Pity the poor planners
In this capitalist world, where so many things are going on at the same time, it becomes very difficult sometimes to keep pace with them all. All the fuss and excitement over the dollar situation, for example, has served to push into the background another very important part of the Marshall Aid programme which seems to be heading for breakdown. Though there have recently been numerous references in the Press about it, its significance does not yet appear to have sunk into the minds of the politicians. If it has done, then they are doing their desperate best to pretend that it does not exist.
In September, 1947, the representatives of sixteen European nations came together in Paris and agreed to the European Recovery Programme (E.R.P.), since called the Marshall Plan. Throughout the proceedings it was the magic word “production” that was most frequently on the lips of the delegates, “everything possible to increase production” was the keynote of the conference. To this end production programmes were drawn up for all the so-called vital commodities, and targets were set for every year up to 1951. Thus, to give an instance, overall oil-production was scheduled to rise from 55 million tons in 1947, to 75 millions in 1948, and to 114 millions in 1951. Similar targets were set for other commodities like foodstuffs, coal, ships, iron and steel, motor vehicles, etc. Everything perfect and precise—on paper. Hardly a hint that such a thing as the capitalist system could turn all their wonderful plans into just so many exercises in arithmetic.
Not two years have passed since these plans were made, and 1951 is still quite a long time off, yet already the targets are looking silly. Today, the emphasis is not upon production, production, production, but upon the fears of overproduction—this, by the way, not at the end of the programme in 1951, but in 1949. Take, as one example, oil. The Conference report said:
“The world market for petroleum and its products is at present very tight. The U.S.A., outstandingly the largest producers and consumers of oil, from being large exporters to Europe and elsewhere, have become net importers. It will, therefore, not be easy to cover the rising needs of the participating countries and W. Germany.”
About eighteen months later we get the City Editor of the News Chronicle saying:
“… very shortly it looks as though there will be oil going begging for purchasers in any currency that they chose to offer for it.”
And later:
“On the face of it we have here a situation fraught with remarkable possibilities—on the economic side great price falls for all oil products, but on the other hand big financial losses and mis-employment of resources; a struggle between rival oil interests in America and Europe for inadequate markets; and on the political side a struggle between American taxpayers with a case for their pockets and American oil interests preferring that Marshall Aid or some successor should pay them to send oil to Europe which Europe could not pay for and might not want to. For Europe the obviously proper course is to slow down at once on refining and pipe-line projects.” (News Chronicle, 9/7/49.)
What applies to oil, applies to almost every other commodity mentioned in the programme—to foodstuffs like wheat, to coal, to iron and steel, to ships, to motor vehicles; in nearly every case the buyers’ market is making nonsense of the targets. Objectives which in 1947 seemed fine and reasonable now seem stupid. The planners have once again underestimated capitalism’s powers of recovery, even after six years of war devastation; they have sadly miscalculated its capacity to produce; they have ignored the inevitability of slump; and they have no answer to a situation where there is a struggle, not to produce goods, but to dispose of them on the world’s markets. Their plans are reduced to meaningless, useless mathematical calculations, with no application to the real world, the world of capitalism. Capitalism will always defeat the efforts of the planners, however sincere, however thorough, however clever— for they try to plan the unplannable.
S.H.