paid, but to secure this result along with others by
making it in itself more interesting and more democratic
in organization.
[36] The above quotations are all from the first pamphlet of the
National Guilds League, ``National Guilds, an Appeal to Trade
Unionists.''
Capitalism has made of work a purely commercial
activity, a soulless and a joyless thing. But substitute
the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of
the few; substitute responsible labor for a saleable commodity;
substitute self-government and decentralization
for the bureaucracy and demoralizing hugeness of the
modern State and the modern joint stock company; and
then it may be just once more to speak of a ``joy in
labor,'' and once more to hope that men may be proud
of quality and not only of quantity in their work. There
is a cant of the Middle Ages, and a cant of ``joy in
labor,'' but it were better, perhaps, to risk that cant
than to reconcile ourselves forever to the philosophy of
Capitalism and of Collectivism, which declares that work
is a necessary evil never to be made pleasant, and that
the workers' only hope is a leisure which shall be longer,
richer, and well adorned with municipal amenities.[37]
[37] ``The Guild Idea,'' No. 2 of the Pamphlets of the National
Guilds League, p. 17.
Whatever may be thought of the practicability
of Syndicalism, there is no doubt that the ideas which
it has put into the world have done a great deal
to revive the labor movement and to recall it to certain
things of fundamental importance which it had
been in danger of forgetting. Syndicalists consider
man as producer rather than consumer. They are
more concerned to procure freedom in work than to
increase material well-being. They have revived the
quest for liberty, which was growing somewhat
dimmed under the regime of Parliamentary Socialism,
and they have reminded men that what our modern
society needs is not a little tinkering here and there,
nor the kind of minor readjustments to which the
existing holders of power may readily consent, but
a fundamental reconstruction, a sweeping away of
all the sources of oppression, a liberation of men's
constructive energies, and a wholly new way of
conceiving and regulating production and economic
relations. This merit is so great that, in view of it,
all minor defects become insignificant, and this merit
Syndicalism will continue to possess even if, as a
definite movement, it should be found to have passed
away with the war.
PART II
PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE
CHAPTER IV
WORK AND PAY
THE man who seeks to create a better order of
society has two resistances to contend with: one that
of Nature, the other that of his fellow-men. Broadly
speaking, it is science that deals with the resistance
of Nature, while politics and social organization are
the methods of overcoming the resistance of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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