244

The main spheres of the manufacturing industries in today’s capitalist economy are far from having been uniformly affected by scientific and technical progress. Its influence can be clarified in practice by a more or less detailed study of 245 each industry (and its main divisions), but it would seem logical, in an initial approach to a comparative assessment of the rates of growth of all industries, to assume that scientific and technical advances as a rule have a stimulating effect on industries whose output is growing at accelerating tempos.  [245•1  Table 26 below covers all the important manufacturing industries without exception and graphically indicates the extremely wide range of their development trends. For comparison’s sake we have also included the corresponding indicators for the power and mining industries.

Table 26 Comparative Growtli Rates of Separate Industries of the World Capitalist Economy (average percentages for the appropriate periods) Industry 1948-1960 1060-1973 1973-1981 Manufacturing 6.5 6.2 1.9 Food & beverages 3.9 4.3 2.7 Textiles 3.7 4.2 —0.2 Clothing & footwear 3.6 3.0 —0.1 Paper & printing 6.0 5.1 1.8 Woodworking 3.8 5.5 0.2 Building materials 5.7 5.6 1.5 Chemicals 8.7 8.8 2 8 Base metals 4.0 5.5 0.1 Metalworking 6.8 6.8 2.4 Power (electricity, gas) 8.6 8.0 3.9 Mining 4.2 4.4 1.2 Source: calculated from UN Statistical yearbook and UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics for the appropriate years.

p Because of the inner Jaws and unresolved contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, the growth rates of each of the manufacturing industries are clearly unstable in the period under review and repeatedly experience steep cyclic rises and falls. The general index, as already mentioned, had risen by a factor of 5.3 by 1978 compared with 1948. This level can be taken as a kind of ’demarcation line’ 246 when the general results of the postwar growth of the separate industries are being compared.

p The figures indicate that not one of the light industries cited reached this average level in recent decades, the slowest rates, moreover, being characteristic mainly of such old, ‘traditional’ industries as textiles, clothing and footwear which played a very marked role in the aggregate output of manufacturing in the initial stages of industrial development. The main methods of production in these industries differ little at the present time in their fundamental technical solutions from those that predominated in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. The output of the textile industry rose by 160 per cent during the period covered by the table, and that of clothing and footwear rose by only 120 per cent, the annual growth rates being 2.9 and 2.5 per cent respectively. The indices of the food and drink industries were a little higher (annual growth around 3.8 per cent).  [246•1  It was the slow development rates of these industries that in the main determined the significant postwar decline (mentioned in the previous chapter) in the proportion of light industry in the capitalist world’s total output of manufactured articles.

p The paper and printing industries grew more dynamically in these years, and so did output of building materials ( annual rates 4.6 to 4.8 per cent), although they did not reach the average level of growth for manufacturing (5.2 per cent). Their weight in the aggregate industrial production of capitalist and developing countries (together with the woodworking industries, which increased their output by a factor of 3.5) has therefore also had a certain tendency to fall.

p The most impressive growth rates since the war have been achieved by the chemical industry. Over the last three decades its output rose almost 8.5-fold (at a mean annual rate of 6.7 per cent); the bulk of its product, moreover, consisted of qualitatively new items not produced before World War II. The list of chemical products coming onto the world market is doubling every seven to ten years, largely because of the industry’s rapid technical progress.

247

p Scientific and technical advances are also accelerating development of a number of promising lines in such a complex and extremely varied sphere of production as metalworking. Quite a few qualitatively new technological processes have been developed which, on the one hand, have increased the imbalance in the development of the separate metalworking industries and, on the other hand, promoted a 6.3-fold increase in their aggregate production between 1948 and 1981 (a mean annual growth rate of 5.7 per cent). These rates, like those of the chemical industry, have shown a tendency, with very steep fluctuations from one year to another in the first postwar decades, to a marked acceleration, which has led to a rise in this industry’s weight in the aggregate industrial production of the world capitalist economy.

p The basic metal industries grew at the slowest rates for the main heavy industries (3.6 per cent), considerable unevenness being typical, moreover, of the different metals. In particular a lagging of iron and steel behind the non- ferrous metals was typical of this period. A reason for their comparatively slow dynamics on the whole that strikes the eye is the fact that a not unimportant objective of scientific and technical progress today is to reduce the consumption of metal in industrial products. World overproduction crises also hit the basic metal industries harder than the other heavy industries.  [247•1 

p When, however, we consider their absolute growth in the long term, the postwar changes are quite substantial, especially compared with preceding stages of capitalism’s development. Steel production, for instance, rose from 115 million tonnes in 1937 (within today’s capitalist world) to between 470 and 500 million tonnes at the end of the 70s,  [247•2  the growth coming mainly, moreover, from long established traditional production methods. The bulk of basic metals are still produced, with individual technical innovations, by fundamentally the methods that had already been invented by the turn of the century.

248

p The trends under review led to major changes in the postwar .structure of manufacturing, the most essential of which are shown in Fig. 17. In addition to estimates of the weight of the basic industries in the aggregate production of manufacturing, we have included data on the proportion of the capitalist and developing countries in the value of the output of each industry for one and the same year.  [248•1  The figures give a graphic idea of the very substantial shifts in postwar capitalist production that are important in principle for appraising its present industrial structure. The weight of food, beverages and tobacco, and textiles in the total was almost halved (from 20 and 10 per cent to 12 and 5 per cent respectively). These two industries now yield around one-sixth of the total production of capitalist countries’ manufacturing industries, whereas they used to produce approximately half at the beginning of the century.  [248•2  The proportion of chemicals more than doubled in the period under review (from 7 to 17 per cent). Even on the eve of World War II it was only 40 per cent of the weight of the food, beverages, and tobacco industry, and two-thirds that of the textile industry. At the beginning of the 80s, however, the volume of chemical production in value terms was as much as that of these two industries taken together.

p The large-scale changes in the industrial structure of today’s capitalist economy are also associated with a significant acceleration of the growth of the metalworking industries. While they produced a little more than a fourth of total manufacturing production in 1948, they were almost two-fifths in the early 80s. This growth was essentially a continuation of a previously noted process. Alfred Maizels’s figures indicate that the proportion of metal products was less than a seventh, on an average, at the beginning of the century (16 per cent in Europe, 10 per cent in the USA, and 2 per cent in Japan).  [248•3  It has been in the postwar decades, however, that there have been essential shifts under the
•
249 V i g. 17 Weight, of the principal sectors in the aggregate product of I he manuf-iciuring industries of the world capitalist economy (in percentages) METAL PRODUCTS 38 CHEMICALS 17 OTHER INDUSTRIES 97 BASIC METALS 9 9 19 21 22 25 27 17 18 1 20 S § co co So CO k\\\"’ 1 SHARE OF CAPITALIST COUNTRIES K’X-v :-J SHARE OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Fuurci’x; UN S/iilisI ical Yrarliooh. Yearbook of National Accounts Statistics, and Monthly linlli’tin of Statistics for the relevant years.
•
impact of scientific and technical progress that have raised the leading branches of engineering to a qualitatively new level of development and encouraged further industrialisation of the economies of capitalist countries.

250

p The relative decline in the weight of ’other industries’ in Fig. 17 is mainly due to the fall in the proportion of clothing and footwear in total production, and also of woodworking and to some extent of the paper and printing industries (which fell respectively from 8 to 4 per cent, 5 to 4 per cent, and 8 to 7 per cent). A distinguishing feature of this process is the growth in the share of developing countries in the output of each of these industries, oriented today mainly on the home market. In the period under review the share of the former colonial world grew considerably in clothing and footwear, paper and printing, and the woodworking industries; in the production of building materials it rose from 8 per cent to nearly 20.

p This line of development, it must be noted, was typical, in fact, of all the main branches of manufacturing. The weight of developing countries in the food industry rose from 17 to 21 per cent, in textiles from 22 to 27 per cent, and in basic metals from 3 to 13 per cent. The world crises of the 70s and early 80s, which affected the industry of the industrial centres particularly heavily, led to a further strengthening of these trends.

Analysis of the changing sectoral structure of the industrial centres indicates that those industries grew fastest, as a rule, that were closely linked with production for export, i.e. were actively involved in the international division of labour. In the 60s and 70s, for instance, the growth rates of the physical volume of the exports of the technically most advanced industries in the developed countries considerably outpaced their rates of production. The physical volume of their exports of manufactures rose much more slowly (in constant prices) in those years than exports of engineering output or chemicals. The growth rates of their chemical exports in this period, for example, were more than three times as fast as the growth rates of production. At the same time the export quota of such industries as textiles, clothing and footwear, woodworking, basic metals, building materials, etc., rose  at qualitatively lower rates.