[37]
[37] ``The Guild Idea,'' No. 2 of the Pamphlets of the National
Guilds League, p. 17.
Whatever may be thought of the practicability
of Syndicalism, there is no doubt that the ideas which
it has put into the world have done a great deal
to revive the labor movement and to recall it to certain
things of fundamental importance which it had
been in danger of forgetting. Syndicalists consider
man as producer rather than consumer. They are
more concerned to procure freedom in work than to
increase material well-being. They have revived the
quest for liberty, which was growing somewhat
dimmed under the regime of Parliamentary Socialism,
and they have reminded men that what our modern
society needs is not a little tinkering here and there,
nor the kind of minor readjustments to which the
existing holders of power may readily consent, but
a fundamental reconstruction, a sweeping away of
all the sources of oppression, a liberation of men's
constructive energies, and a wholly new way of
conceiving and regulating production and economic
relations. This merit is so great that, in view of it,
all minor defects become insignificant, and this merit
Syndicalism will continue to possess even if, as a
definite movement, it should be found to have passed
away with the war.
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