Abstract
The Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb were social theorists of substance whose ideas had a key role in British debates around the concept of industrial democracy. This chapter traces these debates through four major phases corresponding to the early theories of the Webbs in the 1890s, the militant industrial upsurge of 1910–1921, debates around public ownership in the 1940s, and the revival of ideas of workers’ control in the mid-1960s. It demonstrates the persistence in Britain of a voluntarist conception of industrial relations as a form of participation through vigorous and unimpeded trade unions operating within the framework of the liberal state. Whatever the historical strengths and weaknesses of this approach, it left a particularly weak participatory legacy following the subsequent neoliberal offensive against organized labor and collective bargaining.
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Notes
- 1.
The distinction is most fully elaborated in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (1920). Nevertheless, the functional interdependence of consumer and producer is clearly indicated as early as Beatrice’s paper ‘The relationship between co-operation and trade unionism’ (1892) in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Problems of Modern Industry (1898).
- 2.
The articles were first published in Justice in 1884 and may be found in Nicholas Salmon (1994, pp. 32–5, 39–46).
- 3.
The book deals with the building guilds in two pages, without offering much hope of their revival, and otherwise has almost nothing to say from the perspective of building labor.
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Morgan, K. (2019). Fabians, Guild Socialists and ‘Democracies of Producers’: Participation and Self-Government in the Social Theories of the Webbs and Their Successors. In: Berger, S., Pries, L., Wannöffel, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_6
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