Both are
open to the same criticism; you cannot reconcile two
points of view merely by denying one of them.''[36]
But although Guild Socialism represents an attempt
at readjustment 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.
[36] The above quotations are all from the first pamphlet of the
National Guilds League, ``National Guilds, an Appeal to Trade
Unionists.''
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 labor for a saleable commodity;
substitute self-government and decentralization
for the bureaucracy and demoralizing 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
labor,'' 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
labor,'' but it were better, perhaps, to risk that cant
than to reconcile ourselves forever to the philosophy of
Capitalism and of Collectivism, which declares that work
is a necessary evil never to be made pleasant, and that
the workers' only hope is a leisure which shall be longer,
richer, and well adorned with municipal amenities.
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