That is where men can be supposed to have "the habit and
tradition of working together." The rest of the plant, the rest of the
industry, is an inferred environment.
4
Anybody can see, and almost everybody will admit, that self-government
in the purely internal affairs of the shop is government of affairs
that "can be taken in at a single view." [Footnote: Aristotle,
_Politics_, Bk. VII, Ch. IV.] But dispute would arise as to what
constitute the internal affairs of a shop. Obviously the biggest
interests, like wages, standards of production, the purchase of
supplies, the marketing of the product, the larger planning of work,
are by no means purely internal. The shop democracy has freedom,
subject to enormous limiting conditions from the outside. It can deal
to a certain extent with the arrangement of work laid out for the
shop, it can deal with the temper and temperament of individuals, it
can administer petty industrial justice, and act as a court of first
instance in somewhat larger individual disputes. Above all it can act
as a unit in dealing with other shops, and perhaps with the plant as a
whole. But isolation is impossible. The unit of industrial democracy
is thoroughly entangled in foreign affairs. And it is the management
of these external relations that constitutes the test of the guild
socialist theory.
They have to be managed by representative government arranged in a
federal order from the shop to the plant, the plant to the industry,
the industry to the nation, with intervening regional grouping of
representatives.
Pages:
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313