By Gwydion M. Williams
Trump is President for the second time, because he promises to do something about the long-term decline of the USA as a manufacturing power.
Not just cheap production of US designs, which is how it started in the 1980s. Being aware that Mao’s China had launched satellites and exploded hydrogen bombs after the Soviet Union turned against them under Khrushchev, I had expected the successful rise of China to continue now that the USA was not boycotting them.[1]
Things like China’s remarkable take-over of fields like electric vehicles, solar power, drones, humanoid robots, and the increasingly popular robodogs. I’ve just seen details of their Mountain Cat M20, a next-gen robot that climbs, jumps, swims, and powers through the toughest terrain; useful for war as well as emergency rescues. And the ‘Land Aircraft Carrier’, a large six-wheeled, four-seat van that also carries a two-person electric vertical take-off and landing quadcopter drone in its rear compartment. The quadcopter can automatically deploy from the van and reattach after flight, with a flight time of approximately 30 minutes. It was displayed at the Zhuhai Air Show in November 2024. On sale soon at a quarter of a million dollars, though much more in the USA if the tariff war continues.
None of this is good for the US. Whether Trump reverses the trend is another matter. Like every US president since Reagan, he is committed to getting rid of rules disliked by industry, and letting the rich take a larger share of the nation’s wealth. He has also been hostile to the broad spread of subsidised scientific and technological research that gave the USA the microchip and the internet. And let a research physicist at the particle-smasher CERN use his freedom for private and possibly useless projects. What he did was start the World Wide Web by developing a useful computer language for the old idea of hypertext.
The Trump administration is keen to cut back on state-subsidised research that it sees no immediate need for. I see this as an extension of previous errors, made by cost-cutting Congressmen with a background in law or marketing or financial tricks.
Much of what they cut will indeed have no benefit except for the joy of discovering new truths. New truths that they are mostly uninterested in, and sometimes hostile to.
Back in the 19th century, radio emerged unexpectedly from works of pure science. First James Clarke Maxwell worked out the maths of the mysterious ways in which electricity and magnetism interacted, with their forces at right-angles to each other. He noticed that free-running electromagnetic waves were possible, and that their predicted speed was remarkably similar to the known speed of light. A speed discovered by astronomers, based on variations in the times observed for eclipses of the moons of Jupiter as their distance from Earth varies during Earth’s orbit.
From there, Hertz decided to see if he could work with invisible rays with longer wavelengths than light. He saw no practical use for such things, despite the interesting fact that they could pass through walls. Be detectable over greater distances than the lantern signals that were already being used.
The knowledge being there and open for everyone, people soon put it to use. Notably Marconi, and the innovative Marconi was quite comfortable with Italian fascism when it later took over his country. Actual fascism was not at all like what Trump is doing: both Mussolini and Hitler extended welfare for ordinary workers. Hitler favoured science and innovation, so long as it wasn’t Jewish: unfortunately for him non-religious Jews were almost a majority of the top minds in abstract realms of subatomic physics that led to the atom bomb. Many of those who made it a weapon usable in World War Two would not have worked on such a thing without seeing Jews everywhere being threatened. And contrary to what some believe, the German and strictly non-Jewish atomic project was aimed just at peaceful nuclear power, which it anyway never made useful.
Despite such errors, fascism was a viable model for a modernist future. Without the Soviet Union and its ruthless strengthening under Stalin, it would probably have become the European norm. Meaning among other things that Ukraine might have been settled by Germans and entirely cleared of those classed as Slavonic and inferior. That would have included the Banderists that Kiev now treats as heroes.[2]
To get back to robodogs, the Soviet Union was at one time a leading player. The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology produced a rather limited device called Masha in 1968, though it has largely been written out of history. Only China’s DeepSeek has details: the rest of the internet has it confused with an imaginary device in a Soviet cartoon.
It was the USA that made the first useful devices, but China has now taken up the idea and gone much further. China remains Leninist, and directly inspired by the Soviet experience up to the 1950s. The Soviet Union messed up when Khrushchev pretended that Stalin was something radically different from Lenin. And that a pseudo-market system under total state control was the best way forward.[3] [4] By contrast in China, Deng was wiser, keeping political control but allowing private enterprise under regulation. Something that Lenin tried with the New Economic Policy, and that Mao might have allowed under his scheme for New Democracy. Might have preferred had the USA not been an implacable foe that maintained till the early 1970s that the Taiwan remnant was the legitimate government of all China.
In today’s world, most of the new Chinese devices are much more than copies. The same general idea, certainly, just as Henry Ford made a success of the automobiles that many others had been building. He fought from 1903 to 1911 to avoid paying royalties on an extremely broad concept patent:
“The patent covered any automobile propelled by an engine powered by gasoline vapor… Ford appealed, and on January 10, 1911, won his case based on an argument that the engine used in automobiles was not based on George Brayton’s engine, the Brayton engine which Selden had improved, but on the Otto engine.”[5]
The Otto engine had been developed for stationary power devices, ignoring petrol powered automobiles. An example of how some industries stick to what they know and ignore wilder possibilities. And I’ve heard complaints about other big firms using patents to stifle ideas they have no interest in.
Another classic case is Apple computers. The ideas of a computer screen showing apparent objects and controlled by a mouse emerged from a freely-innovating centre that the copier company Xerox set up when it decided it had to move in computers. But its top management decided to compete directly with IBM for the classical distant big computers with professional operators. It had a little device called the Xerox Alto, which had many of the features of later personal computers.[6] It was experimental, but led onto the half-forgotten Xerox Star, which sold for $16,000 in 1981, but flopped.[7] Too expensive to buy except as a tool for a professional office, but they might have started the computer office revolution earlier had the right people been listened to. The advocates of these devices had given demonstrations at company gatherings. The mostly-male managers were unimpressed – but there was enthusiasm from their wives, who were part of the gathering and who were mostly former secretaries. Mostly the people who would previously have done the dull complex and routine works that managers could push off on another human.[8] But the view of the wives was ignored. Copier salesmen used to making sales to male managers never thought to suggest that secretaries be brought in to see if the new computers would suit their own work.
Much bigger success came with the Apple Macintosh, sold in 1984 at $2,495, which private users could afford. And it seems that managers bought this and similar devices from the budget specified for typewriters. And then showed them as an existing success to more senior managers. Included things like spreadsheets, which are easy with computers but enormously hard and seldom used before the first office computers.
The billionaires grouped around Trump are people similar to Ford. People who made a marketing success of ideas that others had developed. They seem not to understand the need for a free flow of ideas that may not make any sense in immediate marketing terms. So while they may bring some jobs back to the USA, these will not be good jobs. And they are mostly hostile to the churn of innovations that China is successfully managing.
[1] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/recent-issues/2019-11-magazine/2019-11/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera
[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/the-soviet-past/market-socialism-in-the-soviet-union/
[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/the-soviet-past/marxism-and-market-socialism/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._Selden
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
[8] Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. By Douglas K. Smith. Page 209.
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