Resource exploitation

“ Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources or necessarily of producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to re-establish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of under-consumption, or adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organisation to the service of the people. ”

“ But can the proprietors of mines be prevented from associating, from reducing their general expenses and costs of exploitation, and from working their mines to better advantage by a more perfect understanding with each other? ”

“ The economic surplus which the industrial revolution of the latter eighteenth century created was the product of a crude, extensive exploitation of our natural resources. With the aid of the steam engine men skimmed the cream of the mines, the forests, and the new soil of the American continent. ”

“ Only in a regime of public ownership and operation will the full benefits accruing from centralized control and mass production be passed on to the consuming public.
Transportation, communications and electric power must come first in a list of industries to be socialized. Others, such as mining, pulp and paper and the distribution of milk, bread, coal and gasoline, in which exploitation, waste, or financial malpractices are particularly prominent must next be brought under social ownership and operation. ”

“ It is true that the manifold multiplication of riches in the last four centuries is due primarily to inventions for the exploitation of natural resources, but the capitalistic method is ideally fitted for the utilization of these new discoveries and for laying up of their increment for ultimate social use. ”

“ Countless trained intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. ”

“ We have built upon this most uncertain apex as a base, an inverted pyramid by which ocean and land carriers, merchants, brokers, speculators, and every branch of parasite commerce were to wax lustily. We may devise as we will rural credits, schools of agriculture, prophets of agrarian science, bellowing from the tail-end of peripatetic railway coaches, grants of seed, warrants, elevators, labour-saving machinery, and every other panacea to nurse the sick field labourer. ”

“ The people of this country are too wise to permit the private ownership of land and the means of production, and thus deprive themselves of the abundance, that can be provided for all by the intelligent application of human labor to those natural resources which exceed in productiveness all the demand that can be made upon them. ”

“ But the unnecessary expansion of industrial plants, the waste of natural resources, the exploitation of the consumers of natural monopolies, the accumulation of stagnant surpluses, child labor, and the ruthless exploitation of all labor, the encouragement of speculation with other people's money, these were consumed in the fires that they themselves kindled; we must make sure that as we reconstruct our life there be no soil in which such weeds can grow again. ”

“ As their primary task businessmen devoted themselves to the exploitation of labor power and the storage and merchandising of the products turned out by herdsmen, farmers, craftsmen. Part of their profits went into more elaborate standards of feeding, clothing and housing themselves and their dependents. ”

“ The commercial exploitation of natural resources, being fundamental to modern civilization, attracts a liberal share of the talents and energies of workers trained for the industrial professions. A second trend has specialized in the further development of the sciences which are characteristic of our time. ”

“ But while this result is gradually brought about by the manufacturers endeavouring to produce their goods by means [208] of machinery, at as little cost and with as great facility as it is possible to attain, the thousands who gained their subsistence by the labour which these machines have supplied, are left without a resource; they must crawl out the remainder of their miserable lives as they can, and are left to famish, to beg, or to steal. ”

“ The exploitation of the natural resources of the United States and the really marvelous growth of the country have resulted in some large fortunes which catch the public attention, but they have also resulted in countless small accumulations of property all over the country, as shown by the deposits in the banks and by the amount of life insurance carried. ”

“ He who takes the standpoint of production sees the enormous undeveloped resources of this country—the mines to be exploited, railroads and highways to be built and rebuilt, farms to be opened up or to be more intensively cultivated, manufactures to be multiplied, and the markets of the world to be conquered by our exports, while there are not enough workmen, or not enough willing to do the hard and disagreeable work at the bottom. ”

“ We may conclude, then, that improvements in production, and emigration of capital to the more fertile soils and unworked mines of the uninhabited or thinly peopled parts of the globe, do not, as appears to a superficial view, diminish the gross produce and the demand for labour at home ”

“ Particular attention should be given to the industries rounded upon natural resources, especially where destructive competition produces great wastes of these resources and brings great hardships upon operators, employees, and the public. ”

“ Is it not time to turn from the perspective of history to the realities of the present day economic organizations? Here, in the twentieth century, civilization of the Western World is an economic system which automatically turns into the coffers of those who control the natural resources (forests, ore, coal, fertile land) an endless stream of wealth. ”

“ Cheap food, climate, soil, or natural advantages, such as cheap land, vast plains for pasture, or rich mines, may give to a country wealth and prosperity in spite of the evils of depreciated paper money; but when we come in competition with the world in the advanced grades of production which give employment to the skilled mechanic, we must rest such industry upon the gold basis, or we enter the lists like a knight with his armor unbound. ”

“ Something must be done to develop the resources of this country. With the best lands of the world; with a population intellectual, energetic, and ingenious far beyond the average of mankind; with the richest mines of the globe; with plenty of capital; with a surplus of labor; with thousands of arms folded in enforced idleness; with billions of gold asking to be dug; with millions of acres waiting for the plow, thousands upon thousands are in absolute want. ”

“ As has been said before, there are to be included in the improvements which increase the value of land not only the improvements which directly increase productive power, but also such improvements in government, manners and morals as indirectly increase it. Considered as material forces, the effect of all these is to increase productive power and, like improvements in the productive arts, their benefit is ultimately monopolized by the possessors of the land. ”

“ With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labor more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody. ”

“ The cheapness, fertility, and quantity of our waste lands, offer such powerful inducements to cultivation, that our countrymen are constantly engaging in it. I would not check this disposition, by hard terms in the sale of it. Let it be easily accessible to all who wish to acquire it. But I would countervail this predilection, by presenting to capital and labor motives for employment in other branches of industry. Nothing is more uncertain than the pursuit of agriculture, when we mainly rely upon foreign markets for the sale of its surplus produce. ”

“ We are just entering upon our development. We are just beginning to export the products of our mines, so when we ask the question whether this great Nation will continue to grow, and this industry will increase, there is but one answer, and that is in the affirmative. We ask another question—are these resources inexhaustible? And there is but one answer, and that is in the negative, because we are now beginning to see the end of some of these resources. Shall we curtail the development of an industry like this and not supply the needs of the people? ”

“ The splendid machinery of production created during the last century must not be destroyed, but utilized for the benefit of mankind. The question which we have now to ask ourselves is this: What is the ultimate purpose for which the business [Pg 107] of the world is conducted, what the real purpose of all this planting and reaping, this mining and manufacturing, this exchanging of commodities? Is it not, primarily, to furnish each human creature with food, shelter, and clothing,—the means of supporting life? Men require something more than the mere means of subsistence ”

“ That is not overproduction—it is either bad manufacturing or bad financing. Is business good or bad according to the dictates of fate? Must we accept the conditions as inevitable? Business is good or bad as we make it so. The only reason for growing crops, for mining, or for manufacturing, is that people may eat, keep warm, have clothing to wear, and articles to use. ”

“ Old work-places are closed, production is regulated and organised, profits are guaranteed when works are idle, economies in management are effected, processes of manufacture are specialised and differentiated. The waste involved in competitive industry is enormous, and the sheer force of circumstances is tending to eliminate it.
4. Waste of Labour.
One further consideration must be noted. We have seen that the private ownership of land and capital is a serious drain upon national wealth and a heavy burden upon national production. ”

“ They are dependent for food upon the producers of food stuffs in agriculture and manufacturing. Miners must be clothed; and are thus compelled to look to the textile workers and to those of kindred industries. Miners must be sheltered; and the lumber and building workers supply that necessity. The products of the mines have to be transported; and so the transportation workers on land and sea play their part in the process.
That process of wealth production today is a social process—international and world-wide in its scope. ”

“ The appropriation of things other than land, such as brute animals, grain, timber, minerals, and generally the raw materials, of which all the commodities which men need or desire are made, does not so interfere; for there is no limit, or no known limit, to the supply of things of this class which men by labor can acquire, if the land, which is the source of supply, be not monopolized. ”

“ The tendency, then, being to a perpetual increase of the productive power of labour in manufactures, while in agriculture and mining there is a conflict between two tendencies, the one towards an increase of productive power, the other towards a diminution of it, the cost of production being lessened by every improvement in the processes, and augmented by every addition to population; it follows that the exchange values of manufactured articles, compared with the products of agriculture and of mines, have, as population and industry advance, a certain and decided tendency to fall. ”

“ The materials of manufacture being all drawn from the land, and many of them from agriculture, which supplies in particular the entire material of clothing; the general law of production from the land, the law of diminishing return, must in the last resort be applicable to manufacturing as well as to agricultural history. As population increases, and the power of the land to yield increased produce is strained harder and harder, any additional supply of material, as well as of food, must be obtained by a more than proportionally increasing expenditure of labour. ”

“ Capitalism will harness these hundreds of millions of cheap toilers to the most modern tools of production, and this cheap labor, surrounded with seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, will come in direct competition with the workers of the Western world. ”

“ As there is little demand for the products of labor, the production must decrease to conform to the decreased demand. Employment must be restricted, wages must be reduced, and transportation and every form of exchange must shrink with a shrinking circulation. There must be less employment on the farm, less employment in the factories and forests, less employment in the mines, less employment on the lines of transportation, less employment of merchants and middlemen, less increase and distribution of the things which are necessary to the comfort and subsistence of the human family. ”

“ We propose to own the commodities we produce ourselves and to exchange commodities containing a certain quantity of necessary social labor, for other commodities representing an equal quantity of necessary social labor.
You and I work for the boss because he owns the factory or mine or railroad or the mill. Ownership of the means of production and distribution (the factories, land, mines, mills—the machinery that produces things) makes masters of capitalists and wage-workers of you and me. ”