第121章 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF INDUSTRYPart I: CAPITAL AND

Syndicalism is in large measure a reaction against forms of state socialism which are vitiated by a defect similar to that which we find in the Rochdale cooperative plan.So far as the public services are honestly and efficiently administered by public officials, the public which these officials represent is primarily the citizen in his capacity of consumer.The municipal services are run, either to give him cheap transport or lighting of sound standard quality, or else to enable him to get police, street-cleaning or some other service which he could not otherwise have got.But this bureaucratic socialism is apt to neglect or to ignore the interests of its employees, and to deny them any influence in determining the conditions of their employment, other than that which they can bring to bear as citizen-consumers.Thus are found cases where public departments, or the contractors they employ, are allowed to pay wages so low or to offer such irregular employment, as to contribute to that inefficiency and destitution for which the same public is subsequently called upon to make financial and administrative provision.This is an inevitable defect of a one-sided or consumers, socialism.Nor is it likely to be remedied by any general perfunctory recognition of the duty of the public employer to observe standard conditions.For in most cases public employment will, by virtue of its monopolistic character, contain features that have no precise analogy in the outside business world, so that some separate method of determining the application of standard conditions is necessary.Unless that method admits direct representation of the interests of the employees, there can be no sufficient security that these interests shall receive proper consideration.This is not a demand that the employees shall 'interfere' with the public management, or 'dictate' the terms of their employment.On the contrary, it is clear that the official managers must, in the ordinary course of business, secure the execution of their orders.But, considering that their standpoint must always be biassed towards a special interpretation of the public interest in the sense of efficiency and economy of a particular output, this narrower public interest must be checked by reference to a wider public interest in which the human costs of production shall be represented.An accumulating weight of recent experience in various countries makes it evident that state-socialism must fail unless adequate provision is made for safe-guarding the interest of particular groups of public employees.This safeguard cannot, of course, be given by any mere concession of the right of combination and of collective bargaining.