Vince Ferrer asked about the relationship between social credit and guild socialism. Briefly, our movement's cofounder A. R. Orage was a guild socialist before his life-changing meeting with Douglas in late 1917 or early 1918. (He had broken his journal away from the Fabians by 1909.) He collaborated with S. G. Hobson on the book National Guilds. Taking inspiration from Ruskin's classic polemic "On the Nature of Gothic," the guild socialists wanted to turn the trades unions into vertically integrated guilds self-owned but chartered by the state, where master and man would find common ground and take pride in the work and to extend such guilds horizontally to include every occupation, such that there would be no one not in a guild. They would then use the leverage of these organizations to demand the full proceeds of production, dismantle the wage system (in which workers are constrained to sell their labor as a commodity), and substitute payment on a service basis that continues through sickness and idle times and also maintains reserves (unemployed) in every occupation. In proposing to break the artificial bond between personal income and employment and in its general Ruskinian philosophy, guild socialist were ripe for conversion to social credit.
Michael Lane
Triumph of the Past
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