The boundaries of the districts would vary from one industry to another. The boundaries of the divisions would be uniform for all industries. The whole world would therefore be partitioned into a number of divisions, such, for example, as: North America, South America, South Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, Northern Europe, Northern Asia, Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and Australia. In setting the boundary lines of these divisions, economic homogeneity, geographic unity, the distribution of the world population and the character of existing civilization would all be called into question. Under such a grouping would fall the agricultural workers of Southern Asia, the transport workers of North Europe, the manufacturing workers of North America.
4. World industrial units, so designed as to include within their scope all of the producers of the world classified in accordance with their occupations.
To-day, the outstanding method of classifying the people of the world is to take them in relation to their political affiliations. The new grouping would arrange all of the peoples in accordance with their economic activities. A simple form of classification would include: agriculture, the extractive industries, manufacturing, transport, trade, housekeeping, and general (miscellaneous) trades. The classification might be made far more elaborate, but for clarity of discussion a simple classification is of great assistance. Every person in the world who performed a useful service would belong to one of these great industrial or occupational groups, and the aggregate of the membership of the groups would equal the aggregate of all the producers of the world.
Under this plan, therefore, each individual would have a series of economic affiliations. He might, for example, be a docker on the French Line at Le Havre (local affiliation); a dock worker in the Le Havre district (district affiliation); a transport worker of North Europe (divisional affiliation); a worker in the transport industries of the world (industrial affiliation).
Since each of the producers in the world would have this series of relations, all of the producers would be grouped together in local, in district, in divisional and in world industrial groups, so that the economic life of the world would present the picture of a completed economic structure very similar to the political structure that has been evolving for many centuries, and which has reached its highest forms of development in such new countries as Australia and the United States, where each person is a citizen in a borough, city or town, in a county, in a state and in the whole nation or federation of states.
While political life has been thus organized about the administration of certain public affairs, economic life has remained disorganized, or has been organized largely with an eye to owners' profits. The producers society will be organized in economic terms very much as the present society is organized in political terms. Each producer will be a participant in the life of economic units, graduated from the local economic unit to the world industry.
This is, of course, an idealized picture, subject to an infinitude of modifications, just as an architect's plan for "a bungalow in the woods" or a city planner's scheme for a model town is idealized and subject to modifications. It is not a working drawing, but a general design which is intended to place the whole subject of economic reorganization on a plane where it can be discussed as a matter of practical social science.
The plan presented here is simplified as far as possible in order that attention may be concentrated on the essential issues that the world faces. Too much time and energy have already gone into contentions over details, when there was no general plan in view. Let no man deceive himself with the delusion that the solution of the world's economic problem is a simple matter, but at the same time, each one who is striving toward a better world may rest with the assurance that there are certain simple and fundamental principles that underlie world economic organization.
Society is structural, and as a structure it must function; the economic world is built up of working units that are compelled, by the nature of modern industry to work co-operatively, but the very nature of the political structure of modern society hampers this co-operative work in many essential directions; federation seems to be the logical answer to the enigma of effective social organization, and it only remains to organize a workable series of economic units and to build them into a world structure—a world structure in terms of production rather than of politics.