[h2]1932 Essay{/h2]
The world at the present day is suffering from two misfortunes : there are people who desire goods which they cannot purchase, and there are people who have goods which they cannot sell. Those who have goods which they cannot sell are adopting various ingenious means of disposing of their surplus.
Brazil, which suffers from a surplus of coffee, has taken to using it as fuel on the railways and to burning it on large funeral pyres in lonely valleys. There is a glut of rubber, which is unfortunately made worse by the fact that the natives cannot be restrained from tapping the rubber trees. Fortunately rubber trees are subject to a pest, which has hitherto been combated but which is now about to be encouraged. The world's cotton crop has, in the past, been threatened by the boll weevil, but now the boll weevil is welcomed as a friend, since it helps to prevent overproduction of cotton.
Nobody has thought for a moment that it might be a good thing if somebody could enjoy the produce of human labour. Our morality is ascetic, which makes us regard work as a virtue; it follows that production is good and consumption is bad. This ascetic twist has produced a world system in which half the world is poor because it produces too much and the other half because it consumes too little.
What is the cure for this queer insanity?...
... It seems clear that to improve trade, we must find some way of bringing goods to those who want them. So far, however, the collective wisdom of mankind has not been equal to this effort. People not yet in asylums suggest that the cure for unemployment due to overproduction is to be sought in longer hours. I think it is clear that to start the economic machine again working normally it will be necessary no longer to demand that each operation should at each moment be profitable. There is food rotting in the West of the United States and Canada; there are unemployed populations starving in all the industrial regions throughout the world. If the food were brought to the starving populations, and they were set to work such as would satisfy the wants of Western farmers, the world would be the richer even if no individual capitalist made a profit.The motive of individual profit has apparently broken down, and only organised public effort will restore the economic life of the world.
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