We suffer frequent periods of so-called bad luck only because we manage so badly. If we had a vast crop failure, I can imagine the country going hungry, but I cannot conceive how it is that we tolerate hunger and poverty, when they grow solely out of bad management, and especially out of the bad management that is implicit in an unreasoned financial structure[160]. Of course the war upset affairs in this country. It upset the whole world. There would have been no war had management been better. But the war alone is not to blame. The war showed up a great number of the defects of the financial system <i.e. laid open the failure of hopes for the self-regulation of production and consumption by a free market in connection with the actual living needs>, but more than anything else it showed how insecure is business supported only by a money foundation. I do not know whether bad business is the result of bad financial methods or whether the wrong motive in business created bad financial methods[161], but I do know that, while it would be wholly undesirable to try to overturn the present financial system, it is wholly desirable to reshape business on the basis of service. Then a better financial system will have to come. The present system will drop out because it will have no reason for being. The process will have to be a gradual one.
The start toward the stabilization of his own affairs may be made by any one. One cannot achieve perfect results acting alone, but as the example begins to sink in there will be followers[162], and this in the course of time we can hope to put inflated business and its fellow, depressed business, into a class with small-pox — that is, into the class of preventable diseases. It is perfectly possible, with the reorganization of business and finance that is bound to come about, to take the ill effect of seasons, if not the seasons, out of industry, and also the periodic depressions» (Ch. 9. “Why Not Always Have Good Business?”).
Those were the thoughts of H. Ford about the problems caused by the absence of planning basis and they might have been regarded as simple complaints which do not oblige and do not exhort to do anything. But it is not so considering the general context of his book where in chapter 7 he makes direct statements on the objectively formed necessity to include planning basis into the economy of society:
«There are far too many assumptions about what human nature ought to be and not enough research into what it is. Take the assumption that creative work can be undertaken only in the realm of vision. We speak of creative “artists” in music, painting, and the other arts. We seemingly limit the creative functions to productions that may be hung on gallery walls, or played in concert halls, or otherwise displayed where idle and fastidious people gather to admire each other’s culture (put in bold type by the authors)[163]. But if a man wants a field for vital creative work, let him come where he is dealing with higher laws than those of sound, or line, or color; let him come where he may deal with the laws of personality. We want artists in industrial relationship. We want masters in industrial method — both from the standpoint of the producer and the product. We want those who can mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole. We have limited the creative faculty too much and have used it for too trivial ends (put in bold type by the authors)[164].
We want men who can create the working design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life. Good intentions plus well-thought-out working designs can be put into practice and can be made to succeed. It is possible to increase the well-being of the workingman — not by having him do less work, but by aiding him to do more. If the world will give its attention and interest and energy to the making of plans that will profit the other fellow as he is, then such plans can be established on a practical working basis. Such plans will endure — and they will be far the most profitable both in human and financial values (isolated in a separate paragraph and put in bold type by the authors).
What this generation needs is a deep faith, a profound conviction in the practicability of righteousness, justice, and humanity in industry. If we cannot have these qualities, then we were better off without industry. Indeed, if we cannot get those qualities, the days of industry are numbered. But we can get them. We are getting them (isolated in a separate paragraph and put in bold type by the authors) (Ch. 7. “The Terror of the Machine”).[165]
Ford was mistaken in his evaluation of the perspectives: the days of industry are not over. But he was right in his apprehension that in the historically developed by that time (it was only 1922) form industry does not have a right for existence. He was right: the global biosphere and environment crisis, an unquestionable attribute of the life of mankind in the last quarter of the 20th century and in the foreseeable perspective of the 21st century, is a result of predominance of those methods of managing which Ford foresaw, condemned and warned against offering his alternative.
Yet the problem of alternative principles of managing organization on the basis of demographically grounded target definition and of planning in long-term successions is connected with the question how a problem of freedom of man is comprehended within a society. Depending on the answer to this question a private-capitalist enterprise and «free market» system will pass to this alternative according to its own free will or it will happen inevitably under the influence of extra-social (biosphere-ecological crisis and people’s physical and psychological degradation) and intra-social conditions (social and political activity, uncompromising initiative of the more progressive part of society).
In one of his interviews Stalin commented upon the rights and freedom of man:
«I can hardly imagine what «personal freedom» an unemployed may have, he who walks hungry and cannot find an application of his labor. The real freedom exists only where exploitation is destroyed, where there is no oppression of people by other people, where there is no unemployment and hunger, where a man does not live in fear of losing his job, his house, his bread next day[166]. Only in such society real and not official, personal or any other freedom is possible[167]» (from a conversation with the chairman of a news-paper union Roy Howard, March 1, 1936).
It has been mentioned that the high level of individual social protection including the guarantees of economic rights (which are essentially creative and consumer’s rights) and freedoms calls for control. I.e. it calls for a demographically grounded definition of targets and efficient regulation of product exchange, in a multiindustrial production and consumption system from which the society obtains the majority of consumed goods.
11 years later (in the year of H. Ford’s death) Stalin has a discussion with another foreign interviewer concerning the problem of necessity to regulate production and distribution in national economy in order to get free from the vicious circle of economic depressions and social disorder resulting from the latter.
«J.V. Stalin asks: And what about the businessmen? Are they willing to be controlled and limited?
Stassen answers that they usually object to it.
J.V. Stalin observes that they will surely object» (from a conversation with some Stassen, April 7, 1947).
Stassen’s answer actually proved that Stalin was right in rejecting H. Wells’ statement of bourgeoisie’s kindness. In the other aspect a question of necessity of governmental regulation of private enterprise is a question of private and state ownership over means of production and a question of relationship between the state and any individual of the society and especially the businessman.