The History of the Fabian SocietyPease, Edward R. (Edward Reynolds)
History
The History of the Fabian Society
Pease, Edward R. (Edward Reynolds)
Fabian Society (Great Britain); Socialism -- Great Britain
Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing
more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall
be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day. This
by itself would not imply Socialism at all: it would be merely a revival
of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded
self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators. Guild Socialism,
with the emphasis on the Socialism, implies that the industries, however
completely they may be controlled by their separate staffs, must pool
their products. All the Guild Socialists admit this. The Socialist State
must therefore include an organ for receiving and distributing the
pooled products; and such an organ, representing the citizen not as
producer but as consumer, reintroduces the whole machinery of
Collectivism. Thus the alleged antithesis between Guild Socialism and
Collectivism, under cover of which the one was presented as an
alternative to the other, vanished at the first touch of the skilled
criticism the Fabians brought to bear on it; and now Mrs. Sidney Webb,
who was singled out for attack by the Guild Socialists as the arch
Collectivist, is herself conducting an investigation into the existing
control of industry by professional organizations, whilst the quondam
Guild Socialists are struggling with the difficult question of the
proper spheres of the old form of Trade Union now called the craft
union, and the new form called the industrial union, in which workers of
all crafts and occupations, from clerks and railway porters to
locomotive drivers and fitters, are organized in a single union of the
entire industry. There is work enough for many years to some of the old
Fabian kind in these directions; and this work will irresistibly reunite
the disputants instead of perpetuating a quarrel in which, like most of
the quarrels which the Society has survived, there was nothing
fundamental at issue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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