What would a modern version of "guild housing" look like - where people organise to build their own homes?

A wall mural of William Morris in Walthamstow, where guild buildings - built under Morris’s ethos - were a success

To consider alternative forms of housing is partly about escaping a classic Right-Left binary. The Right might point to sink estates (or the Grenfell fire) as an indication of the failure of post-war social housing, with only competitive private developers promising quality builds. The Left retorts by point out how unfettered capitalist housing marginalise many, pricing them out of the market.

But an intriguing article in Tribune wonders whether the leftist habitual response - that we should massively return to state housing - is the right one. Joe Mathieson writes about the UKs ‘building guilds’ in the first few decades of the 20th century. These are examples of worker-initiated house building programmes that had massive success (though followed by a tumble into insolvency). Thousands of solid, well-built homes were raised across the country, from London to Wigan, Rotherhame to Portsmouth The ethos and practice, says Mathieson, has lessons for us today.

First, the urge had its taproot in the Arts and Crafts movement, led by John Ruskin and William Morris, from the middle of the 19th century. Their dream was that high-skilled work of all kinds should be conducted by guilds - associations of workers who could self-containedly embark on complex projects, like housing, without the need for much top-down planning or direction. Or as Mathieson puts it: “communalise labour, pay its members well, and reinvest any profits made back into the unit.” As he writes further:

The first building guild was founded in Manchester by the guild socialist S. G. Hobson. At a conference in January 1920, Hobson laid out its three main principles. The first was the construction of cost-efficient, good-quality housing. The second involved the payment of builders in times of sickness, accident, and bad weather. Lastly, and most importantly, came the guilds’ abolition of the profit initiative, with all surpluses being shared with the relevant local authority.

Based on these three tenets, Hobson and the other guildsmen believed that in the long term they would be able to outcompete private contractors and drive them away from the housing market for good. All builders who joined the guild accepted these principles without signing a contract, in order to avoid the yoke of ‘capitalist authority’. As one observer noted in The Times, the guilds were attempting revolution ‘in a non-revolutionary way’.

More here. As we said above, the housing guild had amazing initial success. But they seemed to fall foul of their own financial incompetence - running up huge debts with cooperative banks at the time - as well as Liberal Lloyd George’s withdrawal of government subsidy, originally intended to support the building of “homes for heroes” (from WWI).

Mathieson thinks precedents can be salvaged from this

The building guilds’ failure does not stop their ability to provide a critique of the world of construction in the twenty-first century. The guildsmen sought a return to a conception of work in which construction was enjoyable and worthy, and not a mere commodity to be brought in and dismissed by contractors as and when.

As well as this, the guildsmen were careful to create an architecture that valued the contribution of the operative as much as the designer. These efforts speak to an industry that still construes building labour as comparatively unskilled, and where architects take most of the credit.

…A cooperative and associative architectural imaginary is worth entertaining… Such an imaginary does not necessitate replicating the building guilds’ organisation, or indeed renewing their brand of medieval historicism. Rather, it means capturing their spirit, and thinking about the possibilities of an architecture that relies not on the market or the state, but rather the collective endeavour of people.

Tribune piece here. We were alerted to this piece by our friend Chris Cook (a regular contributor here), who has kindly formulated some further responses:

Having had an interest in Guild Socialism & the Arts & Crafts movement for over 2 decades I found Joe Mathieson's blog post fascinating.

I was aware of how Fabian State/Union socialism was instrumental in its fall and the antipathy between Unions and worker cooperatives that survives to this day. However, I was unaware of its emergence and spontaneous rise through mutual agreement (unencumbered by contracts and rent-seeking!) to address the post WW1 need of municipal authorities for good quality affordable 'Homes for Heroes'.

It's ironic that Joe is employed by the Hampstead Garden Trust, one of several UK "Garden Cities/Suburbs" built as high-quality affordable homes, all but one of which privatised themselves as members were seduced by rising land values. Only Letchworth now survives, protected by a bomb-proof constitution.

It is no surprise that Lloyd George - a classical Liberal proponent of land value tax - came into conflict with socialist proponents of a theory of labour value. So it appears that Guild Socialism was firstly crippled by their 'not-for-profit' model of sharing development gains instead of recycling them - as "profit for purpose" into further development.

For the Councils, good quality housing on their land should have been dividend enough. It appears that deadweight costs of a paper-based bureaucracy were simply the nail in the coffin.

What of the future and Joe's closing invitation to entertain a "cooperative and associative architectural imaginary"?

I believe that the future doesn’t lie in collective and corporate legal persons, whether public=state or private=non-state. Rather, we should pursue networked mutual agreements between real people, sharing risks, costs, surplus, use of productive assets and rights of governance.

There are now many examples to point to

In summary, I can envisage a 'bottom up' renaissance of guild socialism, arts and crafts based on direct instant communication, shared associative ledgers (NOT blockchains) and credit instruments based directly upon use value/utility.

More from Chris Cook here.

COMMUNITY, LOCALISM, NEW ECONOMICS, ARTISTS, BUILD THE ECONOMYpat kaneguild socialism, socialism, William morris, arts and crafts movementComment