Half-hours With the W.E.A.

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 52, 8 July 1932, Page 13

Half-hours With the W.E.A.

The World Crisis-Some Longterm Trends

(By Mr.

W.T.G.

Airey

, M.A.)

No. 2-The Industrial God. From 1YA, Wednesday, July 138. Because of the rapid development of the power to produce, as against social, politicai organisation, industry and its adjuncts have tended to become masters of man instead of his servants -a great industrial god that broods menacingly over mankind, and that we dare not stop worshipping. This is best seen in that, for some forty or fifty years, instead of producing to satisfy recognised needs, the emphasis has all been on finding markets for goods and employment for men. Industrialism has violently disturbed established economic and social relationships. (a) Growth of urban populations involving loss of contact of the mass of the people with the land and the means of production. (b) Impersonal dependence on wage employment, which in turn depends on factors over which the employee has no control, eg., drought in a distant country. a change of fashion, the invention of some new pro\@ess. tof Loss of personal relationship with "employers-spirit of antagonism accentuated by the spirit of competitive individualism which ac: companies growth of modern industrialism. Socialism is the result of industrialism, aiming at economic democracy. In its various forms it has had influence on general trends of thought and action — ‘We are all Socialists, more or less." Whatever our views on the remedies suggested, we must recognise that there is a problem in the economic-industrial sphere needing solution. Until it is solved there must be social discontent and a real failure in the output for social welfare and development.