The Next Step: a Plan for Economic World Federation

Chapter Vi. World Administration 119

1. The Basis for World Administration. 2. The Field of World Administration. 3. Five World Problems. 4. Work of the Administrative Boards. 5. The Resources and Raw Materials Board. 6. The Transport and Communication Board. 7. The Exchange, Credit and Investment Board. 8. The Budget Board. 9. The Adjudication of Disputes Board. 10. The Detail of World Administration.

Chapter Vii. Trial and Error in Economic Organization 135

1. Trying Things Out. 2. The Capitalist Experiment. 3. The Cost of Experience. 4. Education. 5. Pacing the Future. 6. Accumulating Social Knowledge. 7. Conscious Social Improvement. 8. The Barriers to Progress. 9. Next Steps. 10. The Success Qualities.

Chapter Viii. Economic Liberation 151

1. Why Organize? 2. Freedom from Primitive Struggle. 3. Freedom from Servility. 4. Wisdom in Consumption. 5. Leisure for Effective Expression. 6. Culture and Human Aspiration.

WHAT TO READ 164

THE NEXT STEP

I. THE NEW ECONOMIC LIFE

1. The Historic Present

The knell of a dying order is tolling. Its keynote is despair. Gaunt hunger pulls at the bell-rope, while dazed humanity listens, bewildered and afraid.

Uncertainty and a sense of futility have gripped the world. They are manifesting themselves in unrest, disillusionment, the abandonment of ideals, opportunism, and a tragic concentration on the life of the moment, which alone seems sure. The future promises so little that even the most hopeful pause on its threshold, hesitant, and scarce daring to penetrate its mystery.

The war showed the impotence of the present order to assure even a reasonable measure of human happiness and well-being. Of what profit the material benefits of a civilization that takes a toll of thirty-five millions of lives and that wrecks the economic machinery of a continent in four short years? Yet the failure of the revolutionary forces to avail themselves of the opportunity presented by the war proved the unreadiness of the masses to throw off the yoke of the old régime and to lay the foundations of a new order. The world rulers painted a picture of liberated humanity that led tens of millions to fight with the assurance that victory would make that hope a reality. The workers yearned for the social revolution and for the establishment of the co-operative commonwealth with its promise of equality and fraternity. But the events that staggered the world between 1914 and 1920 shattered both ideals.

Now that the terrible conflict has ceased, we pause and reflect. Millions are weary, millions are old, millions are broken, millions are disappointed, and the weary ones, the old ones, the broken ones and the disappointed ones have lost their vision and have abandoned their faith. Yet life sweeps on--its unity unimpaired, its continuity unbroken, its force unchecked, its vigor unabated. Multitudes have been born since the end of the Great War, and other multitudes, who were babes in arms when the Great War began, are growing into young manhood and womanhood. The war, with its hardships and its fearful losses, is history. The present, merging endlessly with the future, makes of each day a to-morrow in which hundreds of millions of those who now inhabit the earth will live.

How?

That is the question which the world to-day faces. The answer is in our hands.

2. Economic Needs

Humanity has always been face to face with the bread and butter problem because people must have food and clothing and a roof over their heads or pay the penalty in physical suffering. Under the present world order, for lack of these simple economic requirements, millions of poverty-stricken workers perish each year, of slow starvation and exposure in Paris, London, Chicago, Tokyo; of famine in China, Egypt and India.

Some issues present themselves for consideration only occasionally. The demand for economic necessaries each day recurs with tireless insistence in the life of every individual. Men have learned this fact through frightful experiences, and they look forward with hope or with dread to the comfort of plenty or to the disaster of want. So effectually have these forces entered into everyday life that they color all aspects of human existence, and people continually think and act in terms of economic hardship or of economic well-being. This simple fact of economic determinism--the influence of the livelihood struggle upon the conduct of individuals and of societies--plays a fateful part in shaping both biography and history.

The economic issues before primitive society were comparatively simple ones. The producer--the hunter, herder, farmer--snared his game and cooked it, tended his goats and lived on their milk and flesh, planted and reaped his crops, and used them to sustain life. Later, the baker, the saddler, the tailor and the carpenter spent their energies in producing the articles of their trade and in disposing of them. The herdsman could live on his hills, the farmer in his valleys and the artisans in their towns, content and at peace with the remainder of the world, neither knowing nor caring what was happening to their fellow dwellers on the planet. Confined within its narrow bounds, primitive thought was as local as primitive life.

But such isolation is no longer possible. The currents of economic life, like most other phases of human activity, have swept beyond the local forests, the grass lands, the tilled fields, the oven and the carpenter's bench, and gaining momentum in their ever-widening course, they have circled the world.

3. Worldizing Economic Activity

The past hundred years have witnessed a speedy worldizing of human affairs built upon a transformation in the ways of making a living. These changes have been effected by the industrial revolution, which, toward the end of the eighteenth century began to make itself felt in Great Britain. Its influence spread over Europe, America and Australia during the last three-quarters of the nineteenth century, but it did not reach Japan until 1860. Almost within the memory of the present generation, therefore, the scope of trade, manufacture and finance, the search for markets, the organization and unification of labor and of popular thinking about economic problems, have passed from a local into a world field.

The inventions and discoveries which were the immediate cause of the industrial revolution succeeded one another with a bewildering rapidity that is well illustrated in the case of communication. The steamboat, first made practicable in 1807, and the locomotive, invented about 1815, provided the means of rapid transportation of goods, people and messages. The power press (1814) and the manufacture of paper from wood-pulp (begun in 1854) made possible cheap and abundant reading matter. The telegraph, invented about 1837, laid the basis for instantaneous communication. The first trans-Atlantic cable (1858) annihilated the water barrier to thought. The telephone (1876) and the wireless (1896) brought the more remote parts of each country and of the world within easy reach of the centers of civilization, while the radio-phone (1921) enables millions to sit around a common table for thought, instruction or enjoyment. The camera (1802) supplemented by the moving picture process (1890) has enabled those who do not read to secure information that was formerly reserved for the learned and the cultured. Thus steam, electricity, and a number of other discoveries and inventions in the realm of natural science have brought the minds of the world in as close touch as were the inhabitants of a fifteenth century Italian city.

The effects of industrialism date only from history's yesterday, yet its results have already been momentous and far-reaching. This is particularly true of the close dependence of industries upon supplies of raw materials and fuels, of the volume and the variety of the goods produced and transported, of the speed with which communications are sent, of the widened opportunities for travel, and of the immense amount of information on the printed page and the film that goes, each day, from one part of the world to another.

Nature has not scattered coal, iron, copper and sugarland over the earth in the same lavish way that she has distributed air and sunshine. On the contrary, the important resources from which industry derives its raw materials and its fuels are found within very limited areas to which the remainder of the world must go for the commodities that supply its basic industries.

Within each country raw materials are produced at one point and shipped elsewhere. Ore, coal, grain and meat-animals make up the bulk of the freight tonnage in Europe, in America and in Australia. A similar economic relation exists between the various countries, some of which produce far more than their proportionate share of minerals and fuels. Thus, in 1913, the United States, with but 7 per cent of the world's population, produced 36 per cent and consumed 37 per cent of the world's iron ore supply. The figures for the other important nations were: ("World Atlas of Commercial Geology," Dept. of the Interior, Washington, 1921, p. 27)

Per Cent Per Cent Produced Consumed

Germany 20 27 Britain 9 14 France 12 7 Russia 5 5 Belgium 0 4 Spain 6 1

Only in France and Spain did production exceed consumption. Four of the remaining countries used more iron ore than they produced, which meant that they were forced to depend upon some other country for their supply. Belgium, with her many industries, imported practically all of the iron ore that she used.

Continue reading The Next Step: a Plan for Economic World Federation free in the Wunder reader →