RAW MATERIALS. — They are also improperly called "flocks," as those obtained directly, through so-called first-hand labor, from nature: land, sea, and atmosphere. In truth, they are the most important, as they pertain to mass consumption; when suitably transformed, they serve in the preparation of all other materials, which are termed, according to their more or less immediate use, semi-finished products and manufactured goods. Ordinarily, they are understood as those that give rise to industries; but it is evident that foodstuffs, agricultural land, and sources of energy—whether electrical (such as waterfalls), thermal (such as solid, liquid, or gaseous fuels), or atomic (as uranium is today)—also fall within this category; and, by extension, so do climatic resources and human labor.
Raw materials thus represent the true and fundamental material wealth for the life of individuals and nations, constituting one of the basic reasons around which much of social events revolve and by which they are explained. The historical or arbitrary division of the earth’s surface into distinct plots or political States has created a geographical distribution of raw materials that bears no relation to the actual needs of consumption, as determined by the varying density of populations and their level of civilization. The exchange infrastructure, particularly monetary and credit systems, which might have corrected this situation, has never functioned properly, chiefly because political considerations have habitually taken precedence over economic ones—a precedence to which we owe the fact that exchange techniques remain in an imperfect stage of development, inadequate to the needs of humanity (cf. PROGRESS; EXCHANGE).
Moreover, the distribution of raw materials is not a fixed natural given, since useful materials and their relative utility change from era to era, following scientific and technical progress and the habits of men: some are at a certain point replaced by others, certain substances suddenly become usable when previously they were not, while others lose value for economic reasons as tastes change and production techniques improve with synthetic products. For this reason, the concentration of populations, which in the early stages of history must certainly have conformed to the geographical distribution of then-known and utilized raw materials, has not been able to remain consistent with this natural criterion; and over time, local situations of wealth and poverty have formed, followed by programs of expansion (imperialisms), claims, and monopolies that reflect more concerns for the future than the real needs of today. Such situations thus appear unjust and even cruel.
Self-sufficiency in raw materials gradually becomes the practical ideal of every national policy: when States do not indeed become shrewd merchants of raw materials, with the dual aim of national enrichment and economic and political hegemony, exercised by controlling or denying to less-endowed countries—through the interplay of prices, tariffs, and economic policies in general—the raw materials they need. In this way, human societies have been given a profoundly materialistic orientation that has gravely undermined, diverted, or submerged the noblest ideals and concerns of a spiritual nature, including the exercise of right and sound reason even in political activities; and it has then become easy to invoke, in moments of particular social friction, a veritable general doctrine, historical materialism, for which nature itself seemed 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 obstacles in the path of the desired redistribution; nor do the current Permanent Conference on Raw Materials within the U.N. (limited to a few materials of military importance) or the measures following Truman’s Point Four for depressed areas yet point to an equitable and radical solution to the problem. This problem is, moreover, one with that of the redistribution of populations and with that of chronic or periodic unemployment.
A strange simplism has at times attempted to deny the existence of a raw materials problem: one need only recall the repeated declarations of the British Minister A. Eden during the last world conflict: “The raw materials problem does not exist in absolute terms. Raw materials are at everyone’s disposal: one need only pay for them.” Statements that were endorsed by distinguished economists of our own country. The problem is thus simply shifted from the territorial plane to that of the availability of means of payment and freedom of exchange—that is, 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 political solutions and revert to an economic one of greater freedom in exploitation and exchange, assisted by a more suitable organization of markets and credit. A solution of this kind, the only truly rational one, will be facilitated if national policies allow greater scope for the development of the practical solidarities among peoples, destined to strengthen the conviction that the poverty of some represents an ever-increasing cost and a constant obstacle to the improvement of the wealth of others. Unfortunately, however, in human societies, individual selfishness is mirrored as collective selfishness of categories, classes, or nations—equally blind and dangerous, armed as it is with political power and exacerbated by partisan issues and the spirit of representation. The persistent unrest, fueled by the hope for raw materials and, equally, by the scarcity of means of payment and the obstacles to trade, provokes a continuous and nervous elaboration of defenses, claims, and reprisals; in consequence, old and new bureaucracies (administrative, political, trade union, military) and various forms of parasitic intermediation and business dealings, as well as widespread political corruption, have grown to enormous proportions—all contributing to the indefinite expansion of unproductive or barely productive labor and the progressive reduction of useful labor. In fact, it is generally succumbed to the suggestion that the discipline of vast and complex problems demands centralized and coercive state organizations; whereas, instead, it should counsel recourse to more extensive automatisms and decentralized articulations of private initiative within a framework of true economic freedom, served and controlled by perfect monetary, credit, market, and exchange instruments. Without this, the vicious circle will not be broken whereby the economy does not develop because it is constrained by politics, while politics cannot give way unless the dangers of crises and wars, inherent in the raw materials problem and its direct consequences, have first disappeared.