Artists Are Reviving the Idea of the Medieval Guild
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I ended up making my own, and I couldn't have done this without the existence of a nearby arts center that had space for rent and (I'm guessing) $50K worth of machinery. I see similarities between the 'guilds' mentioned in the article and my local arts center. I also see needs that could be met if the art-center (guild) concept was extended beyond it's current function.
Not really sure about its feasability, just incredibly dissapointed in the offerings that I was presented with in our free-enterprise system and perhaps a bit idealistic about locale-specific workshops that might serve consumers better.
This "free enterprise system" offered you the craftsman who - free of the shackles of guilds - would have given you a price that you didn't agree on, for the kind of work you would have liked to have performed.
I don't understand what you are disappointed about - that skilled craftsman get to charge well for their work? That cheaply produced products don't live up to the work of a skilled craftsman? Have you calculated the opportunity cost of doing it yourself?
That said, to elaborate on what exactly I'm dissapointed with, I'd say:
1) today's mass produced furniture is of significant lower quality than that of generations past. Why is it that so many industries improve over time, yet the offerings for furniture have gotten so much worse?
2) the manufacturer's exploitation of asymetric information. When they know how crappy the product is, and the consumer doesn't, the manufacturer wins the transaction every time. Too many times I've felt like a sucker only a few months after purchase. Spending more money doesn't mean you get a better product, it often means I'm a bigger sucker.
3) The lack of diversity in available options. You have either low-quality department store options, or you have a super expensive individual craftsman, with nothing in-between.
4) the lack of accountability for companies that peddle crap. Example: Ikea's quality has been the butt of jokes for a long time, but consumers keep going back. This isn't the way I expected the free market to operate.
And yes, I have considered the opportunity cost of doing it myself. I realize I'm probably weird in that I chose this, and it wasn't an easy, nor cheap choice, but I'd rather do it than give the department stores another dollar of my business. I'm dissapointed that if someone else was in the same situation as me, I wouldn't have an easy answer for them.
Let's accept this premise as true, if a company can cut corners and consumers keep paying the same price regardless, quality is allowed to suffer. Competition stops working when consumers can't tell the difference or don't bother shopping around.
> 2) the manufacturer's exploitation of asymetric information. When they know how crappy the product is, and the consumer doesn't, the manufacturer wins the transaction every time. Too many times I've felt like a sucker only a few months after purchase. Spending more money doesn't mean you get a better product, it often means I'm a bigger sucker.
Well, you do know better now, right? The asymmetry isn't set in stone. You can spend more time on research, educate your fellow peers, etc. Start a YouTube channel that becomes the top result when people look for furniture.
Perhaps people just don't care enough though, then that information asymmetry is actually part of fair pricing. There are other areas, cars for example, where there's a wealth of such information both sought after and provided.
> 3) The lack of diversity in available options. You have either low-quality department store options, or you have a super expensive individual craftsman, with nothing in-between.
Again, this reflects the purchasing habits of actual consumers. People don't care about furniture enough to pay a good price for quality work, therefore producers have to adapt to either ends.
> 4) the lack of accountability for companies that peddle crap. Example: Ikea's quality has been the butt of jokes for a long time, but consumers keep going back. This isn't the way I expected the free market to operate.
I guess your expectations were wrong then. There are many reasons for IKEA's success, the furniture quality (perhaps ironically) happens not to be one of them.
> I realize I'm probably weird in that I chose this, and it wasn't an easy, nor cheap choice, but I'd rather do it than give the department stores another dollar of my business
Don't get me wrong, I totally respect your choice and "do it yourself" attitude. You may have gotten more out of it than you paid. If it's really just about the furniture though, paying a craftsman to do the work may just be cheaper.
> I'm dissapointed that if someone else was in the same situation as me, I wouldn't have an easy answer for them.
The "easy answer" is to pay the craftsman, but people don't want to hear it because they can't (or just don't want to) pay for them.
That said, I wanted something with mortise/tenon joinery, and for that I needed a woodshop. There's a big gap between the tools you note and a 'woodshop'.
Particular tools: workbenches, tablesaw, bandsaw, jointer, thickness planer, drill press, and a dust collection system to keep everything clean and safe.
Of course, you can sacrifice powertools for handtools and still have a woodshop, but tradeoffs are obviously present.
The second you start looking at making aesthetically pleasing furniture you're looking at doing proper joinery (tenons, dovetails and the like) not hammering nails in.
Likely at the very least you'll want either a table saw, a router, and a number of jigs, or quite a few different specialized hand saws and some high-quality chisels. Likely you'll want to resaw boards to correct thickness as well, so figure a Bandsaw or for larger pieces, a planer.
Same as this general thread - access to good tools makes things cheaper and easier to do.
I figured as much, but I would still be very interested in reading whatever you have to write on the subject.
I am considering making my own furniture when I buy a house in the next year or two.
Youtube videos and online resources are plentiful, and while they are better than nothing, they can't capture the nuanced fine motor skills that are required, and they can't point out the mistakes that you are making as you are doing them.
see also "maker spaces"
The space nearest to me was started by people whose primary interest is Burning man. I toured the shop and it was... chaotic at best. They reconfigured the shop to focus on whatever contraption they were planning for next years show. They seemed to say whatever they could to potential paying customers just to collect their money and keep the shop running. They cut some serious corners on safety and I don't think I could have accomplished the tasks that I set out to do had a gone down the maker space route.
I realize that other shops might be different.
I've been to hackerspaces...
2 in Indiana
1 in Baltimore
1 in Washington DC
1 in Cambridge (MA)
1 in Louisville (tomorrow evening)
They all are packed in whatever space they could rent. Safety is like the safety of a shop floor: dont be stupid around machines that can deglove, cut, burn, or electrocute you. And every place had points of contact to ask about proper safe operations, and all had abundant PPE.
Makerspaces.. well, my first feeling is it's a pretty name in place of "hacker". Secondly, 'maker' has heavier commercial usage with commercial 'makerspaces'. They aren't seat-of-pants operation like a hackerspace can be. Ive also noticed that places that call themselves "makerspaces" also seem to discourage open house nights, and focus on "call for a walkthrough".
The model works in a big city with lots of potential users and well-off people who are willing to donate. It would have to be modified if extended elsewhere
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild
I think co-op is a way more accurate term for it.
The trade unions in many big cities really are like guilds. They monopolize a particular trade, fix prices, offer apprenticeships and certifications, provide benefits/retirement packages, and attempt to quash any competition by non-members.
That said, the spaces described in the article are not like this. They seem to basically be hackerspaces for artists.
Certifications are more complicated - definitely some instances of certifications function as little more than to reduce the supply of labor. But there are some cases where wanting to certify some level of competence may be desirable.
Most of us who dwell here live in a world where the infrastructure is digital. Need to build a bigger thing? Just upgrade your instance or scale your cluster. Need stronger tools? Just find it and read the manual.
For artists and designers working in the physical space it's not that easy.
Got a commission for a large public sculpture that won't even fit in the door to your studio? Spend all the money you earn on it to rent a commercial space. Need welding machines, casting oven or a ten meter textile printing table? Contract it out and loose creative control.
The ability to share resources and tools is essential for the creative professions and the fact that their purpose is highlighted in this article is a positive sign.
Spaces like these are not guilds which restrict supply or inflate the price. They are more like docker containers which allow complicated infrastructures to be run and built on you local physical infrastructure.
Another note...
I've recently thought a communal food hall would be pretty interesting where people who are trying to start their own restaurant, food truck, etc. could have some base infrastructure at a low cost so they could build out their product over a few months. I'm sure these probably exist.
The bigger problem comes from what kind of production you allow. We focus on large scale production but it’s not a production line. Nobody needs permission to work on anything specific but some people have exploited the subsidized rates and then you need to step in.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-03-01-19970600...
> "The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians," the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. "The current rate of physician supply -- the number of physicians entering the work force each year -- is clearly excessive."
> Cohen said federal money should "no longer be used to support the training of foreign nationals."
And it seems the actual focus is on whether to fund foreign students.
true medieval guilds were not socialist - they were christian - and cannot truly be recreated within a classical liberal / free-market economic system since they were protected cartels with monopoly power over production/distribution within their respective territories granted by the local aristocracy with the blessing/protection of the church.
this is not a judgement or value statement either way - but a point that painting historical guilds as 'socialist' (with the implicit marxist class progression from feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism this entails), is revisionist, and misrepresents (hides?) the actual historical structure of which guilds were a part, and 'steals the credit' via misattribution to an ideology which actually sought the destruction of the remnants of the guild-based system.
which also is not to say that the idea of medieval guilds and socialist worker cooperatives don't have anything in common from a materialist perspective either...
There is a tradition of Christian Socialism, arguably including the Primitive Church, but the rest of your critique is spot-on.
> this is not a judgement or value statement either way - but a point that painting historical guilds as 'socialist' (with the implicit marxist class progression from feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism this entails), is revisionist, and misrepresents (hides?) the actual historical structure of which guilds were a part, and 'steals the credit' via misattribution to an ideology which actually sought the destruction of the remnants of the guild-based system.
Such Presentism is sadly rife whenever non-historians try to make a point about comparing modern ideas to historic ones. The idea that people in the past weren't moderns with worse hygiene, but instead had their own worldview and goals divorced from the modern mindset, is quite lost on them.
So, is Socialism inherently anti-religious? Only if you think the Marxists own the term.
either way, in common discourse 'socialist' is not the same as 'socially oriented'; 99.9% of the time (and also i posit for this article) it is pretty safe to assume that the reference relates to one or another group claiming some ideological lineage to the paris commune / 1st internationale seeking the abolishment of capitalism, private property, and religious authority.
this is still true even for mainstream european socialist parties, etc, even if they don't promote strict adherence so much these days (and so are more 'social democratic')
also: many anarchists are socialists but not marxists, though they do agree with the class theory part..
"Free enterprise" was originally a call to revolt against the guilds.
And here I thought the 30-fold increase of prosperity of ordinary people came about because we now have ubiquitous access to what, in pre-industrial times, was considered unlimited amounts of energy.
Stop producing electricity, stop burning coal, stop pumping oil, and you'll very quickly see prosperity regress to pre-industrial levels, regardless of what economic deity you worship.
Not at any other time through thousands of years of civilization or five large continents.
For some reason, the industrial revolution did not develop in any other societies over the centuries that shared a similar system of free enterprise with imperial England... Why didn't the various Italian city states industrialize during the Renaissance?
And while individuals got very rich from colonizing, and rulers got much pride from ruling vast new lands, the colonizing societies as a whole did not really get richer from it. There are benefits from colonies, but there are also costs.
Of course, Spain and Portugal did build vast preindustrial colonial empires in the New World. Not by being (very) much more advanced, but mostly by the incredible luck of having much better immune systems! The fact that 80-90% of the New World people just spontaneously died on encountering Europeans, for reasons none of the sides understood, is one of the most astonishing events in history to me!!
So they (mostly Spain) had a few centuries of weird prosperity in mountains of gold and silver, while still having a primitive mercantilist economy. Once capitalism and the industrial revolution started elsewhere, they were left in the dust, their pretty metal stashes no match for liberated human ingenuity.
You do ask a good question. Why did the stars align in 1760s England, and not in the several other places in history that seemingly had most of the ingredients? I've seen it asked a few times, and never answered. I won't pretend that I, some random programmer with opinions on a web forum while eating breakfast, have the answer either...
People frequently credit our economic system for uplifting us from pre-industrial squalor.
It's like a young millionaire praising a daily exercise regiment, and hot yoga three times a week for his success, and not the fifty million dollar trust fund he inherited at the age of 18. It helps, but it's not the important part.
On the other hand, America has adopted the belief that large corporations are only obligated to maximize profit for their shareholders and they are too large and decentralized for social forces to effectively hold them accountable.
How could a group of people who monopolize on a trade "generally be a positive force in the community"? Just because they "provide for the poor" (on their terms)?
> On the other hand, America has adopted the belief that large corporations are only obligated to maximize profit for their shareholders and they are too large and decentralized for social forces to effectively hold them accountable.
Those corporations are also obligated to actually pay their employees, who are obligated to pay taxes. What does the state do with all that income? Fund welfare programs and infrastructure. People may believe the those corporations get "all the money", but on the average corporate profits[1] account for far less money than public spending[2].
[1] https://b-i.forbesimg.com/timworstall/files/2013/05/cp_gdp.p...
[2] https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs...
Those who have paid attention to history understand that there's a fine balance here. Too much taxation and the economy collapses, making everyone poor. Too little taxation and the infrastructure and social system suffers unnecessarily.
Those who understand nothing keep complaining about corporate paper profits and wealth inequality, as if those were the measure for actual welfare.