Pretty cool read. I'm actually starting a worker's cooperative for software developers that may eventually become a guild. I wish the article focused less on this specific company and the history of guilds and more on the basic concept and the potential future.
Essentially guilds are a loose connection of people, usually in a specific industry, that pools their collective numbers to protect each individual worker. They may have started in medieval times but they've stuck around ever since. Remember how all the movies made in 2011 were incredibly bad? Well you can thank the Writer's Guild of America for that. They formed a massive strike that put the entire industry on hold until screenwriters got better pay. If every industry had a guild I highly doubt the 1% would even exist.
Cooperatives and guilds fit VERY well in the digital age. We're no longer bound to one location but we still need the help of many to share numerous digital resources, from things like server usage to twitter followers. It also helps to have a physical space to collaborate with other members and build your professional network.
Corporations have made it pretty clear they don't care about the average worker and it's about time the average worker started doing something about it.
I agree that there may be a place for guilds (or guild-like associations) in the modern economy, but as an historian who studies these things and thinks they are worth noting, I felt the article underplayed the role of politics and geography in the success of medieval guilds. Being granted a legal monopoly over their craft by the rulers of a particular place was absolutely fundamental to their power and influence.
The article explores the exclusionary nature of guilds in terms of production restrictions and social groups, but spends less time explaining the exclusive, legal right to a monopoly over a political division of space. That is what gave them the cabal-like clout to do all that followed, good and bad, including fostering cooperation and mutual resources. They had the ability, even the right, to surveille and extort within their territory, to physically insulate their members from offers by other guilds, to shut down competitors in their area of operations, and to influence social attitudes toward their work through mutual relations with politicians and even autocrats. These kinds of social and market controls may be unavailable to a modern guild, and they may be obsolete in the digital age in terms of some of their key geographic advantages, but they are alive and well in the corporate world with which a modern guild would compete.
Do you see a group such as what you have in mind, if it were to become a guild, finding geography and legal clout important at all? Or are you more interested in the union-like, cooperative/non-compete aspects of guilds that the article focuses on? Do you think modern guilds can have one without the other and still function as guilds once did? I'm not trying to be confrontational or anything, just curious in an academic way. I think there's a lot of merit in bringing the idea of guilds back to the economy, especially if they can give power back to workers and erode any aspect of corporate control over labor markets.
Pretty cool read. I'm actually starting a worker's cooperative for software developers that may eventually become a guild. I wish the article focused less on this specific company and the history of guilds and more on the basic concept and the potential future.
Essentially guilds are a loose connection of people, usually in a specific industry, that pools their collective numbers to protect each individual worker. They may have started in medieval times but they've stuck around ever since. Remember how all the movies made in 2011 were incredibly bad? Well you can thank the Writer's Guild of America for that. They formed a massive strike that put the entire industry on hold until screenwriters got better pay. If every industry had a guild I highly doubt the 1% would even exist.
Cooperatives and guilds fit VERY well in the digital age. We're no longer bound to one location but we still need the help of many to share numerous digital resources, from things like server usage to twitter followers. It also helps to have a physical space to collaborate with other members and build your professional network.
Corporations have made it pretty clear they don't care about the average worker and it's about time the average worker started doing something about it.
I agree that there may be a place for guilds (or guild-like associations) in the modern economy, but as an historian who studies these things and thinks they are worth noting, I felt the article underplayed the role of politics and geography in the success of medieval guilds. Being granted a legal monopoly over their craft by the rulers of a particular place was absolutely fundamental to their power and influence.
The article explores the exclusionary nature of guilds in terms of production restrictions and social groups, but spends less time explaining the exclusive, legal right to a monopoly over a political division of space. That is what gave them the cabal-like clout to do all that followed, good and bad, including fostering cooperation and mutual resources. They had the ability, even the right, to surveille and extort within their territory, to physically insulate their members from offers by other guilds, to shut down competitors in their area of operations, and to influence social attitudes toward their work through mutual relations with politicians and even autocrats. These kinds of social and market controls may be unavailable to a modern guild, and they may be obsolete in the digital age in terms of some of their key geographic advantages, but they are alive and well in the corporate world with which a modern guild would compete.
Do you see a group such as what you have in mind, if it were to become a guild, finding geography and legal clout important at all? Or are you more interested in the union-like, cooperative/non-compete aspects of guilds that the article focuses on? Do you think modern guilds can have one without the other and still function as guilds once did? I'm not trying to be confrontational or anything, just curious in an academic way. I think there's a lot of merit in bringing the idea of guilds back to the economy, especially if they can give power back to workers and erode any aspect of corporate control over labor markets.