THE COMPLICATED LEGACY OF LA TOUR DU PIN
PART TWELVE: GUILDS, 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.
In an earlier post, I discussed Christopher Blum’s book, Critics of the Enlightenment1, with its focus on French Social Catholics and their common rejection of the two Overton window options of liberalism and socialism. Though, to be clear, by socialism they meant Marxist influenced left-wing socialism. This in contrast to what Jean Claude Michéa would have characterized, present among at least among some of these Social Catholics, as right-wing socialism (see A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars). I’d mentioned in that context, while I found the economic critiques of several of these thinkers – e.g., Bonald, Le Play, and Keller – fascinating and edifying, I really bought the book for the short, forty page, selection by René de la Tour du Pin (hereafter: Pin) on “the corporate regime.” While that post was a digression from the series on Guilds, Old and New, it seemed to make sense to include my response to Pin within this series.
I found this essay to be quite a mixed bag. Pin structures his discussion in terms of the conflicting requirements, values, and outcomes of what he calls “the corporate regime” and “the regime of freedom of labor.” Honestly, I found his discussion of the institutional requirements for a corporate regime to be quite disappointing, as I’ll get into momentarily. However, his discussion of the comparative social, economic, and political outcomes of the two regimes was not merely fascinating, but frankly in places so prescient in its anticipation of our own world, a century and a half after he wrote, as to verge upon astonishing. Before we can get to that topic, though, let’s dissect why I think his prescriptive institutional requirements for guild corporatism were so disappointing.
Pin did have some interesting remarks about how the renaissance of guilds faced a dilemma caught between the corrosive free market, if the guilds are to allow free labor market movement in or out of the guild, on the one hand; and on the other hand, stultifying bureaucratic administration if the state were to impose obligatory mandates for participation in a craft or profession (p. 196).2 I trust, though, that the regular reader around these parts will recognize this distinction as a false dichotomy: setting up monist sovereignty and free market individualism as the exclusive choice set is to reduce choice to a binary between left-wing options. Actual right-wing pluralism disappears along the way. And that disappearance is peculiar, since Pin is very conscious of the medieval constitution as the fertile model for rejuvenating guild corporatism.
In fact, I found his argument here a bit confused, if not downright mischievous. To begin with, he emphasizes a distinction between “administering” and “governing”: a distinction I’d happily endorse. Indeed, at one point he seems to be arguing for something like the kind of federal corporatism advanced by the like of Proudhon: “The corporation is like the township, a state within the state, that is, it is bound to the state by a moral contract that includes reciprocal rights and duties” (p. 197). Thus, he’s giving the corporation a place reminiscent of the fedun in federalism. This seems like a promising start from the perspective of heterarchical pluralism. However, very quickly this promise vanishes. He goes on to say: “The public authority [presumably, in context, the state] does not dictate [the guild’s] rules, but it approves them in order to keep them within the bounds of a corporate utility that does not injure the public utility…” (p. 197)
So, as we’ve seen in the thinking of other corporatists, the state somehow is supposed to play the part of impartial referee. Though, it’s unclear – given the managerial class’ long history of conceptual self-dealing (see my book, The Managerial Class on Trial) – why one would expect the state to interpret “public utility” in some socially impartial and magnanimous manner. A bit further on Pin claims that the “state has an interest in supporting the interests of the working class…” (p. 197) Well, maybe, but such an unbounded assertion seems strangely blind to the, even by the late 19th century, hardly unobserved propensity for money to infiltrate politics, under which conditions, notwithstanding whatever (competing) interests exists for them, the bribe-able agents of the state become inclined to develop strong incentives to the contrary.
Again, while such facts have been studied by public choice economists since Pin’s time, broad accusation along these lines had been credibly enough leveled in the 19th century. By 1848, Marx and Engels had claimed: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Pin’s apparent obliviousness to this fairly standard perspective leaves one the impression that he’s imagining a government of angels.
But such angelic presumptions about the state go even further; Pin even offers up the state as the workers’ “tutor” in the teaching of corporatist values and practices.
Because we must not only preserve but also promote the corporations, the actions of the government must be full of solicitude. Its current role should be that of the vigilant tutor, who supplies by his own ability what his pupil cannot and thus provides for the pupil’s future. When the pupils have attained maturity, the government will only act by the promulgation of laws that coordinate these new autonomous forces with the whole ensemble of social and political institutions. (p. 197)
Well, maybe, but I find such a notion awfully farfetched given the long history we have of the state taking positive action to destroy all intermediary heterarchical pluralist institutions, including guilds. Such visions of a state of angels seems at odds with the conflicting interest of class and persistence of human rapaciousness. I fully appreciate that a major pillar of Social Catholic corporatism was precisely to overcome the socially destructive effects of Marxian class struggle – but it seems preposterous to assume that one can simply wish away such conflict with a conviction in the capacity of the state to behave with angelic impartiality.
One could argue, though Pin doesn’t, that the success of such a guild corporatism is therefore reliant upon the agents of heterarchical pluralism gaining control over the state. However, in the cases of both North American populism and German Social Catholicism we have noted the risks and failures of such historical efforts (see here and here, as well as my book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars).
In fact, it seems to me that Pin’s prescriptive requirements for achieving corporatism may well have helped paved the way to guild corporatism’s darkest period. His high resolution (and somewhat naive) involvement of the state in the creation and maintenance of guild corporatism leans much too far into the fascist corporatism, in which the supervision of class conflict through guild solidarity becomes a cosmetic facade for rejuvenated monist sovereignty: pluralism to monism (rather than the other way around). All such disguised and cryptic monism was just another flavor of standard managerial class ventriloquism: see here, here, and here). These fascist strategies of the managerial class are discussed at length in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial.
So, clearly, I’m not especially impressed with Pin at the level of prescriptive requirements for the renaissance of guild corporatism. However, as mentioned above, I was impressed on several occasions by the prescience with which he was able to identify the likely outcomes of pursuing his regime of freedom of labor. Certainly, to say his version of the corporative regime comes up short doesn’t imply that some other (more heterarchical) version of guild corporatism wouldn’t better insulate a society against the dangers of free markets. Obviously, Pin is writing at a time when the spatial revolution is accelerating into takeoff mode – even if it hadn’t yet achieved the condition of full-on moonshot “space bias” with which we’re all familiar today well into the 21st century. And yet, writing nearly a century and a half before our current moment, his predictions are striking in places.
First, here he lays out the problem:
The freedom of labor, otherwise known as capitalism, exhausts both man and nature and endangers both the producer and production. Capitalism is the system today practiced throughout our social economy. It tends to one end: to increase the return on capital by decreasing the costs of production. It does this in two ways: by procuring the best possible price for labor and materials and by employing in production the least possible quantity and quality of each. (p. 203)
Pin acknowledges that the rationale underpinning this system, of constantly degraded wages and reduced employment, is the value of competition in reducing the price of goods. However, he observes this system paradoxically inclines toward its own self-immolation. The lower priced goods come at the cost of reducing the prospects of an increasingly larger part of the potential market for such goods to even survive economically, much less prosper.
Further, blind to this (apparent) paradox – unless of course the promoters of the regime of freedom of labor actually knew perfectly well what they were leading the working class into – the argument against the guilds was that they obstructed this very ballyhooed competition. Interestingly, Pin does not take the common path of dismissing the importance of competition, but rather argues that seeing the issue through the lens of the guild corporatism allows one to reconfigure both how competition can work, and what benefits it can produce, without succumbing to the destructive forces of free market competition:
Competition is said to be the soul of production. Yet it existed as much in the past, even with the corporate monopoly, which, on the one hand, did not permit a price above the just price because the public authorities watched over it, and, on the other, did not tolerate the decline of the product because the masters kept control of it. There was competition between the masters of the same corporation, competition to see who could offer the best product while paying the same wages and costs for materials and charging the same price. (p. 204)
While there may be grounds for quibbling over some of the details in this passage, Pin’s central point is as obvious upon statement as it is a bit of a spanner in the works of theories of free market competition. Competition need not be processed through reducing wages and labor; it could be through proving the capacity to improve products within the shared productive constraints of providing a family-supporting wage to a large number of workers. Neither case is more competitive than the other, and in both the final product improves. The difference is that one contributes to the misery of the working class, while the other does not.
Now, I understand that the Austrian economist types would laugh at all this, saying such notions of the immiserizing of the working class is an outdated mindset, common incidentally to Marx, which overlooks how under today’s dynamic capitalism the market for new goods, and so new jobs, endlessly unfolds before us like a golden highway of prosperity. Steelworkers become baristas, autoworkers can become Walmart cashiers. The vistas are indeed endless. But of course even if such claims were valid, they are the war cry of the spatial, celebrating labor mobility with utter disregard for the consequences impacting communities, and thereby ultimately families. Those latter are the concerns of temporals, for whom having one’s family-supporting job off-shored is hardly an occasion to quip about the magic of creative destruction, or embrace the thrilling rootlessness of modular individualism.
And, fascinatingly, even back in the 1880s, Pin anticipates an impressive amount of what would ultimately result from a social order rooted in the regime of freedom of labor, and its inevitably corresponding freedom of capital, rather than the regime of guild corporatism. Consider these couple of passages:
Has the system of unlimited freedom of capital improved our production, as is claimed, or has it diminished it? The latter, for it has allowed production to die out on our national soil by allowing it to emigrate to wherever it can find labor and material at better prices. When we argue about the economic decline of France, we should pay attention to this fact: our annual imports exceed our exports by a billion francs, that is, we consume a billion francs more than we produce. Who pays for this excess of foreign production, unless it be the profits of French capital that has left to make fruitful other fields than our own: Our commercial house often see the produce of foreign nations under French trademarks. A large part of those things “made in Paris” are actually made in Germany, and by this double trick of capitalism even our export statistics are often falsified. (p. 204)
The Chinese will become the world’s best workers because they only require that their animal needs be met. Later, the worker, the engineer, the salesman, and the banker himself will be purchased on the open market. Then the banker of London, Paris, or Vienna, having made himself rich by putting his capital to work in China, will in turn face an unequal struggle against the Chinese usurer, who will not give himself the luxuries of a princely palace, teams of horses, parties, and the life of the rich. An irremediable decline awaits the economic order of the civilization of the West at the end of this path of freedom of labor, a path down which it is led by the teaching of the philosophers, the science of the economists, and the power of the capitalists. (p. 205)
Certainly, again, one could quibble with some of the details, but overall this is a remarkably prescient anticipation from a century and a half earlier of where the path of the regime of the freedom of labor (and capital) would lead the Western world. And the capacity for such foresight arose precisely out of Pin’s prudent contrasting of the internal implications of the two regimes: labor freedom vs guild corporatism.
As disappointing as I found Pin’s vision for what a corporative regime would look like, or how it could come into existence, his deep understanding of how a regime of guild corporatism differed from the freedom of labor regime, and what the logical consequences of following each path would entail still makes his contribution a valuable resource for those temporals who persist in seeing some potential and prospect in recreating the pluralist institutions that might buffer them against the impact of the final arc in the phenotype wars, as the spatial revolution takes its inexorable course.
And, as we near the conclusion of this series on Guilds, Old and New, I have one more historical context I want to explore before moving on to some reflections upon how indeed the lessons from this series might be applied by those today who would aspire to regenerate some dimensions of the pluralist constitution, whether as a remedy to our ages excessive space bias or as a cushion against the probable collapse of that age’s spatial revolution. So, if you want to stay on top of all that, but haven’t yet, please…
And if you know anyone else who you think be interested in the topics we discuss over here, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
Christopher O. Blum, Critics of the Enlightenment (Providence, Rhode Island: Cluny Media, 2020).
Since, on this rare occasion, I’m actually using a hardcopy book, I’m giving you the page numbers of the quotations — old school style. Never say I don’t do things for you.