Corporatization of Paper Manufacturing

Abstract

This chapter explores the development of the Dutch paper industry in the phase of Fordism between 1914 and 1980. Following periods of economic downturn and uncertainty brought about by the First and Second World Wars, there was a concerted effort towards state-led restructuring and consolidation to rejuvenate national industries. During Fordism, cartel structures emerged as crucial forms of cooperation, while corporatization and mergers and acquisitions became tools for industry consolidation. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a significant rise in unionism, but the economic downturns of the 1970s led to its rapid decline. Notably, in this era, waste paper emerged as a profitable substitute for virgin wood fiber in Dutch paper production.

The whole ‘mode of regulation’ was organized under the dominance of big monopolies, closely linked to the state, and allowed capitalism to expand in a relatively balanced, steady way.

Thomas (2005, para. 15)

The Fordist accumulation regime constitutes the third phase of capitalism in the Netherlands from 1914 until 1980. Fordism is an accumulation regime with a distinct mode of regulation and set of technical and social relations of (re-)production, originating in the early twentieth-century US-American politico-economic context.¹ Fordism, as an ideal-type accumulation regime, involves a nationally based circuit of capital rooted in mass production and mass consumption.

Fordism’s virtuous circle involves rising productivity based on economies of scale in mass production, rising incomes linked to productivity, increased mass demand due to rising wages, increased profits based on full utilization of capacity, increased investment in improved mass production equipment and techniques, and a further rise in productivity.²

To understand the Fordist mode of regulation, one has to consider its institutional and organizational base, namely the involvement of state agents, class fractions, and labor-capital relations in the circuit of capital. First of all, the Fordist state can be characterized as a Keynesian-inspired welfare state, which secures capital-intensive investments in mass production and fosters R&D ventures while at the same time ensuring mass consumption through safeguarding a minimum prosperity of the lower and middle classes.³ To do so, labor policies involve the recognition of unions for wage bargaining, minimum wage legislations, and the development of welfare programs to ensure high consumption levels for the unemployed. Exemplary Fordist organizations either base their rising scales of productivity on trusts and cartel structures or on horizontally integrated corporations. In Fordism, surplus profit is foremost based on returns of investment, as higher productivity lasts only “until the innovation(s) become standard practice”.⁴ The expansion of corporate enterprises thus relies on the availability of private capital and reinvestment of profits. In Fordism, consumer credits, secured by central banks, are fundamental to increase purchasing power of middle and lower classes and are in turn hedged through “state credit policies […] aimed at aggregate demand and full employment”.⁵ Furthermore, the interdependence of mass production and mass consumption manifests through the rising importance of commercial capital, being ever-present in the form of mass advertising, mass retailing, mass credit, and mass media.

4.1 Interim War Period 1914–1945

The transition from the phase of Dutch monarchic liberalism to Fordism in the Netherlands was a gradual process, which followed the political and economic uncertainties of the interim war period from 1914 to 1945. World Wars I and II affected the Dutch economy heavily, including its paper industry. Phases of economic booms and downturns appeared at ever-shorter intervals from 1914 onwards, as reflected in the production output of the Dutch paper industry (see Fig. 4.1). On the one hand, Dutch paper production depended on imported raw materials, and was, thus, strongly affected by the unstable political climate between its European trading partners. On the other hand, the export possibilities for Dutch paper rose with the shutdown of production facilities in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom during World War I.⁶ Even though the Dutch paper industry quadrupled its profits during this time, the first half of the 1920s was marked by a decreasing demand for paper and a thorough shortage of coal throughout Europe, which also took its toll on the industry. Before the economic crisis started in 1929, bringing prices for paper products to a record low, the Dutch paper industry experienced a short revival in the second half of the 1920s. Nevertheless, by the 1930s, the industry tried to countervail immense losses caused by the Great Depression by forming cartel agreements, such as negotiations on raw material prices.⁷ The Dutch government also reacted to the volatilities and capitalist crises, banning the export of raw materials from 1930 onwards.⁸ As a consequence, the Dutch paper industry did recover to some extent from the economic devastation of the late 1920s and 1930s.

Fig. 4.1

(Source Own illustration based on Bouwens [2004, pp. 77, 87, 115])

Production of paper and board in tons in the Netherlands, 1921–1952

With the beginning of World War II, the industry once more faced the industrial and political uncertainties of wartime. Under German occupation, the paper industry, among many other Dutch industries, was fully annexed, solely serving German demand for paper.⁹ A shortage of resources, including machinery, raw material, and fossil fuels, led to an immense decrease in Dutch paper production output and sites, and, thus, to a concentration of industrial activity. Many workers, who lost their jobs as a result of stand-stills or even shut-downs were recruited for the program of Arbeitseinsatz, a German program to forcefully relocate industrial experts from occupied territory to support German production.¹⁰ Most of Dutch paper production either served the propaganda-program of Nazi-Germany or was heavily regulated to prohibit the production of, for example, specific newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and office materials. After a few months of war-activity within the occupied Dutch territory, the Dutch paper industry comprised only 50 companies, producing 350,000 tons of paper and board; by September 1944, the entire Dutch paper production had come to a standstill.¹¹

4.2 Industry Consolidation

At the turn of the twentieth century, the importance of prior forms of network cooperation, namely mutual insurance contracts or rederijen, decreased as the majority of industrial companies turned to commercial insurance companies instead.¹² This does not mean though that network cooperation as a whole lost its importance for Dutch industries. On the contrary, previous forms of cartel structures were simply replaced by new forms of cartels, ultimately remaining the most important form of cooperation during the twentieth century in the Netherlands and abroad.

For example, the Nordic paper and pulp production, along with its trade, experienced intensive consolidation under the well-known SCAN-cartels, which were established in the 1930s.¹³ These cartels posed a growing challenge for Dutch paper producers in terms of accessing raw materials and securing consumer markets. The increasing European integration through trade policies and the removal of tariffs also posed a threat to the international position of the Dutch paper industry by exposing it to greater international competition. Thus, also for the Dutch paper industry, the importance of network cooperation in the form of cartels and business interest associations became pivotal. A prime example, the VNP grew to flourish by the 1930s, fostering “[a]greements on prices, sales and production [to reduce] competition and provide[…] stability for the members”.¹⁴ These new forms of network cooperation and commercialized insurance slowly loosened the ties among members of the big Industria (either linked through family bonds or previous cartel structures) and established new ones with members of the growing finance and service sectors.¹⁵

This transition reflected a growing integration between industrial and financial interests within these networks. Starting after World War II, this transition reinvigorated European markets through redefining industrial and bank policies. From then on, the Ministry of Economic Affairs saw mergers “[…] as the most plausible way for improving efficiency, optimizing added value and stimulating effective corporate management in weak and vulnerable industries”.¹⁶ As a consequence, banks started issuing long-term loans to industrial agents for mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and this incommensurable trend progressed from vertical integration to growing numbers of takeovers. Before 1950, the main industrial region of the Netherlands, Zaanstreek, which had ceased in relevancy for the Dutch paper industry, was to a large extent closed for ‘outside’ investment capital.¹⁷ Yet, during Fordism, the reliance of the industrialist class fraction on capital from within its (family) networks was soon replaced by finance capital from banks. This was partially due to the newly established ‘old boys network’, comprised of the supervisory directors of big corporations as well as banks, which dominated Dutch industries throughout the entire phase of Fordism.¹⁸ These emerging networks represent early manifestations of the intersection between the industrialist and financial class fractions. Industrial agents began shifting their reliance away from internally accumulated capital and intra-industry network insurance. Instead, they increasingly relied on commercial insurance and the banking sector as a means of support.

Efforts of governmental restructuring to coordinate the productivity of the Dutch economy included the regulation of industrial usage of resources and price-fixing strategies, which made the 1950s a booming decade for the paper industry.¹⁹ Accordingly, between 1950 and 1960 the Dutch paper industry produced up to 1.5 million tons of paper and board annually.²⁰ Soon machine numbers increased by 35 percent, comprising a total of 170 machines in use.²¹ Until the 1960s, there was significant growth in employment rates and relatively few mergers and acquisitions in the industry.²²

From 1960 onwards though, the state played a major role in supporting concentration in the case of the Dutch paper industry. Originally, the Dutch state had supported merger negotiations between the two paper companies KNP and VGZ. These were stopped as both companies were simultaneously negotiating with the North American companies Crown Zellerbach and MacMillan Bloedel to secure joint investments into production facilities and plants.²³ Another factor, which influenced the stopping of merger negotiations between KNP and VGZ, was the fusion of Bührmann (originating in 1866 as a paper trading company) and Tetterode (a graphic trading company) in 1963. Following this mega-merger, Bührmann-Tetterode (BT) took over numerous other companies in various related sectors such as graphical machinery, stationary and envelopes, book-shops, publishing houses, and the toy-industry, paying the majority of these takeovers in cash, as was common in the 1960s when corporations still expanded through accumulated capital based on past profits.²⁴ Dutch businesses, overall, adopted strategies inspired by American and British examples, such as vertical integration and the formation of large corporations, to mitigate the high costs of declining international competitiveness due to high operating costs associated with labor, surplus production capacity, and stricter ecological standards compared to other European countries.²⁵

As a response to the growing importance of international shared capital investments and mergers as well as the growing pressures from low-cost production in third-wave industrialized countries, the Dutch state was eager to restructure national sectors into concentrated industries.²⁶ Sector-restructuring strategies included the implementation of specific organizations under public law, which were independent advisory organizations, comprised of industrial experts. The best-known example of outsourcing state-led restructuring programs to industrial experts is the Nederlandse Herstructureringsmaatschappij (NEHEM, Dutch Industrial Reconstruction Corporation), founded in 1972 and designed after the British Industrial Reconstruction Corporation (IRC).²⁷

During this time, BT as well as KNP “took advantage of [the] complex restructuring process of the national board industry and with the support of the government acquired the lion’s share of the solid board producers”.²⁸ Gradually, joint ventures between KNP and BT started, leading to a growing concentration of the Dutch paper industry by 1970. To cope with the growing concentration, VGZ was forced into liquidation, which led to its bankruptcy after a request for financial support was denied by the Dutch state in 1981.²⁹ Interestingly, already in 1975, the government agency Investerings- en Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij voor Noord-Nederland (NOM, Investment and Development Company for the Northern Netherlands) had set up a joint venture with BT and KNP, named Kappa, a comparably big industrial paper plant for Dutch standards at that time. NOM held 49 percent of the shares of this new plant, which enabled Kappa to increase its production capacity by 60 percent.³⁰ A total of 115 million guilders of public money were invested into this state-industry joint venture.

With its efforts, the Dutch government actively served the interests of the industrialist and managerial class fractions in order to rehabilitate those particular industries, which focused on national demand, were internationally depreciated and outright shrinking. This is also the case for the Dutch paper industry, which had declined by 20 percent in its overall production capacity from 1967 to 1976.³¹ Concurrently, the composition of transnational corporations in the Dutch paper industry changed from large, vertically integrated corporations like BT (NL), KNP (NL), MacMillan (CAN), and Crown Zellerbach (USA) in the 1960s, who mainly participated in joint ventures, to corporations following strategies of diversification and acquisition like Feldmühle (GER), CCA (USA), Reed (UK), BPB (UK), and Enso Gutzeit (FIN) in the 1970s.³² As a result of increasing concentration and mounting pressure from the tin and plastics sectors, smaller companies within the Dutch paper industry gradually disappeared while transnational corporations (TNCs) emerged.³³

During the 1970s, the Dutch paper industry encountered three primary obstacles. Firstly, it faced the critical need to find alternatives to expensive imported raw materials, specifically wood fiber. Secondly, due to the increasing speed and scale of the production process, overproduction occurred, necessitating the exploration of new markets. Lastly, the industry had to contend with rising energy and oil prices.³⁴ Despite these challenges, businessmen, consultants, bankers, and politicians assessed the industry’s worth, agreeing that the Dutch paper industry had a right to existence.³⁵ Consequently, the Ministry for Economic Affairs invested heavily in the revitalization of the industry by encouraging industrial concentration in the form of M&As and by financially supporting the VNP, so the Dutch paper industry could rise to all three challenges.³⁶

In addition, so-called crisis cartels, which were tolerated at EU-level and state-co-orchestrated at the national level, became of crucial importance to European industries more generally, and the Dutch paper industry more specifically.³⁷ In the case of the Dutch paper industry, crisis cartels helped organize state-industry projects on energy cost reduction as well as on supporting the independence of the Dutch paper industry from raw material imports.³⁸ By means of crisis cartels and state subsidies, which were tolerated by the EU Commission as “rescu[ing] industrial sectors in despair”, the waste paper had become the most important resource of Dutch paper production in 1970, by far replacing pulp usage.³⁹ This increase in the use of waste paper secured the import-independence of the Dutch paper industry alongside desirable improvements in terms of ecological pollution. Also as a means to maintain profitable prices, secure markets and restrict supply, cartel strategies continued to be of importance to the Dutch paper industry. In fact, rising EU-level pressures for implementing anti-cartel laws more forcefully within the Netherlands were downplayed or outright ignored by the cabinet and the Netherlands continued to be considered a “cartel paradise” throughout the 1980s.⁴⁰ Next to the politically encouraged M&As, cartel practices continued to blossom, ultimately helping the Dutch paper industry to achieve its booming phase of the 1980s.⁴¹

Even before the installation and exemption of the 1970s crisis cartels, cartel agreements had characterized Dutch industrial activities for decades. Cartels exist as different forms of cooperation and are not always in opposition to competition.⁴² Cooperation in the form of cartel agreements was a vital part of Dutch business culture before and after the official enactment of competition laws in 1956.⁴³ While certainly not among the most cartelized industries in the Netherlands between 1962 and 1980, the Dutch paper industry does nevertheless remain comparably steady in its numbers of cartel agreements compared to other industries, ranging between a maximum of about 35 in 1965 to a minimum of 18 in 1980.⁴⁴

In the Netherlands, cartels frequently went unpunished due to the requirement of proving potential economic damages before initiating investigations into collusive practices.⁴⁵ This meant that the burden of proof rested with the accuser rather than the accused, indicating the presence of protectionist elements in Dutch competition law during that period. The Dutch paper industry participated in various forms of cartels and gentlemen’s agreements in the Netherlands from 1962 to 1980. For instance, in 1962, the leading cartel form in the Dutch paper industry (as well as across most industries) was price-fixing cartels, amounting to 42 percent.⁴⁶ This form even rose by 5 percentage points until 1980. Followed by allocation cartels with 18 and condition cartels with 17 percent, both these cartel forms actually decreased by 7 and 4 percentage points respectively until 1980.⁴⁷ The least common cartel forms in 1962, quotas (3%) as well as rebate and exclusive trade (3%) nearly doubled until 1980.⁴⁸

These developments align with the decline in the number of Dutch paper producers and an overall drop in production figures for the first time since World War II.⁴⁹ During this period, the Dutch paper industry faced high production costs and escalating international competition. As the perception of the economic crisis shifted toward a crisis of the embedded liberalist compromise, supranational anti-cartel legislation became more stringent.⁵⁰ Approximately 40 percent of all cartel prosecution procedures conducted by the European Commission between 1970 and 1990 were related to Dutch markets.⁵¹ However, the mentioned statistics reveal only a slight reduction in the proportion of various forms of cartels in the Dutch paper industry from 1962 to 1980. This confirms that the achievements of anti-cartel legislation only resulted in sporadic successes.

4.3 Waste Paper

The ‘discovery’ of waste paper as a viable, profitable substitute for virgin wood fiber depicted a general trend in European paper production from the 1950s onwards.⁵² In the specific context of the Dutch paper industry, it led to new industrial policies, the restructuring of waste management, and the adaption of innovative technology. Industrial policies ranged from financial subsidies for using waste paper in the cardboard and paper production to financial subsidies for warehouses. This latter state policy was called the EXPOVA agreement, which allowed paper producers to store waste paper in times of excess, and to use or sell it in times of shortage.⁵³ The Dutch paper industry and the industrial policies of that era placed a significant emphasis on ensuring a constant and accessible supply of this new and essential resource. To achieve this goal, the Rijksbureau (National Bureau) actively encouraged the public collection of waste paper through various initiatives. One such program was the Jeugd Actie Papier Inzameling (JAPI, Youth Action Paper Collection), which encouraged children to collect waste paper by offering incentives such as toys or recycling subsidies for voluntary organizations and local governments. These efforts aimed to incentivize and facilitate the collection of waste paper, ensuring its availability for the Dutch paper industry.⁵⁴ From the 1950s onwards, the use of waste paper in Dutch paper and board production rose substantially. By 1992, the paper producers in the Netherlands utilized up to 70 percent of possible waste paper and recovered around 55 percent of all waste paper.⁵⁵

The continuous efforts to optimize waste paper management through industrial policies and the subsequent stimuli for paper consumers were accompanied by the adaption of suitable technology. In order to achieve high levels of waste paper usability, the production of cardboard rather than high-quality paper became essential to the Dutch paper industry.⁵⁶ Accordingly, waste paper preparation systems as well as parts of the paper machinery were adapted to the challenges posed by this new raw material. While “a wastepaper line of the 50s […] would have the basic components of the ‘state of the art’ plant today”, recovered fibers did indeed demand a different treatment during the paper and board production processes.⁵⁷ As an extension to the original Fourdrinier design, a section was incorporated into the paper machine to process recovered paper. In this stage, the recovered paper is mixed with water and chemicals and subjected to heat to transform it into loose fibers. In a subsequent step, the pulp mixture undergoes a screening process to eliminate undesirable substances like plastic, glass, ink, and sand.⁵⁸ To this day, pulp from waste paper remains less pure than virgin wood fiber pulp despite all efforts to further innovate the recovery process. Nevertheless, the introduction of waste paper in the Dutch paper production cycle not only relaxed its dependence on importing virgin wood fibers and raw material logs but also served as a viable investment outlet. These technological innovations certainly yielded profit and growth for the capital-owners of the Dutch paper industry, but they were not necessarily improving the situation of its laborers.

4.4 The Rise and Fall of Unions

After the end of World War II, many European states started regulating market forces and implementing wide-ranging social welfare programs as an effective strategy to guarantee rising productivity and full employment.⁵⁹ The phase of Fordism in the Netherlands is characterized by a state, which propels industrial development through creating large-scale national industrial champions. In 1948, the Central Bank of the Netherlands was nationalized and the national organization of employers and employees, called The Stichting van de Arbeid, was involved in the implementation of the guided wage policy.⁶⁰

Trade unionism in the Netherlands achieved its first nationwide success in 1914 with a collective agreement on the eight-hour working day, the illegalization of child labor, and different regulations on working conditions.⁶¹ From now on, most sectors, including the Dutch paper industry, switched from a two-shift to a three-shift system, partially releasing workers of their harsh working conditions. Also, the trade unions’ wage bargaining of the twentieth century originates in the early success of workers’ organizations. “The late industrialization and the parallel movement of pillarization produced a rather complex structure of the trade unions, characterized by strong national federations and, at times, fierce competition between the socialist and confessional trade unions”.⁶² This led to a weakening of the communist unions, in comparison to the right-wing, conservative and socialist unions, which remained strongly represented in the pillarization. Even though unions were partially re-appropriated by the corporate economy from 1919 onwards and taking seats in the High Council of Labor, maintaining ever-closer ties with affiliated political parties, they continued to pose a liable threat to the dominant class fractions. Hence, new forms of employers’ network cooperation developed, directly targeting workers’ liberation movements.

A prime example, the chamber of commerce—the formal network cooperation of the industrialist class fraction at that time—was renewed into the Zaansche Werkgevers Vereeniging (Zaanstreek employer association). Herewith, employers tried to “combat the workers more effectively, and especially […] prevent firms in different branches of industry from being played off against each other”.⁶³ To do so they copied the organizational structure of the workers’ unions, spanning a multitude of sectors and regions. In 1919, the year the Zaanstreek employer association was founded, it counted 14 companies from nine different branches; in 1920, its membership numbers had increased to 78, and in 1922 to 100, by this time spanning the entire Netherlands.⁶⁴ One result of the growing dominance of the Zaanstreek employer association was, for example, that unemployment insurance became state-controlled comparably late, namely after the German occupation in 1943.⁶⁵ Another direct result of the increase in the dominance of the employers’ network organization was that strikes decreased substantially from the 1930s onwards. In addition to joining the Zaanstreek employer association, employers of the Dutch paper industry also associated against the state and workers by joining the already 1904-founded lobbying organ VNP.⁶⁶ The strong organization of employers in the first half of the nineteenth century throughout the majority of sectors in the Netherlands peaked in the exclusion of the communist-led Eenheidsvakcentrale (the umbrella organization of the communist trade unions) from the centralized wage negotiations, which concomitantly ended the most bitter conflicts in the cotton industry that had criticized the re-appropriation of unionism by the corporate system and the unions’ inability to truly represent the proletariat.⁶⁷

From the 1950s onwards, the rise of Fordism in Western industrialized economies generally and in the Netherlands more specifically, demarcated a change in labor-capital relations during Fordism. Fordism describes the “parallel restructuring of both the technological and organizational basis of the production process and the lifestyle of the wage earners”.⁶⁸ Rooted in early slavery and exploitation practices, Taylorist mass production of organizing working procedures as well as controlling the workers alongside the assembly line are pivotal strategies in Fordism. In Fordist times, profits were highly dependent on consumer demands; thus, high and growing wages are essential to write off fixed capital quickly.⁶⁹ In effect, workers were able to afford what they produced for the first time in capitalist history.⁷⁰ Additionally, relative wage costs rose strongly due to, among other factors, the introduction of the five-day workweek.⁷¹ Exemplary of the rising consumption levels at that time, also Dutch paper consumption increased from one million tons to three million tons between 1961 and 1990.⁷² Especially a steep rise in everyday products such as toilet paper and napkins can be noted for that period of rising purchasing power of the working class.⁷³

The state played an important role in securing the Fordist regime of accumulation, “[…] foster[ing] growth and productivity agreements between employers’ organizations and trade unions by promoting capital accumulation through public infrastructure spending and permissive credit and monetary policies”.⁷⁴ Accordingly, the interests of the socialists and conservatives, their corresponding unions, and the industrialist class fraction aligned well during that time. Embedded in the Fordist accumulation regime and industry-wide restructuring processes, unionism rose again. Even though “wage bargaining remained a highly centralized process”, collective workers’ agreements (CAOs) continued spreading during the 1950s as trade unions were strengthening their positions through mutual cooperation.⁷⁵ Consequently, the Dutch paper industry saw the inaugural signing of a CAO in 1950.⁷⁶ However, a significant portion of workers believed that their interests were not adequately represented in the collaboration between workers’ unions and the industrial class fraction. As a result, they organized what are known as “wildcat strikes”, which ultimately did not bring about the desired structural changes.⁷⁷

Throughout the 1960s, rising labor productivity came to determine wages, which soon ceased in excessively high wage levels. First, these developments seemed to support the workers’ consuming behavior and, thus, helped maintain the Fordist accumulation regime. Soon, the crises of the 1970s in combination with the comparably high wage levels in the Netherlands, led to a rapid decline in employment rates and, hence, lower labor productivity and union membership. Concurrently, with the decline of heavy industries, the service industry grew and the demand for two kinds of laborers increased: Highly educated ones, demanded in government employment, business services, and health care, as well as unskilled workers, demanded in sectors such as leisure and catering.⁷⁸ These developments mark the beginning of a changing labor market structure in the Netherlands, which is dominated by a stark rise in higher education personnel in the successive accumulation regime of post-Fordism.

4.5 When Endless Growth Still Seemed Possible

After a phase of economic downturn and insecurities during the First and Second World Wars, the historicization shows that state support, which varied greatly over time, is reformulated in the phase of Fordism, heralding state-led restructuring and concentration as solutions for reinvigorating national industries. Networks between industry and state took the forms of active state support for mergers and acquisitions, which quickly led to the almost complete internationalization of the Dutch paper industry in terms of ownership. Later in the 1970s, the state even actively supported the formation of crisis cartels to secure the profitability of national industries.

Network cooperation within the Dutch paper industry developed accordingly, making cartel structures one of the most important forms of cooperation within the industry. Through such close cooperation, the no-longer Dutch-owned paper mills were able to develop and implement the usage of waste paper as raw material. Herewith, their international competitiveness rose as resource dependence from Scandinavian and other large-scale pulp and paper manufacturing countries decreased. The search for alternative fibers and other technological innovations was thoroughly promoted by the state through financial aid and organizational support. With the introduction of Fordist working structures and strengthening of cooperation among the industrialist class fraction, illustrated for example in the rise of the chamber of commerce, labor unions gradually weakened.

Overall, the so-called ‘golden years’ of capitalism (1950 until the oil crisis in 1973) were not a single homogenous period of growth but rather marked by different shifts in the macro-economic development of the Netherlands as well as changing dominance of class fractions’ interests. In fact, the developments in the Netherlands during Fordism depict a continuous discontinuity. The industrialist class fraction and political authorities overlapped in their interest to reinvigorate Dutch industrial sectors after World War II. Thus, during the 1950s, state-led sector restructuring yielded substantial profits. These rising profits and the rapid industrialization of the 1950s in turn yielded overproduction in the 1960s.⁷⁹ At this time, the state shifted its strategies toward corporatization as M&As were seen as viable routes to cut production costs and deal with overproduction (see Table 4.1).

Table 4.1 Comparing Dutch paper production regions, twentieth century

Consequently, economies of scale, rising wages, and increased international competition did not lead to a general cool-down of industries, but to ever-more capital investment, which in turn made exports grow substantially.⁸⁰ Only when wages began to outgrow productivity and inflation accelerated at the end of the 1960s, the economy grew to be “overheated” in the 1970s.⁸¹ Scholars agree to some extent that Fordist regulation gradually erodes from this point onwards. Reasons for this are “various economic and social crises, increasing competitions on the international and global level, far-reaching technological innovations and sometimes drastic revisions in economic and social policies”.⁸² As will be shown in the following chapter, the Dutch paper industry underwent post-Fordist restructuring processes accordingly. Marked by financialization, flexibilization, and internationalization, the Post-Fordist accumulation regime promotes a supposedly new form of cooperation: Networks.