The Next Step.

by Scott Nearing.

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

Men progress in proportion as they are able to fit themselves for life, and to fit life to themselves. Both processes go on unceasingly.

Recent economic changes have brought the remotest parts of the world into close contact with "civilization" at the same time that they have increased the dependence of one part of the world upon another part.

Oddly enough, this interdependence has been intensified under a system of society that deified compet.i.tion. The conflicts, inevitably resulting from such a contradiction, have taken a terrible toll in life and well-being, and have left Europe in chaos.

The successful organization of the life of the world is impossible without the organization of its economic affairs. For the present plan of compet.i.tion between groups, cla.s.ses and nations there must be subst.i.tuted a means of co-operative living. The organization of a producers society will provide that means. Local initiative must be preserved; self-government in economic affairs must be a.s.sured, and the economic activities of the world must be federated in such a way that all economic problems of world concern will be brought under some central authority which is representative of the various interests involved at the same time that it controls the disposition of economic life. A world parliament composed of representatives elected by the workers in the various producing groups would provide such a central authority, and would furnish the means of directing the economic experiments of the race.

Economic emanc.i.p.ation is the objective. The means for its attainment is a society organized in terms of producers groups, and living in accordance with the highest known standards of intelligent social direction.

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 a.s.sure 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 ma.s.ses to throw off the yoke of the old regime 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 a.s.surance 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. Mult.i.tudes have been born since the end of the Great War, and other mult.i.tudes, 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 b.u.t.ter 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 gra.s.s 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 j.a.pan 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trated 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.

Coal furnishes an even more striking ill.u.s.tration of the economic dependence of one part of the world upon another. The production and consumption of coal, for 1913, in millions of tons, were as follows:

Tons Tons Produced Consumed United States 517 495 Britain 292 217 Germany 191 167 France 40 60 Italy 1 10 Austria-Hungary 17 30

The United States, Britain and Germany produced, in this one year, 121 millions of tons of coal that were either stored or exported. France, Italy and Austria, together with many of the smaller industrial countries of Europe were forced to depend upon their neighbors for coal.

In the case of Italy, practically all of the coal used was imported.

Again, the United States and Spain are alone among the princ.i.p.al countries producing a surplus of copper. Out of a consumption (1913) of 127,000 tons, Britain imported 126,572; France imported 91,437 of the 91,486 tons consumed, and Germany, out of 259,300 tons consumed, imported 234,000 tons.

These figures of the production and consumption of iron, coal and copper tell the story of an economic interdependence that makes isolated industrial life virtually impossible. Manufacturing and transport depend for their maintenance upon minerals and fuels, and those countries that propose to manufacture and to transport must either produce minerals themselves or depend upon some other country that does produce them. In practice, a few countries are enabled to produce more of the minerals and fuels than they themselves use, and to sell the surplus to their needy neighbors.

With the spread of the industrial system, this dependence will increase rather than diminish because of the way in which the reserve supplies of minerals and fuels are distributed. The princ.i.p.al deposits of iron, coal, copper and petroleum are apparently in the Western Hemisphere, and particularly in North America. In so far as this is true, the remainder of the world will be compelled to look to the Americas for these basic commodities. Out of a total world product of iron ore (1913) of 177 millions of tons, the United States produced 63 millions (over a third) because that country is far better supplied with available iron ore deposits than is any other country. Since the war, France holds the second largest deposits, but the third largest are in Newfoundland, the fourth largest in Cuba, and the fifth largest in Brazil, whose "enormous deposits are almost untouched" ("Atlas," p. 26). As for coal, about three-fourths of the world's known reserves are in North America. The largest known reserves of copper are in North and South America--those of Canada and Mexico are comparatively important; those of Chili probably greater than any other country except the United States.

Petroleum is also highly localized. Between 1857 and 1918 the world's production of petroleum was 1,005 millions of tons. Of this total, three-fifths came from the United States, while seventeen-twentieths came from the United States and Russia. Indeed, resources are limited and localized to such a point that the economic survival of many parts of the industrial world depends upon the continued importation of raw materials from other countries or from other continents.

This localization of resources has resulted in a corresponding localization of many of the basic industries. Germany thus became a manufacturing center and Argentina a producer of food. Necessarily these two countries exchange their products, the Germans eating Argentinian wheat reaped by German machinery. So complete has this specialization become, that industrial communities, and even industrial countries, like Britain and Germany, have ceased to produce sufficient food for their maintenance, and have relied, instead, on the American, African and Australian grain fields.[1]

In order to buy wheat, these countries must sell manufactured goods. In order to manufacture, they are compelled to import the raw materials and fuels--cotton, copper, rubber, petroleum, coal, iron. The countries with highly developed industries have therefore ceased to be self-sufficient.

Their whole economic life has become a part and parcel of the life of the world.

This world interdependence is reflected in the growth of world commerce from a total value of 1,659 millions of dollars in 1820, 4,049 millions in 1850, and 20,105 millions in 1900, to 75,311 millions in 1919.

Meanwhile, the nominal tonnage of steam and sailing vessels increased from 5.8 millions of tons in 1820 to 12.3 millions of tons in 1850, to 20.5 millions in 1900, and to 32.2 millions in 1919.

Resources are sought after, raw materials are transported and manufactured into usable products, manufactured products are exchanged for food and raw materials, and the cycle is thus completed. In its course, all of the princ.i.p.al countries and all of the continents are drawn upon for the means of maintaining economic life.