Guilds

I’ve changed my views a lot during my life. When I was a teenager I went through several stages when I was, with varying degrees of intensity, a Marxist. Every Saturday during the late 1980’s and early 90’s you’d be able to find me selling copies of Militant on the streets or taking part in rallies and marches. Today the newspaper is called The Socialist (http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/main/Home .) One thing that I never noticed at the time, but do now, is that the Communist Revolution that my erstwhile comrades had so dedicated their lives to was something that was very lacking in any particular prophesy. When I first joined their cause, the first question I asked was: What will it be like living in a socialist society? And my comrades seemed rather reluctant to answer me. They even became quite irritated at me for asking, replying: “Well, we’ll never find out unless we avoid Utopian thoughts like that and not live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land!” (Cloud-Cuckoo Land was what they said all the time. Marxists love to talk in clichés). But at times I did wonder what I was actually fighting for. When we were together or speaking officially the party line was “We’re fighting for a £135 a week minimum wage, the nationalization of the top 200 monopolies and the introduction of 16-year-olds onto the electoral register… and a long, long list of what I felt were very shallow and short-sighted ideas. One or two comrades were willing to share larger ideals with me when we were talking one-to-one, but they seemed strangely embarrassed to do so when we were in a group; perhaps they didn‘t want to be thought of as Utopian “Cloud-Cuckoo Landers”. For a philosophy that claims to stand for freedom Marxism is actually infested with its own poisonous brand of Conformism. And as I grew older I realized that Marxism was just another brand of tyranny, one more polarity in the Hegelian dialectic of public domination. And years later I found out that Karl Marx himself was an agent of the Illuminati, with links to the dark tendency of the Theosophists, and that the first Communist Revolutions had been funded by American and British bankers; just like Adolf Hitler was a generation later. (After I abandoned Marxism I was a Welsh Nationalist for a while too, but that‘s another story)

Today I’m not a Marxist and I don’t want to live in a Socialist society. I’m also not shy of describing my visions and dreams. To do so is not to abandon practicality, rationality and feet-on-the-ground action. Far from it, a Utopian dream can provide energy for those very things. It’s a goal to focus on, an “inner truth” as the I Ching says in its chapter on Revolution. At the same time a long-term vision that is too detailed can be time-wasting and derailing, simply because life is so unpredictable. Who knows what the world will be like on the other side of 2012, or whenever the shift in human consciousness occurs? All we can do is create a provisional theoretical model that provides us with a starting block so that when the Illuminati are gone from our lives we won’t run around like panic-stricken madmen screaming in the dark (See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/02/military-do-we-need-it.html ). This model can create stability for society during the immediate post-Illuminati transitional period. In that spirit, after much research, I created a 4-point plan:

1. Government centred on small local communities instead of nation states, continental unions and international blocs.
2. A money system of local community currencies rather than the current centrally-controlled currencies of the Bank of England. See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/03/credit-crunch-what-credit-crunch.html
3. The Basic Income social security system. See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/05/basic-income.html
4. Workers Cooperatives. See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/workers-cooperatives.html

But now my plan has changed. I would like to introduce a new fifth point: The reintroduction of the guild. A guild is an organization of a particular type of craftsman; they were strong during the Middle Ages, but declined after the Industrial Revolution. They’re often confused with trade unions when in fact the two are very different things. A trade union is essentially a political organization that provides legal representation and political clout to a certain group of workers; it has no interest nor bearing on the nature of the workers’ professions themselves. A guild on the other hand is primarily a storage house for the skills, methods, practice ethics, patents and rights, “tricks-of-the-trade”, tool design and production, the introduction of new activities and technology and education and training relating to the actual work done by that profession; although they sometimes also play the role that trade unions do as well. Guilds used to be highly secretive and the above information would often be kept away from non-members. To do a particular job it was necessary to join the relevant guild simply to learn how to do it. There are examples of guilds in the modern world although they’re usually not given that name. Most so-called “professionals” (as opposed to “sub-professionals”!? I actually feel very strongly that this entire dichotomy is a Conformist delusion of the stupidest and most destructive kind.) have professional associations which are in many ways similar to guilds. For instance the British Medical Association or the Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Now I’ve come to realize that the guilds could have a very fertile renaissance in the post-Illuminati world. This is for several reasons. Firstly: The end of the centralized government that made the guilds obsolete in the first place. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution the services I mentioned above that guilds provided were taken up by the new centralized authorities. For instance skills and education was handled by colleges and universities; training, methods and tool-design became the duty of an employee’s management. Professional ethics, patents and legal matters were also delegated to government-appointed committees of experts. This is the point that people who talk to me about this subject bring up the most: Without centralized authority, how can we maintain standards and provide quality control? If you go to the dentist for a filling, how do you know that the dentist will do a safe and effective job? How can you be reassured that he not just some quack who will take your money, shove putty in your tooth and run for the exit? In today’s world that comes from the fact that he has a qualification at an approved university and dentists’ training school, a licence from the Department of Health and membership of a professional dental association. But in the future post-Illuminati world these institutions will no longer exist; so how will we get our reassurance then? Guilds could be the answer. They would operate with lawyers, workers’ cooperative boards and local community officials to get contracts and licences for their members in certain areas. They could also act as disciplinary bodies in case one of their members committed an error. The guild could become the place where the public could go to in order to make a complaint or to give feedback, or just to say thank you for a job well done! Tribunals and arbitration in disputes between various individuals and cooperatives within the same trade could also be provided by that trade‘s guild. The second reason is that guilds could be the vehicle for the organization and deployment of work. For example, the railway network of any country has to be centrally planned. The rail-gauge has to be standard, as does the voltage in power lines and signalling system etc; also station platforms all need to be at the same correct height to allow passengers on and off all the trains. How could we possible organize that in a railway system that covers thousands of miles of tracks linking scores of stations, all run by hundreds of workers’ cooperative companies in dozens of independent micro-nations? How? With guilds. Guilds could adjudicate and make decisions on all those standards that all the independent bodies in the system would then have to conform to.

The third reason is more abstract and fundamental: Guilds could be part of the very healthy social revolution that has to come if we’re going to survive in the post-Illuminati world. Guilds could be a centre for camaraderie, communal intimacy and general esprit-de-corps that is so absent in much of modern society. In a world where humanity slowly reembraces its natural roots in tribal culture, guilds could play an important role in that. Many towns have civically-owned buildings with the name “Guildhall” and this was because they were originally built to house the headquarters of guilds, even though today they have other functions: town halls, theatres, sports halls, offices etc. Maybe in the future we could return these buildings to their original purpose, and indeed we’d need to build new ones! The guildhalls would be part office, part meeting house, part museum, part library and part college all in one. But I’m sure they could also find room in their floor plan for a well-stocked bar whenever the members felt like having a party, or even just a wind-down after a hard day‘s work! The guildhall might end up the social centre for you and your colleagues and even a place where you could communicate with other people who do your job in other countries on the phone or Internet; and between you you could organize “busmen’s holidays”. So, go out and found your own guilds now. I can set up a Hospital Porters’ Guild right now very easily. Everything progressive we can do before 2012 we should do because it will soften the blow when it actually happens if we have a provisional post-Illuminati infrastructure in place.

One role that I don’t think guilds will play in the future post-Illuminati world is that of the trade union. In fact hopefully there will be no need of any trade unions at all. Unions only exist because the modern world is so unjust. They are a damage-limitation scheme, not a solution. Although I reckon that some members of my own current trade union would recoil from the idea of living in a world where their services would not be required. Like many Marxists, they revel in the notion that the world is unjust and the personal importance that that injustice gives them!

(Latest HPANWO Voice article: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2009/09/sun-demonizes-salvia.html

Latest HPANWO TV film: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2009/09/prof-chris-french-mba-gold.html)