By 1927, the United States had more than 22 million motor vehicles on its roads, compared with just 18,000 in the Soviet Union. This staggering disparity reflected one of the greatest productivity revolutions in human history: the mass production of machines capable of multiplying human labour hundreds or even thousands of times over. I'm joined by Dartmouth historian Stefan Link, author of Forging Global Fordism, to explore how Henry Ford and his engineers transformed automobile manufacturing from a skilled craft into an industrial system capable of producing millions of affordable vehicles. We examine the technological foundations of the assembly line, the transformation of unskilled labour into an extraordinarily productive industrial workforce, and the distinctive Midwestern culture that gave birth to this revolution.But Fordism was more than a manufacturing technique. Ford championed a radical producerist philosophy that elevated industrial production above shareholder returns, attracting admirers across the political spectrum, from social democrats to Nazis and Soviet communists. Remarkably, Ford opened his factories to Soviet engineers and helped transfer America's extraordinary industrial capabilities to its future geopolitical rivals. We trace how this technology transfer transformed Soviet and German industry, shaped the outcome of the Second World War, and offers lessons for understanding China's industrial rise, Western deindustrialization, and the struggle to rebuild productive capacity in an age of financialized capitalism.Listen to Decouple on:• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rssWebsite: https://www.decouple.media