FIVE-YEAR PLAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 118, 21 May 1932, Page 5

FIVE-YEAR PLAN

INSTANCES OF FAILURE. PRODUCTION COSTS INCREASE. LONDON. May 7. There is such a famine of all kinds of goods in Russia that the inhabitants of Moscow complain that they have to buy variegated clothes. Many of the people are wearing coats of a different colour from the trousers, which the workers term “clownish,” says the Birmingham University Russian research bureau. Already it is evident, the report states, that certain basic aims of tho Five-year Plan cannot bo achieved within four, or even five years. The propected increase of the cereal har vest to 106,000,000 tons will not be fulfilled, nor will the wages increase as planned. On the contrary, real wages have dropped 30 per cent. The wage level tends to fall as economic and business considerations supplant purely revolutionary and political policies. While the increases in 1931 of 21.7 per cent, in tho gross output of the largo scale industry and 7.6 per cent, in the sowing area are important achievements, general development proceeds unevenly. Labour productivity has decreased and tho cost of production has increased.

As far as the Five-year Plan aims at the entire immediate elimination of private enterprise and replacement, by State monopoly, it is a harmful illusion. Though the opposition of the peasants has been broken in tho last two years, collectivisation has failed to solve the grain problem. The quality of tho “goods” supplied bv the State is strongly criticised.