Functional socialism

GENESIS 13

corner in Cardiff and gave ingenuous and halting support to the Socialist faith. O sancta simplicitas! In those far-off days, our faith was really founded upon a sublime confidence in the integrity of the Civil Service. Hence the origin of State Socialism. To this was added Municipal Socialism. These two went very well in double harness. About 1910, my creed underwent a sea-change. Without consciously changing my trust in the Civil Service, I realized that, however perfect, it was totally inadequate to govern or direct our vast industrial system. The British Syndicalists, then led by Mr. Tom Mann, had come to the same conclusion. But whereas they envisaged political as well as industrial control, I conceived the idea of bridging State Socialism and Syndicalism by the institution of National Guilds. And, greatly daring, 1 wrote a book in support of this thesis. Thus was born the movement known as Guild Socialism.

Whatever the logical or practical defects of the Guild idea may have been, it certainly changed the current of Socialist thought, bringing into perspective, however remote, the concept of Industrial Democracy: of an industrial Parliament functioning on its own basis and subject only to the Commons on large issues of public policy.

That this conception of Industrial Democracy cut deeply into the consciousness of the Labour and Socialist movement there can be no doubt. State Socialism was at a discount; we heard more of Workers’ Control. To-day the industrial aspect of