The New Economics of True Wealth: A Review of Plenitude by Juliet B. Schor

Before founding The New School online publication Public Seminar, sociologist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb put out a precursor titled Deliberately Considered. Through Jeff, who was my dissertation advisor, I have contributed to both publications. In thinking about recent reporting on how one of the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the clearing up of the atmosphere, I recalled Juliet Schor addressing the issue in her 2010 book Plentitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.  I reviewed that book for Deliberately Considered and discovered that I had never published it on my own blog. I'm doing that now. Certain aspects of the argument are indeed prescient. In particular, the way in which community has been foregrounded in the recent pandemic points to how we might enjoy ourselves and each other more by settling for less.

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“Austerity” is a watchword in the media these days in both domestic and international economic news. The recent downturn, the story goes, has meant that governments can no longer sustain entitlement obligations or take on any more debt. So too must citizens reduce their expectations and assume more personal responsibility, accepting less in return.

In her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Juliet B. Schor presents a different narrative, one that suggests the current environment is an opportunity to live a more satisfactory, which is to say richer, life. She offers a solution to the “work-and-spend” dilemma of modern consumerism she initially described in her 1992 bestseller The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure and continued in the follow up The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need of 1999. Her thesis rests on four principles: freeing up time by reducing work hours outside the home, shifting that free time to more self-provisioning, developing low cost, low impact but high satisfaction consumption, and reinvesting in community and other forms of social capital.

Why “Business As Usual” No Longer Works

One of Schor’s main assertions is that we must find another way to define wealth and well-being because, in a phrase, there is no alternative. The supposedly endless cycle of material expansion that fueled economic growth as part of what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumers’ republic” of the postwar era has been exhausted in America at least. Double-digit unemployment, evaporating home equity, and eroding pension balances have taken the gloss off the consumer spending that accounted for between two-thirds and 70 percent of the US economy in recent years.

But more than that, business as usual (or as Schor refers to it “BAU”) has run into another, less malleable barrier: the environment. Mainstream economics has by and large failed to account for the environmental effects (so-called externalities) of growth, a charge many progressives will no doubt find familiar. In particular, Schor debunks the Environmental Kuznets Curve that projects a bell-shaped ratio of economics to environment, that poor nations pollute until they reach a certain level of wealth, which they then use to buy ecological amelioration. The math has never worked in reality, Schor asserts, as every scientifically accepted measure of environmental degradation continues to rise, threatening impending disaster.

Whether anyone not already attuned to Schor’s sensibility will be persuaded by “Plenitude” is debatable. Going back to the Progressive Era, “the good life” in America has been defined by the potential of an unlimited horizon of material comfort, a central ideological construct of modernity that is still hegemonic despite the strains of recent contradictions. Even those who embrace choices such as conscientious consumption of both the green and blue varieties may not be able to picture themselves canning vegetables and living in DIY yurts, two of Schor’s examples of the new economics of plenitude (which seem like very old-fashioned economics to me).

Indeed, the fundamentals of plenitude are largely compatible with austerity. Working less and therefore spending less seem to go hand in hand in either scenario, and we must take it on faith that because they are of our own choosing we will somehow enjoy them more. Of the four principles, the reactivation of community seems to be the most compelling. And to give Schor her due, many of the tactics of plenitude she describes are being practiced in local communities, such as Detroit and other inner cities, that have been abandoned by consumer society and left to their own devices. In that regard, “plenitude” may be in store for us all.

To the Vector the Spoils

Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is a sequel to McKenzie Wark’s highly regarded 2004 book A Hacker Manifesto. Like its predecessor, Capital Is Dead surveys the mental, social, and physical environment in which the means of economic accumulation and thus power have radically shifted, in which value no longer resides in owning the means of production but in controlling flows of information. Wark picks up the narrative begun in A Hacker Manifesto in which conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has been superseded by the domination of the hacker (creators of new concepts and connections) by the vectoralist (so named for their control of the networks through which information flows in space and time). The latter not only capture the physical output of the former’s labor, but appropriate their very being, as well. And it isn’t just workers who are being subordinated, it’s traditional industrialists, too—Facebook has a market value of some $550 billion, nearly 10 times that of General Motors, with a fraction of the employees and virtually none of the infrastructure.

Coming a decade and a half after A Hacker Manifesto, in a brave new world dominated by platforms such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb, and marked by anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene, Capital Is Dead eschews digital utopianism for a sense of urgency that recognizes things have gotten serious. An important part of the book is its critique of what Wark terms ‘genteel’ Marxism, the truly academic ruminations, emerging out of the 1970s with the failure of the New Left, of often-tenured ‘radicals’ ensconced in university comparative literature, philosophy, and cultural studies departments, or what she has time and again referred to as ‘hypo-critical theory’. Instead, Wark offers ‘four cheers for vulgarity’ (the vulgar always goes a step too far) that originates not just from below but from ‘below the below’. Here Wark follows John Bellamy Foster, who in Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and other books, argues that the error of Western Marxism of the genteel variety has been its focus on dialectics to the detriment of consideration of the material. Like Foster, Wark retrieves the lineage of left materialists, such as mid-20th-century biologist Joseph Needham and contemporary science and technology scholar Donna Haraway, who have embraced the science that critical theorists have rejected. This work is summarily recounted in Capital Is Dead but gone into greater depth in Wark’s earlier book, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene.

A major question is that of the book’s title: In what way can we say that capital is dead, especially in light of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the aftermath of which British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism? Wark’s answer is to engage in a thought experiment in which she reviews the various modifiers that have been appended to the word capitalism—‘disaster’, ‘neoliberal’, ‘postfordist’, ‘necro’, ‘communicative’, ‘surveillance’, ‘platform’, et. al—terms that take capitalism as an eternal concept, or perhaps more accurately as a kind of undead. (In fact, ‘zombie’ is yet another modifier appended to the concept of capitalism in recent times.) Wark takes a flamethrower to these ideas through a reading of Marx that burns away the metaphors of phantasmagorical fetishes, such as the commodity form, the spectacle, and false consciousness, that have occupied much critical theory to date in order to get down to what is generally referred to as the ‘base’, although not the one typically taken as situated in the economic means of production but instead the one at the root of what Marx in the less-often read Volume III of Capital refers to as the ‘irreparable rift’ in what he terms ‘the universal metabolism’ of nature.

The ‘metabolic rift’, as it’s come to be known among ecotheorists, is Marx’s premise that humankind’s original disruption, to use the term in its contemporary business sense, is the extraction of the Earth’s organic and inorganic resources for circulation in closed systems that don’t reconnect with their point of origin, AKA the linear economy of make, use, dispose. The metabolic rift widened with the agricultural revolutions of 19th century that drove the need for artificial fertilizers to forestall soil depletion. Advances in agricultural productivity at the time also released cadres of labor to fuel the growth of industrialization and urbanization, further widening the rift. For Wark, the metabolic rift from feudal agriculture to capitalist manufacturing has now entered a third phase: vectoralist information, the privatization of codes and data of every form, including genetic. The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. the capitalist is its power not to actually own anything but to simply extract enormous profit from various flows of value. (Think of platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, or TaskRabbit where the majority of costs are carried by the users on both sides of the equation or Facebook, where users entertain one another and the data derived are then sold to advertisers.)

Wark employs a rhetorical style in Capital is Dead that is clean and direct, belying the erudition upon which it is grounded and in contrast to the aphoristic approach of A Hacker Manifesto. Indeed, Wark notes that Capital is Dead is ‘summing up or maybe concluding things that I have been working on for a long time’. Her forthcoming book Reverse Cowgirl strikes out in a new direction in the form of an autoethnography of the evolution of her identity as a transgender woman. (Full disclosure: Wark served on my dissertation committee when I completed my PhD from the New School for Social Research.)

When it first came out, a number of reviewers of A Hacker Manifesto (myself included) questioned the dialectic of hacker and vectoralist as potentially obfuscating capitalist relationships that continued to hold sway, if perhaps in a different register. With Capital is Dead, Wark firmly establishes the usefulness of those terms to describe a truly new, more pernicious apparatus of exploitation. Yet I’m still not sure this new relationship means that capital is dead. The tech industry, self-avowedly capitalist to its core, operates on ‘progressive ephemeralization’, a concept originally expressed in R. Buckminister Fuller’s book Nine Chains to the Moon, first published in 1938, where he notes technology’s ability to do ‘more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’, a fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto where capitalism’s revolutionary power to wash away all things in its relentless search for profit is summed up in the famous phrase: ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

Be that as it may, things do seem to be different now and for a great many they are demonstrably worse. Whatever one calls it, Wark’s attempt to think outside of orthodoxy, to transform the language by which we understand our current moment, commands our attention. 

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This review was posted on Popmatters on January 14, 2020.

For and Against the Anthropocene

Global temperature anomalies for 2015 compared to the 1951–1980 baseline. 2015 was the warmest year in the NASA/NOAA temperature record, which starts in 1880. It has since been superseded by 2016 (NASA/NOAA; 20 January 2016). Source: NASA Visualization Studio (Public Domain).

Since the turn of the 21st century, many scientists have been arguing for the designation of a new epoch in Earth's geological history, which they term the Anthropocene in acknowledgment of the impact of humans on the planet's evolution. While not yet officially approved by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the concept has been gaining acceptance not only among scientists but in the culture generally as the effects of human activity on climate, biodiversity, and other aspects of the ecosystem seem to be increasingly apparent.

That humans are adversely affecting the Earth, or that there is even anything at all out of sorts with the planet's ecosystem, is a serious bone of contention to the point of denial in many quarters on the right. While the left readily accepts that humans are responsible for the apparent ecological crisis, how to characterize that impact is subject to debate and the central concern of Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today by T.J. Demos, cultural critic and professor at University of California, Santa Cruz and director of The Center for Creative Ecologies.


As noted on the popular website Welcome to the Anthropocene, the term was introduced into current usage in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer. But as Demos notes, various iterations of the concept date back to at least the mid-19th century when Welsh geologist Thomas Jenkyn introduced the term 'Anthropozoic' to describe the current epoch. The specific term 'Anthropocene' seems to date to 1922 when Russian geologist Aleksei Pavlov appears to have proposed it.

The actual onset of the Anthropocene is also a point of discussion. Some scientists contend the new epoch dates to the Industrial Revolution in the early 18th century with the invention of the steam engine. Others place its origins back several millennia with the beginnings of agricultural cultivation and the domestication of crops in the Neolithic Age. Still others posit the dawn of the nuclear age at the end of the Second World War, while some specifically date 1492 as the year when the planet first came to be dominated by humanity with the connection of the two hemispheres under European colonialism. Although not mentioned in the book, devotees of Frankfurt School critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (of which I confess I am one) might identify the mind/body split articulated in the mid-17th century by Rene Descartes as the Anthropocene's fountainhead.

Trained as an art historian, Demos first takes up the ways in which the Anthropocene is visualized by various imaging systems and the ideologies that inform them. Following Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton, Demos divides these perspectives into two camps: the 'techno-utopians' who believe the problem can be fixed via geoengineering and the 'eco-Soterians' (named after Soteria, the Greek daimon of safety and preservation) who seek to work in concert with Gaia's natural processes.

The geoengineering solutions offered by the techno-utopians propose to leverage the advances of science to rectify humanity's domination of nature with even more technological intervention, which some might argue is the root of the problem in the first place. The visual culture of the techno-utopians reinforces humanity's mastery of nature through digital satellite photography and data visualizations in the form of maps, graphs, and virtual simulations. Geoengineering projects tend to be proposed by major corporations and wealthy nations of the global North with support from the likes of the multibillion-dollar Gates Foundation.

Where techno-utopianism operates from the top down, eco-Soterianism works from the bottom up, offering a more critical, grassroots perspective, endeavoring not to 'fix' the Earth so much as to rehabilitate humankind's relationship to it. Most of what Demos surveys in this regard is the action of eco-activists to resist techno-utopianism through direct confrontation—for example, the 2015 blockade of Shell Corporation's Polar Pioneer drilling rig in the waters near Seattle—and consciousness-raising by artists to draw attention to the crisis through documentary filmmaking, exhibitions, and performance. Briefly surveyed here, this work is explored in greater depth in Demos's previous book Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Other manifestations of eco-Soterianism not explored by Demos are ecofriendly practices such as voluntary simplicity, organic farming, locavore consumption, and the like.

A bigger concern of Against the Anthropocene is to contest the very concept itself. According to Demos, a major problem with the Anthropocene concept is the way in which it universalizes the roots of the eco-crisis by situating it among the anthropos, i.e., humanity in general, when it is in fact the result of a specific set of actions taken by a specific set of individuals, which is to say unbridled global capitalism and its agents and beneficiaries, especially as connected to the exploitation of the environment in all its forms in search of ever-increasing profit.

A number of people have grappled with the question as Demos shows. The most direct connection is drawn by those who embrace the concept of the 'Capitalocene',  the geological age of capitalism and its deleterious effects on the environment, which tend to be distributed unequally geographically, socially, and economically to those who lack the wherewithal to resist. Though she doesn't specifically use the term Capitalocene, Naomi Klein identifies its eponymous economic system as one of the combatants in the battle for the future of the environment in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
 

While Capitalocene identifies the culprit and has the benefit of being world-historical truth, it lacks a conception of the possibility of an alternative. A candidate in that regard is Donna Haraway's term 'Chthulucene', from the Greek khthon, 'earth', drawing attention away from human-centered activity—whether universal or particular—to encompass a broader understanding of the planet's ability to persist regardless of whether it is homo sapiens or Blattodea (cockroaches) at the top of the food chain. Thus it is ultimately humankind's mandate to work within Gaia's existential conditions in all their complexity to ensure that another world is not only possible, but certain.

Other concepts have been proposed, positive and negative. To name two: the Gynecene, in recognition of ecofeminist reverence toward Mother Earth, and the Plasticene, the age of plastic, for the artificial materials derived mainly from petrochemicals, which portend to outlast all manner of other fossils.

Whatever their merits from a philosophical perspective, none of the above-mentioned alternative designations appear to have the resonance and likely staying power of the term Anthropocene. Perhaps a compromise might be to propose an alt-Anthropocene movement in which the ecological dead-ender machinations of capitalism are actively resisted and replaced with more holistic ways of thinking and doing. The former is the province of thought-leaders, including artists; the latter is the province of social entrepreneurs, including 'citizen-designers'.

Regardless of the banner under which one chooses to act, act one must. Humanity's collective future depends upon it.

To Be or Not to Be in Detroit City

Abandoned home in the Delray section of Detroit, an ethnic enclave on the city's southwest side whose current population is one-tenth its 1930s level (Photo: Notorious4life, public domain.)

For decades now, Detroit has been one of America’s most notorious clusterfucks. Once the nation’s fourth-largest city, its current population of just over 700,000 is less than 40 percent of its postwar peak of 1.8 million, and it’s predicted to fall even further. More than a third, over 124,000 parcels, of the city’s residential properties are either vacant or completely abandoned. Millions of square feet of commercial property lay empty and moldering. In some sections of town, nature has totally reclaimed its domain and now wildlife freely roam. The poverty rate of 35.5 percent is more than three times the national level, and at $25,193 the city's median household income is half the national average. The municipal government operates under the authority of a State-appointed Emergency Financial Manager. And on July 18, 2013, it became the largest US municipality to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. Small wonder Detroit has been named "America's Most Miserable City" for 2013 by Forbes.

And yet, Detroit has also recently been perceived as a land of opportunity. Artists and other members of what Richard Florida terms the "Creative Class" are said to be hard at work, transforming the troubled city into a postindustrial Elysium, fueled in part by rock-bottom real estate prices and a seemingly unrestricted do-it-yourself social and political environment. (See, for example, here, here, here, and here.)

A few years ago, erstwhile native son Mark Binelli, who grew up in Motown's suburbs and then moved to New York City to make good, currently as a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, returned to his hometown to take stock of the situation. The result was Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis, now out in paperback.

Binelli surveys many of the usual suspects and familiar haunts that have been featured in the national and international media. He reports on the enduring and embittered polarization between the inner city and the suburbs, fought for decades on the battlegrounds of race and class. (Detroit is among America's most segregated cities.) He takes stock of the high crime rate, urban blight, and the virtual collapse of municipal services. He visits the abandoned factories and burned-out neighborhoods.

He also interviews various denizens of the post-Apocalyptic landscape who have dug in and plan to stick it out come what may. Many of these interviews exhibit what feminist literary theorist Lauren Berlant terms "cruel optimism," the continued hope for a return of the good old days that have been inexorably washed away by the shifting tides of global capitalism. Others, like the urban farmers, DIY art folk, community watch volunteers, and other postmodern bricoleurs, are content to make the most out of what they've got, however meagre. The former are in denial; the latter at least in recovery, though I'm not sure there's much to be more optimistic about when it comes to the long-term prospects. Along the way, Binelli reminisces about his youth growing up on the outskirts of the city with forays into it as a member of the family business and aspiring hipster. It's part Blade-Runner travelogue; part Gen-X memoir.

The history Binelli recounts is actually quite good. He makes effective use of some of the classic literature on Detroit, including Clarence Burton's history of the city's first two centuries, originally published in 1922, and Robert Conot's 1974 American Odyssey, which as Binelli notes has shamefully been out of print for nearly 30 years. And he has a way of compressing this research into some really well-turned phrases. He sums up in a few sentences the twisted collective memory of the city's demise in the wake of white flight as understood from one side of the racial divide. In writing about suburban white perceptions of Detroit's first black mayor Coleman A. Young, who left office 20 years ago and died in 1997, he observes:

[T]he wild, disproportionate hatred of Young by white suburbanites was telling in ways that had nothing to do with the mayor's alleged malfeasances. With hindsight, it's difficult to understand how he managed to become so fearsome, with his cotton-mouthed, almost courtly speaking style and jowly stuffed-animal features, the twinkle in his eye perpetually giving his game away. (Like Bill Clinton, he was the sort of politician who brought to the class struggle the same skills he'd developed for years in the ass struggle.) Even today, there's an unsettling fervency to the hatred of Young among certain white ex-Detroiters, who will tell you Coleman Young ruined this city with such venom it's impossible not to see Young as a proxy for every black Detroiter who walks the halls of their old high schools or sleeps in the bedrooms of their childhood homes. (original emphasis)

I got a personal kick out of reading Detroit City is the Place to Be because Binelli and I share some background, however serendipitous. As a longtime Detroiter myself, I know many of the subjects Binelli interviewed, especially in the arts and culture. We  grew up nearby one another in the working-class suburbs of the northeast side, both first-generation sons of Italian immigrants. My blue-eyed soul band, The Delray Blues, played a homecoming gig at the Catholic high school Binelli attended (although it was slightly before his time). My dad, a meat cutter, was a customer of Binelli's Uncle Dave, who owned a knife-sharpening business. In fact, my father still uses a carving knife he got from Dave Binelli decades ago; I cut my index finger deeply on it when I was a kid and still have the scar. In Detroit, there are only two degrees of separation, not the six made famous by the play and, of course, Kevin Bacon.

While the book for the most part is very well researched, there are a few factual errors that need to be corrected. Community activist, social theorist, and local legend Grace Lee Boggs got her PhD in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1940, not Yale, which although it had allowed women to take certain graduate-level classes over the years didn't officially go co-ed until 1969. The vehicle fished from the water at the confluence of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers as part of international art star (and Bjork partner) Matthew Barney's performance project KHU, based on Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, wasn't the Pontiac Trans Am driven off the Belle Isle Bridge earlier in the piece but a 1967 Chrysler Imperial. (A third vehicle, a Ford Crown Victoria, was featured in the final act of the performance so that all the Big Three car makers could be represented. For my Brooklyn Rail review of Barney's performance, click here.) The reference to Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd with regard to the garish neon light installation on the exterior of the Motor City Casino is surely meant to be Dan Flavin. Those inaccuracies say more about the current state of copyediting than they do authorial oversight.

The book is great on reportage but falls short on providing insight into the larger context. That's not really Binelli's fault per se but rather a function of journalism in general. Journalism privileges the first-person testimonial above all. ("Who" is the first term in the journalist's mantra.) Structural analysis only comes in here and there if at all. ("Why" is the last of the five "W's". "How" is tacked onto the mantra as kind of an afterthought.) While Detroit City is the Place to Be excels at providing a street-level snapshot of the D in its latter-day manifestation, the topic still warrants more thoughtful consideration. Binelli does cite one of the best histories out there, Thomas Sugrue's award-winning Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which sees the city's current travails as an outcome of race relations and the attendant housing and job discrimination that, among other things, helped foster disinvestment in the city and its ultimate abandonment by industry seeking to diminish union influence in no small measure by using race as its cover. (For more background on that strategy in American business history, see David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.) But to really understand how Detroit got to its present state, you need to know about the change from what's called the Fordist to the post-Fordist economy.

River Rouge tool and die works, 1941. (Photo: Library of Congress, public domain.)

Fordism, as the term implies, is named for auto pioneer Henry Ford. Founded on the productive capacity of mass manufacturing, the Fordist system pays high wages in return for high output, allowing workers to share in the rising tide of goods and services of the modern factory system. In the early days, it helped Ford increase productivity some ten times while reducing employee turnover and at the same time halving car prices, all the while enabling him to become one of the richest men in world history. It relies on vertical integration, the direct control of the mechanisms of value creation at every step. (Ford's River Rouge Plant saw raw materials -- iron ore, rubber, fabric, etc. -- come in at one end and completed Model A's come out the other. He owned every aspect of the process, including selling the waste material in the form of Kingsford Charcoal.) Ford hated the unions but eventually made peace with them as did the other major American automobile manufacturers. The period of what's known as High Fordism comes after the Second World War as a result of the Treaty of Detroit when unions agreed to halt annual strikes and give up certain bargaining rights in exchange for management's promise to provide secure employment, good wages, and benefits, including pensions. For decades, Detroit blue-collar workers enjoyed the highest living standards in the nation for their class.

Post-Fordism, by contrast, relies on flexible production and a disaggregated value chain, the ability of companies to shift work, and more importantly investment capital, around quickly in response to market opportunity. Technological innovations in information-processing and communications systems have enabled producers to manage operations in far-flung corners of the world in order to maximize profit under what we now call globalization. A response to the falling profit rates of Fordism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, post-Fordism relies on freeing capital from all restraints, including national borders and virtually anything else that might get in the way of making the most return on investment. If the colossal moving assembly lines of Henry Ford are the epitome of the system named for him, the representative environment of post-Fordism is the outsourced sweatshop and now the 24/7 work cycle. Part and parcel of the spread of the post-Fordist system has been the dismantling of its predecessor's Ground Zero, the city of Detroit.

The paperback edition of Detroit City is the Place to Be includes a new afterword written by the author in mid-2013 after the city filed for bankruptcy protection. Binelli moved back to the Big Apple after finishing the book and, one presumes, on to bigger and better things. Perhaps he found that Detroit city isn't the place to be after all, just the place to write about. No matter. The book is a pretty good read, especially if you know the backstory.

The long abandoned 3.5-million square foot Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, production site of one of America's premier automotive luxury brands, which went out of business in 1958. (Photo: Albert Duce. Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA 3.0.)

Update January 8, 2014: This post was revised to reflect Samuel Pope's note that completed Model T's were not produced at the Rouge Plant, only parts. The Rouge wasn't finished until 1928 at which point the Model T was no longer in production. The Model A was the first vehicle to be manufactured from raw materials to finished product at the Rouge. Thank you, Sam, for the correction.