Guild Socialism Revisited, and its Yugoslav Counterpart

Abstract

This paper revisits the early-20th-century British blueprint for Guild Socialism and discusses its similarities and differences with labor managed firm (LMF) theory and with the historic Yugoslav system. It finds that the Guild Socialist vision of a corporatist workers’ state based on universal, non-anonymous, multi-party negotiation of incomes, prices, and quantities comes much closer to anticipating the real-world Yugoslav experiment in worker-managed market socialism than the market-syndicalist utopia embodied in the Western economic model of the LMF and economy.

Citation

Ferrero, M. (2006), "Guild Socialism Revisited, and its Yugoslav Counterpart", Kalmi, P. and Klinedinst, M. (Ed.) Participation in the Age of Globalization and Information (Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 299-319. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0885-3339(05)09010-1