What keeps it running as a non-coercive society?
Mr. Cole has two answers to this question. One is the orthodox Marxian
answer that the abolition of capitalist property will remove the
motive to aggression. Yet he does not really believe that, because if
he did, he would care as little as does the average Marxian how the
working class is to run the government, once it is in control. If his
diagnosis were correct, the Marxian would be quite right: if the
disease were the capitalist class and only the capitalist class,
salvation would automatically follow its extinction. But Mr. Cole is
enormously concerned about whether the society which follows the
revolution is to be run by state collectivism, by guilds or
cooperative societies, by a democratic parliament or by functional
representation. In fact, it is as a new theory of representative
government that guild socialism challenges attention.
The guildsmen do not expect a miracle to result from the disappearance
of capitalist property rights. They do expect, and of course quite
rightly, that if equality of income were the rule, social relations
would be profoundly altered. But they differ, as far as I can make
out, from the orthodox Russian communist in this respect: The
communist proposes to establish equality by force of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, believing that if once people were equalized both
in income and in service, they would then lose the incentives to
aggression.
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