Raw Materials

RAW MATERIALS. - They are also improperly called greggie [crude stocks], as those obtained directly, by so-called first-hand labor, from nature: land, sea and atmosphere. In truth they are the most important ones, those that concern mass consumption: suitably transformed, they serve in the preparation of all the other materials which are called, according to their more or less immediate usability, semi-worked and manufactured. Ordinarily, those are meant which give life to industries: but evidently foodstuffs, agricultural land and sources of energy also fall within their number, whether electrical, such as waterfalls, or calorific, such as solid, liquid or gaseous fuels, or atomic, as uranium is today; and, by extension, also the resources of climate and of men.

Raw materials therefore represent the true and fundamental material wealth for the life of men and of nations, constituting one of the basic motives around which a great part of social events revolves, and by which it is explained. The fragmentation, for historical or arbitrary reasons, of the earth's surface into so many distinct parcels, or political States, has created for raw materials a geographical distribution that bears no relation to the real needs of consumption as determined by the different density of populations and by their degree of civilization. The apparatus of exchange, particularly monetary and credit, which could and should have corrected this situation, has never functioned properly, mainly because of the habitual pre-eminence of political reasons over economic ones: a pre-eminence to which it is due that the technique of exchanges has remained at a stage of imperfect development, and inadequate to the needs of humanity (v. PROGRESS; EXCHANGE).

The distribution of raw materials is, moreover, not even a fixed natural datum, inasmuch as useful materials and their degree of relative usefulness vary from age to age, following scientific and technical progress and the habits of men: some come at a certain moment to be replaced by others, certain substances suddenly become usable, whereas before they were not, others again lose value, for economic reasons, with the changing of tastes and with the perfecting of the productive technique of synthetic products. For this reason the density of populations, which at the beginnings of history must undoubtedly have modeled itself on the geographical distribution of the raw materials then known and used, could not remain consistent with this natural criterion: and thus there have come to be formed, over time, local situations of wealth and of misery, followed by programs of expansion (imperialisms), by claims and by seizures that reflect rather concerns for the future than the real needs of today. Such situations therefore appear unjust and even cruel.

Self-sufficiency as regards raw materials gradually became the practical ideal of every national policy: when States did not make themselves outright shrewd merchants of raw materials, it was with the double aim both of national enrichment and of economic and political hegemony, exercised by rationing or denying to unprepared countries, through the play of prices, tariffs and economic policies in general, the raw materials of which these had need. In this way a profoundly materialistic orientation was given to the development of human societies, one that has seriously eroded, diverted or submerged the noblest ideals and concerns of a spiritual order, including the exercise of right and sound reason even in political activities: it then becoming easy to appeal, in moments of particular social friction, to a veritable general doctrine, historical materialism, for which nature seemed already to offer, with the unequal distribution of raw materials, a foundation of inescapable fatality. The rapid decline of colonialism, after the last world conflagration, and the rise of young and powerful nationalisms, have placed new stones upon the desired redistribution: nor do the current Permanent Conference for raw materials within the U.N. (limited to very few materials of military importance), or the measures following Truman's Point IV on depressed areas, yet point to an equitable and radical solution of the problem. Which is, moreover, one and the same with that of the redistribution of populations and with that of chronic or periodic unemployment.

A strange simplism has sometimes attempted to deny the existence of a problem of raw materials: let one recall the repeated declarations of Minister A. Eden of Great Britain during the last world war: "The problem of raw materials does not exist in absolute terms. Raw materials are at everyone's disposal: one need only pay for them": declarations which distinguished economists of ours made their own. The problem is in this way simply shifted from the territorial plane to that of the availability of means of payment and of freedom of exchange: that is to say, to the field of the general organization of the economy. The denial of the problem should therefore have been followed by the suggestion to abandon the political solution and to fall back on the economic one of greater freedom of exploitation and exchange, assisted by a more suitable ordering of markets and credit. A solution of this kind, the only truly rational one, will be facilitated if national policies leave freer course to the developing of the practical solidarities of peoples, destined to strengthen the conviction that the poverty of some represents a constant impediment and a constant threat to the wealth of others. Unfortunately, on the contrary, in human societies individual egoism re-emerges as collective egoism of category, of class or of nation, equally blind and dangerous, armed as it is with political force and exasperated by questions of prestige and by the spirit of reprisal. The permanent uneasiness, fed by the disparity of raw materials and, which is the same thing, by the deficiency of means of payment and by the obstacles to trade, provokes a continuous and nervous elaboration of defenses, claims and retaliations: whereby the old and new bureaucracies (administrative, political, trade-union, military) and the various parasitisms of a business and intermediary nature grow beyond measure, in addition to a vast work of political corruption: all to the indefinite increase of unproductive or scarcely productive labor, and to the progressive reduction of useful labor. Indeed, one generally succumbs to the suggestion that the handling of vast and complex problems requires centralized and compressive state organizations: whereas instead it should counsel recourse to more extensive automatisms, to decentralized articulations of private initiative within the framework of a true economic freedom, served and controlled by perfect monetary, credit, market and exchange instruments. Without which one will not succeed in breaking the vicious circle whereby the economy does not develop because it is compressed by politics, while the latter cannot give way unless the dangers of crisis and of wars, immanent in the problem of raw materials and in its direct consequences, have first disappeared.

Mario Baronci