It is significant that the guild socialists, in considering how acrimonious disputes between guilds are to be avoided, say that “the labor and brains of each Guild naturally [will evolve] a hierarchy to which large issues of industrial policy might with confidence be referred,” and “at the back of this hierarchy and finally dominating it, is the Guild democracy. …” But then guild socialism is to have no different psychological basis from our present system. This is exactly what we rely on now so patiently, so unsuccessfully—the lead of the few, the following of the crowd, with the fiction that, as our government is based on numbers, the crowd can always have what it wants; therefore, at any moment what we have is what we have chosen—Tammany rule for instance. We need a new method: the group process must be applied to industrial groups as well as to neighborhood groups, to business groups, to professional societies—to every form of human association. If the labor question is to be solved by a system of economic control based on economic representation instead of upon vital modes of association, “industrial democracy” will fail exactly as so-called political democracy has failed.
Perhaps this warning is particularly necessary at the present moment because “group” control of industry seems imminent. Through the pressure of the war guild socialism has made practical as well as theoretical headway in England. There are two movements going on side by side, both due it is true to the emergency of war, but neither of which will be wholly lost when the war is over; it is the opinion of many, on the contrary, that these movements are destined to shape a new state for England. First, the government has assumed a certain amount of control over munition plants, railroads, mines, breweries, flour mills and factories of various kinds, and it has undertaken the regulation of wages and prices, control of markets and food consumption, taxation of profits etc.139
Secondly, at the same time that the state is assuming a larger control of industry, it is inviting the workmen themselves to take part in the control of industry. “The Whitley Report, adopted by the Reconstruction Committee of the Cabinet, proposes not only a Joint Standing Industrial Council for each great national industry, for the regular consideration of matters affecting the progress and well-being of the trade, but District Councils and Works Committees within each business upon which capital and labor shall be equally represented.” These bodies will take up “questions of standard wages, hours, overtime, apprenticeship, shop discipline, … technical training, industrial research and invention, the adoption of improved machinery and processes, and all those matters which are included under ‘scientific management.’ ”140
This is a step which goes far beyond arbitration and conciliation boards. It gives to labor a positive share in the control of industry. “Although it is not at present proposed to give any legal recognition to this new machinery of economic government or any legal enforcement of its decision, … it may reasonably be expected that [these national industrial councils] will soon become the effective legislature of the industry.”
Most noteworthy is the general acceptance of this plan. “All classes appear to be willing and even anxious to apply the principle of representative self-government not only to the conduct of the great trades but to their constituent businesses.” Undoubtedly the English laborer has an increasing fear of bureaucracy and this is turning him from state socialism: his practical experience during the war of “tyrannical” bureaucracy in the government controlled industries has lost state socialism many supporters.
The establishment of the Standing Industrial Councils is a step towards guild socialism although (1) the determination of lines of production, the buying and selling processes, questions of finance, everything in fact outside shop-management, is at present left to the employers, and (2) the capitalist is left in possession of his capital. But this movement taken together with the one mentioned above, that is, the trend towards state-ownership or joint ownership or partial control, has large significance: the state to own the means of production, the producers to control the conditions of production, seems like the next step in industrial development, in government form—the fact that these two go together, that government form is to follow industrial development, gives us large hope for the future.
The British Labor Party in 1917 formulated a careful plan for reorganization with a declared object of common ownership of means of production and “a steadily increasing participation of the organized workers in the management.”141 This wording is significant.
In America also the pressure of war has led to the recognition of labor in the control of industry. Adjustment boards containing labor representatives have been required of almost all private employers signing contracts with the War and Navy Departments.142 The policy of the administration is to recognize collective bargaining. And the President’s Mediation Commission, which imposed collective agreements on the copper industry of Arizona, stated in its official report, “The leaders of industry must … [enable] labor to take its place as a cooperator in the industrial enterprise.” Moreover, the workman is gaining recognition not only in the management of the industry in which he is engaged, but also at Washington. On most of the important government boards which deal with matters affecting labor, labor is represented. The work of the War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board mark our advance
