Martin Amis’sMoneyand the crisis of Fordism

Abstract

This article proposes a fresh contextual reading of Amis's Money as a novel that engages the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical attention has focused largely on its satirical examination of the Thatcherite ethos, but Money is also centrally preoccupied with the collapse of postwar capitalism's institutional structures of inter-class coordination. As a result of this process, the social phenomenology constructed by the novel is not only defined by growing inequality and economic fetishism, but also by a pervasive sense of political uncontrollability over the accumulation process.