REDS DENY AIM TO HIT WORLD TRADE

Stratford Evening Post, Volume I, Issue 94, 30 March 1931, Page 6

REDS DENY AIM TO HIT WORLD TRADE

FLOODING FOREIGN MARKET NOT PART OF PLAN MOSCOW, Feb. 19.

Karl Radek. the Soviet publicist, argues in to-day’s “Pravda” that the capitalist world has no reason to fear economic destruction through the flooding of its markets with cheap Soviet products. “Socialism wants to eat and be clothed and to live decently,” he | writes. “It raises the productivity ] of. labour and organises a planned economic life, not in order to f mce < ' ports and flood the markets 'villx cheap goods, chasing after profit. “Socialism will raise the welfare of the masses so milch that it will export onlv superfluous things in order to obtain from the capitalist world what Is not produced domestically. “During the transitional period, when we especially need machines, we are compelled to force our exports. However, not ex port but. the giowtJr of consumption of the masses is regulating the basis of our economic development.” Radek predicts that capitalism will per fSh. not from Soviet competition, hut from the contradictions devouring it, and especially from the position iu which it places the working class. Whatever one may think of this prediction, Radek’s original thesis that Soviet economy will have neither the desire nor the need to flood the woild with its exports seems quite sound. Anyone who sees the acute shortage of many foodstuffs and manufactuied goods within Russia now, togethei

with the growing demand as a larger number of workers and employees are placed on tine pay roll, can scarcely believe that a really large exportable surplus—except possibly grain and certain raw materials, such as oil and lumber —will exist for many years. Although imports of foreign machinery and .equipment under the Fiveyear Plan oblige the Soviet authorities to force their exports to-day, it seems probable that as the strain relaxes there will be a tendency to diminish the sacrifices demanded from the population, and to ship abroad only such articles as can actually be dispensed with in Russia.

There seems no reason to anticipate any attempt to secure a large predominance of exports over imports, because the accumulation of gold has little utility in the Soviet economic system.

Attempting to secure greater accuracy in the fulfilment of orders to supply State factories, transport and State collective farms, -the Soviet Government to-day published a decree instructing that all orders he couched ip the form of written contracts and that the factory directors responsible for violating these contracts be criminally prosecuted. This reflects the -same tendency as previous decrees prescribing severe penalties for “persons causing accidents in the transportation system or breaking tractors and agricultural machinery,” and shows a determination to employ the full force of the law to combat slackness and neglect, which sometimes have such disastrous consequences in the Soviet economic life.