n organization of industry which
vests administration in a body representing all grades of producers, or
producers and consumers together, for he has no purpose in common with
them; so that while joint councils between workers and managers may
succeed, joint councils between workers and owners or agents of owners,
like most of the so-called Whitley Councils, will not, because the
necessity for the mere owner is itself one of the points in dispute.
The master builder, who owns the capital used, can be included, not
_qua_ capitalist, but _qua_ builder, if he surrenders some of the
rights of ownership, as the Building Industry Committee proposed that
he should. But {111} if the shareholder in a colliery or a shipyard
abdicates the control and unlimited profits to which, _qua_ capitalist,
he is at present entitled, he abdicates everything that makes him what
he is, and has no other standing in the industry. He cannot share,
like the master builder, in its management, because he has no
qualifications which would enable him to do so. His object is profit;
and if industry is to become, as employers and workers in the building
trade propose, an "organized public service," then its subordination to
the shareholder whose object is profit, is, as they clearly see,
precisely what must be eliminated. The master builders propose to give
it up. They can do so because they have their place in the industry in
virtue of their function as workmen. But if the shareholder gave it
up, he would have no place at all.

Hence in coal mining, where ownership and management are sharply
separated, the owners will not admit the bare possibility of any system
in which the control of the administration of the mines is shared
between the management and the miners. "I am authorized to state on
behalf of the Mining Association," Lord Gainford, the chief witness on
behalf of the mine-owners, informed the Coal Commission, "that if the
owners are not to be left complete executive control they will decline
to accept the responsibility for carrying on the industry."[2] So the
mine-owners blow away in a sentence the whole body of plausible
make-believe which rests on the idea that, while private ownership
remains {112} unaltered, industrial harmony can be produced by the
magic formula of joint control. And they are right. The
representatives of workmen and shareholders, in mining and in other
industries, can meet and negotiate and discuss. But joint