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94
Roads to Freedom

and producers alike. The view of the Guild Socialists is that State Socialism takes account of men only as consumers, while Syndicalism takes account of them only as producers. "The problem," say the Guild Socialists, "is to reconcile the two points of view. That is what advocates of National Guilds set out to do. The Syndicalist has claimed everything for the industrial organisations of producers, the Collectivist everything for the territorial or political organisations of consumers. Both are open to the same criticism; you cannot reconcile two points of view merely by denying one of them."[1] But although Guild Socialism represents an attempt at adjustment between two equally legitimate points of view, its impulse and force are derived from what it has taken over from Syndicalism. Like Syndicalism, it desires, not primarily to make work better paid, but to secure this result along with others by making it in itself more interesting and more democratic in organization.


Capitalism has made of work a purely commercial activity, a soulless and a joyless thing. But substitute the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of the few; substitute responsible labour for a saleable commodity; substitute selfgovernment and decentralisation for the bureaucracy and demoralising hugeness of the modern State and the modern joint stock company; and then it may be just once more to speak of a "joy in labour" and once more to hope that men may be proud of quality and not only of quantity in their work. There is a cant of the Middle Ages, and a cant of "joy in
  1. The above quotations are all from the first pamphlet of the National Guilds League, "National Guilds: an Appeal to Trade Unionists."