America skipped feudalism, making its productive methods of global theoretical interest

Evidence

The starting-point of Americanism and Fordism is the impact of America and American productive methods on Europe after the First World War. The fact that America had never known a feudal phase and was therefore free of parasitic residues of older modes of production has always intrigued European Marxists, ever since the days of Marx himself. In the early days of the Soviet Union much attention was paid to the American phenomenon, to the efficiency of American productive technique and even to the apparent democracy of American enterprise. There was also a general interest in the Soviet Union in the possibility of applying American ideas, notably those of Frederick Taylor on “Scientific Management”, under Socialist relations of production. For Gramsci, the full-scale introduction of Americanism into Italy would have a different significance. It would represent a high point of capitalist development, the abolition of the last residues of feudalism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1027

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of ‘Americanism’ — its analytic content is that the US lacked a feudal residue, and its significance differs per national context.
• XREF: The Europe-without-feudalism point connects to the Islamophobia readings’ interest in how modernization narratives differ across national contexts.
• QUESTION: Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’ under Soviet socialism is worth chasing — the later Soviet-Fordism debates may echo in how states import Western bureaucratic rationality.