Guild Socialism? [Archive]

syndicat

18th April 2010, 04:32

Guild socialism was a particular quasi-libertarian socialist tendency that was highly influenced by British syndicalism. It advocated "self-government in industry", that is, workers running the industries. Influencial writers who were guild socialists included G.D.H. Cole (the main theoretician of guild socialism), R.H. Tawney, Arthur Penty, and Bertrand Russell. Russell's most leftwing work, "Roads to Freedom" was written during his guild socialist phase.

Guild socialists differed in terms of their views in regard to a number of points, such as the state. Cole took an essentially anarchist position. His view was that the state needed to be replaced by a new structure, which he called a "Commune," which would be rooted in "ward meetings" (neighborhood assemblies). This was because he believed that only participatory democracy was authentic democracy.

Russell took a more social-democratic position, sort of imaginging that a worker run industry would co-exist with parliamentary style government.

The most innovative feature of guild socialism was the idea that economic allocation should come about as the result of a process of negotiation between people as workers and people as residents and consumers. Their idea was that the democratic assemblies in neighborhoods and local consumer committees and various public service consumer councils would negotiate with the worker organizations controlling the industries to arrive at what will be produced and the price. To some extent this was based on an attempt to appeal for support to the British consumer coop movement, which was apparently very large at that time.

Present-day participatory economics could be regarded as a more sophisticated working out of this idea of consumer/worker planning through negotiation, and in that sense guild socialism was a predecessor.

In the USA guild socialism completely won over the Intercollegiate Socialist Society -- the organization of students and faculty loosely associated with the American Socialist Party. But they believed that the name had to be changed, to be more Americanized, so they decided on the name "Industrial Democracy", and this is why the ISS changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy. (It's student branch became SDS in 1962.)

In the early '20s the guild socialists in Britain tried to put their ideas into practice by building a large construction worker cooperative, called the National Building Guild. But unfortunately this was a failure and the guild collapsed after a couple years.

On the more conservative end of the guild socialist spectrum was Arthur Penty, a Catholic writer who followed the "distributivist" ideas of Chesterton and Belloc. "Distributivism" was the rather utopian idea of going back to small scale self-employed farmers and artisans. Penty believed this was more feasible if we imagine that all the large workplaces were run much as the guild socialists advocated. After World War 1 most of the British guild socialists seemed to gravitate to the labor party ambit, but Penty eventually became a fascist in the '30s, and his economic ideas are still part of the doctrines of the BNP under the "distributivism" label.

G.D.H. Cole later became a well-known Marxist teacher and writer. I highly recommend his 1948 book "The Meaning of Marxism."