expropriate the capitalists. As some point, the unions would also take on the welfare functions of the state. They would dispense old-age pensions, sick benefits, accident insurance, and "much else," as S. G. Hobson put it. By submitting a whole range of important issues to the workers' collective judgment, they would make "better citizens"—the ultimate test of any system of government, in Hobson's opinion. They would also promote fellowship and solidarity and thus counter the atomizing effects of industrial capitalism.

According to the editor of the New Age, A. R. Orage, the reduction of labor to a commodity—the essence of "wagery"—required the elimination of all the social bonds that prevented the free circulation of labor. The destruction of the medieval guilds, the replacement of local government by a centralized bureaucracy, the weakening of family ties, and the emancipation of women amounted to "successive steps in the ... cheapening of the raw material of labor," all achieved under the "watchword" of progress. Since wage labor depended on the "progressive shattering to atoms of our social system," those who opposed it would have to make the unions into agencies of social cohesion and civic trust.

Because syndicalists sought to base the new order on the unions, not on the party and the state, guild socialists welcomed them, with some misgivings, as allies in their struggle against collectivism. Syndicalism, they believed, reasserted the producers' point of view. It refused to equate socialism with a more equitable distribution of consumer goods. It recognized the irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor and rejected the possibility of compromise. It condemned parliamentary socialism on the grounds that it merely elevated the most enterprising members of the labor movement into the middle class, where they soon forgot their revolutionary principles. For all these reasons, syndicalism—"from which Guild Socialists learnt much," Cole wrote in 1920, "in the early days of their own movement"—looked like a considerable advance over orthodox socialism.

But syndicalism was open to objection in its own right. It went too far in asserting the interests of producers, overlooking the need for an agency—the state—to protect the interests of consumers. Guild socialism, according to its proponents, would combine the best features of the socialist and syndicalist programs. The guild system assumed the nationalization of industry not as a panacea but as an essential precondition of

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