Modern industrial structure on the other hand is something essentially new under the sun—newly imagined, designed, constructed, productive. It has no ancestry before 1750 because its essential building unit—the modern machine—did not exist previous to that date.
In the last chapter we dealt with the growth of states into empires and the aggregation of empires into civilizations with the possibility that the existing states could be welded into a world federation. One of the chief obstacles to such a development is the centuries of conflict during which modern nations have been built up and the strong bonds of nationalism have been established as a means of holding divergent groups of people in line by particular oligarchies operating in particular civilizations.
On the economic level such difficulties are minimal. The process of coordination and consolidation was far advanced before the end of the last century. The practice of integration—joining productive units in functional sequences—was also accepted and followed, with little regard for political or cultural considerations. The result has been an economic integration which has developed inside the chief industrial nations and across national boundaries.
Despite political obstacles, economic integration has proceeded with giant strides, especially during the past hundred years. Under a well developed world political federation the world economy could be integrated and used to provide the necessaries, conveniences and minimal comforts for the entire human family. There are nationalistic obstacles to political federation. Economic integration is an obvious must and a logical outcome of the industrial integration that has gone on so swiftly during the great revolution of 1750-1970.
When we talk about integrating the world economy we are dealing with a problem which no previous civilization has faced because no previous civilization had machines or the social and cultural institutions which have grouped themselves around the ultra-modern machine phenomena.
World economy in 1975 includes three essential elements: the planet earth and its resources; the institutional structure of modern society; and human beings with their diverse concepts and skills which provide its motive force. These three factors, land, capital equipment, and human energy, are the three-fold apparatus upon which 3.7 billion human beings depend for the goods and services which sustain them from day to day and year to year.
At an earlier period this economic apparatus centered around the land and its cultivation (agriculture). Since the onset of the great revolution the goods and services have come increasingly from a factory-office centered occupational apparatus. When we consider the integration of the world economy, it is this industrialized, modern economy that we have chiefly in mind. No previous civilization faced such a problem. There are no real precedents upon which we can rely. We must go forward, if we do go forward, experimenting with problems which face the human family for the first time.
The integration of planetary economy in 1975 is a total, or unitary, problem. It is not a problem of one continent, of one nation or empire, of one racial or cultural group. It is a problem which the human family faces as a human family, occupying our planet Earth. It is our capital equipment. It is the success with which we apply our know-how to the earth, using our capital equipment and our skills, producing the goods and services upon which our physical existence depends. We rise or fall, sink or swim in terms of our own capacities, our own abilities to adapt ourselves to historical circumstances which will determine the conditions of life on the earth. Indeed, our decisions and consequent actions may determine our own extinction or survival.
Planetary economy will aim to provide the means of livelihood for its constituents along six lines: to conserve the human heritage of natural resources, using them sparingly and, where possible, adding to them; to produce and distribute those goods and services which are needed to maintain health and provide for social decency; to produce and distribute goods and services honestly, efficiently and economically; to assure simple necessaries for all, including dependents, defectives and delinquents; to give high priority to local self-sufficiency; to maintain enough central economic authority to guarantee adequate goods and services to successive generations of the planetary population.
An effective world government, therefore, must adopt and administer an economic program designed to: (a) Utilize and conserve natural resources, making them available, on a just basis, for the use of successive generations; (b) End involuntary poverty and insecurity and the exploitation of man by man and of one social group by another social group; (c) Make necessary public services generally available on equal terms, to all mankind; and (d) Guarantee equal opportunity to earth-dwellers based on the greatest good to the greatest number.