My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleycirculated years later that they were Jews. I never heard a word about this in America,and in retrospect it certainly appears to me impossible for them to have occupied thatposition in that atmosphere if it had been true. I reiterate that if Cimmie had been half-Jewish it would not have made the slightest difference in my attitude to her or in mypolitical action in opposing anyone, Jew or Gentile, I thought was in favour of anotherwar.The industrial tour was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. It was inDetroit more than in any other centre that I found striking confirmation of one of themain points of my economic thinking from 1918 onwards. The Ford factory producedthe cheapest article and paid the highest wage in the world; in terms of money value,nothing on earth could compare with that original Tin Lizzie. Mass production for alarge and assured home market is the industrial key. It is not so much the rate of wageas the rate of production which determines the cost of production. Britain, turningslowly towards an assured European market, is beginning to grasp this forty yearslater; the time-lag is too long, and stubborn resistance to all new thinking has been anational danger.Another new fact struck me in Detroit with a force which turned me away from theclassic economic teaching, ranging from Adam Smith to Marshall. I watched menworking at the conveyor belt in the Ford factory. Each performed some simpleoperation on the vehicle in the making as it reached him on the conveyor; a processwhich later became familiar, but these were early days. Even with my completemechanical ignorance I could have stepped in at practically any point on the line anddone the simple job of turning a screw or fixing a bolt; it was simplicity itself. Thegenius lay in the organisation which had evolved such easy tasks for the individualworker. Some of the workers were quite primitive types only recently come toAmerica—a number of them, I was told, illiterates—and they were ideal for the jobbecause normal labour was apt to find it too monotonous; during this period men wereleaving the factory on account of the monotony at the rate of about a thousand a week.This was a new world of industry with new problems. At once the thought occurred tome that the most backward labour could eventually be exploited in other countries bythis method, to compete with the most advanced labour. Oriental and African labourdoes not mind monotony as much as the Europeans do, and could be trained quicklyto do simple tasks on the conveyor belt under the minimum of skilled supervision,once the factory was installed. In India the previous year I had seen the beginning ofthe same tendency, which later ruined Lancashire with low-wage competition byusing rationalised industrial processes. Were the orthodox economics still valid if thebackward and low paid could do the same thing as the advanced and well paid —andeven for psychological reasons do it better? What became of the classic concept thatskilled labour in open competition will always defeat unskilled labour? This questionultimately proved decisive in the fate of the cotton industry of Lancashire and thewoollen trade of Yorkshire. India, Hong Kong, Japan and China knocked out ourtraditional trades with rationalised machinery, supplied by our English counties fortheir own destruction in open competition on the world and even on the British market.The same process is now about to be repeated on a far greater scale in our presentconfusion of thinking and muddle of organisation. Emotion rules, and men learnslowly. They usually act only when they feel as well as see the facts. These problems169 of 424