It is quite evident that all this adjustment of the claims and needs of individuals within a process in a business, of businesses in a trade, of trades in industry, would need an elaborate hierachy of representative government, with a supreme legislature and executive, whose will must over-rule the will of the national or local groups within the several trades, as to the quantity and method of work to be done in each concrete process, and as to the remuneration of each sort of work.In other words, society, as a whole, would have imposed its final control upon each group of workers, diminishing to that extent their power to determine the conditions under which they would work, and their effective separate ownership of the instruments of production.The ideal of the self-governing mine, or factory, or railway would thus be over-ridden by the superior ideal of a self-governing society.
But that self-government by society, the supreme legislation of industry, could not perform its work by confining its attention to the various productive processes, and the businesses and trades in which they were conducted.
It would be compelled to study the wants and will of the consumers, or, if it be preferred, of the workers in their capacity of consumers.For, only by the study of the consumer, or the market, could the work of adjusting the application of productive power at the different productive points, and the process of remuneration by which that distribution was achieved, possibly be accomplished.Thus, although the whole body of this syndicalist legislature might have been elected to represent the interests of separate groups of producers, or trades, it would be compelled to give equal attention to the wants and the will of the consuming public.But it would discover that, just in proportion as it was accurately representative of the separate interests of groups of producers, to that extent was it disqualified for safe-guarding the interests of the consuming public, which in each concrete problem would be liable to cut across the interests of special groups of producers.In other words, it would be impossible properly to regulate the railway service without direct regard to the interests of the travelling and trading public as a whole, to regulate the mining industry without regard to the local, seasonal and other needs of coal consumers.But these consumers, interests could not be properly considered in a legislature chosen entirely by separate groups of producers, with the object of promoting the special interests of these groups.The impossibility of syndicalism thus turns upon ignoring in the control of business the will of the consumer.
§10.Thus we are compelled to recognise that in a sound social organisation of the industrial system, and of each part of it, the business, the trade, (or the group of trades) and the consumer or market must be introduced as integral factors of government.We cannot content ourselves with the view that a producer, or any composite body of producers, is necessarily impelled by its self-interest to safeguard the interests of the consumer.
Nor can the consumer safeguard his interests adequately through the guidance or stimulus he brings to bear through his separate individual acts of demand.
He is incapable of protecting himself properly, even when producers are not combined but are competing.When they are combined he is helpless.
The cleavages of immediate economic interest between the worker and the consumer are so numerous that no abstract identity of interests in a community where all consumers were also workers, all parasites being excluded, would suffice to secure the requisite economy and harmony.This economy and harmony can only be secured by giving the consumer a direct voice in the government of industry.
