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firm buys labor-power just as it buys electrical power or machinery, and just as an ordinary purchaser buys a pound of tea or a cake of soap. In short, under modern industrial conditions labor is treated as a 'commodity' and is bought for the purpose of realizing a profit.

Vast consequences flow from this way of treating the worker. Seeing that, in the factory, the worker is present not as a human being, but merely as so much embodied labor power, the worker is not regarded as having any right to share in the control of the factory in which he works. He is there to behave not as a man, but as labor power, to be moved about and used and to have his motion directed at will by those who have purchased his labor. According to the theory of modern industry not only does the factory belong to the employer to do with it what he will: the workman also belongs to the employer during the hours for which his labor has been bought.

Of course, things do not work out quite like this in practice. In the bad days of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the workers were for the most part half-starved, helpless, and unorganized, the theory and the practice did almost completely coincide, as they still coincide in the case of the sweated workers in this country or the downtrodden employees in the mills of India or Japan. But even in these cases, the harmony of theory and practice has been on occasion rudely broken: the workers have rebelled against the conditions of their wage-slavery, and there have been strikes and riots, usually without conscious purpose or final success. In the civilized countries, the workers have gradually organized in Trade Unions, and as they have grown stronger the gulf between theory and practice has widened. The recalcitrance of labor has become more marked and more frequent, and employers have been compelled to bargain collectively with their workers, and to admit their possession not merely of certain human rights, but even of a certain title to a small share in industrial control usually in the form of certain restrictions imposed by the Trade Unions on the way in which the factories are run. This has meant a growing difficulty in administering industry under the existing system, until unrest has risen to such proportions as to threaten the stability of the system itself. We are not far off the position when the workers will refuse any longer to be treated as labor power, and

when the refusal will compel a complete reconsideration of the principles and the practice of the industrial system.

The growing divergence of theory and practice can have only one end. It is impossible, in view of the present strength and consciousness of labor, that our industrial practice should ever again be harmonized with the old theory. It remains, therefore, that we should remodel our theory, and make our practice consistent with that new theory.

What is this new theory? It is here that the medieval guild can teach us useful lessons. For the only way out of our present impasse is to get back to a position in which every workman can feel that he has a real share in controlling the conditions of his life and work. We must reconstruct our industry on a democratic basis, and that basis can be only the control of industry by the whole body of persons who are engaged in it, whether they work by hand or by brain. In short, the solution lies in industrial democracy.

This democracy must be in many ways very different from the democracy which existed in the mediæval guilds, until the rise of inequalities in wealth made them plunge into oligarchy and finally chaos and dissolution. The medieval guilds were local, confined to a particular town and its environs: our modern guilds must be national and even, in many respects, international and world-wide. While preserving the local freedom and local initiative, we must co-ordinate them on the same scale as the market must be co-ordinated. The epoch of worldcommerce calls for national and international guilds.

There will be a second difference hardly less important. The medieval guilds were made up of master-craftsmen, with their journeymen and apprentices who could hope one day to be masters, working in independence in separate workshops under conditions laid down by the guild. The modern guild will be made up, in our time at least, of huge factories in which democratic control will have to be established and safeguarded by far more formal methods than were necessary in the small workshop of the Middle Ages. Moreover, our modern industries are so inter-connected and so bound up one with another, and economics and political considerations are so intertwined, that modern guilds will have to be far more closely related to the State than were the medieval guilds, which, it is true, were often most intimately related to the mediæval municipality.

But, with all these points of difference, the resemblance will be far more essential. Modern, like mediæval guilds, will be dominated by the idea of social service-an idea which has almost vanished from the organization of industry in modern times. They will bring back the direct control of the producer over his work, and will give him the sense, which hardly anyone can have in industry nowadays, of working for the community. That, Guildsmen believe, is the secret of getting good work well and truly done.

If we set this ideal of National Guilds before us, how can we set about its realization? It is made necessary and possible by the emergence and power of Trade Unionism, and Trade Unionism is the principal instrument by means of which it must be brought about. The growing strength of Trade Unionism is beginning to make impossible the continuance of industry under the old conditions; there is no remedy but in making Trade Unionism itself the nucleus of a new industrial order. Our problem, then, is that of turning Trade Unions into National Guilds.

Trade Unions to-day consist principally, though not exclusively, of manual workers. But, clearly, a National Guild must include all workers, whether they work with their hands or with their heads, who are essential to the efficient conduct of industry. Trade Unionism must, therefore, be widened so as to include the salariat. This is already coming about. On the railways, in the shipyards and engineering shops, and in other industries the salariat is already organizing, and is showing an increasing tendency to link up with the manual workers. As the power of Trade Unionism grows still greater, this tendency will become more and more manifest. One part of the building of National Guilds is the absorption of the salariat into the Trade Union movement. Another part, on which I have no space to dwell, is the reorganization of Trade Unionism on industrial lines.

As these processes go on, the Unions will continue their steady encroachment in the sphere of industrial control. The divergence between the theory and practice of capitalist industry will become wider and wider, and it may be that we shall find ourselves at last with a practice fitting the new theory achieved without any abrupt or violent transition at all.

What form will the gradual encroachment take? First, I think, the form which it is now manifestly taking in some of

the principal industries. The workers will create strong organizations of their own in the workshops and factories (shop stewards' committees, works committees and so on) and will then demand for these organizations positive functions and powers in the control of industry. At the same time, especially in services which are state-owned and administered, the Trade Unions will demand a share in control, nationally as well as locally. In every direction, the workers through their organizations will gradually demand and secure as much control as they are at present able to exercise. And not merely will the appetite for control grow as it feeds; the competence and the power to control will grow with it, till by a series of stages the functions of industrial management are gradually transfered to the workers' organizations, which will by that time have come to include the whole effective personnel of industry.

This is one side, and the most important side, of the development. But at the same time, the democratization of industry will be accompanied by a similar gradual democratization of politics and of the State. The State will be driven more and more to assume the ownership and control of industry, and every step which it takes in this direction will make more important the existence of real and effective democratic control over the State. The National Guildsman believes that industry ought to be controlled by the workers engaged in it: but he believes also that the State ought to own industry, and that popular control must be established over the machinery of State. I have not left myself space to deal with this side of the problem fully: I can only say that Guildsmen believe that it is impossible to have a really democratic political system while the economic system remains undemocratic, and continues to be based on the denial of the Humanity of Labor. And, on the other hand, the democratization of the industrial system will make possible a parallel democratization of the political machine. The way to political and individual as well as to industrial freedom lies in the control of industry, and it is for this reason that the industrial problem occupies its paramount position among social questions. The Guild system, I believe, furnishes the best possible solution of the social problem, because it carries with it the best reconciliation for our time of the principles of freedom and order-principles apparently in conflict, which must be reconciled in any system which is to

satisfy our moral striving after personal freedom and cooperation one with another.

NATIONAL GUILDS MOVEMENT IN GREAT

BRITAIN'

The objects of the national guilds movement in Great Britain, as defined in the constitution of the National Guilds League, are "the abolition of the wage system, and the establishment by the workers of self-government in industry through a democratic system of national guilds working in conjunction with a democratic State." The leading ideas of the movement are therefore those of democratic organization and self-government in the industrial sphere. National guildsmen look forward to the time when the various industries and services will be administered each by its guild, or association organized for common service, and including the whole necessary personnel of the industry concerned.

This movement is only a few years old; but it has made considerable headway among the manual workers, and to at least an equal extent among many classes of professional and technical workers. By Marxian Industrial Unionists and others of the extreme left wing of labor, it is indeed sometimes denounced as a bourgeois movement of counter-revolutionary tendency. This criticism comes principally from those who refuse to recognize the importance of technical and professional elements in the industrial system, or hold that the existing technicians and professionals are "adherents of capitalism," and that it is necessary to make a clean sweep of them in preparation for a new order ushered in by a proletarian dictatorship.

National guildsmen differ widely in their outlook on the social and economic question as a whole. Faith in national guilds as a form of economic organization is compatible with many degrees of reformist or revolutionary opinion. There are all sorts among guildsmen, from the extreme right, which looks to a gradual development of guilds by the consent of the more progressive employers, to the extreme left, which corresponds closely in method and outlook to the Marxian Industrial Unionists. Neither of these attitudes, however, represents the main, Monthly Labor Review. U. S. Bureau Labor

1 By G. D. H. Cole. Statistics. 9:24-32. July,

1919.

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