FORD (and Morris): capitalism and the re-appropriation of cars.

In his essay, Maybe it Would be Better if we Worked in Groups of Three (2008), Liam Gillick addresses capitalist processes of speculation and planning through the production of cars. Factories, he asserts, are built to attract industry and investment – they are a model of success. Volvo, in its quest for post-Fordist structures of production attempts, during the 1970s, to create models of 'flexibility, collaboration and the idea of a better working environment ... In the Volvo factory you can see trees while you are making the cars. But you are still making cars, never taking a walk in the woods... The idea of collective action and the idea of being able to determine the speed with which you produce a car, whether you produce it in a group or individually, at night, or very slowly, seems close to the question of how to make art over the last fifty years.' (We can read ‘art’ as the renegotiation of social structures, practically and aesthetically). In the end, such flexibility and free time for 'thinking' led to redundancy. Eventually, in 1999, Ford stepped in and 'reintroduced the standard production line, not because it was more efficient in pure capitalist terms but because it reinforced relations of production.'

Dismantling the world of work, Boltanski and Chiapello assert, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), that capitalism separates the economic (car production) from the social (thinking about car production) and hence creates healthy profits, but complemented with a dispersed social world with, for example, high unemployment and a lower quality of life. Capitalism works with our desires for autonomy, which includes ‘self-realisation, re-invention and freedom.’ (Sebastian Budgen, 2000) The latter (desire for autonomy) sustains the former (separation of economic from social) through advertising, which creates allegories where one thing, such as a car, might be given a new set of meanings, such as luxury, machismo, escaping into the wild, freedom, and so on. The car, then, provides a way into the reconfiguration of these ideas of capitalism, production and social organisation, and within a space which is not so full of the media channels through which such allegories are spread.

On the production line in Britain until 1972, the Morris Minor was sold as 'one of the family'. And so it was, such was the care and nurturing it provoked from owners. It also represented self-sufficiency: 'that's what self-sufficiency was really - mending your morris minor.' The Morris Minor appears in photographs from this place in time, where it can be seen in various states of repair, alongside its cousins, the Ford Popular, Escort, even a Rover. These vehicles form so many connections - between places, urban and rural, our home and your home, a place for the children to sleep, a place just the right size for all our stuff, a place to listen to music; and even their absence forced a new relationship with the land on foot, which ‘meant we got embedded in the tapestry of the landscape’. So the use, maintenance, breakdown, and even destruction, of these vehicles is all the more significant, and needs to be looked at in a variety of ways.

The M4, of course, is important here. With the stretch into Wales opened in 1966 when the Severn Bridge had been finished, it was seen as a vital economic line for Wales, thus building on already existing trade routes, which take us to one of our key features of this history: ‘There is evidence of at least two axe factories in the Preseli Hills, which made use of the dolerite and rhyolite tuff outcrops in the east of the region. The wide distribution of products from these factories is an indication of possible trading routes operating at that time and the role played by the people of prehistoric Pembrokeshire. … Pembrokeshire can, therefore, be envisaged as lying on an important east-west commercial routeway during the Late Neolithic.’ (Seymour, 1985)

For those that weren’t already living within the Preseli region at the time, descriptions of arriving in, around and over the Preselis range from packing what little was owned and just ‘jumping into the back of a van and being driven there’, to breaking down on the final slopes. The journey itself, it seems, was exciting, if precarious. And once inside the area, these vehicles dictated much of the way life was lived. Many were illegal (bald tyres, broken lights, etc.) so back roads had to be used in order to avoid authorities, making journeys even more adventurous: ‘I was approaching this corner and the wheel just fell off!’. For one person, however, this was a sign of fitting in, as the landscape was already strewn with broken tractors, and local farmers were also driving vehicles held together with whatever would hold.

There was a lot of assistance with pulling cars out of fields and ditches, and sometimes the ‘hippies’ cars were overturned if they were parked outside a pub – an act remembered almost fondly by some (‘they were probably drunk’), and not at all by others. Either way, it was an act of gentle protest (there were no windows smashed or doors dented, such as you see in footage of city riots) playing with ideas of mobility and the fragility of a ton’s worth of metal. Though, presumable, they were turned back and driven away.

Within the overall themes of a resistance to commodification via reappropriation of objects (cars), and the social structures formed to implement such resistance, can we think of this continual breakdown of vehicles in a landscape which seems to demand their use and, therefore, their upkeep, as symbolic?

Click on images, below, to hear soundclips from interviews, 2012.

'When we arrived in Wales... we had a mattress and...'

'Would the car survive? would I be able to get where I was going?...'

'We bought a sit-up-and-beg Ford Popular... we arrived, it died...'

'After the war success was in the air, people were very ambitious...'

'... the change in exclusive relationships...'

'In a way, material things did not mean a lot to us..'

'We didn't have tellies, and we didn't read newspapers, but...'

'It was so difficult to get there.. car was broken down.. so my social scene was here...'

'I have a sense of disappointment .. in what it could have been..'