225

p The aim of this chapter is to investigate those long-term, reciprocally interacting trends in which the main outlines of the changes taking place in manufacturing are revealed. World War II introduced adjustments in the industrial structure of capitalism established earlier. It led, as we know, to great destruction in the economies of most European countries, and to significant changes in the balance of power between the main centres of capitalism. The 1946 volume of industrial production in Western Europe, for example, was 30 per cent below that of 1938, and in Japan more than 70 per cent below.

p At the same time, however, industrial production had grown apace in the other capitalist countries and pimary commodity producers whose territory had not directly suffered from military operations. Its volume in the United States, for instance, increased by nearly 90 per cent, in Canada by more than two-thirds, and in Latin America by approximately 50 per cent. The physical volume of world capitalist industrial production was consequently 45 per cent above the 1938 level in 1948, within the present boundaries of capitalism.  [225•1 

p Although restoration of several of the leading industries continued over the next few years in the countries that had suffered most from the war (the industrial production of Great Britain and Italy, for example, only surpassed the prewar level in 1949, of West Germany in 1950, and of Japan in 1952), the end of the 40s can be taken as the initial period of the general postwar changes in capitalist manufacturing. 226 It was then that capitalism’s international links were restored and later rapidly expanded.  [226•1 

The tendency inherent in the productive forces of capitalism toward a strengthening of the role and significance of manufacturing in material production began to manifest itself with special clarity from the end of the 40s, and was expressed in a marked quickening of its growth rates in relation to growth of the aggregate GDP of the countries of the non-socialist world. In spite of repeated, steep cyclic fluctuations, the annual growth rates of manufacturing were above 5 per cent in the postwar period. The volume of manufactures in the period considered in Table 22 alone increased (in constant prices) by 150 per cent (140 per cent in the industrial countries and 280 per cent in the developing countries).

Tablje 22 Annual Growth Rates of Manufacturing by Regions and Countries including Region/country 1960-1981* 1960-1973 1973-1981* All countries 4.5 6.1 2.0 Developed capitalist countries 4.2 5.9 1.8 North America 3.7 4.8 1.9 USA 3.8 4.7 2.0 Western Europe 3.7 5.4 1.2 Japan 8.8 12.7 2.9 Developing countries 6.5 7.7 4.6 Asia 6.7 7.9 5.1 Africa 6.9 8.4 4.4 Latin America 6.2 7.6 4.1 * Estimated Sources: calculated from UN Handbook of World Development Statistics, (United Nations, New York, 1979)t UN Statistical Yearbook, and UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics for the appropriate years.

p The world business crises of the mid-70s and early 80s led to the most substantial reduction of production growth rates in manufacturing industries of recent decades. Although
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227 Fig. 15 Dynamics of the development of manufacturing industry in world capitalist economy (1960=100) 300- HEAVY INDUSTRY ALL INDUSTRIES LIGHT INDUSTRY 250- 200- 150- ’960 ,965 ,970 Sources: UN Statistical Yearbook and Monthly Bulletin of Statistics for the relevant years. 5975 1981 228
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growth continued in the developing countries, its dynamics also declined markedly, especially in Latin America, after the crisis of 1974-75.

p These generalised figures of course obscure immense differences in the dynamics of the growth rates of the main manufacturing industries in the various regions and countries. In fact they are only the starting point for subsequent study Oi the organically interconnected long-term trends that ultimately characterise the postwar changes in the industrial structure of the capitalist economy.

p The regional features of the growth of manufacturing will be analysed below in the course of a more concrete investigation; here it is advisable to bring out the dynamics of the processes, which will enable us to picture more clearly the most general changes occurring in recent decades. These processes include, first of all, the course and changing ratio of the development rates of heavy and light industry on a nonsocialist world scale, above all in the main industrial centres where the lion’s share of the total product of capitalist manufacturing is created at the present time.

p The composite data of the international statistics indicate that there have been very significant long-term differences in growth of the potentials of the two most important constituents of manufacturing, i.e. heavy and light industry. In the former the physical volume of production over the period under review increased roughly by a factor of 5.7 but in the latter by only a factor of 3.4. In other words, heavy industry outpaced light in the postwar years by 70 per cent,  [228•1  which could not help leading to substantial shifts in the macrostructure of manufacturing and consequently also in the ratio of the two parts. There is an ever growing gap in the dynamics of their development. (See Fig. 15)

p It would not be right, however, to consider these trends simply as features of the postwar decades. They have a longerterm character. They started in the nineteenth century when capitalism passed to the stage of large-scale machine industry, whose growth began, in fact, to govern the 229 subsequent development of its industrial base.  [229•1  Under monopoly capitalism the ratio between heavy and light industry altered even more rapidly in favour of the former, although the historically determined preponderance of light industry in the total value of industrial output was still maintained right up to the end of the 1930s. On the eve of World War II light industry contributed around half of the total value of the industrial production of the capitalist world.

p The further course of events, however, altered this ratio in an important way. At the end of the 1970s the weight of light industry in manufacturing had already fallen to onethird, and that of heavy industry risen to two-thirds. When we take all industry, then according to the UN statistics, the share of light industry was a little more than a quarter at that time, and that of heavy industry nearly three-fifths of the total volume of industrial production of capitalist and developing countries taken together. That is one of the most important results of the postwar changes in the industrial structure of the non-socialist world, and an extremely important one as regards its economic consequences.

When studying the shifts in manufacturing, however, we must bear the following circumstance in mind. While analysis of the preceding stages of industrial development could be limited in practice to investigation of the processes taking place in the main capitalist centres, such a limitation is no longer quite justified. Given that the increasing interaction of the forces of socialism and the national liberation movement have irreversibly broken imperialism’s former allembracing monopoly in the world economy and world politics, and that the bulk of the countries of the former colonial periphery of imperialism have taken the road of national independence, the commencing industrialisation of the developing countries’ economies is becoming of no little importance for a comprehensive description of the structure of manufacturing in the world capitalist economy.