Functional socialism

150 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

Guild holds a strong strategic position and may take advantage of it; and so on. The solution is suggested: Guild ambassadors, the Guild equivalent of interlocking directorates. “Nor is there any reason why these Guild ambassadors should not be clothed with large authority to commit their Guilds to proposals that vary existing contracts and understandings. If large changes were proposed, the assent of the other Guilds, through their ambassadors, would be as deliberate as the changes were important. We here hit upon a valuable truth: when bodies between which there is no economic harmony disagree (labour and capitalism under modern industrialism) such disagreement tends towards disintegration; but disagreements between two or more bodies, whose economic interests are fundamentally harmonious, tends towards closer economic integration. Thus dissensions amongst the Guilds would almost certainly create a movement to reduce all such friction to its smallest area, and by goodwill on all sides finally to eliminate it.” And the ultimate authority is the National Guild Congress, or, as I have since called it, the House of Industry. With this fleeting glimpse of Guild organization and its inherent difficulties, we can now consider the Guild theory of finance so far as I was able to sketch it. During the past twenty years there has been an increasing flow of propaganda specially directed to finance and its kindred problems. It may not be without interest to consider what we Guildsmen were

thinking in 1913.