MATERIE PRIME. – They are also improperly called greggie, as those obtained directly, through so-called first-hand labor, from nature: the earth, sea, and atmosphere. In truth, they are the most important materials, those that concern mass consumption: suitably transformed, they serve in the preparation of all the other materials which, according to their more or less immediate usability, are called semi-finished products and manufactured goods. Ordinarily, the term refers to those that give rise to industries; but evidently foodstuffs, agricultural land, and sources of energy also belong in this category, whether electrical, such as waterfalls, or thermal, such as solid, liquid, or gaseous fuels, or atomic, as uranium is today; and, by extension, also climatic and human resources.
Raw materials thus represent the true and fundamental material wealth for the life of individuals and nations, constituting one of the basic factors around which a large part of social events revolves and through which it may be explained. The division, for historical or arbitrary reasons, of the earth’s surface into many distinct parcels, or political states, has given raw materials a geographical distribution unrelated to actual consumption needs, as determined by the differing density of populations and their degree of civilization. The apparatus of exchange, particularly monetary and credit-based, which could and should have corrected this situation, has never functioned properly, chiefly because political considerations have habitually prevailed over economic ones: this predominance is responsible for the fact that the technique of exchange has remained at an imperfect stage of development and inadequate to the needs of humanity (v. PROGRESSO; SCAMBIO).
The distribution of raw materials, moreover, is not even a fixed natural datum, since useful materials and their relative degree of usefulness vary from one period to another, following scientific and technical progress and human habits: some are at a certain point replaced by others, certain substances suddenly become usable although they were not so before, while others lose their value, for economic reasons, as tastes change and the productive technique of synthetic products improves. For this reason, the concentration of populations, which at the beginning of history undoubtedly had to conform to the geographical distribution of the raw materials then known and used, could not remain consistent with this natural criterion: thus, over time, local situations of wealth and poverty came into being, followed by programs of expansion (imperialisms), claims, and hoarding, reflecting concern for the future rather than the real needs of the present. Such situations consequently appear unjust and even cruel.
Self-sufficiency in raw materials gradually became the practical ideal of every national policy: when states did not go so far as to become shrewd merchants of raw materials, they nevertheless devoted themselves to this purpose both for national enrichment and for the exercise of economic and political hegemony, regulating or denying to countries lacking such resources, through the manipulation of prices, tariffs, and economic policies in general, the raw materials they needed. In this way, the development of human societies was given a profoundly materialistic orientation, which seriously damaged, diverted, or submerged the noblest ideals and spiritual concerns, including the exercise of sound and upright reason even in political activities: it then became easy, at moments of particular social friction, to invoke a genuine general doctrine, historical materialism, according to which nature seemed already to offer, through the unequal distribution of raw materials, a foundation of unavoidable fatality. The rapid decline of colonialism after the last world conflagration, and the rise of young and powerful nationalisms, have placed new obstacles in the way of the desired redistribution: nor do the present Permanent Conference on raw materials within the O.N.U. (limited to very few materials of military importance), or the measures following from Truman’s Point IV concerning depressed areas, yet point to an equitable and radical solution of the problem. This problem is, moreover, inseparable from that of the redistribution of populations and from that of chronic or periodic unemployment.
A strange simplism has at times attempted to deny the existence of a raw-materials problem: one may recall the repeated declarations of the British minister A. Eden during the last world war: «The problem of raw materials does not exist at all. Raw materials are available to everyone: all one has to do is pay for them»: declarations which distinguished economists in our country adopted as their own. In this way, the problem is simply shifted from the territorial plane to that of the availability of means of payment and freedom of exchange—in other words, to the sphere of the general organization of the economy. The denial of the problem should therefore have been followed by the suggestion that the political solution be abandoned in favor of the economic solution of greater freedom of exploitation and exchange, supported by a more suitable organization of markets and credit. Such a solution, the only truly rational one, will be facilitated if national policies allow the practical solidarities of peoples to develop more freely, strengthening the conviction that the poverty of some represents a constant impediment and a constant threat to the wealth of others. Unfortunately, however, in human societies individual selfishness reappears as the collective selfishness of a category, class, or nation, equally blind and dangerous, armed as it is with political power and exacerbated by questions of prestige and by a spirit of retaliation. The permanent unrest, nourished by the unequal distribution of raw materials and, which amounts to the same thing, by the insufficiency of means of payment and obstacles to trade, provokes a continuous and nervous elaboration of defenses, claims, and reprisals:
as a result, old and new bureaucracies (administrative, political, trade-union, military) and various forms of business and intermediary parasitism are growing out of all proportion, in addition to widespread political corruption: all this leads to an indefinite increase in unproductive or scarcely productive labor and to a progressive reduction of useful labor. In fact, people generally succumb to the suggestion that the management of vast and complex problems requires centralized and repressive state organizations: whereas it should instead encourage recourse to more extensive automatic mechanisms and decentralized forms of private initiative within the framework of genuine economic freedom, served and controlled by perfected monetary, credit, market, and exchange instruments. Without this, it will not be possible to break the vicious circle whereby the economy fails to develop because it is constrained by politics, while politics cannot give way unless the dangers of crises and wars, inherent in the problem of raw materials and its direct consequences, have first disappeared.