If we can assume, then, the gradual development of a new society in
which these principles will be carried out, a society that is made up of
social units of human scale, self-contained, self-supporting and
self-governed, where production is primarily for use not profit, and
where bulk-production is practically non-existent, the sub-division of
labour reduced to the lowest practicable point, machinery employed to a
much less extent than now, and the factory system abolished, what
organic form will labour take on in place of that which now obtains? It
is possible to forecast this only in the most general terms, for life
itself must operate to determine the lines of development and dictate
the consequent forms. If we can acquire a better standard of comparative
values, and with a clearer and more fearless vision estimate the rights
and wrongs of the contemporary system, rejecting the ill thing and
jealously preserving, or passionately regaining, the good, we shall be
able to establish certain broad, fundamental and governing principles,
and doing this we can await in confidence the evolution of the organic
forms that will be the working agencies of the new society.
I have tried to indicate some of the basic principles of a new society.
The operating forms, so far as industry is concerned, will, I think,
follow in essential respects the craft-guilds of the Middle Ages. They
will not be an archaeological restoration, as some of the English
protagonists of this great revolution seem to anticipate, they will be
variously adapted to the peculiar conditions of a new century, but the
basic principles will be preserved. Whatever happens, I am sure it will
not be either a continuation of the present system of capitalism and
profit-hunting, or nationalization of industries, or state socialism in
any form, or anything remotely resembling Bolshevism, syndicalism or a
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Here, as in government, education and
social relations, the power and the authority of the state must decline,
government itself withdrawing more and more from interference with the
operation of life, and liberty find its way back to the individual and
to the social and economic groups. We live now under a more tyrannical
and inquisitorial regime, in spite of (partly perhaps because of) its
democratic forms and dogmas, than is common in historical records.
Nationalization or state socialism would mean so great a magnifying of
this condition that existence would soon become both grotesque and
intolerable. We must realize, and soon, that man may lose even the last
semblance of liberty, as well under a nominal democracy as under a
nominal despotism or theocracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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