a reforming trend that arose in Great Britain in the early 20th century.
The founders of guild socialism were members of the Fabian Society, including G. Cole, A. Penty, and W. Mellor. They established the National Guilds League in 1914 and worked out the program of guild socialism. It combined the traditional structures of Fabian reformism with several positions from anarcho-syndicalism. In its theories, guild socialism presents the transition from capitalism to socialism as a gradual process of supplanting capitalist monopolies by transferring nationalized industries to the control of national guilds, which are associations of workers engaged in a particular branch of the economy. The system of guilds as a democratic and self-governing “association of producers” complemented the state system, which the advocates of guild socialism regarded as an “association of consumers.” The Utopian ideas of guild socialism, which denied revolutionary methods of struggle, did not become widespread among the broad working masses in the face of the revolutionary upsurge after World War I (1914-18), and the guild supporters were also unsuccessful in their attempts to realize their theories in practice (primarily in the building trade). In the 1920’s, guild socialism disappeared from the political arena.