The Next Step: A Plan for Economic World Federation Part 13

The exchange and credit board would, in reality, be the book-keeping department for the world producers' federation, whose exchange transactions would be planned and handled through this department.

8. _The Budget Board_

Two princ.i.p.al functions would be performed by the budget board. On the one hand it would be charged with budgeting or planning the transactions involved in the world organization of economic life. This function would include the estimates of the requirements of the major economic groups during a given year, and the estimate of the sources from which these requirements were to be met. On the other hand, it would be responsible for preparing the budget of the world producers' federation, and of deciding upon the course that must be adopted in order to meet these necessary outlays. Thus the board would correspond, in a sense, to the finance committee of a modern parliament or to the department of finance in a modern cabinet.

9. _The Adjudication of Disputes Board_

The organization of the world producers' federation places before it certain judicial functions. The federation would be called upon to adjudicate:

1. Disputes between any of the industrial groups involving more than one division.

2. Disputes between one of these industrial groups and the world producers' federation.

3. Disputes between various departments of the world producers'

federation and its subdivisions.

These functions would devolve upon the adjudication of disputes board, which would const.i.tute a court or committee of review, charged with the duty of hearing issues in dispute before they went to the board of managers, the executive committee and the world parliament for final decision. The adjudication of disputes board would not be, in any sense, a court of last resort. Rather it would be a court of original jurisdiction, sifting out the issues as they arose, and presenting its findings to a higher body. Most of its decisions would, as a matter of routine, be final, but on any issue of importance, the right of final decision would rest in the world parliament, unless that right were a.s.sumed by the people through a dissolution of the parliament.

The present governmental system, with its checks and balances--legislative, executive and judiciary--has proved far from satisfactory, since it results either in a deadlock between the various authorities, or else some one of them, as for example, the courts in the United States, a.s.sume the final authority. In neither case is it possible for the average man to get to the bottom of the difficulty.

With all the functions of government centering in the world parliament, there would be less chance of friction between the various parts of the governmental machinery, and a greater likelihood of effective co-operation between the various departments of the government. Above all, the citizen would know where to look for action and where to place the responsibility for failure to act.

10. _The Detail of World Administration_

There is something of the grotesque in discussing the problems that would come for solution before a world producers' federation. The organization in question does not exist. How impossible, then, to predict what it will do when it comes into being. Still, the effectiveness of any proposal must be determined by its results in the realm of those routine affairs with which the organization will be called upon to deal. A world producers' federation will be const.i.tuted for the purpose of handling certain world economic problems, and the means by which this control will be exercised is a matter of the first importance.

The plan for world administration, as here outlined, is based on two general ideas. The first is that certain problems of world importance would come before the world parliament for solution; the second is that in dealing with any problems of administration, local autonomy should be preserved, the function of each administrative group should be clearly defined, and the control of the central authority should be exerted primarily for the purpose of approving or of disapproving the actions of the administrative divisions, leaving with them the task of initiating and carrying out the plans involved in the work of their respective divisions. With these simple principles of administration in mind, it is easy to plan almost any kind of administrative organization.

The real test will come when an issue is raised over the status of a given problem. When has the question of resource distribution ceased to be a local matter and become a world matter? When has the problem of credit become a world problem? To such questions there is but one answer: when these matters are of vital concern to more than one division or to more than one of the major industrial groups--in other words, when they pa.s.s beyond the control of one group, they are matters for world jurisdiction.

No plan can be drafted that will antic.i.p.ate the difficulties of world economic organization. The utmost that men can hope to do is to draft a set of working rules that will enable them to act wisely when confronted by difficulties.

The world is still in a state of chaos. There are many local authorities, but no central authority. There are plans and policies, looking to the relief of the more pressing economic and social difficulties, but all of them are conditioned upon the establishment of some world power that shall prove competent to handle world affairs. Out of this chaos there must emerge, first, clear thinking as to the next steps that are to be taken in the reorganization of the world; second, a willingness to make the concessions necessary to this reorganization, and third a conscious purpose to build a better living place for human society.

VII. TRIAL AND ERROR IN ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION

1. _Trying Things Out_

A society, like the individuals of which it is composed, learns first by trial and error. The earliest lessons that the human race received were obtained by this method, and all new information is thus secured. The numerous economic difficulties that lie ahead of the present generation must be met and solved by the method of trial and error, or, as it is sometimes called in political jargon, "muddling through."

During historic times men have spent vast stores of energy in trying things out. It has frequently been observed that man is a social animal.

It might be said with equal truth that he is an experimenting animal. He is curious, he is venturesome, he enjoys change, he relishes novelty, he is eager to better his condition. Animals live on from generation to generation, building nests after the same pattern and migrating over the same territories. But man investigates, ponders, experiments, improves.

This principle of experiment--the appeal to trial and error--holds true of social as well as of individual life. The hunter tries out a new snare or weapon, the machinist constructs a new tool, the chemist works out a new formula, the architect creates a new variety of arch or b.u.t.tress, the educator writes a new kind of text-book, the sanitary engineer devises new methods for securing and safeguarding a water supply, the statesman plans a new system of roads that will open up the rural districts, the social scientist draws the design for a new type of economic organization. From the most personal to the most social, from the most local to the most general or universal, human activities are directed over new fields and into new channels on the principle of experiment, by the method of trial and error.

The scientist or inventor works in his laboratory or in his shop, devoting his energies to investigation and research which are nothing more than the application of the principle of trial and error to the particular problems with which his science is confronted. Once the experimenter has discovered a way to compel mechanical power to toil for man, or to destroy the typhoid germ, or to talk across a continent without wires, the next task is to find a better way or an easier way.

Far from decreasing the necessity for experiment, each new discovery in the realm of natural science opens the door to additional possibilities.

To-day every important college, most cities, many industries, and public inst.i.tutions maintain experimental laboratories in the various fields of applied knowledge, and employ highly trained experts whose sole duty it is to try things out.

Inventors frequently hit upon new ideas or upon novel devices by chance, but for every such chance discovery, there are scores and probably hundreds of ideas and devices that have been carefully thought out, worked over, rejected, revised, modified, until they produced the desired results. There is a margin of chance in all experiment, but surrounding it there is a vast field of careful thinking and planning and of endless purposeful endeavor.

These observations are commonplaces in the laboratory and in the department of research. They have filtered through to thinking people who begin to understand the part that experiment plays in all forms of scientific progress. There is a general agreement that if there is to be an increase in the knowledge that men possess regarding the mechanical forces, the only sure way of gaining this knowledge is to weigh, measure, describe and cla.s.sify. This applies to solids, liquids, gases, rocks, plants, animals, and even to the structure and function of the human body. But when it comes to social inst.i.tutions, even the wisest hesitate and question. Is it possible that social knowledge can be gained only in this way?

There is no other way! Like the individuals of which it is composed, society must investigate, experiment, and learn through trial and error.

Indeed, that is the tacitly accepted method by which social knowledge is acc.u.mulated. History is a record of social experiments--not so consciously directed nor so carefully planned as the experiments that are taking place in the chemical laboratory, but experiments none the less. What other explanation can account for the many forms of family relations.h.i.+p, the many varieties of religious organizations, the numerous types of political inst.i.tutions, the mult.i.tude of educational inst.i.tutions. "Educational experiments" are the commonplaces of the pedagog. Slavery was one of society's economic experiments, feudalism was another, capitalism is a third. Through successive generations these inst.i.tutions have been built up, reformed, discarded and replaced. The history of social inst.i.tutions is a history of social experiment--of community progress through trial and error.

Obstacles are thrown in the way of the social experimenter. Vested interests seek to convince the credulous and the ignorant that whatever is, is right. The jobs of office holders, the possessions of property owners, the security of ruling cla.s.ses, depend upon their ability to sit on the lid of social experiment. "Do not touch, do not think, do not question!" is the warning of masters to their social va.s.sals. Those who eat of the apple of experiment acquire the knowledge of good and evil, and with this knowledge comes the desire to reject and destroy the evil while they hold fast and augment the good.

Those who have learned, and who have dared to protest, have been ridiculed, persecuted, outlawed. Sometimes their bones have bleached on the gibbet or rotted in dungeons. Still, the jail, the gallows and the lynching-bee have not kept experimenters quiet in the past, and they will probably not do so in the future.

During recent times--particularly in the last fifty years--the changes in economic and social life have been so rapid that the "always was and always will be" protest is having a harder and harder time to make itself heard above the clatter of the social house-wreckers, and the rap and beat of the social construction engineers.

2. _The Capitalist Experiment_

The present economic society is an experiment--less than a century old in most parts of the world. It has evolved rapidly through a series of forms, corresponding with the rapid advances in the methods by which men wrested a living from nature.

The ma.s.ses of the people in industrial countries have abandoned their farms, their villages and their rural life, have moved into the cities, and have gone to work in the mines, factories, mills, stores and offices, very much as the mechanics and farmers dropped their accustomed tools and rushed to the gold fields of California and Australia. Within two or three generations the whole basis of life has been s.h.i.+fted and a new order has been established. This change has been made for the purpose of securing a better living.

The people in the industrial countries have accepted capitalism as an essentially desirable means of gaining a livelihood. The new order has given them an opportunity for ma.s.s living that has been reserved in the past for a small percentage of the people. It has provided an immense number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of those who had never enjoyed many possessions.

The new order has made each family in an industrial district doubly dependent--dependent on a job which it can in no wise control, and dependent on the economic mechanism for the supply of goods and services without which ma.s.s city life is quite impossible. The rural family had a supplementary source of living in its chickens, pigs, cows, goats, bees and garden. Fuel was cheap and nature provided berries, nuts and game.

Life was rough, but the means of maintaining it were relatively abundant. City life has cut away almost all of these forms of supplementary income, at the same time that it has imposed upon the family the need to pay for practically all goods and services. The city breadwinner must get and hold a job, if his family is to live.

Ma.s.s life in cities, ma.s.s work in factories, job-dependence--all of these experiments are being made in a field that up to the present time has been virtually untouched by the human race. Mankind has gone into these experiments hopefully, trustingly, blindly, without any guarantee of their workability.

A casual examination of the premises on which the capitalist experiment is built will show the extremely precarious position in which the people who are dependent upon it now find themselves.

The capitalist experiment is built on the a.s.sumption that compet.i.tion rather than co-operation is the effective means of promoting social well-being. Acting under this theory, each man is to forage for himself.

This individual activity was relied upon to promote initiative and to stimulate ambition. In practice, capitalist society has been compelled to abandon compet.i.tion in many of its aspects. Monopoly is the opposite of compet.i.tion, yet the modern capitalist world is full of monopoly because monopoly pays better than compet.i.tion--it is a more workable economic scheme.

Following out the a.s.sumption that compet.i.tion is the life of economic society, one arrives at a necessary corollary to the general theory. The purpose of compet.i.tion is to injure, wipe out and dispose of the compet.i.tor. Therefore the misfortune of our compet.i.tors is our good fortune. This would lead, as applied to the actual conditions of life, to some such formula as:

1. Bankrupt your compet.i.tor and you will profit.

2. Impoverish your neighbor and you will benefit.

3. Injure your fellow-man and you will gain.

Stated thus baldly and harshly, these three propositions sound incredibly silly, particularly in view of the example the world has just had of large scale compet.i.tion--the World War--yet they are a fair picture of the line of thought and conduct accepted as rational by modern economic society. The normal processes of compet.i.tion are directed to the destruction of compet.i.tors. War is a frankly avowed means of smas.h.i.+ng rivals. Nationalism is built on the theory that "our"

nation is superior to all other nations, and that, in the long run, it is capable of defeating (injuring) them.