From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Sun Nov 27 2005 - 16:42:50 EST
I am forwarding a section of a post to the "karl marx" group (a mostly inactive yahoo group) from the 'Nationalist economics bulletin' (published by the British National Party), week of November 21, 2005 (now why would 'nationalists' post on a Marx group? Shouldn't it be obvious that Marx was and Marxists should be internationalists?). The bulletin concerns the UK economy but the section below has wider relevance. Do you agree with the listing of "opportunities" and "drawbacks"? In solidarity, Jerry ================================================================ 7. One big reason Germany has less inequality than we do, is that Germany has a more solid industrial economy, and thus a better-paid working class. One of the biggest myths holding the British economy back is that we can – even must – forget about manufacturing, and stake our future prosperity on service industries. But the empirical evidence from other nations is fairly clear that not only is manufacturing not a dying part of the economy in the developed world, it is in fact one of the best economic sectors for a nation to have a strong presence in, because of its ability to produce sustainable well-paid jobs for ordinary workers, in which it significantly surpasses the service economy. This isn't true for all manufacturing. It's true for advanced, that is high-tech, manufacturing. Most of what you've heard about the obsolescence of manufacturing is indeed true, if you're talking about primitive forms of it. If you're talking about the stamping out of plastic toys and similar items, it is indeed true that this is, today, an intrinsically low-paying industry, because it can be performed by illiterate peasants in Shanghai, and therefore anyone else performing it is in competition with such low-paid workers. But it is an entirely different story for the manufacture of things like computer chips, aeroplane parts, and medical devices. Companies can't do this with illiterate peasant labour. This is why it tends to get done, even today, with highly-skilled and well-paid labour, in places likes Bavaria, California, and Kyushu (Japan). Below is a partial list of advanced manufacturing industries, to make clear how vast the opportunities are: 1. Flat-panel displays for laptops, TVs and other devices. 2. Steel-alloy pipes for transporting oil, which sound primitive but are in fact very sophisticated due to the subtle corrosion-resistant alloys involved and the difficulty of making them in the large sizes that require the least final assembly. 3. Synthetic fibers. Although sewing clothes is low-tech, turning a barrel of crude oil into convincing synthetic silk is not. 4. Photolithographic steppers, the machines used to turn the designs of silicon chips into actual chips. 5. Bearings, ball and otherwise, are a classic seemingly old and dull product that has quietly adapted with the times to become frequently very high-tech. 6. Electric power generators, which are unseen but expensive and ubiquitous. 7. Capacitors, and other obscure but important electronic components. 8. Textile-making machinery like ultra-fast modern looms. 9. Laser diodes, which make CD players work. 10. Nickel hydride batteries, the tiny high-quality ones that are vital for cell phones, camcorders, etc. 11. Robotics, an industry that is not only valuable in itself, but buttresses other manufacturing industries by making readily available the know-how to automate production of other things. 12. Cameras, both conventional and digital, still and motion. 13. Machine tools, which are, of course, the ultimate key to making other manufactured goods. 14. Avionics and aeroplane parts. 15. Watch movements. 16. Ship engines. How do you think all those imports get here? 17. Photocopiers, especially their key electro-optical components. 18. Carbon fiber, an emerging material that is replacing metals in key applications. 19. Construction equipment, which is often a lot more sophisticated than it looks. 21. Medical devices. 22. Equipment for nuclear power plants. 23. High-tech weaponry, including counter-terrorist equipment like bomb sniffers. 24. Green power devices, like fuel cells and the generators, control units, towers and blades of windmills. 25. Pollution control equipment, like sulfur dioxide scrubbers, and pollution detection devices. Note that much advanced manufacturing involves products – fibers, pipes, bulldozers – that one would not think of as advanced, but are in fact more subtly made than one imagines. Advanced manufacturing often centers on the key components of products rather than the products themselves. Many consumer products, for example, consist of technically-advanced components surrounded by a commonplace plastic package that is easy to make. The outside of a fax machine, for example, will say `made in China', simply because final assembly was done there, with unskilled labour. But the bit that really matters – and accounts for most of the cost, and wages paid – is the electro- optical read-write head. This is a sophisticated piece of equipment, made by highly-trained and well-paid labour in some developed country, like Japan. Enthusiasts of the post-industrial economy are simply not honest about its drawbacks: 1. Jobs in computer software, finance, management consulting, and similar fields may be highly paid, but it usually takes a college degree to get one. Most of the British work force lacks a college degree; a large percentage of college-age Britons are not ever going to get one. Without alternatives to the information economy, many of these people are doomed to a low standard of living for their entire lives. By comparison, advanced manufacturing reliably creates a wide spectrum of jobs at all skill levels, and is particularly rich in the crucial category of the skilled blue-collar jobs that ordinary working-class people have a plausible chance of holding. 2. The information economy is intrinsically limited in terms of how many good jobs it can create, because it is limited in how large a portion of our economy it can be, for the simple reason that information is only a limited part of the value chain that makes up any product. The value of a programmer who creates a website to sell DVD players is necessarily limited to some fraction of the value- added of retailing the product, which is only a small part of its overall value. This value is made up of researching, designing, manufacturing, distributing, marketing, wholesaling, retailing and servicing it. If we cede the manufacturing link of the value chain to foreigners, this means ceding a large piece of potential economic activity and the jobs and wealth that flow to whomever performs that activity. And Britain is limited in what share of the world market for internationally-traded services we can win. 3. Jobs in the information economy are more vulnerable to foreign competition than people realize. For example, the current strength of the City of London is vulnerable to the growth in sophistication of the financial sectors of other nations. It is also vulnerable, even if the top jobs stay in London, to `hollowing out' as the `back office' jobs get relocated to India and other places where clerical workers are cheaper. <rest of message snipped, JL> (The list of industries above is derived from Eamonn Fingleton's In Praise of Hard Industries, an outstanding, and very readable, book on this topic). <http://www.bnp.org.uk>
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