Sidney Webb,
who was singled out for attack by the Guild Socialists as the arch
Collectivist, is herself conducting an investigation into the existing
control of industry by professional organizations, whilst the quondam
Guild Socialists are struggling with the difficult question of the
proper spheres of the old form of Trade Union now called the craft
union, and the new form called the industrial union, in which workers of
all crafts and occupations, from clerks and railway porters to
locomotive drivers and fitters, are organized in a single union of the
entire industry. There is work enough for many years to some of the old
Fabian kind in these directions; and this work will irresistibly reunite
the disputants instead of perpetuating a quarrel in which, like most of
the quarrels which the Society has survived, there was nothing
fundamental at issue.
There is work, too, to be done in the old abstract deductive department.
It can be seen, throughout the history of the Society, how any attempt
to discard the old economic basis of the law of rent immediately
produced a recrudescence of Anarchism in one form or another, the latest
being Syndicalism and that form of Guild Socialism which was all Guild
and no Socialism. But there is still much to be settled by the deductive
method. The fundamental question of the proportions in which the
national income, when socialized, shall be distributed, was not grappled
with until 1914, when I, lecturing on behalf of the Society, delivered
my final conclusion that equal distribution is the only solution that
will realize the ideals of Socialism, and that it is in fact the
economic goal of Socialism.
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