NATIONAL GUILDS.

 (By Professor Murdoch.) 

The present time may perhaps be known to future historians as the Age of Bewilderment. It is a time of swift and stupefying disintegrations of belief; a time when the authoritative voices have lost their old dogmatic tone, and the prophets are put to shame, and the experts visibly confounded; a time when the old faiths have crumbled, and the old formulae have failed us, and the old certitudes—the cherished doctrines, the rooted convictions—are torn up and blown hither and thither like dead leaves by the mighty hurricane which has come raging and roaring through the world. Nowhere is this so manifest as in the field of industrial relations. None but the obvious charlatan any longer dares to speak with assurance of what the industrial future may hold in store for us. We know that it will be different from the present; beyond that barren knowledge, all is groping and conjecture. Nevertheless, if we look steadily at the chaos and confusion around us, we do presently begin to discern, or to think, we discern, hints of a certain definite drift of opinion; we do begin to see which way the wind is blowing. In the industrial world I submit that the wind is blowing, though gustily enough, m the direction of national guilds.

 At the risk of seeming to utter the stalest of truisms, one must remark that during the last hundred years we have been presented with four main attempts to solve the industrial problem—the problem, that is, of the relations of Capital and Labour to one another and of the State to both. Individualism was followed by Socialism, Socialism by Syndicalism; and now Syndicalism is being rapidly superseded in its turn by the idea of National Guilds, an idea to which some of its apostles have given the rather misleading name of Guild Socialism.

 Dickens has stated in one immortal phrase the comfortable gospel of Individualism: "Every man for himself and God for us all, as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens." The theory of Individualism was, briefly, that the private employer was to settle his own relations with the employed, while the State stood aside and minded its own business. The practical applications of this alluringly simple creed gave England the spectacle of, in Mr. Sidney Webb's words, "women working half-naked in the coal mines; young children dragging trucks all day in the foul atmosphere of the underground galleries; infants bound to the loom for fifteen hours in the heated air of the cotton mill, and kept awake only by the over-looker's lash; hours of labor for all, young and old, limited only by the utmost capabilities of physical endurance." England, the England that had lately emerged from an heroic struggle for the liberties of Europe turned herself into an industrial hell, so appalling that, though some may still sigh in secret for the good old days before the State began to pry and fuss and meddle in industry, no one openly advocates a return to such conditions. As an avowed creed, Individualism is dead and done with, one of the evil memories of mankind.

 It was succeeded, inevitably, by Socialism; I mean, of course, neither the socialism of the red flag and the barricades and the swift and sudden and relentless seizure of land from  the landlord and of capital from the capitalist, nor the mild, hum-drum, respectable, unadventurous Fabian socialism which aims at the gradual training and equipment of a vast army of State officials; I mean something wider, some thing which includes these and innumerable other creeds, all of which have this belief in common, that salvation cometh by the State, that the industrial problem is to be solved by the action of the State. This is a belief, which no longer animates any large body of thinking persons.

 In France and America Socialism was succeeded by Syndicalism, a doctrine which sprang out of the worker's discovery that the politician was a broken reed and that the bureaucrat could be as much a tyrant as the worst private employer. The discredit into which, all the world over, politicians and parliaments have of late years fallen—whether justly or unjustly I do not pretend to know—made inevitable the coming of some such philosophy as that of Syndicalism.. The syndicalist was essentially anti-socialist; he was 'more hostile to the State than even the old individualist had been. He pinned  his faith to industrial combinations, arrayed for battle against capitalism; and his method was violence. His choice of methods was a fatal mistake, because if the appeal is to violence the worker must always, in the long run, be beaten; but his worst blunder was his attitude towards the State. By taking up that attitude, he not merely threw away an indispensables weapon, but quixotically put that weapon into the hands of the enemy. The failure of the great Australian strike of last year—essentially a  syndicalist adventure—showed many thoughtful men among the strikers where the fallacy of syndicalism lay.

 On the heels of Syndicalism came the doctrine of National Guilds, a doctrine which has made great strides since the war began, and which, as even the London "Times" admitted the other day, "is stirring great numbers of the younger workers, and is receiving quite inadequate notice in the general Press." It has certainly received quite inadequate notice in Australia; we are destined, if I am not mistaken, to hear much of it in the near future. The best exposition of it, so far, is to be found in a book entitled "National Guilds," by Mr. A. R. Orage, the editor of the "New Age," a journal which has been preaching this gospel, week in, week out, these many years. Another book which the inquiring spirit may be strongly advised to read is the remarkable volume, "Authority, Liberty, and Function," by Ramiro de Maeztu, a Spaniard, who writes excellent English, and who seeks to give  the doctrine a philosophical basis.

 A recent article in the "Round Table" points out that the adoption of the Whitley Report by the British Government is a momentous event in the ordering of British life:  "It lays firm the foundations of the new industrial order which the country expects to see after the war—and upon a basis of absolute equality between the two chief partners in the industrial process, management and labour." Now it is true the Whitley Councils are not National Guilds but they are unquestionably a step in that direction; their establishment is one among the innumerable straws which show which way the wind, in Britain at all events, is blowing. The doctrine of National Guilds appears to combine what is best in the ideals of the trade unionist with what is best and most practicable, in the ideals of the socialist; it avoids the fatal error of Syndicalism, in that it clearly recognises the necessary functions of the State: but the name sometimes given to it, "Guild Socialism," is, as I have said, rather misleading, for the National Guildsman has no belief whatever in the State enterprises which we commonly call socialistic. He pins his faith to the idea of a combination of all the men and women—labourers, administrators, hand-workers, brain-workers, skilled and unskilled—connected with a particular industry into a guild which shall manage that industry as a national undertaking. He does not seek to supplement wages by the method known as "profit-sharing:" he seeks rather to abolish the wages system and to substitute therefore a genuine partnership. In the work of the guild the State participates, regulating and controlling on behalf of the community. Syndicalism aims at the creation of guilds so powerful as to be able at their own sweet will to hold up the community; a madness into which the National Guildsman does not fall, being saved by his altogether saner and sounder view of the true relation of the State and industry. I am not going to attempt however, an exposition of this new gospel. Frankly, I am qualified neither to champion nor to condemn, nor even to expound, this or any other industrial creed. But I suppose that even a rank outsider, who confesses with shame that he has never read through a text-book of economics, may be allowed to recognise that the industrial condition into which we have fallen is intolerable in the present and full of darkest menace for the future. Even an outsider may be allowed to feel convinced that the problem will never be solved except by the substitution of some form of partnership for the present relations of employer and employed; and that, unless a sufficient number of people can be brought to recognise this in time, the present war of the nations will be followed by an industrial war within each nation, more horrible still. And my sole purpose in writing these lines is to draw some attention to a proposal which has not yet, in Australia, attracted the notice it deserves; a proposal which may be right or wrong, but which is at any rate an honest attempt to grapple with the facts which lie at the root of industrial discontent. Some in our midst are already thinking along these lines, as a recent correspondence in the columns of the "West Australian" shows. No one, I imagine, believes that the Guild idea can be suddenly realised, in England, or anywhere else; the change must come bit by bit, as all great and salutary changes do; and the essential preliminary is that as many minds as possible should be set brooding over the matter.

West Australian (Perth, WA),  1918  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article27473534