Guild Socialism

[Entrails Konfetti]

So I was scanning wikipedia about nationalist anarchism, and I was pretty annoyed about all these "cute" nationalist Communist political theories, so I tried to find Anarcho-Feudalism, then later low and behold I stumbled upon this "Guild Socialism". Sounds antiquated, obviously

Link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_Socialism)


Guild socialism is a political movement advocating workers' control of industry through the medium of trade-related guilds. It originated in the United Kingdom and was at its most influential in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was strongly associated with G. D. H. Cole.
Guild socialism was partly inspired by the guilds of craftsmen and other skilled workers which had existed in Medieval England. In 1906, Arthur Penty published Restoration of the Gild System in which he opposed factory production and advocated a return to an earlier period of artisanal production organised through guilds. The following year, the journal The New Age became an advocate of guild socialism, although in the context of modern industry rather than the medieval setting favoured by Petty. In 1914, S. G. Hobson, a leading contributor to The New Age, published National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out. In this work, guilds were presented as an alternative to state-control of industry or conventional trade union activity. Guilds, unlike the existing trade unions, would not confine their demands to matters of wages and conditions but would seek to obtain control of industry for the workers whom they represented. Ultimately, industrial guilds would serve as the organs through which industry would be organised in a future socialist society.
The theory of Guild Socialism was developed and popularised by G. D. H. Cole who formed the National Guilds League in 1915 and published several books on guild socialism including Self-Government in Industry (1917) and Guild Socialism Restated (1920). A National Building Guild was established after World War I but collapsed in 1922.

Anyone have any comments or info?

[syndicat]

The quote is quite inaccurate in regard to its origin. The guild socialists were a group of socialist intellectuals in Britain in the World War I era who were highly influenced by the militant syndicalist labor tendencies in the UK in that era, such as the first shop stewards movement. The book "Frontier of Control" is a good source of the various struggles and movments, among rank and file workers, towards gaining or protecting control over work. G.D.H. Cole, the main theoretician of guild socialism was a Marxist intellectual who was later wrote "The Meaning of Marxism". However, the theory was also influenced by anarchsim in that it was an attempt to develop a conception of a socialized, worker-managed economy, that wasn't controlled by the state. In other words, an alternative to the state socialist model of centralized state control, which was advocated by many social democrats or "democratic socialists" in that era.

Thus the inspiration for guild socialism was not so backward looking as the quote indicates, tho there were some Catholic anti-capitalists of that era, like Chesterton and Belloc, who saw guild socialism as the only way to overcome corporate servitude in large industries. These Catholic supporters of worker control were more interested in finding precedents in the medieval guilds for guild socialism.

Some syndicalists in that era put forward a vision of a socialized economy where the individual industries would be run by the workers, and there would be something like a national workers congress to coordinate and plan. The problem with this is that there are fears that this, as well as the state socialist conception, would not be sufficiently responsive in meeting the needs and desires of the population.

This led them to propose that there would be both worker councils and consumer councils, and they would negotiate to determine the content of the good or service provided. So, there'd be, say, a council running the schools, run by the school workers, and there'd be a partents council, for primary and secondary education, and negotiation between them. And similarly for the public utilities there'd be users' councils which would negotiate with the workers council. The most important statement of the guild socialist proposal is G.D.H. Cole's "Guild Socialism Restated" published in 1920. Bertrand Russell also advocated guild socialism in his book "Roads to Freedom" written in 1918 when he was in prison for being anti-war. Russell sort of viewed it as a compromise between socialism on the one hand and syndicalism and anarchism, on the other hand.

This idea of direct negotiation between workers and consumers would later be generalized in the idea of participatory planning, developed by a number of radical economists in the 1970s.

[Whitten]

Guild socialism is reactionary as Guilds represent to relationships between classes for a bygone mode of production. Capitalism did away with guilds because they were not suitable for a more developed mode of production.

[syndicat]

Don't confuse terminology with reality. The "guilds" in guild socialism
were worker councils. They weren't proposing to go back to small-scale
production.

[RedKnight]

http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/personal/wkpaps/gildf/guildgram.GIF http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/per...ildf/gild1.html (http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/personal/wkpaps/gildf/gild1.html)

[syndicat]

The health council in this diagram i think is the patients' council, which negotiates with the health guild. Consumer cooperatives represent the input of the consumers in negotiations with the guilds, as worker management of production. Cole also mentions things like a parents' council for schools, a utility users' council, etc.

The problem with this model is that the community often will need to decide which industry has priority. There will be conflicts in terms of where to put resources. So in reality the residents would need to deal with all areas of consumption through a single organization, such as a residents assembly in neighborhoods. This means it is a mistake to split up the residents into different consumer councils. But I could see advocacy groups existing for specific areas such as schools, environmental protection, patients' rights, etc.

The model was constructed this way partly as a way to suggest a coalition between the British consumer coops and the syndicalist labor activists.