REVOLUTION OR REFORM?

Waikato Times, Volume 113, Issue 18876, 21 February 1933, Page 4

REVOLUTION OR REFORM?

No country (except, perhaps China) produces so many excellent projects for social reform as the United States of America and in no country is it more difficult to secure collective action on a large scale. The report of the President’s Research Committee is an admirable document which covers the whole field of social affairs from the control of industry to the sterilisation of the mentally defective, and submits a programme that could occupy the Legislature for years. “ Ponderously dynamic,” one New York paper calls it, end whatever else is to be said of it, it certainly shows how quickly American opinion is travelling under the influence of the depression.

For an authoritative body to suggest that “a violent revolution and dark periods of serious repression of libertarian and democratic forms ” may be the alternative to American capitalist society in its present form is something refreshingly new. Yet that is what is meant by the muddy phrase about tho need for “more

impressive integration of social skills and fusing of social purposes than is revealed by the recent trends.” The practical proposals „ embrace social services and political changes like insurance against unemployment and old age pensions, the bringing of public utilities under popular control, and the extension of taxes on inheritance, which Europe has long ago adopted. But in other directions the report looks still further ahead. It adopts the new slogan of “ national economic and social planning,” and advocates a six-hour day and a five-day week to spread employment and overcome the serious effects that mechanical invention is producing on the demand for labour.

This is not going quite so far as the latest American economic sect, the Technocrats (who combine their sixteen-hour week with a most alluring social credit system borrowed from British writers), hut it is at least a recognition of the increasing importance which technological unemployment, is likely to play in (he future in (he highly industrialised countries. Belatedly the United States is realising Hint if continuous unemployment seemed negligible in the marvellous years of boom it is unlikely to be so again.