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A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain
A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain Author:Sidney Webb Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER II DEMOCRACIES OF PRODUCERS We are, however, not restricted in our constitution- making to Democracies of Consumers. We also have at our disposal the various forms of Democra... more »cies of Producers, which have, by their survival and steadily increasing development, proved their practicability within their own sphere. The difficulty of surveying this branch of social experience is, indeed, both the antiquity and the ubiquitous variety of associations of producers by hand or by brain. Associations of consumers are, in the world's story, of quite recent origin ;* associations of producers are as old as history itself, ranging from the immemorial castes of India and the guilds of China to the modern Trade Union of labourers and the perennial and ubiquitous organisations of lawyers, priests and doctors. Further, the associations of consumers, born almost contemporaneously with political Democracy, tend to be uniform and stable in their constitution. Associations of producers, on the contrary, are characterised by the utmost diversity and instability of constitutionalstructure. Who can tell us, for instance, whether the mediaeval guild was a democracy or an oligarchy ; or exactly at what periods the London College of Physicians or College of Surgeons was governed from above by a privileged section of the vocation or from below by all those workers subject to its jurisdiction ? We find the same baffling uncertainty when we pass from the constitutional to the economic aspect. Are we dealing in the mediaeval guild with an association of individual owners and organisers of the instruments of production, dictating to different grades of wage-earners the conditions of employment; or with an association of working craftsmen superintending, as fathers of families and master craftsmen, the co-operative production ...« less