and that’s the model they kept (and keep) working toward. When you read about the history of labor riots, it’s full of mine and mill bosses saying “dang it, nobody’s going to tell me who I can or can’t hire or fire!” which means, in shorthand: I have the power.
Fordlandia today is described as a weird failed business idea, not an experiment in totalitarianism from which a bunch of Brazilians were rescued by the invention of synthetic rubber.
I’m disappointed by Marx and Marxists, because I think they stumble off into the weeds and never emerge, trying to explain a theory of justifying the value of labor. What Marx was trying to accomplish was to identify a way of measuring the value of labor in an entire production line: given that a company owns the factory (the means of production) it’s not unreasonable to say that the company needs to recoup plus make a profit for its contribution to the economics of the plant – so, what is labor owed? That whole dialogue is irrelevant if the means of production are owned by labor in the first place; that’s why I favor employee owned and operated businesses – which are shockingly rare in these times. Why is that? Well, capitalists don’t get to come along and grab a slice of the action, that way. I think Marxian reasoning was fair enough in an industrial economy, where labor was interchangeable and factories were hugely expensive – but today we see the internet being used to “disintermediate” some businesses; oddly, though, the “disintermediation” is done by software companies that are not trying to truly “disintermediate” – they’re placing the company across the transaction, controlling it, and charging a smaller but very real slice of the action. Put differently: I reject the idea that Uber’s servers and software are that innovative and important and I wonder that nobody has developed a free alternative. Uber has already demonstrated that there’s a business niche there; why not simply shoot the entire “taxi cab” industry in the heart and put in place a free ride needed/ride offered system? Capitalists would not allow that. That’s why. If you step back a few paces, you can conceptualize capitalism as a sort of built-in tax on businesses: the capitalists get their slice and in return they offer… what? If that reasoning is accurate, replacing capitalism in businesses ought to be a matter of identifying the size and value of the “capitalism tax” and building employee-owned businesses that invest in their own start-up costs without a capitalist or kickstarter or “disintermediator” between them and the customer.
Thank you all for the supportive comments. This kind of stuff is difficult to dig through, and I really do have blood squirting out of my ears, sometimes. The horror that is US labor/capital relations is a deep vein of nasty that I could mine for years without tapping out. I may take a break for a while because we need to pause to watch the drama of the kakistocracy in Washington and cheer when we’re told to for the great Biden cardboard cutout. Frankly, this stuff is so depressing it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning. Next up, maybe the fallout from the Haymarket incident, or the Ford strike, or the Pullman strike. Ugh. All of those are great riots of yesteryear, featuring dead strikers, dead cops, a corrupt justice system, and a national guard that loves to bayonet strikers.
My understanding is that Fordlandia also had a ‘no women and no alcohol’ policy, which of course took it even further to being essentially a slave plantation by removing any ‘distractions’ from serving your gods/masters. It also, unsurprisingly, made the workers much less willing to comply. And instead the people running Fordlandia kept getting distracted stamping out all the popup stills and the like that showed up a little ways outside the town.
Honestly, from what I’ve read up on it, the biggest cause of failure pretty much boiled down to: the workers were locals and the overseers weren’t. Which meant that when the workers decided to leave and disappear into the forest, they knew what they were doing and how to get around in the forest, while the overseers didn’t.
The original Fordlandia was an organizational disaster to the point where even the Brazilian government was getting antsy, and I seem to recall it was the attempt at building a second Fordlandia in a more ‘secure’ location that got shut down by the advent of synthetic rubber. Ford was otherwise quite ready to go ahead with the new plantation.
As I understand it, Marx wasn’t interested in working out precisely the value that labour contributes to the productive process for its own sake. What he was doing in Das Kapital was interrogating the fundamental class relationships at the heart of the capitalistic production process so as to bring out where and why it was exploitative. His analysis basically boils down to the fact that capitalism is structured around having two classes – employers and employees – with antagonistic needs, incentives and desires, and the former (a tiny minority) get to make all the decisions that affect everyone.
The Labour Theory of Value was one tool he used to make this exploitative and antagonistic relationship explicit. Actually the Labour Theory of Value wasn’t a Marx original – Adam Smith and David Ricardo had both used it, and Marx credits their work. But Marx adapted it to show how the exploitation happened. The classical model of Smith and Ricardo would have it that the workers brought labour to the enterprise, the capitalist brought the money to buy tools and raw materials and the landlord provided the workspace, and then the profits were divided up between them according to a fair division based on how much each had contributed. Thus the Smith-Ricardo model of the Labour Theory of Value really was interested in working out precisely how much workers’ labour contributed – because to them it was the basis on which the worker was to be remunerated.
Marx was having none of that. He introduced the concept of the surplus (mehr in the original German, literally “more”), to outline how the division of profits from the enterprise is in no way according to how much each participant contributed but entirely at the behest of the capitalists who make the decisions. So once the costs of the enterprise (labour embodied in tools and materials) are deducted from the money taken in for selling the commodity produced, the remainder of that money must, by definition, be the value the workers have added with their work. Marx’s system would have everything of value added to the starting materials as the surplus, due to the workers. But although they added all that value, they don’t get the value for themselves. The capitalist gives them the smallest portion of it he can get away with giving them – usually just enough to live on, occasionally not even that – and keeps the rest for himself (minus any he has to pay out to maintain things that keep him in his position, such as paying supervisors, funding the police to protect the system, paying for education for the workers so they can do the job, etc.). The issue of whether the workers receive all the value their work adds, as would be fair, is a moot point, given that the essence of the system is that the capitalists are the ones who get to make the decisions.
So, from a traditionally Marxian perspective, you’ve kind of got it the wrong way round. Capitalists aren’t so much a tax on industry as under a capitalist system the telos is that the capitalists get everything and all the other pesky contingencies such as paying workers enough to keep them alive and running a state that functions enough to perpetuate the system are unfortunate taxes on capitalist profits. Which is why worker cooperative enterprises are such a fundamental negation of that system – there are no longer two antagonistic classes competing for the value, with one assumed to be its natural destination by right and the other treated as an outrageous inconvenience for even existing. Instead there is only one class of owner-operators who get to make all the decisions and put up with the consequences of such.
The other big point Marx made was that, even though the fundamental class relationship in capitalism – employer-employee, was different in degree to the fundamental relationships in previous arrangements (master-slave in a slave economy, lord-serf in a feudal one), it wasn’t all that different in kind. Capitalism didn’t change the fundamental existence of a tiny decision-making minority and an oppressed majority who had to put up with what the minority decided. Which is why extreme capitalistic arrangements like the mining towns of the early 20th Century and Fordlandia tend to look remarkably like slave or feudal institutions.
Holy crap!
Seriously though, the wealthy want their lives to be unregulated by the state while they attempt to micromanage the lives of the impoverished literally by barging into their private homes! Now that’s some double standard.
Andreas: All justified by various forms of “reformed” Christianity which posited that the wealthy, the “owners” deserved that status because they were the chosen of Gawd. Which is the dominant flavor in America today, in the various prosperity gospel sects and their ilk.
they attempt to micromanage the lives of the impoverished literally by barging into their private homes!
Well, not private. The homes were the property of the company, and I’m sure the contract stipulated inspections, which made it perfectly okay in the mind of the capitalist. There’s no double standard at all. Watch:
• The workers work for the capitalists so the latter can ask for whatever conditions they want.
• The government works for the capitalists so the latter can ask for whatever conditions they want.
We’ve made progress since then: the capitalists are a bit more subtle these days.
The same lack of privacy and autonomy happens in the military and nobody finds it weird. I’m pretty sure it would be the same on any captive work environment, such as a ship — or, more literally captive, a prison. Do company representatives inspect workers’ cabins on an oil rig?
The model for Elon Musk’s Mars colony?
These are an interesting sort of parasite ecology/economy. If a couple of companies do it there aren’t too many problems other than the humans rights abuses, but if too many workers end up in these situations then you don’t have the necessary body of consumers to buy the shit made by the companies. Pennsylvanian miners can’t afford cars, and Ford’s contractual slaves don’t need coal. If too many companies take this approach it’ll all collapse
cvoinescu@#6
I have lived in rented property. In my case, the business from whom I rented my temporary home didn’t care how I lived, they only cared to make sure that when I move out the apartment isn’t damaged (my contract stated that I will have to pay for repairs if anything is damaged when I move out). And when they needed to inspect smoke detectors in my apartment, they warned me a week in advance about the date and time when they will show up. Even if I would have wanted to have orgies in my rented home, nobody could have caught me at the wrong time.
I don’t know, but they shouldn’t.
Hi, stderr. Generic supportive comment from a rare poster. I always find your posts interesting and educational (if not also saddening and enraging). Write what you wish; I will likely read it.
Andreas Avester @ #8:
I know, but that was then on company housing on land owned by a latter-day robber baron, and this is now on a proper tenancy agreement in a civilized country. In part to avoid exactly that situation, in many places, tenants have clearly legislated rights. Even as a lodger (renting a room in the house the landlord lives in), you have an expectation of privacy. (Although because you literally live in their house, the landlord does have a say on whether and when you can have guests, so orgies would probably be out. Or maybe the polite thing to do is to invite the landlord too — I’m not very good at this.)
jenorafeuer@#1:
Honestly, from what I’ve read up on it, the biggest cause of failure pretty much boiled down to: the workers were locals and the overseers weren’t. Which meant that when the workers decided to leave and disappear into the forest, they knew what they were doing and how to get around in the forest, while the overseers didn’t.
Yes. But, let me demonstrate a bit of why root cause analysis is difficult (and why historians fight so much!) – this is not a criticism of your comment, I’m using it to illustrate:
the biggest cause of failure pretty much boiled down to: the workers were locals and the overseers weren’t and why was that? Because Ford Corp thought they could have a captive work force. And they probably exported overseers from the US because they needed to teach the locals how to do things the Ford way and enforce discipline. I’d say that the local-vs-nonlocal dynamic was a consequence of the root cause which was that Ford was trying to build a captive labor force because they were asshole capitalists.
Which meant that when the workers decided to leave and disappear into the forest, they knew what they were doing and how to get around in the forest, while the overseers didn’t. Again, the root cause was probably the decision to build an insolated facility with a captive labor force. These are all aspects of “that was not a very good idea.”
Andreas Avester@#4:
Seriously though, the wealthy want their lives to be unregulated by the state while they attempt to micromanage the lives of the impoverished literally by barging into their private homes! Now that’s some double standard.
Yup. Power and money aren’t worth much unless you plan to abuse it.
bmiller@#5:
Andreas: All justified by various forms of “reformed” Christianity which posited that the wealthy, the “owners” deserved that status because they were the chosen of Gawd. Which is the dominant flavor in America today, in the various prosperity gospel sects and their ilk.
And purely by coincidence, the prosperity gospel was invented by Andrew Carnegie. To justify his awesomeness and good fortune. And because he totally was not a rapacious asshole.
cvoinescu@#10:
We’ve made progress since then: the capitalists are a bit more subtle these days.
I don’t know if you’ve been watching what has been going on between Lyft/Uber and the state of California, but the state tried to make it a requirement that ‘gig’ workers be treated as employees, and Lyft/Uber threatened to pull out of the state. Not sure who’s going to blink, but ultimately it’s an epic showdown over who gets to decide what benefits employees are due. Uber/Lyft’s whole argument – the whole efficiency of their business – is that the employees are private contractors and set their own hours/workload, therefore fuck them. It’s an angle that Andrew Carnegie would have jumped for joy over: “oh those steel workers are private contractors, they set their own hours, it’s not our fault if the only way they can make ends meet is to work 12-hr shifts and they get no benefits at all – they have FREEDOM!”
@mynax@#9: Thanks for the feedback!
cartomancer@#2:
OK, you’re schooling me hard, and you’re right. I was not careful in how I worded things, since I was making a rough comment, but there’s no excuse for being sloppy. I came to Marx from reading Landes’ Prometheus Unbound and a lot about mining and steel work in Pennsylvania. I guess that’s what I focused on, and mis-focused Marx in consequence. It’s certainly what resonated with me.
The Labour Theory of Value was one tool he used to make this exploitative and antagonistic relationship explicit. Actually the Labour Theory of Value wasn’t a Marx original – Adam Smith and David Ricardo had both used it, and Marx credits their work. But Marx adapted it to show how the exploitation happened.
That’s a much better way of putting it than I did. I assume that there were tons of pro-capitalists who were throwing up a great big smokescreen of “there is no exploitation going on” which is why he hammered that topic.
As I understand it, Marx wasn’t interested in working out precisely the value that labour contributes to the productive process for its own sake.
Right. The problem, as I read it, was quantifying the relationship between the labor and the means of production – you can’t say that there is exploitation unless you refute first the capitalists’ argument that they took a huge risk in building the factory, and their vision and management is what is the most important thing, etc., therefore the laborer’s contribution is minimized because they’re just dumb muscle – or something like that. When I go back to reading See You In Hell I was constantly thinking about that, because Carnegie claimed (fairly, I think!) that he was creating all these jobs and opportunity for the Pittsburgh area – but then, there was a bunch of handwaving that happened and the workers got fucked. So I kept looking at the theory of labor value to see whether there was anything on which could be hung an argument that the work was exploitive – in that context, it seemed pretty clear: the thing that turned a bunch of iron ore in to steel I-beams was a factory + raw material and consumables + labor. You could look at the cost of the consumables and the factory over its lifespan and the cost of labor, and assign a value to the labor it took to turn that ore into an I-beam.
I will note that I watched a bunch of videos of my favorite anarchist, Robert Paul Wolff, and was surprised to discover that he’s a serious Marxian – he asserted (wrongly, I believe) that there is a formal process in Marx that allows us to evaluate labor’s contribution reliably. I didn’t see that. I was a bit croggled, to be frank.
[…] The issue of whether the workers receive all the value their work adds, as would be fair, is a moot point, given that the essence of the system is that the capitalists are the ones who get to make the decisions.
That’s an excellent summary. I did not see that Marx’ focus was on who makes the decisions. That makes a lot of sense.
So, from a traditionally Marxian perspective, you’ve kind of got it the wrong way round. Capitalists aren’t so much a tax on industry as under a capitalist system the telos is that the capitalists get everything and all the other pesky contingencies such as paying workers enough to keep them alive and running a state that functions enough to perpetuate the system are unfortunate taxes on capitalist profits.
That was me being unclear. I was not saying that Marx saw capitalists as a tax; that’s how I see it. In part that’s because of my various experiences with
vampireventure capitalists. There are similarities: because they have the money they get to make certain decisions, but they also retain the power to extract their money at a profit when they want to, which can materially (hugely) impact the business at random times. Speaking as someone who has seen what happens when a VC dumps their shares in a publicly traded company (and it drops 20% in an afternoon) I see them as an unpredictable and uncontrollable force that can take its pound of flesh because it’s monday, or whatever. That’s not Marx, that’s Marcus. I’m sorry I was not clear on that point.That said, the argument about what is the right amount of value that one should get for providing the means of production is something I would expect to fall within Marxian analysis because it was a big deal when people were raising the capital to build railways and factories. Now, its dotcoms and server farms but it’s the same thing, sort of (though “intellectual capital” is a new wild card)
Capitalism didn’t change the fundamental existence of a tiny decision-making minority and an oppressed majority who had to put up with what the minority decided. Which is why extreme capitalistic arrangements like the mining towns of the early 20th Century and Fordlandia tend to look remarkably like slave or feudal institutions.
Yes. That.