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Banal statements are not always useless. We may therefore recall that the master artisan combines in his person the factors of production: capital and labor. The shop management and the business transactions (purchase of raw material and sale of products) were so limited that he could also do manual labor. He therefore differed so little from the journeyman, who had always the chance of becoming master, and from the apprentice, who himself was a future journeyman, that a community spirit reigned among them. When we leave the handicraft economics of the Middle Ages to study modern industry, we face a dissociation of the factors of production: the functions of capital and labor are rested in distinct economic subjects and labor is divided into the specializations that we have mentioned above. The trades are many within each enterprise and the workers are hired after offering their services to the owners' representatives: hence, the phenomenon of an exchange of service for wages, which is its price. In capitalism, the factors of production meet in a market, and are united by a contract. We had to recall these obvious facts concerning the labor market, and the labor contract, because European corporativism challenges these fundamental ideas.
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References
11 Perroux, F., op. cit, p. 21Google Scholar.
12 Cf. International Labour Office, Wartime Developments in Government, Employer-Worker Collaboration, I.L.D., Montreal, , 1941, p. 121–29Google Scholar. If the principal problems of corporativism lie in large industry, it will be understood why we leave aside Portugal, a country poorly industrialized. As for Spain and France, where corporativism is much more recent, their economic and social policy seems to us to be dominated by the liquidation of the war and the necessity of facing exceptional poverty. For France especially, the law of August 16, 1940 on provisional vocational organization, has for its evident object to reorganize industry under the conditions of the defeat and the armistice. As for the Labor Charter, of October 6, 1941 it does not deal with the essential problem: the relationship between the new statute of industrial relations and the economic organization constituted in 1940. Furthermore, it is clear that the destiny of Europe and of European corporativism is a collective destiny, presently dominated by Germany and Italy.
13 Cf. Perroux, F., op. cit. especially p. 35Google Scholar and pp. 207–10.
14 We do not place in the same class European corporativisms here below criticized and the formulas for occupational organization which hesitate to make strikes unlawful, cf. for example, RevTrehey, Francis, who writes, “The Portuguese government, moreover, has further encroached on human liberties, for instance by suppressing free unions and outlawing strikes. Such actions clearly do not conform with Catholic social principles,” op. cit., p. 165Google Scholar.
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21 It is interesting to note that Father writes, Trehey, op. cit., p. 156Google Scholar: “The guild system, therefore, is not only fundamentally opposed to dictatorship, but it is also realizable within a democracy. In fact, its chances are greater in a democracy.… The guild system is a gradual and a collective work of a people.…” This is the very spirit of “corporativism by association” and we can see its difference from “State Corporativsm” as actually established in Europe.