My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleybalance would then tend to reassert itself through the automatic and justifiablemovement of exchange, which now, by a curious paradox, is the only although leastdesirable object of State interference.'If still the situation was not remedied, industry would find a greater incentive toproduce for the home than for the foreign market. A transfer of machinery and labourwould then take place from production for the foreign market to production for thehome market. (In any case some such transfer will probably be necessary in the notfar distant future.) The new demand would thus be satisfied not by foreign production,but by home production for home need.'This process might go very far without any danger to the import of necessaryfoodstuffs and raw materials. By no means all our present imports representfoodstuffs and raw materials. We import completely manufactured articles to thevalue of £300,000,000 per annum, most of which could be made at home. Ouressential supplies can be purchased by far less exports than are at present sent abroad.The natural revulsion from the crude fallacies of Protection has resulted in a fetishworship of the present dimensions of our export trade by minds which have justsucceeded in grasping the elementary fact that we must export in order to importcertain necessaries which cannot be produced at home.' I concluded by saying thatthese were 'some of the consecrated bogeys with which high finance endeavours tobrowbeat' all reformers.At that time I was surrounded by a brilliant group of young men, among whom I bestremember John Strachey, Allan Young and Sydney Barnet Potter, who were all withme at Birmingham. I have already noted that the part of this constructive thinkingwhich was not of my own creation—notably the Import Control Board system—wasthe work of E. F. Wise and E. M. H. Lloyd, who were close associates but not in theBirmingham group. John Strachey was with me as candidate for the Aston Division ofBirmingham, which he won at the 1929 election: I had met him just before the 1924election and suggested his adoption. He was my chief assistant in working out theBirmingham proposals, and had one of the best analytical and critical intelligences Ihave ever known; his subsequent writings on Marx introduced his method of thinkingand working to an even larger audience. His mind was essentially analytical ratherthan creative; his earlier work described my thinking and his later work described thethinking of Marx and the neo-Marxists, but I am unaware that in either case he addedany substantial invention. His excellent book on the Birmingham proposals wasentitled Revolution by Reason, the name I had given to my pamphlet embodying andconcentrating my study of the subject at the I.L.P. Summer School in August 1925; itwas a lucid and admirable exposition. At every stage of this thinking I discussed itsdevelopment with him—both in England and in journeys to France and Italy—and farmore than any other of my companions he aided the slow evolution of the completeidea with the clear and acute understanding of his first-rate mind.It was in America in the winter of 1925-6 that I was confronted with a challenge toderive new ideas from fresh facts. This journey developed and in a sensefundamentally changed my economic thinking. Hitherto my plans had been devised tomake an island economy work in a highly competitive world. A new and morescientific method of expanding credit to secure full production for buoyant homemarket—with new demand based primarily on the necessitous regions—was the155 of 424