Did we take a wrong turn at the Renaissance?
On medieval craft guilds and their relevance to life in the 21st century
A paper cut I did recently on a laser cutting machine, home craftsmanship in action
A note before I begin I know this essay is long overdue. I have been focused on my paper cut art business, so be advised if you are here for my writing that I will probably be writing at most one or two long essays a month from now on, though I will be hanging out on notes a lot as I work.
A critical juncture of history that is not widely appreciated in the 21st century was the rise of the Medicis in Florence Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Medicis were among the first powerful figures in the western world to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church which had held sway over Europe for hundreds of years after the fall of Rome. The Medicis’s funded humanist scholars and artists such Michelangelo and Galileo.1 Perhaps even more important the Medicis collaborated with Jewish money lenders to overturn the Catholic Church’s prohibition on usury. 2 This free flow of money had large consequences for European society, ultimately leading to funding mercantilist trade ventures that weakened the locally oriented village life, and the dominance of such foundations of Christian medieval society as the guild system, most especially the crafts guilds.
Why should we care about crafts guilds in the 21st century? Because as I will argue below the craft guild system provides a very practical alternative to the greed and drastically unequal outcomes of capitalism, and the tyrannical bureaucratic state dominance of state centralist socialism. Both capitalism and socialism have outworn their welcome though bad consequences inherent in those systems for over a 100 years now.
So what was the craft guild system? Briefly it was a combination of a trade cartel and apprenticeship program that assured training, quality control, fair pricing, and access to small business ownership for master craftsmen in crucial trades that assured many people had meaningful livelihoods and weren’t excluded from meaningful participation in production of useful goods and services like blacksmithing, tanning of hide, carpentry, with a clear path to being owner operator master craftsmen themselves. More details of the crafts guild system can be seen here.
Taken from: https://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-england/medieval-craft-guilds.htm
Interesting, but how can we apply these hundreds of years old principles to modern life to make it better?
The idea of the guild as a place to learn a skilled trade or how to be a craftsmen furniture maker etc, should be revived. Young people who want to learn a trade or craft skill should be welcomed with open arms and mentored. Ideas and trade secrets should be shared with those willing to work hard as an apprentice, rather than being locked away just to benefit investors who have no skin in the game. Open source, maker spaces, and other innovative ideas in fact harken back to the apprentice workshop of the high medieval period.
Once the guild or society, or whatever it wants to call itself is formed, it should register a trademark, and the trademark should only be allowed to be used by people who have had their product inspected by a know master craftsman for quality, consistency and value. One of the worst features of modern life is buying products can be a crap shoot in terms of quality and value. This would give people some assurance they are receiving a quality product at a fair price.
The rise of home CNC machines, 3D printers, laser cutters, and other production tools that are affordable and can be operated by a single individual or small crew means true home based production as was seen in the medieval era is a possibility again. This means that the good features of a market like encouraging individual initiative and competition keeping value and quality high, and incentives to reduce waste remain in place, while eliminating the bad features of capitalism like rent seeking, wage slavery, and the need to go to usury money lenders for start up capital.
No more trendy nihilism in the arts! A craft guild like network among artisans should encourage artists to make goods, and services that ordinary people actually like. No more cynical moves like duct taping a banana to a blank canvas and selling it for as much as a house. This doesn’t mean no surrealism or experimentation, but it does mean if you are going to be a member in good standing in a crafts guild you should be working hard to craft items with meaning, skill, and excellence that serve families and societies and aren’t just nihilistic exercises in making a greasy buck.
As you can see reviving the ideal of the craft guild doesn’t just have to be a pipe dream, or merely looking backwards, but the ideals of the craft guild can be an excellent guide to practical action for the maker, artisan, skilled tradesman, or craftsperson in the 21st century. IMO we took a wrong turn at the Renaissance with the rise of usury lending that led to mercantilism and that destroyed the life of family business based productive household. As the globalist system strains and cracks it is a practice worth reviving. While this will likely function for a while at least as only a counter or parallel economy, it will be safe haven for people looking to escape being a wage slave in some ghastly woke corporation or arguably worse a middle manager in some professional managerial class bureaucracy with a “bullshit” job that is soul deadening.
https://www.history.com/news/7-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-medicis
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2016/05/the-consilia-of-alessandro-nievo-on-jews-and-usury-in-15th-century-italy/
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I've been thinking along the same lines for a while. The guild system needs its reputation rehabilitated. Mercantilist propaganda about it has been left to stand too long.
Remnants of it still exist in the modern trades, e.g. electricians. But most artisans work independently or as wagies now, and unions in general are at best a bastardized version with some of the form and none of the function.
The biggest obstacle is anti-trust laws and corporate regulation more broadly, which in typical government fashion seem to accomplish the opposite of their stated intent, incentivising monopoly while undermining both quality and working conditions.
I really appreciated your post. There is so much to think about and future projections to make. I have always made things by hand with what I hope is the highest level of quality and beauty as the goal. My guild master was my grandmother, who trained me for years. My father also did the same thing in different arts. It was fabulous, and so I shared the skills with others who had the inclination.
There seems to be a growing hunger for both this path to excellence and the products produced. Guilds would provide a formalized path to survival, advancement and security.
The rise of the Merchant Princes as the blueprint for bottom line obsessed monopolies presaged our modern day Robber Barons. When you own the banks, transportation, manufacturing, and distribution of all or a majority of the elements in many industries you have the power to change everything you want. It was an ugly, murderous time, in many senses it is worse now. Apathy and disdain for the people versus hatred; a burning need for control and subjugation.
It is unsurprising that the flood of materials from other countries produced such awe inspiring art and development. Guilds could take advantage of this modern phenomenon as well with both hand and technical means.
You have inspired me to think about this excellent path to both reviving art and beauty for its’ own sake, but giving young people a solid path forward. Bravo!