Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day. This by itself would not imply Socialism at all: it would be merely a revival of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators. Guild Socialism, with the emphasis on the Socialism, implies that the industries, however completely they may be controlled by their separate staffs, must pool their products. All the Guild Socialists admit this. The Socialist State must therefore include an organ for receiving and distributing the pooled products; and such an organ, representing the citizen not as producer but as consumer, reintroduces the whole machinery of Collectivism. Thus the alleged antithesis between Guild Socialism and Collectivism, under cover of which the one was presented as an alternative to the other, vanished at the first touch of the skilled criticism the Fabians brought to bear on it; and now Mrs. 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. This is not fully accepted as yet in the movement, in which there is still a strong leaven of the old craving for an easy-going system which, beginning with "the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange," will then work out automatically without interference with the citizen's private affairs.