Made in Britain

Exports and Imports
Before the war “Made in Britain” was a selling point. At any rate, enough manufacturers thought so to make something of a splash about it in their advertisements. We don’t hear so much of this now. Down at any youth club, we know, it is Italian clothes which are all the rage. Swedish tableware has won a name for itself as an elegant, durable wedding present. The black leather jackets knock up their tons on motor cycles from Japan, which also supplied a lot of the cameras that clicked away on our damp beaches this summer.

To the casual observer—and this is how we can describe most of the workers whose fortunes under capitalism depend upon their observations being anything but casual—this gives the impression that British industry is being engulfed by a wave of foreign imports. This impression is often coloured by heart-racking stories of the cheap labour which foreign industries are supposed to use. Stories of pregnant Japanese women sweating out long hours in textile mills for next to no pay. Of slum dwellers in Milan being squeezed in the factory until their pips squeak. English employers, of course, are supposed to play fair. No cheap labour is used here. All of this country’s exports are fairly priced and compete honestly on the world’s markets. So runs the popular story. You can hear it in any City restaurant any day of the week.

From there, the argument progresses simply. Because they use cheap labour, the foreign industries can knock out dirt cheap goods. But the British manufacturer, selling his products as if he were playing cricket, sticks to the rules and poor, simple, honest fool that he is, is undercut and outsold all over the world. So British industry packs up and we are left unemployed, staring at shop windows full of cheap cameras from Tokyo and cheap shirts from Hong Kong. This should be enough to teach us all to buy British, even if it does cost us twice as much from our wages.

This argument is so popular, so convenient to British capitalism—and so wrong—that it is worth dealing with.

First of all, nobody should run away with the idea that imports are a one-way traffic. This country, although it imports an enormous amount of wealth, is also one of the world’s great exporters. Last June, for example, Britain exported £327.8 million worth of goods. This holds good also for the specific case of Japan, which is the villain of so many of the dark import/export sales. According to the Director of the Anglo-Japanese Economic Institute, who wrote to The Guardian on 15th August last, Japan is importing British goods at the rate of one million pounds worth each week. Japanese business men do not like the prospect of being outsold any more than their English counterparts do. The letter went on:

.” . . many Japanese industries have been protesting to their own Government about possible flooding of the Japanese market by foreign goods once Japan’s 90 per cent import liberalisation plan is in full operation this October. It seems there are two ways of looking at everything.”

British business men should appreciate the force of this as much as anyone. For they, like the Japanese, complain about foreign imports at the same time as they are exporting for all they are worth. Some of them shelter behind protected markets in this country, but demand that the industries which supply them with their raw materials should be subjected to the rigours of freely competing imports. The agricultural interests in this country are notorious for adopting this attitude. Although they prosper on padded home market, British farmers do not care about undermining the interests of other industries in this country, if this means that they might be able to buy cheaper food for their animals or cheaper fertilisers. They object to the chemical industry having its own protected market, making them pay more than they would for foreign chemicals. Last March, for example, the chairman of the Farmers’ and Smallholders’ Association was advising all farmers to buy Italian fertilisers because this was cheaper than the same stuff turned out by British chemical firms. This may be good business for the farmer, but not so for IC1, who were at the time agitating for an anti-dumping duty on imports of the fertiliser.

Another example of this is the attitude of British European Airways, who can always be relied upon to put up a bitter opposition to any private airlines application for a licence to ply along one of their routes. BEA’s objections have nothing new about them. They plead that they have spent time and money on building up the routes and that they will only be able to afford the expensive equipment which a big airline needs if they are allowed a monopoly of British operators on their routes. In their last annual report, they said that they would not make up their mind about how many of the new Trident jets they would order until they knew what competition the government is prepared to allow over these airlines.

Nobody who knows anything about capitalism would expect BEA to surrender their established fields of exploitation without a fight. Neither would they expect any capitalist concern to protect some other industry’s interests. In the same report, BEA announced their new, cut-rate “walk-on” fares to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Belfast. These low fares are especially designed to attract passengers away from the railways. It is obvious that BEA, like any capitalist business, favours competition when they are making the running. In fact, the railways could reasonably object to the new fares by using the airline’s own arguments against them. They could plead that they have built up the passenger traffic over the routes which BEA is now trying to dominate. They could argue that they have a lot of expensive equipment to buy and do not know whether this will be worthwhile if they are to be so easily undercut.

Undercutting
This sort of tangle is not confined to domestic industries. Early last year, an application from the Steel Company of Wales to be allowed to import cheap American coking coal was fought, and defeated by the National Coal Board. The fact that the coal industry had succeeded in preventing the Americans from undercutting them did not stop them trying to do the same thing to coal industries abroad. Lord Robens, chairman of the NCB, is itching for this country to join the European Common Market and on August 29th last he gave his reasons for this. British coal, he said, could undersell coal from the Ruhr into Ham-burg; (he only thing that slops it doing so is the import quota which the German government, doubtless under pressure from Lord Robens’ counterparts in their country, uses to restrict British coal imports to 400,000 tons a year. Lord Robens frets under this restriction. Without it. he thinks, the coal mines could double or treble their sales in Germany. He likes competition provided it is the “heads-I-win-tails-you-lose” variety.

It is obvious, then, that this business of imports and exports is very much two-sided. A broad view sees that the exports of British coal mines are the imports of German power stations and that the exports of the Honda motor cycle firm are the imports of the British dealers in those machines. But capitalists are seldom interested in broad views or any ether such concept. Any industry in capitalism must sell to survive and none of them can afford to be particular about how they make their sales. Sometimes they have to put in some backstairs pressure work upon a government department to protect their market. Sometimes they have to indulge in some double-talk and black-is-white argument. Sometimes they must be inconsistent. And sometimes they must tell lies. For none of them can ever cry enough. While they protect their own markets they must always be seeking new ones, always trying to move into some other industry’s established field of selling. This is typical of the muddle and wasteful anomalies which capitalism produces in such abundance.

Unhappily—and in some ways almost unbelievably—many workers take their masters’ part in this struggle. The miners were behind the NCB’s fight against the American coal. Presumably lapanese workers will back their employers in their protests to the government in Tokyo over the freeing of imports into Japan. Textile workers over here complain about the cheap goods coming in from Japan and other Far Eastern countries, without realising that these goods may have been made in such abundance and so cheaply on machines which were exported from this country. It is too obvious that international trade in an established part of capitalism which no amount of prejudiced and one-sided objection can break down.

This reasoning may not appeal to the redundant motor cycle worker as he watches the Hondas roaring along the bypass. But he would do better to consider the root cause of his unemployment. He was laid off because it was not profitable to employ him any longer. Because everything it makes is meant to be sold, capitalism fits everything into the strait jacket of profitability. If profitability says that foreign goods must be imported, in they come. If it says that an industry must close down, if does so.

Profitability, for example, says that shipworkers must be laid off. In the boom of the early fifties many ships, especially tankers, were produced on speculative orders which hoped that when they were built there would be a market for them. But by the time the ships were ready a new trading pattern had developed and with it a demand for the enormous “super tankers.” This forced a lot of the smaller tankers into the grain market, flooding the market for bulk carriers, bringing freight rates down and driving the shipping industry into a slump. This is typical of the anarchic problems which capitalism’s profitability mania creates in abundance, but can never solve. It was not caused by foreign competition; only aggravated by the fact that all the world’s shipyards were going flat out in boom time to cash in on the market. That is something which every industry tries to do, and will always try, so long as capitalism is with us.

That is where our unemployed worker, and the clerk in the City restaurant, should look for the key to unravel their problems. There has never been any lack of medicine men to peddle their remedies for capitalism’s ailments. But the ailments keep on showing themselves wath ever greater complications. Nothing can be too drastic to cure them. Even a bit of straight thinking about capitalism.
IVAN