36 ([return])
[ The above quotations are all from the first pamphlet of the National Guilds League, "National Guilds, an Appeal to Trade Unionists.">[
35 ([return])
[ The ideas of Guild Socialism were first set forth in "National Guilds," edited by A. R. Orage (Bell & Sons, 1914), and in Cole's "World of Labour" (Bell & Sons), first published in 1913. Cole's "Self-Government in Industry" (Bell & Sons, 1917) and Rickett & Bechhofer's "The Meaning of National Guilds" (Palmer & Hayward, 1918) should also be read, as well as various pamphlets published by the National Guilds League. The attitude of the Syndicalists to Guild Socialism is far from sympathetic. An article in "The Syndicalist" for February, 1914, speaks of it in the following terms: a Middle-class of the middle-class, with all the shortcomings (we had almost said `stupidities') of the middle- classes writ large across it, `Guild Socialism' stands forth as the latest lucubration of the middle-class mind. It is a `cool steal' of the leading ideas of Syndicalism and a deliberate perversion of them. . . . We do protest against the `State' idea . . . in Guild Socialism. Middle-class people, even when they become Socialists, cannot get rid of the idea that the working-class is their `inferior'; that the workers need to be `educated,' drilled, disciplined, and generally nursed for a very long time before they will be able to walk by themselves. The very reverse is actually the truth. . . . It is just the plain truth when we say that the ordinary wage-worker, of average intelligence, is better capable of taking care of himself than the half-educated middle-class man who wants to advise him. He knows how to make the wheels of the world go round.">[
37 ([return])
[ "The Guild Idea," No. 2 of the Pamphlets of the National Guilds League, p. 17.]
38 ([return])
[ Kropotkin, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," p. 74.]
39 ([return])
[ Ib. p. 81.]