The Next Step: A Plan for Economic World Federation Part 9

g. Each divisional executive board picks a staff of experts or engineers, who are approved by the divisional executive committee, and who const.i.tute the technical general staff of the division.

4. SUGGESTIONS FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF A GENERAL INDUSTRIAL GROUP ON A WORLD BASIS.

a. The general industrial group, or general occupational group, would be a major subdivision of the world's industrial life. All of those producers who were engaged in like activities would be cla.s.sed together, and the number of these world industrial groups would be determined as a matter of administrative convenience. The producers of the world might, for example, be divided into the following major industrial groups: agriculture, the extractive industries, manufacturing, transport, trade, housekeeping, and general (miscellaneous) workers. Some such economic grouping of producers would include all who are employed in producing goods and services and would provide the basis for an alignment of the world's population in terms of what the producers did rather than in terms of where they lived.

b. Thus far, in the detailed statement of local, district and divisional organization, only the barest outline has been given, first because it was the intention to discuss the world economic problem rather than the local problem, and second because the internal structure of each industry would be determined largely by that industry, and would, of necessity, vary considerably with the varying industrial conditions. The organized world industries, however, are the economic framework of the producers' society, and their organization becomes a matter of the most supreme concern to producers everywhere.

c. The control of affairs in each of the major industrial groups would be vested in a congress of from 500 to 1000 members, meeting at least as often as once in each January.

A. The members of the divisional congresses, within these same industrial groups, are the candidates for election to the world congress. They are voted for directly by the workers in each division, and if they are elected to the industrial congress, the places thus made vacant in the divisional congress are filled by special election.

B. Each division would send a minimum of twenty members to the industrial congress, and an additional member for each specified quota of workers.

d. The industrial congress would pick an executive committee from its own membership. This committee would meet at regular intervals, and would be responsible for the conduct of the industry when the industrial congress was not in session.

e. The congress would pick a number of additional committees to deal with the various problems arising within each industry. These committees might be called policy committees. In practice, and for the sake of greater effectiveness, it might be desirable for the industrial congress to select a chairman, permit him to pick his committee from the membership of the congress, and then endorse the whole committee, very much as a minister in a responsible government picks his cabinet. Since these committees would be concerned with problems of policy on one side and with problems of administration on the other, such a method would develop a far more harmonious working group.

f. The chairmen of these various policy committees together with the chairman of the executive committee would const.i.tute the board of managers of the industry, which would be the responsible directing authority for the world industrial group.

g. Connected with each of these committees, and selected by them, there would be a board of engineers and experts, responsible for the technical side of the industry.

A diagram may help to visualize the relations existing between the various parts of the world organization. (p. 98.)

10. _The Progress of Self-government_

This outline of the organization of one of the major world economic units is tentative and suggestive rather than arbitrary or final. The details of the plan would necessarily vary from one industry to another and from one district and one division to another. All such matters of detail would be subject to the decisions made by the district committees, by the divisional congresses and by the world congress of each industrial group.

The aim of the plan is to build up an economic structure that will be efficient and at the same time sufficiently elastic to meet the changing needs of the times. Production is always necessary, but the methods vary from one age to another. The changes which occur in the economic activities of a population must find their counterpart in the changing economic structure of that community, otherwise disorganization and chaos will inevitably result.

The means best calculated to preserve the efficiency and to guarantee the mobility of the economic life of the world is self-government. No other known means of directing and controlling social affairs will secure permanent results, either of efficiency or of mobility.

PLAN FOR THE WORLD ORGANIZATION OF ONE INDUSTRIAL OR OCCUPATIONAL GROUP

-------------------------------- | | | Industrial Board of Managers, | Sits | composed of committee chairmen | Continually | | -------------------------------- /| / | Each division / | represented on / | each committee / | --------- ---------- --------- |Policy | |Industrial| |Policy | |Committee| |Executive | |Committee| | | |Committee | | | --------- ---------- --------- | / | / | / | / |/ ----------------------------------- | Industrial Congress consisting of | Meets in January, | representatives from each of the | no division less | world divisions | than twenty members.

------------------------------------- /| / | / | / | / | / | ---------- ------------- --------- | | | | | | The producers of each |Australian| |Mediterranean| |North | of the world divisions |Division | |Division | |American | are the qualified | | | | |Division | electors for each | | | | | | industry in each ---------- ------------- --------- division.

Self-government is present to some degree in every form of society of which there is a record. Under some circ.u.mstances it is confined to one caste or cla.s.s. Again it is the right of the whole society. In one place it is confined to political affairs alone. In others it is present in all public activities. Everywhere, however, there is self-government of some kind.

Recent generations have devoted their attention to the fostering of political self-government, and to the organization of a mult.i.tude of voluntary a.s.sociations based on the self-governing principle. Generation by generation the peoples have been prepared to a.s.sume an ever-increasing authority over the complicated mechanism of public affairs. Self-government in the clan or in the agricultural village was a simple matter compared with the management of public affairs in a modern economic society. It is this task, however, that confronts the present generation. The principle of self-direction, extended into the complex field of economic relationships, must be relied upon to pull together the scattering threads of economic activities. That this task involves an immense amount of propaganda and educational activity, goes without saying. That it is the only sound basis for social procedure seems to be the conclusion inevitably arising out of a careful examination of the premises.

The organization of sound economic groups is a problem in the field of social engineering. The preparation of the industrial populations for economic self-government is a problem in the field of education. Both of these problems lie at the root of any effective reorganization of the world's economic affairs.

V. A WORLD PRODUCERS' FEDERATION

1. _World Outlook_

An organization of producers into groups corresponding with their occupations lays the basis for world thinking and world federation. Each active member of society would then be directly a.s.sociated with a group that was world wide in its scope, so that transport workers, miners, farmers and other producers would be in constant touch with similarly occupied men and women on every continent.

One of the princ.i.p.al disadvantages of the present organization of society is the sectionalism arising out of the political divisions established by national boundary lines. In a world where all of the producers were organized along lines corresponding with their occupations, sectionalism would have much less chance to play a role in the lives of the people. To be sure issues would arise between the various economic groups, but each individual would be affiliated with a world organization, and the scope of his interests and of his thinking would therefore be much broader than it is under the present system of political divisions. World thoughts and world views on a hitherto unknown scale would be the logical outcome of world economic affiliations in producer groups.

The organization of society along the lines of production will therefore necessarily broaden the outlook of those whose visions are now limited by the confines of a political state, and the present ties of loyalty which bind the individual within a geographic area would then attach him to a world organization and would compel him to think in world terms.

That there are limitations imposed by the affiliation of the individual with an economic group cannot be denied, but such limitations are far less drastic than those prescribed by restricted geographic areas.

2. _The Need of Organization_

The organization of society in terms of economic activity, building up through intimate local units, through district and divisional units to world organization within the major industrial groups does not provide any basis for effective co-operation between the individual groups. The metal workers of the world might produce machinery and the farmers wheat, but by what means are they to exchange their product and regulate their output in a way to secure the maximum of advantage on both sides?

There are two outstanding characteristics of present-day economic life.

One is its world scope. The other is the intimate and constant inter-working of the various parts of the economic machine so well described by J.A. Hobson in his book on "The Industrial System."

Agriculture, mining, transportation, manufacturing and so on are all linked into one functioning mechanism. To be sure there are times when the machine does not work very well--as after a great economic depression, but the purpose is there, the intermittent working harmony of the mechanism is unquestioned, the experience in world economic activity is a permanent part of the heritage of the race, and there remains only the task of making world economic relations more effective and more permanent than they have been in the past. The ice has been broken in the sea of world economic life and the human race has already taken many a plunge in its waters.

Under any form of society that can be foreseen in the immediate future, the need of close co-operation between the various parts of the world economic mechanism will tend to increase rather than to diminish, and it is therefore of great importance to have at hand a means of maintaining and facilitating the contacts between the different economic groups.

The present system has given economic life an exceptional opportunity to grow within the boundaries of single nations, and to co-operate within those areas that are not sacred to compet.i.tion. Meanwhile the need for world co-operative organization has grown steadily with the evolution of economic life on a world plane, fostered by some of the clearest visioned among the men who are responsible for the direction of the economic world.

3. _Present-day Economic Authority_

Under the present system of society the linking together of the various parts of the economic world is a private matter. Mines, factories and mills use the railroads as a means of transporting their products. The intermediary in this as in other transactions between the various branches of the economic world is the bank. Thus the banker, who provides the credit, and through whose private inst.i.tution financial transactions take place, becomes the arbiter of economic destiny, rendering decisions upon which the well-being of the ma.s.ses or producers depends, yet wholly irresponsible for the results that follow on these decisions. Using the people's money, possessed of vast authority over the jobs and the property of the producers, the banker is answerable only to other financiers who have a similar power and who enjoy a similar freedom from social restraint. Within the scope of the law prohibiting fraud and theft, and subject to the limitations of conscience the bankers and their confreres follow the dictates of their own inclinations. Quite naturally, under the circ.u.mstances, they have grown rich, and powerful far beyond the extent of their riches, since their control of the credit--upon which the whole business community depends--and their easy access to other people's money in the form of insurance premiums and savings bank deposits, place them in a strategic position which permits them to dominate and to dictate outside the boundaries of their ownership.

The power now exercised by the bankers will, in a producers' society, be under the control of public servants whose business it will be to link up the various lines of activity within the economic machine.

At one stage in the development of the world's economic life it was necessary to take out of the hands of private individuals the right to issue money, and to make of money issue a public function. To-day no one questions the desirability of having money issued by public authority, and the right to issue money is recognized as one of the important attributes of sovereignty.

Meanwhile there has been a change in the character of the medium of exchange. Credit and not money is employed to adjust most of the relations between economic groups. In 1920, for example, the total amount of money in circulation in the United States, including gold, silver, and all forms of paper money was only 6,088 millions of dollars, while the bank-clearings--that is, the exchange of checks between banks--totaled 462,920 millions of dollars. If to these figures are added the volume of checks drawn and accepted on the same bank, the amount of commercial paper discounted, etc., some idea may be obtained of the importance of credit transactions as compared with the use of cash under the present system. Nevertheless, while the right to issue money has become a public function, the right to issue credit remains in the hands of private bankers.

Under a producers' society, the relation between the various groups of producers will be maintained through a system of book-keeping that will charge against each economic group what it uses in the form of raw materials, machinery and the like, and will credit each group with the value of its product. Such a system is in vogue in any large industrial plant, where each department keeps its own accounts, charges the other departments with what they get from it and credits them with what they receive. The whole is handled through a central book-keeping system.

The principle of social book-keeping is not new, therefore, but is an essential link in any large and complex economic organization. It merely remains to apply the principle to producers' groups instead of to the affairs of a private banker or to the book-keeping system of some great industrial trust.

How shall a joint control be exercised by all of the producers' groups over those economic activities, such as the handling of credit, or social book-keeping, that affect more than one of them? The obvious answer is that they can be transacted through some organization in which all of the groups partic.i.p.ate on a footing of economic equality.

Common, interests will sooner or later compel common action, or action through a joint board. The point has been reached in the economic history of the world where some such common action of the producing groups is vitally essential to their continued well-being. The logic of economic development is compelling men to turn from the owners' society of the present day to a producers' society, organized by the producing groups and functioning in those cases where the single group of producers finds effective function impossible.

4. _Federation as a Way Out_

Experience has shown that the best way to secure co-operation among a number of groups having more or less divergent interests is through a federated or federal system of organization, under which each of the const.i.tuent groups retains control over those matters which relate exclusively to the affairs of that group, while all matters affecting the well-being of two or more groups are handled through the central organization or federation.

The United States of America is an a.s.sociation of sovereign states, each of which retains the right to decide those matters which are of importance to that state alone, while all questions of interstate concern are automatically referred to the Federal Government. At the same time, matters of common concern to all of the states such as the coinage of money, relations with foreign governments, the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the states, and the like, are also under exclusively federal jurisdiction. By this means, those questions which are of local moment may be settled within the state in which they arise, while all questions affecting the interests of more than one state, and those having to do with the common interests of all the states, fall within the jurisdiction of the Federal Government.

The organization of business has followed similar lines of federation.