Functional socialism

THE REVIVAL OF GUILD SOCIALISM 147

Those who owned and controlled the sources of wealth commanded also the labour which produced the wealth, and in commanding labour they controlled the foundations of society and its political superstructure.

‘These sentences, culled from Beer’s abstract of my analysis of the wage system (in National Guilds it runs to nearly one hundred pages), indicate clearly enough that it was a condition precedent to any “‘national” solution that wagery must be transformed into partnership. That is why the Guild Socialists were never tired of urging the trade unionists always to strike for status, and never for minor modifications of wage conditions, or trivial additions to wage rates, which could be easily absorbed in higher prices.

For my part, I am still unrepentant. I am as certain now, as twenty years ago, that all our efforts and schemes—industrial, financial or social—are of no ayail until the worker controls every process of industry. The National Guild was devised for precisely that purpose. It was evident, then as now, that the way to kill the commodity valuation of labour was for labour, primarily through the trade unions, to secure a monopoly of labour. Hence the Guild Socialists’ plea to the workers to form “blackleg proof unions”. I add that the wage system is as much a moral as an economic blot upon our civilization. The strange moral blindness of practically the whole community to the wickedness, the degradation, of wagery is not dissimilar from the attitude of the Southern planters to slavery. There is a difference not to the credit of this generation: the planters main-