Functional socialism

MOTIVE IOI

Unlike the small man with the small garden, they are always on the alert. As who would say: “I know the meaning of the economic struggle, and I’ll bear my share; but I want music or literature or athletics or travel, or I have a religious mission. To do these things I want all I can get, and I mean to support everything that strengthens the economic position”. This type, in fact, represents the majority of the workers, whether in the counting-house or the workshop. Whilst, therefore, within the functional jurisdiction, the organization of the personnel must provide the ladder for all who have ambitions to rise in the functional hierarchy, what ultimately counts most is to provide the means and leisure for all men and women of active mind and habit. An industrious community is a healthy community, but its interests properly extend far beyond workshop and factory. What was written twenty years ago in National Guilds is equally true now:

It is doubtful whether the majority of mankind regard their means of livelihood as the main concern of life. “They would fain work that they may live; wagery compels them to live that they may work. The preoccupations, practical and spiritual, of bare subsistence benumb faculties and aspirations of incalculable value. It is impossible to move amongst even the most poorly paid wage-slaves without encountering signs of genius, of thought, of artistic or literary or religious cravings. We haye written it before, but it bears constant repetition: the case for democracy is that it is the inexhaustible well from which the nation draws its resources, human,