World Trade Plans (1944)

From the April 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under this heading the Manchester Guardian for February 8th, 1944, does some rather effective debunking of the scheme sponsored by Sir Edgar Jones, known as the World Trade Alliance.

We suppose it is a good sign when an influential organ like the “M.G.” saves us Socialists the trouble of proving that capitalist production for an unknown arbitrary market cannot be “planned.”

Briefly, the idea of the “World Trade Alliance,” which has received the blessing of the Council of the Trades Union Congress, and the sympathy of the Federation of British Industries, is “that the producers of the world’s chief export commodities should form production committees to fix prices and agree on the quantities which each national group should export.”

“A Central Clearing Bureau is expected to see to it that each country balances its exports and imports, and a World Development Commission would provide additional outlets for ‘surplus’ production by placing it cheaply or gratis in needy parts of the world.”

After pointing out that something like this has actually been tried in the “World Wheat Agreement,” the Guardian goes on to say : —

“What is proposed is that the market mechanism should be entirely replaced by quantitative regulation . . . the principle itself is based on a fallacy. . . Sir Edgar Jones speaks highly of the pre-war cartels for aluminium, rubber, tin and other raw materials. . . . Now, some of these schemes had all the restrictive vices of the textbook monopoly. . . . Few trades hold a monopoly for long and few agreements between producers survive large changes in relative costs. This scheme could work only in a world where costs of production did not change. . . . The danger lies in holding out the promise of stability to an economy like ours, which, more than almost any other in the world, must change or decay. . . . But in a moving world we can no more stop demand from changing than we can stop a tree from growing, or. at any rate, only by the same means.”

What the Guardian does NOT say is that this not merely applies to the World Trade Alliance, but also to the Atlantic Charter and the “brave new post-war world.”

Horatio.