PLANS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21580, 27 February 1932, Page 3

PLANS

Written for the Otago Daily Times,

By Lloyd Ross,

Greeting a friend these days, one does not gay, “ How’s your health? " or “ How’s the weather been?” but “How’s your plan? ” It may be only a gardening programme, a course of medical treatment, or a .walking tour, but we use the latest word “ plan ” so frequently, as though the mere repetition had some magical qualities. The word suggests foresight, conscious control, regimentation, bureaucracy or tyranny, according as whether one is outlining his own plan or listening to the plan of some other fanatic. It may even suggest a dangerous lack of humour, as when the young Russian guide in the Hermitage gallery at Leningrad halted before the portrait of a delightful old burgomaster by Frans Hals, and said, “Look, the typical bourgeois of the seventeenth century. Notice his cunning, greedy .eyes! " It may be repreeentedby the control figures of the Five Year Plan, embracing every commodity used by 100,000,000 people; it may be merely the efforts of the terrorised mother to keep her baby above the Plunket line. “ Plan your health, or plan the world; but have a plan,” is the slogan of to-day. You must have a plan —a twenty-year plan or a week-end plan, or you are intellectually bankrupt. Plans were made, not by Bolshevists, but by the first man who made a new year resolution; the first text book was not by Grinko or Bukharin or Stalin, but by Mrs Beeton and the compiler of copy books. Our planning takes on a more urgent and a more basic purpose. The background is a seething mass of hungry men and women. The new doctrine is that we must more and more plan our social development, or civilisation smashes. There is going the round of English papers a letter, which the governor of the Bank of England is supposed to have written to the governor of the Bank of France, “ Unless drastic measures are taken to save it, the capitalist system throughout the civilised world will be wrecked within a year. I should like this prediction to be filed for future reference.” The danger is that planning in this panicky atmosphere we should become ponderous in our own conceit and sense of importance of the occasion and that we may look to “plans” as we look to a patent medicine that will cure all our bodily ills at one gulp. Lest we begin to feel that, if we do not scribble on our desk calendar our own Five Years Plan for the universe we are doomed, I am thinking about plans in a most humble setting. Sitting here by the fireside, glancing up from the Macmillan Report on France and Industry to watch my daughter building worlds of blocks, I realise that making plans is man’s expression of the chill that is still in him. One more block and the tower is completed; one more block and the edifice may tumblo down. Who shall say how much financial credit shall be issued? Too much or too little and men are tramping the streets for work. Such a thought, while it compels more and more people to outline their plans frantically and nervously, is not conducive to the calm and scientific approach to the subject. It is better to pretend that we are merely building cities on the floor. We begin again, getting excited at the sense of the power of moving about blocks, which may be pieces of wood or may be factories, people, nations. . The Communists could limit their own wages to a mere- pittance because all the satisfaction they desired was the thrill and joy of building for millions, homehow or other the following picture of the Soviet Union, drawn by _ Stuart Chase, seems to liave a connection with nooi games:—“Sixteen men in Moscow to-day are attempting one of tbe most audacious economic experiments in history. As the Presidium of the State Planning Commission, responsible to the Council of Peoples Commissars, they are laying down the industrial future of 146.000,000 people and of one-sixth the land area of the world for 15 years. . . . It is an experiment so immense, so novel, and so courageous that no student of economics can afford to neglect it. Whether it transcends the limits of human administrative capacity and fails, or whether it meets this challenge and succeeds, it has much to teach us. It is something new in the world.” At present the general opinion is that the blocks are being heaped one above the other without crashing, and we can only look down, somewhat amazed, that apparently the laws of human nature are being conquered. A worker at the great dam on the Dneiper asked what difference it would make to him if the dam were not completed in time, replied: “ But the country needs electricity.” If the Russian plans succeed it will be because the active co-operation of the worker has been obtained. Saya Grinko; "In every factory and workshop the workers m their production conferences discussed the potentialities and prospects of their particular enterprises and the contribution they could make to the development of their own branch of industry in connection with the Five_ Year Plan.” There is a grim determination on the child’s face as the castle mounts, sways, and is held, topples over, and is built again and again, and I wonder, as I turn now to the plans of the West, if the vital factor in them all is whether they_ will be able to obtain the active assistance of the worker. The threat goes out that we must plan or perish. Business men, and economists join in the chorus. Mr 1 rank Hodges, member of the Central Electricity Board, and director of the Bank of England Securities Management Trust, wrote recently: “The whole tendency of the age is towards some form of centralisation and unified control. By this I do not mean nationalisation or State ownership, but the application of a conception of ordered development to industry instead of the fatalistic doctrine of laissez-faire.” The keynote of the speeches of the United States Chamber of Commerce meeting last April was the need for industrial stabilisation. It was industry’s problem, they said, to integrate production and consumption and set its house in order rapidly, to avert threatened political action. Sir Arthur ’Salter, formerly director of _ the economic section of the League of Nations, in an address to an audience of selected financiers, said: “If we are not to have chaos, we are faced with a choice between collective leadership by industry or collective control by the State.” He urged upon his audience tbe for consultation in order that they might help furnish the leadership of the world. We must not grow too serious, or we shall start suppressing or killing one another, or refusing to change our ideas, or declaring that our plan, and only our plan, can abolish poverty, wars, unemployment, crime, divorce, ignorance, drink, and every other evil; but by approaching the plans of industry, as the contributions of thoughtful and practical business men, we will get an idea of the steps that are being proposed. One American soap manufacturer estimates his annual production in advance (the variation does not exceed 3 per cent.), divides the total by 48, plans to produce that much soap in every week of the year, and guarantees 48 weeks’steady employment to every man who has been in the factory for a term of at least six months. Seasonal employment has thus been removed, but what would happen if a machine were introduced making it possible to do the same work with half the staff? In another soap factory, in one room, some 250 women were engaged in wrapping up cakes of naphtha soap in paper wrappers; in the next room a machine was operating which wrapped up as many cakes of soap as the entire 250 women in the other room. The company executive to the question why the women were not replaced by a machine, replied that the policy was never to discharge any employee except for discipline or inefficiency. They were not replacing any wrappers who died, resigned, or got married. When the 250 wrappers were gone, then a new machine would be installed. No new soap wrappers would be trained. “The principle was not to discharge anyone but to let tbe industry take care of those who had dedicated themselves to it until their task was finished.” Labour-saving devices are introduced by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company gradually so that there is a combination of work utilising the labour-saving device with the bulk of the work still being done as before. The change-over to the automatic telephones was planned three years ahead so that workers were not dismissed. Mr Robert Rees, of the company, thus summarised the viewpoint of many em-. ployers who are attempting to balance production in their own industries. “ Enlightened industry will accept the challenge that the prime responsibility for providing against technological unemploy- ■ inent rests with the industries concerned.” Is it possible to widen the schemes to

include not merely particular factories, but a whole industry and perhaps the complete economic development of a nation or of the world? It is here our castle of blocks tumbles. Economists have doubted the possibility. “ Booms and slumps are inevitable,” Sir William Beveridge wrote in 1909, “or at least preventable only at the cost of great harm.” Mr Davidson, in the last annual report of the Bank of New South Wales, questions “ whether Governments are competent to complete on planned lines a task that calls for varied and unforeseen individual initiatives.” But when great combines or governments limit the production or sales of wheat, cotton, rubber, oil, coffee, tin and sugar, they have already been compelled by the evils of unbalanced production to take in practice the steps that have been criticised in theory. Eighty per cent, of the sugar exporting industries in seven countries with a capital investment of £400,990,000 have agreed to a plan which contemplates the adjustment of sugar production to world consumption through the gradual liquidation over five years of the surplus of 2,500,000 tons of sugar. In the course of the negotiations at Paris, the American who drew up the scheme told the delegates that the capitalistic system was on trial; that if it could not -solve the sugar problem, it would have to fail because the sugar problem was typical, not isolated. What building is being done to-day! What a world this daughter of mine making worlds of blocks is to grow up to! Huge combines regulating the supply and, production of raw materials will have enforced their commands in every part of the world, deciding how much wheat, coal, iron, and so on will be produced by the national units. Of what use will a tariff, a vote, a strike, or an Arbitration Court be when production is regulated in this way, if depressions are to be avoided? We cannot shudder at the prospect, for already the steps have been taken by those who control the bulk of the marketing of primary products. Mr Swope is the chief executive of the General Electric Company and director of some of the largest producing concerns in the United States. He recently threw on the carpet his plan. All the firms in each industry were to be brought into a trade association. Each association was to stabilise prices and employment, and to organise its own unemployment insurance scheme with equal contributions from workers and employers, and regulated by a board representing all interests. So tbe boot and shoe, the iron and steel, the cotton, tbe radio, and the motor industries were to combine among themselves to prevent the waste of competition, and the evils of over-production. The laws at present limiting trusts and monopolies were to be amended and monopolies encouraged, for only by the regulation of production oi all the firms in an industry could depressions be avoided. _ The federal regulatory body for each industry would pass on to the particular concerns its rules for stabilising production and marketing. Many American financiers. _ business men, and economists are thinking along similar' lines. As yet few of them are prepared to advocate a central board which will try to stabilise production throughout the country as between industrial trust and industrial trust, but the same arguments that apply to the need for regulation between firm and firm apply as between industry and industry. Is there to be set up side by side with the political parliaments a parliament of industry and commerce regulating the economic details of our lives? Mr Swope, millionaire manager, is whirling ua along too fast! The steps that, he believes must be taken if industry is to be saved from unemployment and anarchy, and if the West is to meet the challenge of Russia, are such that we feel afraid at the loss of individual liberty and initiative. He is demanding that we modify our outlook on competition and freedom, His leviathan of trusts rolls on. His alternatives of trustification on a scale yet unknown or the_ deepening of unemployment are tbe culmination of the machine age. Many are terrified at the prospect s. If I must, plan, I would play with blocks, I will not face the alternatives. My daughter shall be told a story of fairies and I shall hope for a magic wand to shut out the faces of the hungry men and women —if I can.