Functional socialism

THE REVIVAL OF GUILD SOCIALISM ISI

Plainly, a sound system of finance was essential to our picture. The conclusion was that the Guilds must be their own bankers, with their own national bank and clearing house. Two practical issues promptly emerged: international exchange and gold. The Guilds must buy from abroad food and raw materials. How were they to pay? With their own goods to the utmost limit and necessarily sold in the currency of their purchasers. As gold was then the universal medium, the Guilds’ foreign transactions must be in gold. But gold was simply meaningless in the internal finance of the Guilds. Here I may quote:

Having abolished wages, and in consequence knocked the bottom out of the fund from which rent, interest and profits are drawn, it becomes evident that labour value has zpso facto supplanted gold values. It would therefore be a work of supererogation to persist with a monetary system that has lost all vital relationship to reality. A Guild member obviously does not earn each week £2 15s. 74d.; such a token or set of tokens would be meaningless. He has in fact earned the average equivalent of twenty-four, thirty-six or forty-eight hours’ work, payable by his own and other Guilds and necessarily valued in time or in labour units based upon time. Beyond all doubt his work has ceased to be measured by the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. She, God be thanked, is dead. The object of measuring the wage slave’s labour by gold is that dividends paid out of labour shall be paid in gold. The valuation of labour and the products of labour by a gold standard are obviously the perquisites of the present banking system, and are a