The ‘Freedom from Hunger’ campaign has focussed the attention of the more favoured countries on the glaring inequalities that exist in the world today between nations. There is much talk of ‘one world’, and with the immense speeding up of communications, physically speaking, this concept is now real. But the world is divided into two camps as clearly as when Disraeli wrote about the ‘two nations’ in Victorian England. On the one hand, there are the ‘provided for’, those who enjoy this world’s goods and live in plenty and luxury; and on the other hand, the ‘have-nots’ who stagnate in want and are familiar only with the fear of hunger, sickness and death. Far from being filled up, the gap between these two groups is growing wider, for prosperity breeds prosperity, and want engenders want.

The amount of actual hunger and under-nourishment in the world is difficult to calculate, for under-developed countries have underdeveloped statistics. And scientists differ about what actually constitutes under-feeding in terms of calories and so on. This has led at times to exaggeration. It does not seem at all true, as is sometimes claimed, that two out of three people in the world go to bed hungry. The best evidence, produced by Dr P. V. Sukhatme of FAO in May 1961, estimates the proportion as between ten and fifteen per cent, that is to say between 300 million and 450 million of the inhabitants of the world. Malnutrition is also a scourge of the less developed countries and leads to diseases such as kwashiorkor, pellagra, beriberi, etc. The same report puts the number of those suffering from under-nutrition and malnutrition as fifty per cent of the world’s inhabitants.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, has given free hand to the Indian ruling classes in their campaign against the Indian babies. Under the unofficial, yet distinctly recognizable, leadership of Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, wife of India’s prominent banker and diplomat, the male and female representatives of wealth and high society gather around the banner of ‘The Family Planning Association’. With official blessings they hold meetings and distribute their propaganda with the avowed purpose of pressing for more drastic measures against over-population.

Progress has been made during the last ten years; from moderate beginnings with the advocacy of the ‘safe period’, the Association and the Health Ministry went on to endorse artificial contraceptives and sterilization, so that today there is a growing demand for legalized abortion. No Tibetan crisis or Chinese threat is capable of turning these people’s minds from their single goal—the decimation of future Indian generations.

Justification is provided by the humanitarian and patriotic motives that inspire their relentless struggles against the natural expansion of the race. Arguments are invoked about world peace, which is to be promoted by their efforts; others claim that population limitation is vindicated on religious grounds because it prevents millions of souls ‘cascading into perdition’.

For many it has already become a way of life, and an end in itself that no longer requires any theoretical or practical justification. As one of the ladies at a recent meeting of the Family Planning Association summed it up: ‘We are on the lookout for children everywhere. Where there are children there must be parents.

The discussion of the Government’s incomes policy has overshadowed discussion of the setting up of the National Economic Development Council. This is hardly surprising. Every individual is not only very concerned with what goes into his pay packet, he is also fully aware of what is happening to it. Economic growth, inflation and a host of other factors, may have just as great a bearing on his standard of living as the amount of cash he actually takes home, but, for all that, it is a less obvious bearing. Nevertheless, the question of economic growth is a vital one for each individual, and for the community as a whole. Moreover, it is a question that is intimately connected with the subject of incomes policy. In the present article, economic growth will be considered under three headings. The first is the desirability of economic growth; the second, the facts which account for slow or rapid growth; and thirdly, the possibility of framing a policy for more rapid growth in Britain.

Since the war, Britain has been faced with the problem of inflation. During the war, inflation occurred because of the very heavy Government spending on war materials, a restricted supply of civilian goods for consumption, and a reluctance to raise taxation to the level where it would have left civilians with just enough money to buy the greatly restricted supply of civilian goods available. Many economists thought that the high level of personal savings (which did much to keep inflation from getting entirely out of hand) would prove a useful defence against any post-war depression.

Simone Weil was still a school-girl when she discovered Marx, and in a way through Marx the crisis-stricken Europe of the late twenties and the early thirties. While deeply influenced by Marx in her earlier writings, his doctrine was never a revelation or a religion for her. Her syndicalist experience showed her the inability of orthodox marxism to cope with twentieth century problems. Her enormous knowledge of the history of philosophy prevented her from being satisfied by a relatively poor and fragmentary philosophical system. Her moral and metaphysical aspirations were not met by Marx’s answers to eternal human problems. She threw off his influence quickly, long before her religious experiences. She still retained a strong interest in several marxist problems and especially in that of ‘estranged labour’. Her early writings describe and question. The works of her maturity answer. No one else has created so rich a synthesis of the problems which might have been raised while attempting to analyse labour. Although Plato and Marx are the most important contributors to this synthesis, its answers are of purely Christian inspiration.

One may say without hesitation that the most original, if not the only original, idea of Marx in the field of philosophy proper was that of the alienation of labour. The whole pathetic richness of his early writings culminates in his description of ‘estranged labour’. How the worker is alienated from the product of the work which will be not his own. How he is alienated from his work since it does not serve him, and how he comes to hate it as causing pain and suffering. The worker is no more the subject but the object of the work.