THE COLLECTIVIST WAGES SYSTEM
I
In their plans for the reconstruction of society the collectivists
commit, in our opinion, a twofold error. While speaking of abolishing
capitalist rule, they intend nevertheless to retain two institutions
which are the very basis of this rule--Representative Government and the
Wages' System.
As regards so-called representative government, we have often spoken
about it. It is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent
men--and such are not wanting in the collectivist party--can remain
partisans of national or municipal parliaments after all the lessons
history has given them--in France, in England, in Germany, or in the
United States.
While we see parliamentary rule breaking up, and from all sides
criticism of this rule growing louder--not only of its results, but also
of _its principles_--how is it that the revolutionary socialists defend
a system already condemned to die?
Built up by the middle classes to hold their own against royalty,
sanctioning, and, at the same time strengthening, their sway over the
workers, parliamentary rule is pre-eminently a middle-class rule. The
upholders of this system have never seriously maintained that a
parliament or a municipal council represent a nation or a city. The most
intelligent among them know that this is impossible. The middle classes
have simply used the parliamentary system to raise a protecting barrier
against the pretensions of royalty, without giving the people liberty.
But gradually, as the people become conscious of their real interests,
and the variety of their interests is growing, the system can no longer
work. Therefore democrats of all countries vainly imagine various
palliatives. The _Referendum_ is tried and found to be a failure;
proportional representation is spoken of, the representation of
minorities, and other parliamentary Utopias. In a word, they strive to
find what is not to be found, and after each new experiment they are
bound to recognize that it was a failure; so that confidence in
Representative Government vanishes more and more.
It is the same with the Wages' system; because, once the abolition of
private property is proclaimed, and the possession in common of all
means of production is introduced,--how can the wages' system be
maintained in any form? This is, nevertheless, what collectivists are
doing when they recommend the use of the _labour-cheques_ as a mode of
remuneration for labour accomplished for the great Collectivist
employer--the State.
It is easy to understand why the early English socialists, since the
time of Robert Owen, came to the system of labour-cheques. They simply
tried to make Capital and Labour agree. They repudiated the idea of
laying hands on capitalist property by means of revolutionary measures.
It is also easy to understand why Proudhon took up later on the same
idea. In his Mutualist system he tried to make Capital less offensive,
notwithstanding the retaining of private property, which he detested
from the bottom of his heart, but which he believed to be necessary to
guarantee individuals against the State.
Neither is it astonishing that certain economists, more or less
bourgeois, admit labour-cheques. They care little whether the worker is
paid in labour-notes or in coin stamped with the effigy of the Republic
or the Empire. They only care to save from destruction the individual
ownership of dwelling-houses, of land, of factories; in any case--that,
at least, of dwelling-houses and the capital that is necessary for
manufacturing. And labour-notes would just answer the purpose of
upholding this private property.
As long as labour-notes can be exchanged for jewels or carriages, the
owner of the house will willingly accept them for rent. And as long as
dwelling houses, fields, and factories belong to isolated owners, men
will have to pay these owners, in one way or another, for being allowed
to work in the fields or factories, or for living in the houses. The
owners will agree to be paid by the workers in gold, in paper-money, or
in cheques exchangeable for all sorts of commodities, once that toll
upon labour is maintained, and the right to levy it is left with them.
But how can we defend labour-notes, this new form of wagedom, when we
admit that the houses, the fields, and the factories will no longer be
private property,--that they will belong to the commune or the nation?
II
Let us closely examine this system of remuneration for work done,
preached by the French, German, English, and Italian collectivists (the
Spanish anarchists, who still call themselves collectivists, imply by
Collectivism the possession in common of all instruments of production,
and the "liberty of each group to divide the produce, as they think fit,
according to communist or any other principles").
It amounts to this: Everybody works in field, factory, school, hospital,
etc. The working-day is fixed by the State, which owns the land, the
factories, the roads, etc. Every work-day is paid for with a
_labour-note_, which is inscribed with these words: _Eight hours' work_.
With this cheque the worker can procure all sorts of merchandise in the
stores owned by the State or by divers corporations. The cheque is
divisible, so that you can buy an hour's-work worth of meat, ten
minutes' worth of matches, or half an hour of tobacco. After the
Collectivist Revolution, instead of saying "twopence worth of soap," we
shall say "five minutes' worth of soap."
Most collectivists, true to the distinction laid down by middle-class
economists (and by Marx as well) between _qualified_ work and _simple_
work, tell us, moreover, that _qualified_ or professional work must be
paid a certain quantity more than _simple_ work. Thus one hour's work of
a doctor will have to be considered as equivalent to two or three hours'
work of a hospital nurse, or to three or five hours' work of a navvy.
"Professional, or qualified work, will be a multiple of simple work,"
says the collectivist Grönlund, "because this kind of work needs a more
or less long apprenticeship."
Some other collectivists, such as the French Marxist, Guesde, do not
make this distinction. They proclaim the "Equality of Wages." The
doctor, the schoolmaster, and the professor will be paid (in
labour-cheques) at the same rate as the navvy. Eight hours visiting the
sick in a hospital will be worth the same as eight hours spent in
earthworks or else in mines or factories.
Some make a greater concession; they admit that disagreeable or
unhealthy work--such as sewerage--could be paid for at a higher rate
than agreeable work. One hour's work of a sewerman would be worth, they
say, two hours of a professor's work.
Let us add that certain collectivists admit of corporations being paid a
lump sum for work done. Thus a corporation would say: "Here are a
hundred tons of steel. A hundred workmen were required to produce them,
and it took them ten days. Their work-day being an eight-hours day, it
has taken them eight thousand working hours to produce a hundred tons of
steel--eight hours a ton." For this the State would pay them eight
thousand labour-notes of one hour each, and these eight thousand cheques
would be divided among the members of the iron-works as they themselves
thought proper.
On the other hand, a hundred miners having taken twenty days to extract
eight thousand tons of coal, coal would be worth two hours a ton, and
the sixteen thousand cheques of one hour each, received by the Guild of
Miners, would be divided among their members according to their own
appreciation.
If the miners protested and said that a ton of steel should only cost
six hours' work instead of eight; if the professor wished to have his
day paid four times more than the nurse, then the State would interfere
and would settle their differences.
Such is, in a few words, the organization the collectivists wish to see
arise out of the Social Revolution. As we see, their principles are:
Collective property of the instruments of production, and remuneration
to each according to the time spent in producing, while taking into
account the productivity of his labour. As to the political system, it
would be the Parliamentary system, modified by _positive instructions_
given to those elected, and by the _Referendum_--a vote, taken by _noes_
or _ayes_ by the nation.
Let us own that this system appears to us simply unrealizable.
Collectivists begin by proclaiming a revolutionary principle--the
abolition of private property--and then they deny it, no sooner than
proclaimed, by upholding an organization of production and consumption
which originated in private property.
They proclaim a revolutionary principle, and ignore the consequences
that this principle will inevitably bring about. They forget that the
very fact of abolishing individual property in the instruments of
work--land, factories, road, capital--must launch society into
absolutely new channels; must completely overthrow the present system of
production, both in its aim as well as in its means; must modify daily
relations between individuals, as soon as land, machinery, and all other
instruments of production are considered common property.
They say, "No private property," and immediately after strive to
maintain private property in its daily manifestations. "You shall be a
Commune as far as regards production: fields, tools, machinery, all that
has been invented up till now--factories, railways, harbours, mines,
etc., all are yours. Not the slightest distinction will be made
concerning the share of each in this collective property.
"But from to-morrow you will minutely debate the share you are going to
take in the creation of new machinery, in the digging of new mines. You
will carefully weigh what part of the new produce belongs to you. You
will count your minutes of work, and you will take care that a minute of
your neighbours should not buy more than yours.
"And as an hour measures nothing, as in some factories a worker can see
to six power-looms at a time, while in another he only tends two, you
will weigh the muscular force, the brain energy, and the nervous energy
you have expended. You will accurately calculate the years of
apprenticeship in order to appraise the amount each will contribute to
future production. And this--after having declared that you do not take
into account his share in _past_ production."
Well, for us it is evident that a society cannot be based on two
absolutely opposed principles, two principles that contradict one
another continually. And a nation or a commune which would have such an
organization would be compelled to revert to private property in the
instruments of production, or to transform itself into a communist
society.
III
We have said that certain collectivist writers desire that a distinction
should be made between _qualified_ or professional work and _simple_
work. They pretend that an hour's work of an engineer, an architect, or
a doctor, must be considered as two or three hours' work of a
blacksmith, a mason, or a hospital nurse. And the same distinction must
be made between all sorts of trades necessitating apprenticeship, and
the simple toil of day labourers.
Well, to establish this distinction would be to maintain all the
inequalities of present society. It would mean fixing a dividing line,
from the beginning, between the workers and those who pretend to govern
them. It would mean dividing society into two very distinct classes--the
aristocracy of knowledge placed above the horny-handed lower orders--the
one doomed to serve the other; the one working with its hands to feed
and clothe those who, profiting by their leisure, study how to govern
their fosterers.
It would mean reviving one of the distinct peculiarities of present
society and giving it the sanction of the Social Revolution. It would
mean setting up as a principle an abuse already condemned in our ancient
crumbling society.
We know the answer we shall get. They will speak of "Scientific
Socialism"; they will quote bourgeois economists, and Marx too, to prove
that a scale of wages has its _raison d'être_, as "the labour force" of
the engineer will have cost more to society than the "labour-force" of
the navvy. In fact--have not economists tried to prove to us that if an
engineer is paid twenty times more than a navvy it is _because_ the
"necessary" outlay to make an engineer is greater than that necessary to
make a navvy? And has not Marx asserted that the same distinction is
equally logical between two branches of manual labour? He could not
conclude otherwise, having taken up on his own account Ricardo's theory
of value, and upheld that goods _are_ exchanged in proportion to the
quantity of work socially necessary for their production.
But we know what to think of this. We know that if engineers,
scientists, or doctors are paid ten or a hundred times more than a
labourer, and if a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural
labourer, and ten times more than a girl in a match factory, it is not
by reason of their "cost of production," but by reason of a monopoly of
education, or a monopoly of industry. Engineers, scientists, and doctors
merely exploit their capital--their diplomas--as middle-class employers
exploit a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of
nobility.
As to the employer who pays an engineer twenty times more than a
labourer, it is simply due to personal interest; if the engineer can
economize £4,000 a year on the cost of production, the employer pays him
£800. And if the employer has a foreman who saves £400 on the work by
cleverly sweating workmen, he gladly gives him £80 or £120 a year. He
parts with an extra £40 when he expects to gain £400 by it; and this is
the essence of the Capitalist system. The same differences obtain among
different manual trades.
Let them, therefore, not talk to us of "the cost of production" which
raises the cost of skilled labour, and tell us that a student who has
gaily spent his youth in a university has a _right_ to a wage ten times
greater than the son of a miner who has grown pale in a mine since the
age of eleven; or that a weaver has a _right_ to a wage three or four
times greater than that of an agricultural labourer. The cost of
teaching a weaver his work is not four times greater than the cost of
teaching a peasant his. The weaver simply benefits by the advantages his
industry reaps in international trade, from countries that have as yet
no industries, and in consequence of the privileges accorded by all
States to industries in preference to the tilling of the soil.
Nobody has ever calculated the _cost of production_ of a producer; and
if a noble loafer costs far more to society than a worker, it remains to
be seen whether a robust day-labourer does not cost more to society than
a skilled artisan, when we have taken into account infant-mortality
among the poor, the ravages of anæmia, and premature deaths.
Could they, for example, make us believe that the 1s. 3d. paid to a
Paris workwoman, the 3d. paid to an Auvergne peasant girl who grows
blind at lace-making, or the 1s. 8d. paid to the peasant represent their
"cost of production." We know full well that people work for less, but
we also know that they do so exclusively because, thanks to our
wonderful organization, they would die of hunger did they not accept
these mock wages.
For us the scale of remuneration is a complex result of taxes, of
governmental tutelage, of Capitalist monopoly. In a word, of State and
Capital. Therefore, we say that all wages' theories have been invented
after the event to justify injustices at present existing, and that we
need not take them into consideration.
Neither will they fail to tell us that the Collectivist scale of wages
would be an improvement. "It would be better," so they say, "to see
certain artisans receiving a wage two or three times higher than common
labourers, than to see a minister receiving in a day what a workman
cannot earn in a year. It would be a great step towards equality."
For us this step would be the reverse of progress. To make a distinction
between simple and professional work in a new society would result in
the Revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal fact
we submit to nowadays, but that we nevertheless find unjust. It would
mean imitating those gentlemen of the French Assembly who proclaimed on
August 4th, 1789, the abolition of feudal rights, but who on August 8th
sanctioned these same rights by imposing dues on the peasants to
compensate the noblemen, placing these dues under the protection of the
Revolution. It would mean imitating the Russian Government, which
proclaimed, at the time of the emancipation of the serfs, that certain
lands should henceforth belong to the nobility, while formerly these
lands were considered as belonging to the serfs.
Or else, to take a better known example, when the Commune of 1871
decided to pay members of the Commune Council 12s. 6d. a day, while the
Federates on the ramparts received only 1s. 3d., this decision was
hailed as an act of superior democratic equality. In reality, the
Commune only ratified the former inequality between functionary and
soldier, Government and governed. Coming from an Opportunist Chamber of
Deputies, such a decision would have appeared admirable, but the Commune
doomed her own revolutionary principles when she failed to put them into
practice.
Under our existing social system, when a minister gets paid £4,000 a
year, while a workman must content himself with £40 or less; when a
foreman is paid two or three times more than a workman, and among
workmen there is every gradation, from 8s. a day down to the peasant
girl's 3d., we disapprove of the high salary of the minister as well as
of the difference between the 8s. of the workman and the 3d. of the poor
woman. And we say, '"Down with the privileges of education, as well as
with those of birth!" We are anarchists precisely because these
privileges revolt us.
They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure
them in a society that began by proclaiming equality?
This is why some collectivists, understanding the impossibility of
maintaining a scale of wages in a society inspired by the breath of the
Revolution, hasten to proclaim equality of wage. But they meet with new
difficulties, and their equality of wages becomes the same unrealizable
Utopia as the scale of wages of other collectivists.
A society having taken possession of all social wealth, having boldly
proclaimed the right of all to this wealth--whatever share they may have
taken in producing it--will be compelled to abandon any system of wages,
whether in currency or labour-notes.
IV
The collectivists say, "To each according to his deeds"; or, in other
terms, according to his share of services rendered to society. They
think it expedient to put this principle into practice, as soon as the
Social Revolution will have made all instruments of production common
property. But we think that if the Social Revolution had the misfortune
of proclaiming such a principle, it would mean its necessary failure; it
would mean leaving the social problem, which past centuries have
burdened us with, unsolved.
Of course, in a society like ours, in which the more a man works the
less he is remunerated, this principle, at first sight, may appear to be
a yearning for justice. But in reality it is only the perpetuation of
injustice. It was by proclaiming this principle that wagedom began, to
end in the glaring inequalities and all the abominations of present
society; because, from the moment work done began to be appraised in
currency, or in any other form of wage, the day it was agreed upon that
man would only receive the wage he should be able to secure to himself,
the whole history of a State-aided Capitalist Society was as good as
written; it was contained in germ in this principle.
Shall we, then, return to our starting-point, and go through the same
evolution again? Our theorists desire it, but fortunately it is
impossible. The Revolution, we maintain, must be communist; if not, it
will be drowned in blood, and have to be begun over again.
Services rendered to society, be they work in factory or field, or
mental services, _cannot be_ valued in money. There can be no exact
measure of value (of what has been wrongly termed exchange value), nor
of use value, in terms of production. If two individuals work for the
community five hours a day, year in year out, at different work which is
equally agreeable to them, we may say that on the whole their labour is
approximately equivalent. But we cannot divide their work, and say that
the result of any particular day, hour, or minute of work of the one is
worth the result of one day, one hour, or one minute of the other.
We may roughly say that the man, who during his lifetime has deprived
himself of leisure during ten hours a day has given far more to society
than the one who has only deprived himself of leisure during five hours
a day, or who has not deprived himself at all. But we cannot take what
he has done during two hours, and say that the yield of his two hours'
work is worth twice as much as the yield of another individual, who has
worked only one hour, and remunerate the two in proportion. It would be
disregarding all that is complex in industry, in agriculture, in the
whole life of present society; it would be ignoring to what extent all
individual work is the result of the past and the present labour of
society as a whole. It would mean believing ourselves to be living in
the Stone Age, whereas we are living in an age of steel.
If you enter a modern coal-mine you will see a man in charge of a huge
machine that raises and lowers a cage. In his hand he holds a lever that
stops and reverses the course of the machine; he lowers it and the cage
reverses its course in the twinkling of an eye; he sends it upwards or
downwards into the depths of the shaft with a giddy swiftness. All
attention, he follows with his eyes fixed on an indicator which shows
him, on a small scale, at which point of the shaft the cage is at each
second of its progress; and as soon as the indicator has reached a
certain level, he suddenly stops the course of the cage, not a yard
higher nor lower than the required spot. And no sooner have the colliers
unloaded their coal-wagonettes, and pushed empty ones instead, than he
reverses the lever and again sends the cage back into space.
During eight or ten consecutive hours every day he must keep the same
strain of attention. Should his brain relax for a moment, the cage would
inevitably strike against the gear, break its wheels, snap the rope,
crush men, and put a stop to all work in the mine. Should he waste three
seconds at each touch of the lever,--the extraction, in our modern,
perfected mines, would be reduced from twenty to fifty tons a day.
Is it he who is the most necessary man in the mine? Or, is it perhaps
the boy who signals to him from below to raise the cage? Is it the miner
at the bottom of the shaft, who risks his life every instant, and who
will some day be killed by fire-damp? Or is it the engineer, who would
lose the layer of coal, and would cause the miners to dig on rock by a
simple mistake in his calculations? Or is it the mine owner who has put
his capital into the mine, and who has perhaps, contrary to expert
advice, asserted that excellent coal would be found there?
All those who are engaged in the mine contribute to the extraction of
coal in proportion to their strength, their energy, their knowledge,
their intelligence, and their skill. And we may say that all have the
right to _live_, to satisfy their needs, and even their whims, when the
necessaries of life have been secured for all. But how can we appraise
the work of each one of them?
And, moreover, Is the coal they have extracted entirely _their_ work?
Is it not also the work of the men who have built the railway leading to
the mine and the roads that radiate from all the railway stations? Is it
not also the work of those that have tilled and sown the fields,
extracted iron, cut wood in the forests, built the machines that burn
coal, slowly developed the mining industry altogether, and so on?
It is utterly impossible to draw a distinction between the work of each
of those men. To measure the work by its results leads us to an
absurdity; to divide the total work, and to measure its fractions by the
number of hours spent on the work also leads us to absurdity. One thing
remains: to put the _needs_ above the _works_, and first of all to
recognize _the right to live_, and later on _the right to well-being_
for all those who took their share in production.
But take any other branch of human activity--take the manifestations of
life as a whole. Which one of us can claim the higher remuneration for
his work? Is it the doctor who has found out the illness, or the nurse
who has brought about recovery by her hygienic care? Is it the inventor
of the first steam-engine, or the boy, who, one day getting tired of
pulling the rope that formerly opened the valve to let steam under the
piston, tied the rope to the lever of the machine, without suspecting
that he had invented the essential mechanical part of all modern
machinery--the automatic valve?
Is it the inventor of the locomotive, or the workman of Newcastle, who
suggested replacing the stones formerly laid under the rails by wooden
sleepers, as the stones, for want of elasticity, caused the trains to
derail? Is it the engineer on the locomotive? The signalman who stops
the trains, or lets them pass by? The switchman who transfers a train
from one line to another?
Again, to whom do we owe the transatlantic cable? Is it to the
electrical engineer who obstinately affirmed that the cable would
transmit messages while learned men of science declared it to be
impossible? Is it to Maury, the learned physical geographer, who advised
that thick cables should be set aside for others as thin as a walking
cane? Or else to those volunteers, come from nobody knows where, who
spent their days and nights on deck minutely examining every yard of the
cable, and removed the nails that the shareholders of steamship
companies stupidly caused to be driven into the non-conducting wrapper
of the cable, so as to make it unserviceable?
And in a wider sphere, the true sphere of life, with its joys, its
sufferings, and its accidents, cannot each one of us recall someone who
has rendered him so great a service that we should be indignant if its
equivalent in coin were mentioned? The service may have been but a word,
nothing but a word spoken at the right time, or else it may have been
months and years of devotion, and we are going to appraise these
"incalculable" services in "labour-notes"?
"The works of each!" But human society would not exist for more than two
consecutive generations if everyone did not give infinitely more than
that for which he is paid in coin, in "cheques," or in civic rewards.
The race would soon become extinct if mothers did not sacrifice their
lives to take care of their children, if men did not give continually,
without demanding an equivalent reward, if men did not give most
precisely when they expect no reward.
If middle-class society is decaying, if we have got into a blind alley
from which we cannot emerge without attacking past institutions with
torch and hatchet, it is precisely because we have given too much to
counting. It is because we have let ourselves be influenced into
_giving_ only to _receive._ It is because we have aimed at turning
society into a commercial company based on _debit_ and _credit_.
After all, the Collectivists know this themselves. They vaguely
understand that a society could not exist if it carried out the
principle of "Each according to his deeds." They have a notion that
_necessaries_--we do not speak of whims--the needs of the individual, do
not always correspond to his _works_. Thus De Paepe tells us: "The
principle--the eminently Individualist principle--would, however, be
_tempered_ by social intervention for the education of children and
young persons (including maintenance and lodging), and by the social
organization for assisting the infirm and the sick, for retreats for
aged workers, etc." They understand that a man of forty, father of three
children, has other needs than a young man of twenty. They know that the
woman who suckles her infant and spends sleepless nights at its bedside,
cannot do as much _work_ as the man who has slept peacefully. They seem
to take in that men and women, worn out maybe by dint of overwork for
society, may be incapable of doing as much _work_ as those who have
spent their time leisurely and pocketed their "labour-notes" in the
privileged career of State functionaries.
They are eager to temper their principle. They say: "Society will not
fail to maintain and bring up its children; to help both aged and
infirm. Without doubt _needs_ will be the measure of the cost that
society will burden itself with, to temper the principle of deeds."
Charity, charity, always Christian charity, organized by the State this
time. They believe in improving the asylums for foundlings, in effecting
old-age and sick insurances--so as to _temper_ their principle. But they
cannot yet throw aside the idea of "wounding first and healing
afterwards"!
Thus, after having denied Communism, after having laughed at their ease
at the formula--"To each according to his needs"--these great economists
discover that they have forgotten something, the needs of the producers,
which they now admit. Only it is for the State to estimate them, for the
State to verify if the needs are not disproportionate to the work.
The State will dole out charity. Thence to the English poor-law and the
workhouse is but a step.
There is but a slight difference, because even this stepmother of a
society against whom we are in revolt has also been compelled to
_temper_ her individualist principles; she, too, has had to make
concessions in a communist direction and under the same form of charity.
She, too, distributes halfpenny dinners to prevent the pillaging of her
shops; builds hospitals--often very bad ones, but sometimes splendid
ones--to prevent the ravages of contagious diseases. She, too, after
having paid the hours of labour, shelters the children of those she has
wrecked. She takes their needs into consideration and doles out charity.
Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was
poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating
"surplus value," of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently
destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger.
It was poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of the poor
increased so rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions
and wars that followed the founding of States, and to the increase of
riches resulting from the exploitation of the East. These two causes
tore asunder the bonds that kept men together in the agrarian and urban
communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle of _wages_, so
dear to the exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly
practiced in their tribal life.
And it is this principle that is to spring from a revolution which men
dare to call by the name of Social Revolution,--a name so dear to the
starved, the oppressed, and the sufferers!
It can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under
the proletarian axe, voices will cry out: "Bread, shelter, ease for
all!" And those voices will be listened to; the people will say: "Let us
begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that
we have never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we
will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of middle-class rule: its
morality drawn from account books, its 'debit and credit' philosophy,
its 'mine and yours' institutions. 'In demolishing we shall build,' as
Proudhon said; and we shall build in the name of Communism and Anarchy."