It may appear plausible to argue that the control of each process of production should be left to the producers who may be presumed to know it best.But it becomes evident, even to the syndicalist, that no business could be conducted upon this policy unmodified.No house-building could proceed, if the plasterers, the bricklayers, the carpenters, had each full power to determine when they would work, at what pace they would work, and what remuneration they should exact.There must be a definite arrangement between the groups of workers in the several processes within each business, which will qualify the control of plastering by the plasterers, bricklaying by the bricklayers, by a wider control that represents the common.Interests of the business.Not merely does the syndicalist idea recognise this cooperation of the processes within a business, but it extends the cooperative character of the control to the trade as a whole.Under syndicalism the building trade would not be broken into a number of businesses in each of which would be made a separate arrangement between the carpenters, bricklayers, etc., employed in it.The arrangements as to hours and pace and remuneration, etc., would be determined by representatives of the various crafts on a trade basis.and would be the same for all businesses and all jobs.But the organisation of producers could not stop there.Each trade could no more be entirely self-governing than each business or each process in a business.The trade-organisation of the miners could not, having regard to the interests and needs of other trades, be safely entrusted with the absolute control of mining, or the railway workers with the absolute control of the railways.There must be some power to prevent the miners reducing their amount of work and their output to an extent which will cripple the other trades which need coal, and to compel the railway workers to afford reasonable facilities of transport on reasonable terms to shippers and travellers.For, otherwise, there would be substituted for the conflict of capital and labour within each business or each trade, a conflict of trades, each striving to do as little and to get as much as possible out of the aggregate wealth.Nor can it be assumed that the intelligent self-interest or social sympathy of the miners, or railwaymen, or other trades, would be adequate safeguards against such abuses.This is evident when we bear in mind the central concrete problem before us, the social distribution and utilisation of the surplus.For it will be technically possible for any strongly-placed special group of workers, such as the miners or railway workers, to take to themselves, in remuneration or in leisure, an excessive proportion of this surplus, leaving very little for any other group of workers.The guild-feeling, upon which syndicalism mainly relies, not merely supplies no safeguard against this abuse of power, but would almost certainly evoke it, unless a potent control, representing industry in general, were established over the individual trades or guilds.Experience of cases where local trade-unions are occasionally placed in a position of tyranny shows that they will play for their own hand with a disregard to the interests of their fellow-workers in other trades as callous as is displayed by any trust of capitalists.Assuming, then, that it were possible for guild-societies to develop to the point that the workers in each trade were in possession of all the instruments of production, and were able to conduct the processes efficiently, the problem of distributing the 'surplus' among the several trades or guilds, in the shape of pay or leisure, would still remain unsolved.
Among the groups of producers, in a word, there would remain divergencies of interest, which would be incapable, upon a producers' policy, of solution.
Syndicalists, confronted with this phase of their problem, plunge into vague assurances that the process of agreement which had taken place between the workers in the several processes and the several businesses in a trade, could be extended to the workers grouped in the larger trade-units, and that the real solidarity of working-class interests would somehow instinctively express itself in equitable and durable arrangements.But the moment one passes from the region of phrases to that of concrete facts the difficulties thicken.An elected council of national workers would have to devise some practicable method of comparing units of railway service with units of mining, bricklaying, doctoring, acting, waiting, etc., so as to apply to each productive process the support and stimulus needed to induce the workers engaged in it to do their share of work and to receive their share of wealth.
No mere time basis for such competition would be practicable.It would be necessary to induce a body of labour and capital to apply itself to each process of each occupation, sufficient in quantity and in efficiency to supply the requirements of the working community as a whole, and to devise a mode of remuneration, or distribution of products, which would satisfy this requirement.
