Functional socialism

58 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

brain and hands? In the meantime, Parliament is gradually losing control over the large industrial interests without constituting a corresponding economic authority. This has not escaped the eyes of the more astute trade union leaders. A. A. Purcell and A. M. Wall, for example. They write in their Foreword to The House of Industry:

We frankly admit that in our discussion of the idea of a Parliament of Industry, or National Economic Council, Parliamentary ideology has confused its advocates and influenced their vocabulary. Control of industry, the planning, co-ordination, and regulation of economic affairs, cannot be dealt with even by analogy on Parliamentary lines. . . . It is still true to say that, in the minds of many trade unionists, the project of setting up anything in the nature of an Industrial Council or Parliament of Industry is linked up with the problem of relationship between employers and workers. . . . Yet with so little wisdom and foresight do the politicians manage their own affairs, including the defence of Parliamentary institutions, that they are actively engaged at this moment (1931) in legislating away their control over industry. We need only instance the creation of the Electricity Commission and the proposed new authority for the passenger transport system of London as illustrations of this tendency on the part of Parliament to give away its control of economic affairs. “hese new bodies are the illegitimate children of Parliamentary Socialism, which bears so little resemblance to Socialism as almost to deserve the name of State Capitalism. Almost, but not quite: for real State Capitalism would not tolerate the emergence of