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Victor Böhmert's Critique of the Traditional and Restrictive Nature of Guilds (1858)

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Oh, you gentlemen, is it not better and more just to favor drawing and raising up the great, great class of the poor into the middle class? What you are demanding of the state may be expressed in the following words: “We, citizens numbering about 1000 or 2000, are rather afraid of becoming proletarians if our privileges were to be taken away, — therefore, the remaining 10,000 poorer citizens and workers need to remain proletarians and should definitely not be supported in the belief that they are entitled by nature, and are at liberty not only to work but also to labor at making the most useful and expedient and rewarding things possible.” — We have no better way of characterizing the injustice that is propagated by our guild laws and that burdens all of civil society with ever more misery than to cite the famous words of Adam Smith, who wrote over 80 years ago (for us, though, still to no avail) in his work on the wealth of nations: “The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think proper. To judge whether he is fit to be employed, may surely be trusted to the discretion of the employers whose interest it so much concerns. The affected anxiety of the law-giver lest they should employ an improper person, is evidently as impertinent as it is oppressive.” —

After this has been said, how can one actually uphold the accusation that occupational freedom creates a proletariat? The very opposite is true. Occupational freedom is the best and only lasting means to dispose of the proletariat; for it is the only thing that provides a poor man with the freedom to be gainfully employed or to work, and in fact [to do] whatever is most useful or rewarding depending on conditions. By contrast, the guild system is an impediment not only to all those non-guild members who make up the majority of civil society — no, it has even become a curse on the craftsmen themselves, on the very same class that is still looking for support in imagined privileges, instead of improving its own lot through the blessing of free labor and free competition! — Let us not be misunderstood when we rail against one-sided preferential treatment for the occupational trades as a class. We are not aiming to work toward the disappearance of the middle class, no, we only want the gates to this social station to be opened up to all the working classes, and we think it is most distressing that the class of craftsmen, of all people, is leaving the middle class and merging into the proletariat. Just take a look at developments from the last several decades. Is not the impoverishment of the class of craftsmen a standing complaint in all the books

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