Guild Socialism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Guild socialism is a political movement advocating for workers to control industry through a system of national guilds that operate in an implied contractual relationship with society and consumers. A. R. Orage, Arthur J. Penty, Samuel Hobson, and ultimately G. D. H. Cole are all associated with guild socialism.

Guild socialism originated from seventeenth-century British philosophers John Ruskin and William Morris and their monastic-order vision of labor and the productive process, in which the role of the wage earner is transformed into one of producer and integral member of a community. Ruskin and Morris argued that economic theory and capitalism per se had no moral implications for the essential dignity of labor as self-creation. In the weekly British literary magazine New Age (1907–1920), British editor A. R. Orage wrote about an emergent guild socialist sensibility, a left–Nietzschianism that charted a separate course from both syndicalism, with its tendency to pit the potentially tyrannical self-interest of producers against the general needs of the community, and state socialism, with its technocratic planning where the workforce is deprived of its right to organize work creatively on a day-to-day basis.

Guild socialist writings continued to draw upon similar theories, including Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s writings on mutual aid (1902); the theories of Fernand Pelloutier, leader of the 1800s French trade union Bourses des Travail; French writer and historian Georges Renaud’s Guilds in the Middle Ages; and German historian Otto von Gierke’s theory of the real personality and fellowship of producers’ associations (Genossenschaft). In Restoration of the Guild System (1916), English writer Arthur J. Penty stressed the need to return to small-scale production, decentralized forms of control, and personalized relations to restore democracy to spheres of human activity. Guilds and cooperatives were understood as centers of mutual aid, education/apprenticeship, regulation of standards of quality, regulation of workshop health, and safety, training, and socializing interactions.

A formal political theory of guild socialism was formulated between 1913 and 1920 by Samuel Hobson and George Douglas Howard Cole. Hobson presented a national-scale projection beyond decentralized craft production in National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out (1914); and National Guilds and the State (1920). Hobson demonstrated Fabian and Nietzschian perspectives in moving beyond medievalist origins and ideals and stressed “mastership,” differentiating function from ability, expertise, and leadership qualities beyond the “profiteering spirit.” In Guild Socialism Re-Stated (1920), Cole presents a thoroughly worked-out blueprint for “social self-management” based on participation and dialogue, resisting both Fabian and Bolshevik plans to reduce producers to implementers of plans formulated by technical experts outside the shop floor.

Cole proved to be the most prodigious and consequential writer of the new theory of guild socialism: He produced World of Labor (1913), Self-Government in Industry (1917), Labor in the Commonwealth (1918), and Social Theory (1920). Cole stressed the need to transcend French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s attack on partial associations; for it is possible for nonstatist associations to pursue their interests in a way that does not necessarily bring them into conflict with other associations or the state. In his 1914 article, “Conflicting Social Obligations,” Cole noted that “the state cannot fully express the associative will of men. ”The state is but one of many functional associations that must be coordinated by some federal national commune of the associations. It may be guided by the general will of all its members, but it should not express their will. The state needs to be contained in the world of groups rather than vice versa.

Cole argues for social theory rather than political theory. In his work, sovereign institutions of government are deemphasized and replaced with the sovereignty of associational life in general, as a reflexive governance functionally representing the division of labor taken as a heterarchical rather than a hierarchical whole.

With the collapse of the guild socialism movement in the 1920s, Cole—impressed with trade unions’ cooperation during World War I (1914–1918) and saddened by their partiality in the 1926 coal mining industry’s general strike—began to appreciate the sense of underlying harmony necessary for the redistribution of material inequality and the state’s “true nature.” In The Next TenYears (1928), Cole moved from themes of communitarianism and mutualité to a more pronounced functionalism involving workers’ control within a strengthened trade unionism rather than a centralized collectivism.

Bibliography:

Carpenter, Niles. Guild Socialism: An Historical and Critical Analysis. New York: Appleton, 1922.
Cole, G. D. H. Guild Socialism Restated. London: Parsons, 1920.
Eisfeld, Rainer. “The Emergence and Meaning of Socialist Pluralism.” International Political Science Review 17 (1996): 267–299.
Hobson, Samuel. National Guilds and the State. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920.
Hutchinson, Frances, and Brian Burkitt. The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism. London: Routledge, 1997.
Penty, Arthur J. Guilds and the Social Crisis. London: Allen and Unwin, 1919.
Stears, Marc. “Guild Socialism and Ideological Diversity on the British Left, 1914–1926.” Journal of Political Ideology 3 (1998): 289–306.

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