Amazon.com description: Product Description: From the PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
The theory and policy of Guild Socialism, or National Guilds, have been developed over a period of years, and primarily with a view to British industrial conditions. The widespread interest which they have aroused in the United States of America shows, however, that, while there is much in the American conditions that is different, there are nevertheless, broadly speaking, similar social diseases calling for similar remedies. It is not for an Englishman to prescribe to the citizens of other countries the medicine for their social ills: he has amply enough on hand in seeking to act as a physician — one among many — to his own countrymen, threatened as they seem to be by the alternatives of a sudden breaking up or of a gradual breaking down of the mechanism of British industry. This is, indeed, too pessimistic a statement to express the real facts of the industrial situation in Great Britain at the present time; for there are forces of creation as well as forces of destruction at work. But at best it will be a hard-run race between these forces, and the prospects of a victory for the creative forces have not grown brighter of late.
In the United States of America, although a similar contest is proceeding, it has neither reached the same phase nor passed through the same stages. British industry to-day is vastly more concentrated and trustified than American industry, and the very smallness of Great Britain has led, among employers and workers, to a much closer organization and a much greater uniformity of method and policy. New schemes and policies tend to arise in Great Britain nationally, and experiments to be made on a national scale — facts which make theorizing perhaps easier, but practical tests more difficult than in America. All these considerations, and many others like them and behind them, mean that, even if Guild Socialism has a message for the citizens of the United States, it is likely to assume among them a form different in many respects from that which it has taken on in Great Britain.
I have made, and can make, no attempt to indicate what this different form should be. That can only be determined by the American people themselves. Already, in the books of Mr. Ordway Tead and others, there are signs of the emergence of ideas closely akin to those of the Guild Socialists of Great Britain. The significance of the " Plumb Plan " of the American railway men is discussed elsewhere in this book ; and, only during the last few months, the new Farmer Labor Party has adopted a plank in its platform which indicates at the least a tendency towards the conception of industry in terms of democracy which has been the basis of the Guild movement. It is difficult for me to estimate the real significance of these and similar movements and tendencies in the world of American industry; but I have the thought that, after all, there is nothing peculiarly British about the fundamental ideas which underlie the Guild movement. The form which it has assumed — its actual clothing of institutions and programs — is mainly British; but the ideas behind it, if they are valid at all, are in the main universal, and are capable of giving rise to many diverse systems based on different material and psycho- logical conditions....