Dyson discovers that the profit system sucks (2002)

From the March 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s official – Dyson “bagless” vacuum cleaners suck, but capitalism sucks harder.

On 5 February 800 workers in Wiltshire found they would soon be jobless when the vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson announced that it intended to switch production to Malaysia. Few were surprised by the decision, which was motivated by economic considerations, primarily the high cost of labour in Britain compared to that in Malaysia. According to BBC Radio 4, the average cost of labour in Malaysia is just £1.50 an hour, compared to £11.50 in Britain. By transferring production, Dyson will be able to cut production costs by 30 percent.

A difficult decision?

If the newspapers are to be believed, this decision was not taken lightly. James Dyson, the millionaire inventor who owns the company which bears his name, is a self-appointed ‘champion of British industry.’ He claims to have a deep commitment to the cause of manufacturing in Britain, and insists that he fought hard to make remaining in the country a viable option. But staying in the country was not a viable option. If Dyson had not been prepared to cut costs he would soon have found himself forced out of the market by other companies which were prepared to take that step. Dyson would not be able to match the prices of his competitors without sacrificing his profit margin. It was not Dyson who decided that his firm must move to the Far East – it was the crazy economic system under which we live.

Profit comes first

As Dyson and the workers in his factory have discovered, under capitalism it is profit which must come first. In the whole affair there has been no mention of what anybody wants – not the workers, not the consumers and not even Dyson himself. The only consideration which matters is the need to make a profit.

Dyson: decision made

The whole Dyson affair highlights the fact that, in many ways, the profit system imprisons bosses and workers alike. The owners of companies, factories, services etc. can amass enormous amounts of wealth, but they cannot go against the demands of profit. They must do its bidding, whether they like it or not, as James Dyson has demonstrated. Capitalism does not run, and cannot run, on the basis of what people want. Dyson may want to stay in Britain, he may want not to have to lay off workers, but what he has to do is make a profit.

What about quality?

Another factor has been noticeably absent from discussion of the Dyson affair. There has been no question at all of how to make the best or most effective vacuum cleaner. Capitalism doesn’t care what you make or how you make it – as long as you sell it at a profit. On top of which, it must be admitted that vacuum cleaners ought to be a pretty low priority anyway in a world where most people don’t even have the necessities of life. That never enters into it, however, because the world is not run on the basis of what people want, it is run on the basis of making profit.

What about the workers?

Eight-hundred workers will find themselves jobless as a result of Dyson’s transfer to Malaysia. In this instance, many will probably find new jobs relatively quickly, since Wiltshire has fairly low unemployment.

The point, however, is that will only find work if someone can make a profit from their labour. The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of useful things that people could be doing makes no difference. They could, for example, manufacture basic medical supplies which could save the lives of millions in developing countries. That activity would be a major priority in any system based on meeting human needs. It isn’t going to happen under capitalism though, because it would not make a profit.

As long as we allow the resources of the world to remain in private hands, profit will continue to reign supreme. However, there is an alternative. The world’s resources could be owned and controlled by everyone, and run in the interests of society, not in the interests of profit. This is common ownership and democratic control, the object of the Socialist Party.

Dave Templar

Production Values: the Dyson Cyclone vacuum cleaner (2011)

The Production Values Column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sideways glance at capitalism through some of its products.  This month: the Dyson Cyclone vacuum cleaner

Far from being a revolutionary invention, the inventor of the Dyson Cyclone vacuum cleaner (James Dyson) made no attempt to hide that the idea behind the invention he patented was nicked from seeing dust extraction equipment in a sawmill, a technology that has been around for the best part of a century.

The product however almost never got made due to the enormous costs of licencing and patenting.  This forced Dyson to look for investment from major manufacturers. The market-leader – Hoover – was one company that was offered the option of investing.  They declined as the product (which doesn’t need filter bags) kind of challenged their basic business model (which relies on the ongoing sale of replacement filter bags worth 100s of millions of dollars each year).  Hoover’s vice-president regretted in hindsight that “Hoover as a company did not take the product technology off Dyson”.  And what would they have done with it ? – “it would have lain on the shelf and not been used.”

Needless to say, now that it has established itself, the Dyson company is hardly acting like a “new broom” (for want of a better phrase) – instead they have been particularly quick to use patent law to protect against anyone coming close to copying their supposedly “original” design .

Portrayed endlessly as a society which incentivises invention and rewards risk, capitalism arguably often does the very opposite. Despite the rags to riches storylines, the best way of getting very rich is usually to make sure you are pretty rich to start with.

Rather than a testament to the creativity of the individual, let alone the magic of the market system, next time you hoover (or perhaps, “Dyson”) the carpet, think of all the useful products that never made it because of the artificial hurdle that is the patenting system that capitalism requires.  All the talk of the lifeblood of capitalism being the plucky little entrepreneur with a great new idea is nonsense: the last thing capitalists want is another capitalist joining them to share out the spoils of the class war – even if it means a great invention for gathering dust just has to (apologies) gather dust.

NEXT MONTH: we take a look at that modern must-have accessory, bottled water.

Pathfinders: The Fall and Rise of the Electric Car (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Connoisseurs of outlandish conspiracy theories will fondly remember one set of nerdy non-petrol-heads who, a few years ago, were desperate to tell us at great length why and how the electric car industry had been effectively 'killed' by the existing fossil car producers. Not that the carmakers were entirely innocent of any ill-will, but the failure of this early horizon tech at that time didn't require any complicated or conspiratorial explanation. There was simply a lack of market demand and social infrastructure including charging stations. Fast forward a few years and these same nerds must now be mourning the death of their pet conspiracy, killed off by a changed political, environmental and commercial landscape. Now that France has announced a plan to phase out all diesel and petrol cars by 2040, and the UK has followed suit with a similar scheme, the electric car industry is well and truly plugged in and heating up once again.

Just last month UK inventor James Dyson announced plans to launch an electric vehicle (EV) by 2020, a time-scale some commentators say is close to impossible, given the densely-packed hurdle race of regulations the EV will have to negotiate first (Guardian, 26 September). The design is being kept under wraps, very possibly because there isn't one: “We don’t have an existing chassis . . .  We’re starting from scratch. What we’re doing is quite radical,” says Dyson, which might be code for 'we’re making it up as we go along'. But he clearly means business as he's already invested around a billion in battery technology and now plans to invest a further £1.5bn in developing the prototype. What's not a secret is that it'll be a high-end vehicle made in China for the China and East Asia market, the market which is most keen on 'clean' technology and which also buys the most luxury cars. So don't expect your next school run or shopping trolley to be a Dyson. Wags will say it sucks anyway.

The conspiracy nuts do have one small consolation while mourning the corpse of their theory – they were right that the car industry as it was would not innovate into EV development, and that the impetus would have to come from outside. And so it did, with Elon Musk’s Tesla start-up, which somehow managed to sell thousands of cars last year while still making a loss. Now Dyson’s involved you’d really expect intrepid balloonist and media babe Richard Branson to pile in some cash too, but Mr Galactic has instead plunged his millions into Elon Musk's weird and wacky maglev tube idea, which proposes to fire people across the country in bullet-pods with their faces presumably contorting into rippling G-force playdoh (Guardian, 12 October).

It’s no longer just outsiders who are making the EV play. All the carmakers are scrambling to meet the deadlines set by the UK and French governments. Jaguar Land Rover aims to have 'clean' versions of all its range by 2020, and BMW is working on an electric Mini, while Nissan is already selling its Sunderland-made Leaf EV.

Alert readers might wonder why the word ‘clean’ appears here dressed in quote marks. The filthy truth is that the electricity that powers these cars has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is almost certainly going to be a power station using gas, oil or coal for fuel. All that an EV owner can truthfully claim is that they have shifted their carbon footprint out of sight by a trick of ventriloquism. Naturally carmakers are not inclined to emphasise this point. When Tesla markets cars with the proud label ‘Zero emissions’ they are actually dealing in ‘Zero admissions’.

And why not indeed, when governments propose do the same thing and call it a carbon-trading scheme? In this ventriloquist act, heavily polluting countries buy and use the ‘polluting potential’ of cleaner (because poorer) countries. They then don’t have to clean up their own act, which means they can continue to clean up on sales. Meanwhile the poor countries at the watery end of climate change, like the Maldives, can use these carbon credits to buy themselves whatever they like, such as rubber rings or scuba equipment.

Currently what’s putting off most potential buyers of electric cars, apart from the fancy prices, is ‘range anxiety’, the fear of being stranded somewhere remote with a flat battery. Added to this is the well-known fact, after a spate of exploding Samsung phones, that lithium-ion batteries, which also power laptops and EVs, can get very hot. This appears to have been the case in June when motoring star Richard Hammond crashed an electric supercar which then caught fire and burned to a crisp. One reason why Dyson is avoiding liquid batteries and opting for the less-volatile solid-state alternative.

Technical niggles aside, the EV is sure to find ready approval among the more moneyed liberal set who don’t realise their trendy wood-burning stove is a much worse domestic polluter than gas central heating, whether the fuel is North Sea, Norwegian or fracked methane, or that their family dog is in carbon terms roughly equivalent to running two SUVs. But in the bigger picture, isn’t there something more fundamentally off-course about electric cars? Instead of building a whole new generation of EVs to run people over, clog cities and sit idle in motorway tailbacks, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether the world really needs individual modes of transport on this vast scale?

Well, some people do ask that question. But capitalism isn’t about what people need, it’s about what people want and are willing to pay for. And if people want personal transport, because public transport by ‘loser cruiser’ is not an aspiration of the upwardly-mobile, then that’s what the machine will gear up to produce, to the detriment of any logical public transport solution.

We often say that socialism is a system of society based on material abundance, however the word abundance can be taken the wrong way. It doesn’t mean that everyone can have everything they can possible imagine, including their own palace and ocean-going yacht, or ‘Cartier for everyone’ as propounded by optimistic advocates of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. ‘Abundance’ is perhaps better thought of as ‘sufficiency’, and sufficiency entails some prioritisation over production. When ordering those priorities, what socialism will have in mind first is food, shelter, sanitation and healthcare for every individual on the planet. In this context, the idea of building individual electric cars or other adult toys is likely to take a back seat.

Paddy Shannon