Guild socialism is a political movement advocating workers' control of industry through the medium of trade-related guilds"in an implied contractual relationship with the public". It originated in the United Kingdom and was at its most influential in the first quarter of the 20th century. It was strongly associated with G. D. H. Cole and influenced by the ideas of William Morris.

Guild socialism was partly inspired by the guilds of craftsmen and other skilled workers which had existed in England during the Middle Ages. In 1906, Arthur Penty published Restoration of the Gild System in which he opposed factory production and advocated a return to an earlier period of artisanal production organised through guilds. The following year, the journal The New Age became an advocate of guild socialism, although in the context of modern industry rather than the medieval setting favoured by Penty.

In 1914, S. G. Hobson, a leading contributor to The New Age, published National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out. In this work, guilds were presented as an alternative to state-control of industry or conventional trade union activity. Guilds, unlike the existing trade unions, would not confine their demands to matters of wages and conditions but would seek to obtain control of industry for the workers whom they represented. Ultimately, industrial guilds would serve as the organs through which industry would be organised in a future socialist society.

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Michael Lavalette (born 1962) is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and is a local councillor in Preston, Lancashire, England. He was first elected as a Socialist Alliance candidate shortly after the start of the Iraq War in 2003. And re-elected as a Respect councillor in 2007. In the split within Respect in 2007 he remained loyal to the SWP and broke with George Galloway.

He is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Liverpool Hope University, formerly having worked at both Liverpool and Central Lancashire universities.

Along with Chris Jones, Iain Feguson, and Laura Penketh, he was an author of the Social Work manifesto for a new engaged practice and organiser of the Liverpool and Glasgow conferences of the Social Work Action Network (SWAN), which stands in the radical social work tradition and seeks to oppose the increased managerialism and privatisation within the social work profession, and to promote social work practice based on principles of social justice.

At the end of 2008 the Social Work Action Network ran a campaign defending social workers in the aftermath of the Baby P tragedy. Shortly after, along with Iain Ferguson, he wrote a polemical pamphlet called 'Social Work After Baby P' that included significant contributions from academics, practitioners and senior trade union officers.

Douglas "Doug" Casey is an American-born economist and advocate of the free market. He is a best-selling financial author, international investor, entrepreneur, and the founder and chairman of Casey Research, a provider of subscription financial analysis about specific market verticals including natural resources/metals/mining, energy, commodities, and technology. Since 1979, he has written, and later co-written, the monthly metals and mining focused investment newsletter, The International Speculator. He also contributes to other newsletters, including The Casey Report, a geopolitically oriented publication.

Casey graduated from Georgetown in 1968 where he was a classmate of Bill Clinton.

An avid traveller and international opportunity seeker, Casey's first book, The International Man (1978), was designed to show readers how to make the most of their personal freedom and global financial opportunities.

His 1979 book Crisis Investing (1979) became the largest selling financial book in history, listing at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list for a total of 12 non-consecutive weeks.

David John Nellist (born 16 July 1952) is a British Trotskyist activist and former Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for the now abolished constituency of Coventry South East. He is a member of the Socialist Party of England and Wales and a former councillor in Coventry.

From 1982-86, Nellist was a Labour councillor for Coventry on West Midlands County Council.

A long-standing supporter of the Militant tendency, Nellist was the MP for Coventry South East from 1983 to 1992. He was known for his standing as a "workers' MP on a worker's wage", taking only the wage of a skilled factory worker, which amounted to 40% of what he could have earned and what other MPs took for themselves. The rest he donated back to the Labour movement and to charities.

When Tony Blair was first elected to Parliament in 1983, it was intended that he would share an office with Nellist at the Palace of Westminster. The duo's differing political views were considered not to make for the most harmonious working environment, so Blair was quickly allocated office space with another newly-elected Labour MP – Gordon Brown, a friendship which would lead to the creation of New Labour and the party's ideological shift away from the labour movement towards the so-called 'third way'.