methods and forms of production. This situation served to awaken a critical spirit in the workers, and made them more ready to listen to plans for a change in the industrial system.
It is legitimate to say that by 1921 the guild propaganda, while it had not made any direct appeal to the larger masses of the workers in Great Britain or other countries, had come to exercise a powerful influence over a steadily growing number of the younger local and national leaders of the Labour movement and in the professions. This influence could be seen in the changing policies and programmes both of trade unions and professional associations and of socialist societies. For example, the Miners' Federation, which before the war advocated a measure of nationalization of the mines which would have placed them under direct State administration, laid before the Coal Industry Commission, in 1919, a scheme which was in substance an adoption of the Guild Socialist proposals for in- dustrial self-government. Similar influences have been at work in other industries, notably in the post-office, on the railways and in the building industry. The influence of the Guild Social- ist propaganda has also been considerable in the professions, and especially in the teaching world; while in the sphere of socialist organization the policy and programme of the Inde- pendent Labour party, the Labour party and other organiza- tions have been largely changed so as to incorporate the idea of control of industry by the workers more or less on the lines advocated by the Guild Socialists.
The National Guilds League, which is the only organization directly representing the Guild Socialist movement in Great Britain, defines its objects in the following terms: " 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 other democratic functional organizations in the community." An examination of this definition will serve to indicate clearly the main ideas upon which Guild Socialism is based.
The central idea, undoubtedly, is that of self-government in industry. The guild propaganda is above all connected with the advocacy of a change in the system of industrial administration which would result in placing the power and responsibility of administration in the hands of the workers engaged in each particular industry or service. Guild Socialists have always stressed the point that by " workers " they mean not simply the manual workers engaged in industry, but the whole necessary personnel. Indeed, the oft-used phrase " workers by hand and brain " seems to have been coined by the Guild Socialists, and was used by them from the beginning of their propaganda. They have stressed, moreover, not only the need for common action by all the workers " by hand and brain," but also the need for the recognition, in any form of democratic industrial organization, of vital functional differences between one grade of workers and another. The democracy which they have advocated has been not the government of industry by in- discriminate mass voting, but a system in which power and responsibility would be definitely related to the particular function which each individual or group of individuals is called upon to fulfil in the service of the community.
The central idea of Guild Socialism is thus the idea of func- tional democracy, or, in other words, the application of demo- cratic principles to the organization of all forms of industry and public service. This advocacy is closely combined in Guild Socialist propaganda with a critique of the current conceptions of democracy. Guildsmen are fond of pointing out that the pres- ent forms of democratic organization, which may be called, for short, " parliamentary democracy based on universal suffrage," are not in reality democracy at all, and do not in fact provide for the direction of the affairs of the community by the posi- tive wills of its members. They urge that it is useless to look for effective democracy in the political sphere as long as the principle on which industry, which so largely dominates men's b'ves in modern communities, is organized is the principle of autocracy, or, at best, of fundamental class divisions. In this aspect their teaching may be regarded as a precise application
of the Marxian " materialist conception of history " to the criticism of modern parliamentary democracy. If industry is democratically organized, they hold that real democracy in the political sphere will follow almost as a matter of course; but, as long as men, in their daily work, are compelled to submit to external dictation and have no recognized voice in the ordering of their service, these class conditions, they hold, will inevitably reproduce themselves in the political sphere. Guildsmen say that " economic power precedes political power."
The central object, then, of the Guild Socialists is to establish democracy in the sphere of industry, and thereby to secure that it shall be applied throughout the whole sphere of social organization. In advocating such a change they recognize that their hope of success rests on relating their ideal definitely to actual movements existing within the world of capitalism, but capable of being so transformed as to supplant capitalism and replace it in the organization of industries and services. They have therefore always based their propaganda directly upon the organizations which the manual and professional workers have created for the purpose of protecting their interests and improving their position under the wage system, and they have sought to persuade these organizations to accept the principle of industrial self-government, and to work for the realization of it by endeavouring, in proportion as their power increases, to extend their actual control over capitalist in- dustrialism. Mention has been made above of the transforma- tion which has taken place in the programmes of many trade unions and other working-class bodies, largely under the in- fluence of Guild Socialist ideas. The members of these bodies, from regarding the purpose for which their organizations are built up as limited to the protection of their members' interests under the wage system in face of those by whom they are em- ployed or the securing of useful legislation, are gradually broad- ening their conception of the function of these organizations so as to include the assumption of direct " control " and respon- sibility for the organization of industry. Nor is this influence manifest only in the changing programmes of the working- class organizations, but also in their positive policy and action. It was particularly plain in the " shop stewards' movement " in the British engineering and kindred industries, which, during the war, endeavoured to establish in the workshops a wider measure of direct trade-union " control of industry." It is also manifest in the widening of the range of industrial disputes, and in the putting forward by the unions of claims which involve the recognition of their right to interfere and negotiate on behalf of their members in connexion with questions of " dis- cipline " and " management." It appears further in demands that foremen and supervisory workers should be members of the trade unions, and even that they should be appointed by, and responsible to, those who have to work under them.
The most remarkable outcome of the guild propaganda, and also the only important practical experiment which the Guild Socialists have so far been able to make, is to be found in Eng- land in the Building Guild movement. Towards the end of 1919 a movement arose, largely fostered by the local branch of the National Guilds League, among the building operatives in the Manchester area, for the formation of a guild which would be prepared directly to undertake work, especially on behalf of the public authorities, in the sphere of house-building. A local Building Guild organization, governed by representatives from the local management committees of the various building- trade unions, was set up in the Manchester area, and the move- ment spread very rapidly throughout the country, so that during the following year something like a hundred local Build- ing Guild committees, linked up in a central organization, were brought into being. These guild organizations proceeded to make tenders to the local authorities for the carrying-out of the housing schemes which were then being brought forward in most parts of the country, and after some difficulty the Ministry of Health was induced to sanction a limited number of contracts on an experimental basis. In March 1921 work was already proceeding on about 20 such contracts.
