Functional socialism

166 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

values, a struggle for position and posts; and, in the end, the workers precisely where they are now and confronted, not with vulnerable employers, but an invulnerable State. It is surely inconceivable that any political party could so callously disregard existing conditions as to suggest so brutal a delay. During this struggle, in God’s name, what is to happen to the unemployed, the part-employed, and the millions whose wages are now reduced to bare subsistence? It can only be contemplated on the assumption that we are all hopelessly mad.

The New Britain cannot be founded upon the Parliamentary methods of the Victorian period. The belief is now universal that Queen Anne is dead; it is astonishing what vast crowds still worship at the shrine of Queen Victoria. This New Britain of our dreams and ambitions has no patience for the first, second, and third readings of inoperative legislation; it sees instead a new industrial regime of workers organized in their appropriate guilds and serving the community by co-operatively producing and distributing the wealth we now possess in unprecedented profusion. This functional control is essential to our economic health. Whilst no single possessor of individual wealth need fear injustice, it is certain that no individual must stand in the way of industrial reorganization. For it is a choice between functional control and the continuance of the wage-system, with its inevitable sequel of privation and bastard leisure. Nevertheless, the new order will not come unless every worker of every rank—intellectual, technical,