[35] The ideas of Guild Socialism were first set forth in ``National Guilds,'' edited by A.R.Orage (Bell & Sons, 1914), and in Cole's ``World of Labour'' (Bell & Sons), first published in 1913.Cole's ``Self- Government in Industry'' (Bell & Sons, 1917) and Rickett & Bechhofer's``The Meaning of National Guilds'' (Palmer & Hayward, 1918) should also be read, as well as various pamphlets published by the National Guilds League.The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild Socialism is far from sympathetic.An article in ``The Syndicalist'' for February, 1914, speaks of it in the following terms: a Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings (we had almost said `stupidities') of the middle- classes writ large across it, `Guild Socialism' stands forth as the latest lucubration of the middle-class mind.It is a `cool steal' of the leading ideas of Syndicalism and a deliberate perversion of them....We do protest against the `State' idea...in Guild Socialism.Middle-class people,even when they become Socialists, cannot get rid of the idea that the working-class is their `inferior'; that the workers need to be `educated,' drilled, disciplined, and generally nursed for a very long time before they will be able to walk by themselves.The very reverse is actually the truth....It is just the plain truth when we say that the ordinary wage- worker, of average intelligence, is better capable of taking care of himself than the half-educated middle-class man who wants to advise him.He knows how to make the wheels of the world go round.''
The first pamphlet of the ``National Guilds League'' sets forth their main principles.In industry each factory is to be free to control its own methods of production by means of elected managers.The different factories in a given industry are to be federated into a National Guild which will deal with marketing and the general interests of the industry as a whole.``The State would own the means of production as trustee for the community; the Guilds would manage them, also as trustees for the community, and would pay to the State a single tax or rent.Any Guild that chose to set its own interests above those of the community would be violating its trust, and would have to bow to the judgment of a tribunal equally representing the whole body of producers and the whole body of consumers.This Joint Committee would be the ultimate sovereign body, the ultimate appeal court of industry.It would fix not only Guild taxation, but also standard prices, and both taxation and prices would be periodically readjusted by it.'' Each Guild will be entirely free to apportion what it receives among its members as it chooses, its members being all those who work in the industry which it covers.``The distribution of this collective Guild income among the members seems to be a matter for each Guild to decide for itself.Whether the Guilds would, sooner or later, adopt the principle of equal payment for every member, is open to discussion.'' Guild Socialism accepts from Syndicalism the view that liberty is not to be secured by making the State the employer: ``The State and the Municipality as employers have turned out not to differ essentially from the private capitalist.'' Guild Socialists regard the State as consisting of the community in their capacity as consumers, while the Guilds will represent them in their capacity as producers; thus Parliament and the GuildCongress will be two co-equal powers representing consumers and producers respectively.Above both will be the joint Committee of Parliament and the Guild Congress for deciding matters involving the interests of consumers and producers alike.The view of the Guild Socialists is that State Socialism takes account of men only as consumers, while Syndicalism takes account of them only as producers.``The problem,'' say the Guild Socialists, ``is to reconcile the two points of view.That is what advocates of National Guilds set out to do.The Syndicalist has claimed everything for the industrial organizations of producers, the Collectivist everything for the territorial or political organizations of consumers.Both are open to the same criticism; you cannot reconcile two points of view merely by denying one of them.''[36] But although Guild Socialism represents an attempt at readjustment between two equally legitimate points of view, its impulse and force are derived from what it has taken over from Syndicalism.Like Syndicalism; it desires not primarily to make work better paid, but to secure this result along with others by making it in itself more interesting and more democratic in organization.
[36] The above quotations are all from the first pamphlet of the National Guilds League, ``National Guilds, an Appeal to Trade Unionists.''
Capitalism has made of work a purely commercial activity, a soulless and a joyless thing.But substitute the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of the few; substitute responsible labor for a saleable commodity; substitute self-government and decentralization for the bureaucracy and demoralizing hugeness of the modern State and the modern joint stock company; and then it may be just once more to speak of a ``joy in labor,'' and once more to hope that men may be proud of quality and not only of quantity in their work.There is a cant of the Middle Ages, and a cant of ``joy in labor,'' but it were better, perhaps, to risk that cant than to reconcile ourselves forever to the philosophy of Capitalism and of Collectivism, which declares that work is a necessary evil never to be made pleasant, and that the workers' only hope is a leisure which shall be longer, richer, and well adorned with municipal amenities.[37]
[37] ``The Guild Idea,'' No.2 of the Pamphlets of the National Guilds League, p.17.
Whatever may be thought of the practicability of Syndicalism, there is no doubt that the ideas which it has put into the world have done a great deal to revive the labor movement and to recall it to certain things of fundamental importance which it had been in danger of forgetting.Syndicalists consider man as producer rather than consumer.They are more concerned to procure freedom in work than to increase material well-being.They have revived the quest for liberty, which was growing somewhat dimmed under the regime of Parliamentary Socialism, and they have reminded men that what our modern society needs is not a little tinkering here and there, nor the kind of minor readjustments to which the existing holders of power may readily consent, but a fundamental reconstruction, a sweeping away of all the sources of oppression, a liberation of men's constructive energies, and a wholly new way of conceiving and regulating production and economic relations.This merit is so great that, in view of it, all minor defects become insignificant, and this merit Syndicalism will continue to possess even if, as a definite movement, it should be found to have passed away with the war.
