[stick of capitalist production. Clearly whilst Britain could…]

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stick of capitalist production. Clearly whilst Britain could not have been expected to hold on to the full third of export markets it had in 1900 - it should have held its 16.4% share of 1960.

Today it is down to under 8%. Only the USA has similarly been losing its share of markets, principally to. West Germany and Japan. ' From a position of leader at the top of the First Division, Britain is now lingering deep in the relegation zone.

Sir Terence Beckett of the CBI, summed up his class's problems well. "We have become uncompetitive in both price and product." As regards imports, the volume of international manufactured goods being sold in the UF is increasing at 9% a year.

So whilst UK capitalism has barely retained its proportion of overall UK exports, imported manufactures have massively increased their take of inward In 1950 manufactures accounted for 4% of British imports; by 1979 these figures had leapt to leanesegan relates she Piss or I abour Movement Campeign for Palestune FIRST NATIONAL CONFERENCE delegation County Hall, Londor SE 1 actmuride thi OBSERVERS WELCOME 36%. This was the biggest shift of any capitalist country.

Under Thatcher, the manufacturing sector's output has been in decline not only relative to the economy as a whole, but in absolute terms over the last three years as well.

Needless to say, all other national capitalisms have done better. Between 1958 and 1981, Britain's output increased by only 49%. Only Luxembourg of the EEC's UK partners failed to match that. Belgium has managed a rise of 122%, France 144%, Germany 150%, and Italy 253%. The average for the orginal six members of the EEC is 163% - over three times the UK rate. Thatcher's policies have simply lanced a septic carbuncle that has been growing for decades, and unleashing in the process an unparallelled haemorrhaging of jobs.

Once again, whilst all advanced capitalisms have seen some recent shift of employment out of industry, the extent of the exodus out of the UK manufacturing sector is unparallelled in the West.

Taking the same period from 1958 to 1981, of the original EEC six, France and Germany maintained stable numbers in manufacturing while Italy and Luxembourg increased theirs.

Movement Campaign for Palestine WEEKEND SCHOOL June 18-19, 11am County London SE1 Speakers: Avishai Erlich (The Zionist State); Moshe Machover (Labour Zionism); Nira Yuval-Davis Zionism and Women); Uri Davis, Palestinian and Lebanese speakers; speak-: ers from the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity and Women for Palestine.

Sunday: Speakers School. Discussion involving representatives from other solidarity organisations. contact LMCP, c/0 28 Carlton Mansions, Holmleigh Road, London N16 'The cause lies with the rather a lot, but even the latter's 16% loss pales besides the UK's 26%.

At just 5.4 million, the British manufacturing workforce is now smaller than at any time since the 1890s, including the thirties.

Peaking at 9 million in 1965, it has now, accentuated by Thatcherism, fallen by one third; with almost all of the decline coming in the decade from 1970.

From June 1981 to June 1982 UK manufacturing was losing 1,000 jobs a day - thanks to structural decline and M. Thatcher. While Tebbit says "unemployment is tailing off" -workers are losing about 700 jobs a day this year across all sectors!

Losses

Interestingly, if manufacturing employed the same number of people today as it did in 1970, there would be no unemployment. The job losses in the last decade have stemmed from a disintegrating "productive" sector.

But British capitalists do have their problems. Take Germany for example. The latter has almost exactly the same size of labour force as the UK and is only a little less export dependent (26% of GDP is exported as opposed to the UK's 30%).

The amazing difference is that Germany's 26% of GDP contains a whopping 21% of the world market for manufactures, while Britain's 30% represents a tiny 8% market share.

West German GDP is now nearly twice the UK's £200 billion and the gap is still growing.

So what are the historical and structural reasons for the disintegration of the British economy?

The domination of the landed banking fraction over manufacturing capital within the English bourgeoisie, during the early phase of the industrial revolution, set the economic, political and cultural framework for the financing of British imperialism.

The pre-eminent historic project of the British bourgeoisie was the growth and maintenance of extensive imperial markets abroad, to the exclusion of the intensive development of productive technique at home.

For the City of London was not only the new Mecca for Indian maharajahs to pay homage to, it was also the sovereign head of an economy to which Northern manufactürers doffed their caps.

The journal Management for Industry put it well:

«The free market mechanism worked well enough for the first 80 years or so. But after the first phase, the short-term economic interests of the firm and the long JOHN HARRIS term economic interests of an imperial economy as a whole, began to diverge, with the advent of foreign competition". JOHN Germany and the USA in particular -built formidable infrastructures (research institutes, technical colleges) in order to exploit and apply the new scientific innovations that would facilitate the new burgeoning economies ability to claw back the UK's lead.

Moreover, by 1913, Germany was producing 3,000 graduate engineers a year; the UK with no long term strategic planning, had only 9,000 students in total and the entire output of all branches of science was only 350.

Hence as George Bernard Shaw, said at the time «British industry and its "practical'ness were no more fit to meet this formidable attack than the British militia would have been to meet the Prussian Army."

Furthermore, the whole cultural ethos of the British Establishment was to "make your money and get out"

The more enterprising capitalist turned to finance and trade rather than "mucky industry"

Even the great Frederick Engels retired at 49 with an ample pension and a successful business, to turn his mind to more important problems!

In short a process of "ideological de-industrialisation" had already set in long before the economic fruit was delivered by Thatcher and Tebbit.

Ironically, Terence Beckett put his finger on a major factor for his class's decline. "So the really bright people go into the City if they want wealth, the Civil Service if they want comfort. The rewards are not high enough in industry. It's not fair"

The dominant structural element reinforcing decline. has been the imbalance in investment vis-a-vis the UK and its competitors.

Cumulative

Indeed, it has been estimated that overseas investment was already exceeding net domestic UK capital formation by 1870. By: 1914, industrial investment was inadequate for the modernisation of an increasingly geriatric industrial base.

Today, argues the -bourgeois economist Eltis, "there is now a very large cumulative loss of capital and research and development"

Bourgeois economists are now forced to admit that the historic staryation of investment has created a massive structural imbalance in the economy: whilst the private sector has contracted, the public sector has expanded throughout the seventies (nearly £30 billion is now spent on the NHS and DHSS).

Hence, in 1961 20.8 million market sector empioyees were running parallel with 3.6 million in the public sector. By 1981 the respective totals had become 18.1 million (13% fewer) and 5:3

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hat are the answer on unemployment? L LA The Tories argue that unemployment is due to the world recession.

That certainly doesn't account for a lot of the job cuts since 1979. 50,000 school meals workers' jobs have been lost because of cuts and price rises pushed by the Tory government. 400,000 building workers are unemployed because the Tory government has cut public spending on house-building by half.

That's not the world recession' It's government policies that can be reversed. But what about the big decline of jobs in manufacturing?

Yes: capitalists world-wide produce where it is most profitable, and buy from the cheapest supplier. The ebbs and flows of investment and trade, regulated by the rule of profit, leave armies of jobless all round the world (some much bigger than Problems and Policies it wouldn't. But getting the Tories out and Labour in would be a step in the process of the labour movement rousing itself, fighting for alternatives, and then developing better alternatives through experience.

We must fight to hold a new Labour government to its promises on issues like renationalisation, increased public services and public investment. At the same time we need to organise for direct action.

Cuts can be stopped and jobs can be saved by strikes and occupations. Work-sharing without loss of pay is a direct alternative to job cuts which can be fought for at the level of the workplace, the company, the industry, and finally the whole economy.

It is specially important to organise the unemployed in unemployed branches of trade unions if possible, and in

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moneyed interests who have tradition ally managed the old war horse'. Belgium lost a few and Holland