The Modern Review/Volume 38/Number 5/The Next Economic Stage
THE NEXT ECONOMIC STAGE
By PROF. NALINAKSHA SANYAL, m.a
In the very primitive stage of human life man never knew how to make things for his own use. He lived by hunting and by gathering fruits etc., or by otherwise appropriating nature’s products directly for his own consumption. There was no industry, no division of labour, no private property. Economists have called this the hunting stage.
In the second stage, known as the pastoral stage, men learnt to domesticate animals. The necessity for securing food for future consumption was felt and the only way towards this was found in keeping herds of animals ready for future satisfaction of wants. The animals required pasture and the life of man necessarily grew to be nomadic.
Animals however could not eternally supply food for the growing generations of men. Nature had to be controlled and directed to produce provisions for human beings. Men learnt to utilise nature’s power for raising food products for themselves. The agricultural stage was reached. Gradually the idea of private property developed and a system of some division of labour was also noticed.
The fourth stage was reached with the adoption of hand-made manufactures. Man’s necessities began to grow and the ideas of self-sufficiency and exclusiveness gave place to conceptions of inter-dependence and co-operation. Men produced articles at home with materials and tools collected by themselves and exchanged them directly with consumers by way of barter. This handicraft stage evolved through different manifestations and ultimately led to the industrial stage of modern times.
In the industrial stage manual power is largely replaced by machines and nature is made to help mankind with steam and electric power. A complete revolution in the methods of production, transportation as well as exchange is brought about, and men become more and more inter-dependent. Barter gives way to money economy. Mechanism of exchange becomes intricate with the introduction of credit. Division of labour becomes wider and finer and extends to territorial division through international trade. Private property develops with a vengeance. Capitalists command economic destinies of nations and labour is completely dissociated from any control of production. This is the present economic stage. No human institution however is ordained to remain static and signs are already manifest of the possible break-up of the present economic order. The growing demand of labour to participate more fully in the fruits of production, the cry for the destruction of capitalism, the problems of the trusts and the kartels, the combination of numerous small capitalists with labourers in joint-stock or co-partnership production, the growth of credit in all its manifestations, the nationalisation of productive organizations (culminating in Bolshevik destruction of private property in the case of Russia) are all steady indications of the coming of a new era.
In this coming age industry is likely to take up corporate form. Partly on account of the growing difficulties of competition and partly on development in the ideas of co-operation, the individual manufacturer will have hardly any scope for making a stand in the future economic world. Credit will almost ccmpletely replace money and a complexer form of barter with paper measures for values of articles will grow as the principal method of exchange. The object of production will primarily consist in offering “service” to mankind and the ideas of making money or profiteering will almost totally disappear. All benefits of industrial achievements will proceed ultimately to the community at large being filtered through individuals, syndicates and the newly organised state. The conception of private property will be revised totally and the laws of inheritance and transfer re-written, and re-modelled.