Functional socialism

FUNCTION 43

trade unions or professional associations—it was certain that the advent of finance-capital would render it impotent. This was done partly by the sheer weight of associated finance and credit and partly by strictly maintaining the higher szaius of the technicians over the lower szaius of the wage-earners. But the wheel has gone full circle. We now witness the extraordinary phenomenon of the professional technicians demanding dominance and control over every industrial process. A technocracy; an exchange of King Log for King Stork. The mass of the workers, themselves technicians and craftsmen, would certainly have something to say about the stazus of these industrial aspirants.

The real difficulty we encounter in urging the functional principle is that the word “function” repels. It has a cold, scientific air. Yet it was in frequent use in Elizabethan days. Coriolanus, we may remember, pushes away the cook and shouts:

Follow your function, go And batten on cold bits.

A warmer word might more speedily win allegiance. Perhaps the mot juste will come some day in a flash of inspiration. Meantime, we must examine function’s scale of values and plan our functional society.

II

FUNCTION IN THE FLESH

Our difficulty in dealing with an abstract idea, like