Matthew Lynn's A Bit Too Marxist Here
A common enough mistake
Stomping around shouting that this factory, this one ‘ere, should stop doing that and go do this other thing is to make a very Marxist mistake. It’s also a very common mistake which gives a good indication of how badly the Marxist Brain Rot has afflicted our society.
Matthew Lynn’s often enough not bad but this is still wrong:
Time for Britain’s car plants to switch to making weapons
Why close factories to build new ones and lay off workers when we could repurpose our manufacturing sector?
Oooh, no Matty, Lad.
But hold on. Perhaps there is a simple solution that is staring everyone in the face.
It could switch from making cars to guns, tanks and other military supplies, just as some of the German companies are doing. After all, that is where the demand is – and the automotive industry is perfectly placed to supply it.
This is to make the same mistake the enviroloons do when they shriek that BP should be building solar parks - something that BP actually did do, in fact for a number of years it was the world’s largest solar panel maker. They just weren’t very good at it which is the point to be observed here.
The logical background to this is that Marxist Loonery of thinking that there’s “labour” and “capital”. Yes, fair enough, useful shorthand for certain types of analysis. But Loonery when we attempt to apply that analysis to detailed observation of, God Forbid, management of the economy.
Because there is no such thing as “labour” which can be switched from task to task. Nor “capital” in that same sense.
Sure, sure, BP contains labour and capital. But that whole system is optimised to sucking fossil fuels up through a girt big straw and shipping it around the world. It doesn’t even work to try to switch that to coal (as Shell expensively found out) let alone sunlight collection (as BP found out).
Capital - and skilled labour - simply isn’t switchable between tasks in that sense. No, saying it’s all energy doesn’t work. BP is optimised for fossils. If we want solar then better to build a new organisation optimised for solar.
To claim that BP - because it’s in energy - should be making solar is to go with the claim that because Airbus is in transport it should be making trams and bicycles. They’re forms of transport, see? ‘N’ we can just tell the capital and labour to switch the production of different forms of transport, right? Simples!
Which is to be making that Marxist mistake of thinking about those things by class. There’s this class of stuff called “capital” ‘n’ another called “labour”. Within capital and labour they’re just the same thing that can be directed across different activities.
So, what’s Lynn suggesting? That a production line for Range Rovers should now switch to tanks? But they’re nothing like the same. Different materials, different toolings, different machines, different volumes. Hell, you’d probably not even use the same buildings.
No, no, it isn’t true that America’s car factories closed then opened again two weeks later making tanks. They closed and opened again making jeeps and trucks. The tanks were made in tank factories. Because that’s what you need to make tanks. A tank factory, not a car factory.
A business, a plant, a process, a goup of people, optimised for the one task is not transferable to some other task. Not at any level of technological sophistication above that of an army of navvies with shovels it isn’t.
But this is how far the brain rot has indeed spread. Even the Torygraph is analysing productive capacities using Marxist logic.
Sigh.
Yes, you can't just turn a Range Rover Factory into a tank factory.
But if you wanted to build a tank factory from scratch, you'd find it much easier to do so in a country that already had car factories in it. Otherwise you aren't just building the tank factory; you are building a tank factory and all the supply chains and all the ball bearing factories and so on.
And if I was hiring people to work in my tank factory I'd much rather hire people with experience of the Range Rover production line than supermarket shelf stackers or fruit pickers. The processes won't be the same but they must be closer.
I'm coming round to the view that having at least one loss making car factory in the country still running is worth a bit of subsidy: not to "preserve jobs" in the car making industry, but to preserve supply chains and skills so that they are there if we need to pivot to tank-making in a hurry. Any cars they actually sell that defray these costs would be a bonus. I've recently learned the term for this is "sovereign capability", which is suddenly relevant in a world where we can't even trust the Americans to sell us what we might need.
That's the Nolongerverytorygraph to you, sunshine!