GUILD SOCIALISM, IN TIME AND SPACE
PART THIRTEEN: GULDS, OLD AND NEW
This post is an installment in a longer series on Guilds, Old and New. To review a full index of all the installments to this series, see the introductory, part one of the series, here.
I want, in this penultimate installment to this series on Guilds, Old and New, to reflect on the brief, though intriguing, movement of guild socialism, which enjoyed a short golden era in the early 20th century. Long time readers here will know that the current predisposition to assume that socialism is a left-wing phenomenon is historically (and theoretically) illiterate. In fact, early in the 19th century right-wing socialism was likely just as relevant as left-wing socialism. (For more on this, see A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.) It was only over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly under the influence of Marx and the impact of the Dreyfus Affair, that socialism became almost exclusively identified with the left (see here). Guild Socialism, though, as we’ll see, might be regarded as a last gasp of that older right-wing socialism – though the thinkers associated with it wouldn’t likely have worded it that way.1
As we’ll see, ultimately, guild socialism was not up to the resolution of its own contradictions. Those contradictions though were not a product of its (quasi) right-wing inclinations so much as of its quixotic aspirations to revive temporalist practice – not as an alternative to, but – as an elaboration of spatial modernism. In these remarks I’ll restrict myself to one of the most influential guild socialist theorists, G. D. H. Cole, as drawn from his book, Guild Socialism Restated2, as well as his intriguing introduction to the English translation of Georges Renard’s useful book, Guilds in the Middle Ages.3
Counter intuitive as it may initially seem, I’m going to start with Cole’s book, and circle back to a discussion of the introduction to Renard’s book, which was published two years earlier than the former. Presumably, published just a couple years apart, both works were the product of a common stewing of ideas in Cole’s mind. It makes sense though to begin with the book, as he has more room there to flesh out the foundations of his thinking, while the introduction serves as almost a manifesto – a distilling down of what he then considered the core ideas of importance for guild socialism.
The problems this examination helps reveal in guild socialism perhaps also helps explain Cole’s own biographic choices. While one of several notable figures who provided the intellectual foundations for guild socialism (along with, e.g., Penty, Hobson, and Orage), he’s generally acknowledged as the writer who most contributed to the popularity of the guild socialist vision in the early decades of the 20th century. By the end of the 1920s, though, the guild socialist enthusiasm dissipated, and Cole himself moved on to become a more conventional socialist and trade union enthusiast.
By 1920, though, he’d not yet given up the ghost. So we will start with some of the foundational thinking Cole provides in Guild Socialism Restated. As is common here, we’ll start by giving Cole some leash to lay out his case. He starts off observing a growing clamor among “organized workers” for “control of industry,” or what in some circles is called “worker self-management”:
This book on Guild Socialism is an attempt to explain the real character of this demand, particularly as it appears amongst the English-speaking peoples, and at the same time to present the central ideas of Guild Socialism as above all an attempt to give theoretical and practical expression to the aspirations on which the demand is based. It is written in the belief that, until we devise and create forms of social organisation within which these aspirations can find reasonable satisfaction, there is neither hope of any ''reconstruction'' which will make our industrial system efficient nor prospect of health in the body social as a whole.
The Guild Socialist believes what he believes, not so much as the result of a process of abstract reasoning, as because, if his fundamental assumptions are granted, the Guild Socialist solution of the social problem seems to him to spring simply and naturally out of the form in which that problem presents itself today. He claims, not to be imagining a Utopia in the clouds, but to be giving form and direction to certain quite definite tendencies which are now at work in Society, and to be anticipating the most natural developments of already existing institutions and social forces.
The best way, then, of understanding the Guild Socialist attitude is to see, first, what are the fundamental assumptions about Society which the Guildsman makes; secondly, how he visualises the situation with which the industrialised communities of Europe, America and Australasia are at present confronted; and thirdly, what are the forces and institutions in whose development he believes that the solution of the problem principally lies.
Society is to be regarded as a complex of associations held together by the wills of their members, whose well-being is its purpose.
Society will be in health only if it is in the full sense democratic and self-governing…
...democracy, which it assumes to be good, involves an active and not merely a passive citizenship on the part of the members.
[This applies to] industrial and economic fully as much as to political affairs.
The essence of the Guild Socialist attitude lies in the belief that Society ought to be so organised as to afford the greatest possible opportunity for individual and collective self-expression to all its members, and that this involves and implies the extension of positive self-government through all its parts.
...theoretical ''democrats'' totally ignore the effects of undemocratic organisation and convention in non-political spheres of social action, not only upon the lives which men lead in those spheres, but also in perverting and annihilating in practice the theoretical democracy of modern politics.
We are faced by the fact that, owing to the preponderant influence of economic factors, the present machinery of Society expresses the point of view of the social class which still continues to control its economic life.
Given then these ideals and conditions, Cole goes on to flesh out how the medieval model of the guild can be retrofit to the needs of his industrial society, particularly in contrast to the then prevailing forms of unionism.
The principal social phenomenon of our times is the rise of working-class organisation, first and foremost in its Trade Union form, but also in the Co-operative Movement and in other less important aspects. This working-class organisation already represents a very great social power; but it is a power unrecognised in the constitution.
The medieval Gild was not indeed confined to industry: it was the common form of popular association in the medieval town. There were Gilds for social and charitable, and for educational, as well as for industrial purposes; and every Gild, whatever its specific function, had a strong religious basis and an essentially religious form.
The Gild was a regulative rather than a directly controlling or managing body. It did not itself manage the industry, though it sometimes acted as a purchasing agent for materials: it left actual management in the hands of its members, the master-craftsmen; but it laid down elaborate regulations governing the actions and professional code of the members.
These regulations, which are the essence of the medieval Gild system, had as their basis the double object of maintaining both the liberties and rights of the craft and its tradition of good workmanship and faithful communal service, as expressed in the "Just Price."
...we are concerned less with their actual achievement – which was, for a period of centuries, very great indeed – than with the spirit which animated them, and the principles upon which their power was based.
It is undoubtedly the case that, though there were sharp practices and profiteering in the Middle Ages, the Gildsman or the Gild that committed or sanctioned them did so in flat violation of moral principles which he or it had explicitly accepted as the basis of the industrial order, whereas to-day moral principles are regarded almost as intruders in the industrial sphere, and many forms of sharp practice and profiteering rank as the highest manifestations of commercial sagacity.
Today, commercial morality has made a code of its own, and most of its clauses are flat denials of the principles of communal morality.
Cole acknowledges, though, that whatever benefit lies in unearthing lessons of the medieval guilds, that model cannot be used as a blueprint for developing appropriate worker organization models amid the industrial, early 20th century.
...we cannot seek to restore the medieval – that is, the communal – spirit in industry by restoring the material conditions of the Middle Ages. We cannot go back to "town economy" a general regime of handicraft and master-craftsmanship, tiny-scale production.
Though, of course, I’d observe that in a certain sense, some aspect of going back is inevitable, following the logic of the phenotype wars trajectory. Here Cole moves on to speculate upon the organizational structure of such projected contemporary guilds.
Our present problem is, taking the conditions of production substantially as we find them, to reintroduce into industry the communal spirit, by refashioning industrialism in such a way as to set the communal motives free to operate.
A National Guild would be an association of all the workers by hand and brain concerned in the carrying on of a particular industry or service, and its function would be actually to carry on that industry or service on behalf of the whole community. Thus, the Railway Guild would include all the workers of every type – from general managers and technicians to porters and engine cleaners required for the conduct of the railways as a public service.
I do not pretend to know or prophesy exactly how many Guilds there would be, or what would be the lines of demarcation between them.
It must not, however, be imagined that Guildsmen are advocating a highly centralised system, in which the whole of each industry will be placed under a rigid central control. The degree of centralisation will largely depend on the character of the service. Thus, the railway industry obviously demands a much higher degree of centralisation than the building industry, which serves mainly a local market. But, apart from this, Guildsmen are keen advocates of the greatest possible extension of local initiative and of autonomy for the small group, in which they see the best chance of keeping the whole organisation keen, fresh and adaptable, and of avoiding the tendency to rigidity and conservatism in the wrong things, so characteristic of large-scale organisation, and especially of trusts and combines under capitalism today.
...the object of the whole Guild system is to call out the spirit of free service by establishing really democratic conditions in industry. This democracy, if it is to be real, must come home to, and be exercisable directly by, every individual member of the Guild. He must feel that he is enjoying real self-government and freedom at his work; or he will not work well and under the impulse of the communal spirit.
Then, to my mind a bit surprisingly given the above emphasis upon democracy, autonomy, and self-government, Cole makes an odd appeal to the Marxist idea of factory discipline, celebrating how the modern industrial factory would assure guild solidarity by ensuring that “men have the habit and tradition of working together.”
While there may well be some truth to this observation, this appeal to the virtues of factory discipline seems to entail further complications yet to come, as discussed below. After all, humans are naturally social animals. It is the spatialist modernism of industrial society that fractures communal life into the modular individualism of mass society. Here we have a clear glimpse of what I see as the core antinomy of Cole’s position: aspiring to temporalist culture within a spatialist habitus.4 I believe such a marriage is doomed to an incompatible union.
Perhaps, then, given this antinomy, it shouldn’t be too surprising to see Cole’s guild socialist ideal to begin listing in the direction of managerial class ventriloquism. (A topic discussed elsewhere on the Substack, as well as in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial.)
Neither the Guild as a whole nor the Guild factory can determine all issues by the expedient of the mass vote, nor can Guild democracy mean that, on all questions, each member is to count as one and none as more than one. A mass vote on a matter of technique understood only by a few experts would be a manifest absurdity, and, even if the element of technique is left out of account, a factory administered by constant mass votes would be neither efficient nor at all a pleasant place to work in.
How, then, will these Guild leaders be chosen? That it will be by the Guild itself goes without saying; for their imposition upon it from without would at once and utterly destroy its democratic character. But this does not mean that every type of leader must be chosen by a mass ballot of the whole Guild.
Let us begin our answer by removing from the discussion the man who is chosen, mainly or exclusively because he possesses a particular technical qualification, for the performance of a function which is essentially technical.
He is not really a leader, but a consultant or adviser, and the matter of choosing him is an expert question which does not raise the democratic issue.
At Cole's time this may have seemed like common sense, but a century of further experience with the managerial revolution has revealed this assumption as part of the self-legitimizing ideology of the managerial class: smuggling self-serving substantive rationality in the rear door under the blasé guise of purportedly innocent formal rationality (see here). And as the reader is perhaps beginning to see, of course this logic is a piece with the paradox of Cole’s larger project: marrying temporalist culture with spatialist habitus; and invoking the medieval constitution on behalf of an exercise in social engineering. The problems in the foundation of Cole’s guild socialism become more explicit still as we look at his introduction to Georges Renard’s book on medieval guilds.
We find Cole beginning with a celebration of the occasion of Renard’s book being translated into English, given how little English-language scholarship had been done on the topic at the time of his writing.
It is a curious gap in our economic literature that no simple introductory study of Mediaeval Guilds has yet been published in England.
This is all the more remarkable, because to an increasing extent in recent years men’s thoughts have turned back to the Mediaeval Guilds in their search for solutions of present-day industrial problems.
As the Trade Union movement develops in power and intelligence, it inevitably stretches out its hands towards the control of industry. The Trade Union, no doubt, begins as a mere bargaining body, “a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving their conditions of employment”; but it cannot grow to its full stature without becoming far more than this, without claiming for itself and its members the right to control production.
Mediaeval Guilds assumed many different forms under the varying circumstances of their origin—in Holland and Italy, France and England, Scotland and Germany. But, underlying all their different manifestations, a fundamental identity of principle can be found; for, in all, the direct control of industry was in the hands of the associated producers.
By this point, the deeper theoretical trouble in Cole’s characterization should be evident. A temporalist, no doubt, would agree with him that trade unions, and the trade union mindset, would be insufficient as institutions to serve as bulwarks against spatial modernism. As we’ll see though, Cole’s basic assumptions don’t lend his thought to this understanding. Already a hint of the central problem I see in his description of guild socialism is revealed in the wording above, which seems to be overlooking that, within the medieval guild context, the masters were capitalists. Certainly their apprentices, and often their journeymen, lived in their home (the usual site of material production) and the apprentice at least likely employed the tools of the master. Further, such goods were sold under the authority of the master.
So, medieval guilds did not entail workers control, in any 20th century sense of the term, but rather as the Social Catholics appreciated a realignment of interests away from Marxian class conflict toward a commonality of class interests across industries. Class conflict is replaced by vocational negotiation. This is a point we’ll have occasion to return to below.
The Guilds Merchant reached their zenith in the twelfth century. Thereafter, as trade and industry grew in extent and complexity, the general organization of all merchants and master-craftsmen in a single body gave way to a system of Craft Guilds, each representing as a rule a single craft or “mistery.” Some of these Guilds were predominantly Guilds of traders, some of producers; while some included both trading and producing elements. By the fourteenth century the Guilds Merchant had everywhere disappeared, and the Craft Guilds were in possession of the field. Thus came into being the organization of industry generally known as the “Mediaeval Guild system.”
...the Crafts themselves, which, as we have seen, made their own regulations for the ordering of trade and production; but the city authorities always maintained and asserted a right of intervention in the affairs of the Guilds whenever the well-being and good service of the consumer were involved; and this right was frequently exercised in the case of the Guilds which organized the supply of food and drink. Neither the limits of Guild authority nor the limits of municipal intervention were accurately or uniformly defined.
Among the Guildsmen wide social distinctions appeared, and the master-craftsman before long found himself, in relation to the rich trader or large-scale manufacturer, very much in the position of a labourer in relation to his employer.
The Guild was thus internally a self-regulating unit laying down the conditions under which production was to be carried on, and occupying a recognized status in the community based on the performance of certain communal functions. It was not, however, wholly independent or self-contained; it had intimate relations with other Guilds, with the municipal authority of the town in which it was situated, and, in increasing measure, with the national State within whose area it lay.
New industries, moreover, and rival methods of industrial organization began to grow up outside the towns and to challenge the supremacy of the Guilds; while, in the Guilds themselves, the system of regulation began to break down, and inequality of wealth and social consideration among the Guildsmen destroyed the democratic basis of the earlier Guild organization.
There's a really interesting point here. Guilds may have worked precisely because the capitalist was still a hands-on producer. Once the capitalist becomes more abstracted from the production of goods, drifting more in the direction of abstract work – organizing processes, effectuating finance – a guild system may not work; phenotypic interests become sharper, and so we find Marxian class conflict arises. We've seen how the Social Catholics embraced guilds as alternative forms of social production that erased such class conflict.
However, for such a project to succeed the capitalist as financier/planner would have to be replaced by capitalist as producer. But of course the capitalist as producer would be the capitalist not only in identity with non-capitalist producers, but in a specific physical location. While this is in keeping with a time biased society, it is not consistent with a space biased one. Production crosses the threshold of the spatial revolution once all the aspects of production, including the work itself (abstract labor), are reduced to inter/ex-changeable factors of production. Only then, when production is detached from any organic connection to a place or a community does the globalist regime of outsourcing, geo-arbitrage, international financing, transnational conglomerates, and post-national globally-merged jet-set elites, become possible.
And of course as per my observation above: the time biased production process of the guild could not sustain a space biased society, with all its technical marvels and elevated prosperity. Just as it would not succumb to the bureaucratic impersonality and disenchanted alienation from humanity's negative feedback loop with nature. It's not, as ever, about one social phenotype being morally or practically superior. Each has its season, appropriate to its place along the spiral of the phenotype wars.5
...the growth of new industries which had never come under Guild regulation, and the grant by the Crown of special privileges to individual monopolists and patentees, contributed to the downfall of the old system. Where the Guilds did not die, they were transformed into exclusive and privileged companies which in no sense carried on the mediaeval tradition.
Gradually, as capital accumulated in the hands of the traders, the rift between them and the master-craftsmen widened and, gradually too, the master-craftsmen lost their independence and their status as free producers. Not only the marketing of the goods which they produced, but also the essential raw materials of their crafts, passed under the control of the traders, either by the operation of economic forces alone, or by the purchase of some valuable concession or monopoly from the Crown. Moreover, where the actual producer retained his power, he did so by a transformation of function. Gradually, he turned into a capitalist trader and lost all unity of interest and outlook with the working craftsman.
So we see that in, at least some dim sense, Cole acknowledges my essential point from above, about the incompatibility between temporal pluralist institutions and the habitus of spatial modernism. Peculiar then that. at least for some time, he persisted in perceiving guilds as a means to advance workers industrial control. Though perhaps it was his eventual recognition of the incompatibility of guilds with space biased society, and the contemporary inevitably of the latter, which led him to eventually abandon guild socialism for class based unionism.
At this time, though, Cole had not yet come to that conclusion, and closes his introduction to Renard’s book on an optimistic note, highlighting the promise of the guild spirit in the modern world of industrial production.
This decay of the Guilds, however, is not of primary importance for those who seek to learn lessons from their experience. If we would judge them and learn from them, we must study them as they were in the time of their greatest prosperity and power, before the coming of capitalistic conditions had broken their democracy in pieces and destroyed their essential character.
The mediaeval organization of industry, then, was based upon the twin ideas of function and balance. It was an organization designed for an almost self-contained local type of Society, and before the coming of national and international economy it broke down and fell to pieces. As a local system of organization it reached its greatest perfection in those countries in which town life was strongest and national government weakest (e.g. in the Hanse towns of Germany; in Italy, and in Flanders). In this country the towns never possessed the strength or the independence necessary for the perfect development of the Guild system; but even so all the essential principles of the Guilds were operative.
Today we stand at the beginning of a new period of economic history. The Trade Union movement, created mainly as a weapon of defence, is beginning to challenge capitalist control of industry, and to suggest the possibility of a new form of functional organization adapted to the international economy of the modern world.
Upon close examination, Cole serves the fascinating role of absorbing the zeitgeist of 19th century (especially Social Catholic) guild corporatism and, in his theoretical elaboration, foreshadows the multiple failures of an aspirational transplanting of the guild idea into the heart of the spatial revolution as born out by the ineffectual (and at least sometimes insincere) authoritarian and fascist experiments in guild corporatism. At least, that is how I read him. Be that as it may, probably nowhere is the contradiction of the new guild corporatism more stark. The idea that the modern habitus of the spatial revolution could run on the fuel of temporal pluralist institutions and culture is nowhere else I’ve looked been made more manifestly preposterous.
But of course my point was never to squeeze the square peg into the round hole. The point was to suggest ways in which pluralist institutions might be generated by temporals that could provide a cushion for a softer landing as the spatial revolution exhausts itself and careens toward the cliff of civilizational crash. And none of the limitations we’ve seen in aspiration to leverage medieval guilds in the modern world, among the Social Catholics or the Guild Socialists, mitigates those lessons and prospects.
But I’ll have more to say about all this in the next, and final, installment to this series on Guilds, Old and New – and (burying the lead!) my penultimate post on the pluralist constitution. So, as that revelation should suggest, we’re coming up to a big sea change (there’s a pun here that won’t yet be obvious) in the direction of this Substack. So, if you don’t want to miss all that, and haven’t yet, please…
And, of course, as ever, if you know someone who you think would appreciate what we get up to over here, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
Of course, as I observe in the book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, right-wing socialism continued if only as a very minority position through the 20th century, in the likes of George Orwell and Christopher Lasch.
G. D. H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated, 1st edition (New Brunswick: Routledge, 1980).
Georges Renard, Guilds in the Middle Ages, trans. Dorothy Terry (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).
For those unfamiliar with it, I use the phrase “habitus” in a manner resonate with that of Pierre Bourdieu, as shaped by structure that generates action, so that social action and agency simultaneously reflect and reproduce social structure. In other words, even among individuals who are not distinctly spatial phenotypes the structures of space biased society tend to generate spatial expressions of agency – even if they are less deeply or organically experienced than by actual spatials. I clearly though diverge from Bourdieu in his default resort to environmental, rather than phenotypic, grounding of the habitus.
For relatively new readers of this Substack, who don’t understand what I’m on about here, it’s recommended that you read my recent book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.