Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing Industry 

the sectors of production that process or reprocess industrial and agricultural raw materials. Unlike extraction industry, which finds the object of its labor in nature, manufacturing industry deals with objects that are themselves already the products of labor. Manufacturing industry includes enterprises that produce ferrous and nonferrous metals; chemical and petrochemical products; machinery and equipment; wood products, paper, and pulp; cement and other construction materials; light industrial products; and foodstuffs. Enterprises that repair industrial products are also included.

Manufacturing industry constitutes the basis of expanded reproduction and the foundation of the growing productivity of social labor. In the USSR, the concentration of all material and technical resources in the hands of the state under conditions of a planned economy ensures the rapid growth of all sectors of manufacturing industry (see Table 1).

Table 1. Output of selected manufactured products in the USSR
Product	1913	1940	1975
Growth rate of total output of machine building and metalworking ............	1	29.7	1,149
Metalcutting machine tools (units) ............	1,800	58,400	231,000
Turbines (kW) ............	6,000	1,200,000	18,900,000
Cast iron (tons)........	4,200,000	14,900,000	103,000,000
Steel (tons) ..........	4,300,000	18,300,000	141,000,000
Synthetic resins and plastics (tons)........	—	10,900	2,842,000
Chemical fibers (tons) ............	—	11,100	955,000
Paper (tons)..........	269,000	812,000	5,215,000
Textiles (billion sq m) ............	2.194	3.3	9.956
Leather footwear (pairs) ............	68,000,000	211,000,000	698,000,000
Granulated sugar (tons) ............	1,363,000	2,165,000	10,382,000
Animal fats (tons, not including production at private farms)......	129,000	226,000	1,231,000

The share of manufacturing industry in overall industrial output reflects the degree of a country’s industrial development and the relative advance of the sectorial structure of industry. Under Soviet power, while industry as a whole grew by 105 times (comparing 1972 figures to 1913) and the fuel industry, the key sector of extraction industry, grew by 46 times, the basic sectors of manufacturing industry grew by a much greater measure: by 1,040 times for machine building and metalworking and by 564 times for the chemical and petrochemical industry. Because of this superior growth rate, the share of manufacturing industry in the total volume of USSR industrial output in 1972 equaled 91.5 percent.

Manufacturing industry has also reached a high level of development in the other socialist countries.

Among the capitalist countries, those with the most highly developed manufacturing industries are the United States, Japan, the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Canada.

V. I. FOMICHEV [18–628–4; updated]