Introducing Fordism into Europe demanded extreme coercion against moral resistance.

Evidence

For this reason, the introduction of Fordism encounters so much “intellectual” and “moral” resistance, and takes place in particularly brutal and insidious forms, and by means of the most extreme coercion. To put it crudely, Europe would like to have a full barrel and a drunken wife, to have all the benefits which Fordism brings to its competitive power while retaining its army of parasites who, by consuming vast sums of surplus value, aggravate initial costs and reduce competitive power on the international market. The reaction of Europe to Americanism merits, therefore, close examination. From its analysis can be derived more than one element necessary for the understanding of the present situation of a number of states in the old world and the political events of the post-war period. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1045

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of an imported, ultra-modern productive form meeting entrenched social structure returns later as an interpretive frame for modernization narratives in the Islamophobia corpus about ‘Western’ values imposed on other societies.