Page 180 - Afrika Must Unite

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL INTEGRATION 165
Korea, Formosa, Pakistan, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, and the
West Indies, are too limited. . . . As a consequence, there is an
implicit movement in the world today towards regionalism - not
the regionalism of the various pacts inspired by the capitalist
world, although some of these may unwillingly foster the move­
ment. But a regionalism based upon economic and cultural
identification and co-operation.1

The greatest single lesson that can be drawn from the history
of industrial development in the world today is the uncounted
advantages which planning has in the first place over the laissez
faire go-as-you-please policies of the early pioneers of indus­
trialism; and secondly, how immensely superior planning on a
continental scale, allied to a socialized objective, has proved for
the giant latecomers into the realm of modern statehood over the
fragmented discordant attempts of disunited entities, as on the
South American continent. The rates of growth of the Soviet
Union and China are much higher even than that of the other
continental giant, the United States of America, whose economic
evolution stretched over a longer period of time and whose
capital accumulations, as a result of large-scale plantation farm ­
ing by slave labour, and the conversion of its products into
manufactured goods, were already considerable before her large-
scale industrialization got under way in earnest, after the war to
m aintain the union. America is the most vocal proponent of free
enterprise, unfettered by central planning. H er society shows the
most glaring social inequalities, from the Negro sharecropper
living close to or below the subsistence line and financial tycoons
amassing astronomical fortunes, with all possible gradations of
wealth and poverty in between. Sixteen million people still
rem ain unintegrated with the body politic.
Soviet embarkment upon planned industrialization occurred
on the edge of the nineteen-thirties, after a really critical
approach had been made to the intricate problems involved in
making the ‘take off5 with a paucity of reserves and resources
rather greater than our own at the present time. There were the
1 Prof. Oliver C. Cox of Lincoln University, U.S.A., in a paper entitled
Factors in Development o f Under-Developed Countries, delivered in Accra, June
1959-