Part 6

The Chinese instance is poignant. A few years ago—until the War, in fact—China exported food and raw materials and imported manufactured goods—nothing else to speak of either way. This was as the Western industrial nations wished it to be. So anxious were they to have it so that they bound China by treaty not to put tariff barriers against the goods they wished to sell in the Chinese markets, except by mutual consent—that is to say, with their consent.

The War suspended this thraldom. The Chinese imported machines and began to make their own things, especially cloth. Power-looms appeared as by magic. And after the War, they continued to appear. During three years after the War the number trebled, and in 1922, the table of Chinese imports and exports presented a strange face. Among her imports were machines and machine-parts; also semimanufactured goods to be finished in Chinese factories. And one-fifth of her total exports consisted of manufactured goods. China an exporter of machine products!

And so up and down the earth. In Brazil, where there was hardly any visible production of artificial things before 1914, the whole outlook has changed. That country is now able from her own machines to meet the whole of her want for matches, textiles, footgear, wallpaper, phonograph-discs, hardware, hats, and playing cards, and will soon be self-supplied with practically everything she needs.

The Colonial System that was to have answered forever Great Britain’s need for raw materials and food in exchange for machine-products will not hold in that character. In India the revolt is political; elsewhere it is peaceably economic. Canada is already powerfully machined; she is exporting motor-cars. Australia, going in the same direction, is beginning to export shoes. The Union of South Africa takes steps to subsidize local industry. Ireland no sooner gains control of her economic life than she puts a tariff-wall around herself to limit the sale of foreign goods, meaning British goods as well, thinking thereby to foster infant industries.

Well, everyone now is doing that. The old industrial countries, too, are protecting themselves against one another’s goods, the last to come to it being Great Britain herself. For more than half-a-century she was the protagonist of free trade, abhoring tariffs, because she was paramount in machine-craft and could beat her rivals both in their own markets and in her own. That advantage having departed from her, she is driven to tariff-protection: she puts up barriers against other people’s goods if they are too cheap, because they are too cheap, and calls it Safeguarding Home Industries.

THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS

What does it mean? Can there be too many desirable and useful things? Can things be too cheap? You would say No. Surely, so long as any human want remains unsatisfied, things cannot be either too plentiful or too cheap? But there is another dimension.

Everything that is not still or dead must exist in a state of rhythmic tension. It is true of the plant, it is true of the animal, it is true of each race of plants and each race of animals, it is true of the kingdom of plants against the kingdom of animals. It is true of people, as individuals, as races, as a species. And it is true, also, of the machine.

In the living organism growth of tissue at a normal rate consonant with the rhythm is vital. A wild growth of that same tissue will be fatal. In the aggregate of life there is equilibrium among millions of different forms, each form striving but never succeeding and is possessing every other form and taking the world. The oyster, if unhindered, would displace every other living thing on the earth in maybe ten generations, and then, of course, perish for want of space in which to contain itself. What hinders the oyster and at the same time preserves it is that principle of tension in nature, without which it would be impossible for innumerable forms and varieties of life, the relations of which to one another are reciprocal, neutral, hostile, anonymous, to exist together all in one great taut pattern.

Now regard the third kingdom, artificial, implanted with mechanical beasts, that contains civilization. Life in this environment is economic. Its characteristic behaviour is a progressive differentiation of labour. Tasks are divided and subdivided until, at length, there are countless separate groups of people, each one performing a singular function to which it is trained and tending to become unable to perform any other. The subdivisions are beyond enumeration. They multiply so fast that the book of the census cannot keep up with them.

The shoe-industry, for example, does not consist in shoemakers. You might search it in vain for a shoemaker—that is, one who should know how to raise a pair of shoes from flat leather. In the shoe factory the material passes through a train of machines. Each machine is minded by an operative who performs one little specialized part of the work in endless repetition. The product is shoes by thousands of gross.

But who determines what kinds of shoe and how many shoes shall be made? What becomes of them when they are made? Who knows they can be sold? What if they are not saleable?

If you address these questions to one of the operatives minding a machine you will find him dumb. He knows only his own function.

It is very complicated. There are two industries here. One is the shoe-industry; the other is the shoe-machine industry. One could not exist without the other, yet they are separate and very unlike. The shoe-industry itself, that has dispensed with shoemakers, will have a finance department, an economic department, a buying department, a department of production science, a style and designing department, a chemical department, a department of distribution, a sales department, an advertizing department, and others we do not think of. It is all about shoes. These are all shoe people. They agglomerate in shoe towns. They think shoes. The world is a foot. The more it can be shod the better. They live by shoes.

But to do this they must be able to exchange shoes for the things they want. Shoes, therefore, must have a relation of value to every other thing in the economic world. It follows that, in order to have this exchange-value, shoes must have also a relation of quantity to all other things. If for any reason the production of shoes becomes suddenly abnormal that exchange-value is lost. It is like one kind of tissue growing wild in the organism. Shoes are necessary; but an excessive quantity cannot be absorbed by the economic body. There will be in that case a morbid pathology in the shoe-industry, unemployment in the shoe town, despair among the shoe people, many of whom have never learned to do anything else. Left to themselves, without shoes to make, they might even starve.

It may be in the same way a soap town, a textile town, a garment town, an iron town, a motor town like Detroit, a rubber-tire town like Akron, a furniture town like Grand Rapids. It may be all of these—that is to say, industry as a whole, increasing its output at an abnormal rate. As you project the thought you begin to see, first, the vital importance of rhythm, equilibrium, tension, in the realm of industry, and then the inverse meaning of a sudden competitive increase in the machine-power of the world.

Ask the Italians what it means. They are an old people coming to it with a fresh mind. The conversation that follows took place in February, 1925. Talking are, on one side, the Italian Minister of Finance, and on the other, a visiting journalist:

“The industrial idea is new in Italy. It is since the War. You had a clean slate. You could have done anything you had the imagination to do. First you might have made a scientific survey of Italy’s latent genius and resources, and then you might have thought of producing goods that should be uniquely Italian and therefore non-competitive. But what have you done? You have gone in for the great staples of world commerce, such as cotton and woollen textiles, artificial silk, and motor-cars. Don’t you see that in doing this you take on the competition of Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, the United States?”

“Yes, we see that.”

“Those countries have the field and the experience and better access than Italy to sources of raw material.”

“That we know, also.”

“Then how can you hope successfully to compete with them? What have you that they have not? What advantage against theirs?”

“One you haven’t thought of.”

“What is it?”

“A man can live on less in Italy than anywhere else. We don’t know why that is. It may be the way the sun shines on him. But it is a fact. That is our advantage. With that we shall succeed.”

“Do you realize what that means? You are saying that Italy proposes to found an industrial career on the lowest terms of human existence. Your people will not accept it.”

“But they will.”

“How do you know they will?”