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13 - The Collectivest Wages System - The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin · Logic Library

• Chapter thirteen, the collectivist wages system. It is our opinion that collectivists commit a twofold error in their plans for the reconstruction of society. While speaking of abolishing capitalist rule, they intend, nevertheless to retain two institutions which are the very basis of this rule, representative government in 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 resis results, but also of its principles. How is it that 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 affirmed 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 class has simply used the parliamentary system to raise a barrier between itself and royalty without giving the people liberty. But gradually, as the people become conscious of their interests, and the variety of their interests multiply, the system can no longer work. Therefore, democrats of all countries vainly imagine palliatives. The referendum mistried and found to be a failure. Proportional representation is spoken of, so is representation of minorities and other parliamentary utopias. In a word, they strive to find what is not to be found, and they are compelled to recognize that they are in a wrong way, and confidence in a representative government disappears. It is the same with the wages system, for after having proclaimed the abolition of private property and the possession in common of all means of production, how can they uphold the wages system in any form. It is nevertheless what collectivists are doing when they recommend labor checks. It is easy to understand why the early English socialists came to the system of labor checks. They simply tried to make capital and labor agree. They repudiated the idea of violently laying hands on capitalist property. It is also easily understood why Prudon took up the idea later on. 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 labor checks. They care little whether the worker is paid in labor notes or in coin stamped with the effigy of the republic or the empire. They only care to say from destruction individual ownership of dwelling houses, of land, of factories. In any case, that of dwelling houses and the capital that is necessary for manufacturing and labor notes would just answer the purpose of upholding this private property. As long as labor 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 them in one way or another for being allowed to work in the fields or factories, or for living in the houses. The owners will accept to be paid by the workers in gold, in paper money, or in checks exchangeable for all sorts of commodities. But how can we defend labor notes this new form of wagedom when we admit that all houses, fields and factories will no longer be private property, and that they will belong to the commune or the nation. Let us closely examine this system of remuneration for work done preached by French, German, English and Italian collectivists. Spanish anarchists who still call themselves collectivists, imply by collectivism the possession in common of all instruments of production and the quote liberty of each group to divide the produce as they think fit, according to communists or any other principles. And it amounts to this. Everybody works in field, factory, school, hospital, et cetera. The working day is fixed by the state which owns lands, factories, roads, et cetera. Every work day is paid for with a labor note, which is inscribed with these words eight hours work. With this check, the worker can procure all sorts of merchandise in the stores owned by the state or by diverse corporations. The check 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 two pence 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 marks 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 an hour work of a doctor will have to be considered as equivalent to two or three hours work of a hospital nurse, or to three hours work of a navvy. Professional or qualified work will be a multiple of simple works, says the collectivists Groanland, because this kind of work needs a more or less long apprenticeship. Other collectivists, such as the French Marxists, do not make this distinction. They proclaim equality of wages. The doctor, the schoolmaster, and the professor will be paid in labor checks 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 minds in factories, some make a greater concession. They admit that disagreeable or unhealthy works 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 paying a lump sum for work done. Thus, the 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 hour 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 labor notes of one hour each, and these eight thousand checks 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 in the sixteen thousand checks 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 twice more than the nurse, than the state would interfere and would settle their differences. Such is, in a few words, the organization collectivists wish to see a rise 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 labor. As to the political system, it would be parliamentarianism, modified by positive instructions given to those elected by the referendum, a vote taken by nose or eyes by the nation. Let us own that this system appears to us unrealizable. Collectivists begin by proclaiming a revolutionary principle, the abolition of private property. Then they deny it no sooner than proclaimed by upholding an organization of production and consumption that originated in private property. Claim a revolutionary principle and ignore the consequences that this principle will inevitably bring about. They forget that the very fact of abolishing individual property and 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. Are all yours. Not the slightest distinction will be made concerning the share of each in this collective property. But from tomorrow you will minutely debate the share you are going to take in the creation of new machinery, in the digging of new minds. 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 neighbors cannot 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 tends only 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 apprize 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. Nation or a commune that would have such an organization would be compelled to revert to private property in the instruments of production, or to transform itself immediately into a communist society. 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 a more or less long apprenticeship in the simple toil of day laborers. 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 above the horny handed lower orders, the ones 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 phosphorers. 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 in Marks two to prove that a scale of wages has its rays on deetra, as the labor force of the engineer will have cost more to society than the labor 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 the necessary to make a navvy, And has not Marx asserted that the same distinction is equally logical between two branches of manual labor. He could not conclude otherwise, having on his own account, taken at Ricardo's theory of value and upheld that goods are exchange 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 one hundred times more than a laborer, and that a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural laborer 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 laborer, it is simply due to personal interest. If the engineer can economize four thousand pounds a year on the cost of production, the employer pays him eight hundred pounds. And if the employer has a foreman who saves four hundred pounds on the work by cleverly sweating workmen, he gladly gives him eighty pounds or a hundred twenty pounds a year. He parts with an extra forty pounds when he expects to gain four hundred by it. And this is the essence of the capitalist system. The same differences obtain among diverse manual trades. Let them, therefore not talk to us of the cost of production, which raises the cost of skilled labor, 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 laborer. The 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 Europe in comparison with countries that have as yet no industries. Nobody has ever calculated the cost of production. And if a loafer costs far more to society than a worker, it remains to be seen whether a robust day laborer does not cost more to society than a skilled artisan. When we have taken into account infant mortality among the poor, the ravages of anemia and premature deaths, could they, for example, make us believe that the one shilling three pence paid to a Paris workman, the three pence paid to an Avern peasant girl who grows blind at lace making, or the one shilling eight pence paid to the peasant represent their cost of production. We know full well that people work for less, but we also know that 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 wage 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 collective at 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 laborers than to see a minister receiving in a day what a workman cannot earn in a year. It would be a great step toward 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 Revolutions 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 August fourth, seventeen eighty nine the abolition of feudal rights, but who on August eighth sanctioned these same rights by imposing dues on the peasants to compensate the noblemen, placing these dues under the projection of the revolution, it would mean imitating the Russian government, which proclaimed at the time of the emancipation of the serfs that the land should henceforth belong to the nobility, while formerly the lands were considered belonging to the serfs or else. To take a better known example, when the Commune of eighteen seventy one decided to pay members of the commune council twelve shillings sixpence a day, while the federates on the ramparts received only one shilling threepence, this decision was hailed as an act of superior democratic equality. In reality, a 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 revolutionary principles because she failed to put them into practice. Under our existing social system, when a minister gets paid four thousand pounds a year, while a workman must content himself with forty pounds or less. When a foreman is paid two or three times more than a workman, and among workmen there is every gradation from eight shillings a day down to the peasant girls three pence. We disapprove of the high salary of the minister, as well as of the difference between the eight shillings of the workmen and the three pence 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. That 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 a 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 labor notes. 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. In fact, in a society like ours, in which the more a man works, the less he has remunerated. This principle, at first site may appear to be a yearning for justice, but it is really only the perpetuation of past injustice. It was by virtue of this principle that waged and began to end in the glaring inequalities in all the abominations of present society. Because from the moment work done was apprized in currency or in any other form of wage, the day it was agreed upon that man would only receive the wage he could secure to himself, the whole history of state aided capitalist society was as good as written, it germinated 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 will be communist. If not, it will be drowned in blood and have to be begun over again. Services render 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 with regard to production. If two individuals work for the community five hours a day, ye're in year out a different work which is equally agreeable to them. We may say that on the whole their labor is 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 a minute or hour 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 is worth twice as much as the yield of another individual working only one hour, and remunerate him in proportion. It would be disregarding all that is complex in industry and agriculture, in the whole life of present society. It would be ignoring to what extent all individual work is the result of past and present labor 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 coal mine, you will see a man in charge of a huge machine that raises and lowers a cage. In his hands. He holds a lever that stops and reverses the course of the machine. He lowers it, and the cage turns back. In the twinkling of an eye, he raises it. He lowers it again with a giddy swiftness all attention. He follows, with his eyes fixed on the wall, an indicator that shows him on a small scale at which point of the shaft the cage is at each second of its progress. 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 I loaded their coal wagons and pushed empty ones instead than he reverses the lever and again sends the cage back into space. During eight or ten consecutive hours, he must pay the closest 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 obstruct work in the mine. Should he waste three seconds at each touch of the lever, in our modern, perfected minds, the extraction would be reduced from twenty to fifty tons a day. Is it he who is of greatest use 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 who would cause the miners to dig on rock by a simple mistake in his calculations? And lastly, is it the mine owner who has put all his capital into the mine, and who has, perhaps contrary to expert advice asserted that excellent coal would be found there. All the miners engaged in this 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 apprize their work? And moreover, is the coal they have extracted the the work? Is it not also the work of men who have built the railway leading to the mine, and the roads that radiate from all its stations. Is it not also the work of those that have tilled and sown in the fields, extracted iron cut woods in the forests, built the machines that burn coal, and so on? No distinction can be drawn between the work of each man. Measuring the work by its results leads us to absurdity. Dividing and measuring them by hours spent on the work also leads us to absurdity. One thing remains. Put the needs above the works, and first of all, recognize the right to live and later on to the comforts of life for all those who take 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 enter 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 workmen of Newcastle who suggested replacing the stones formerly laid under the rails by wooden sleepers, as the stones for want of elasticity cause the trains to derail? Is it the engineer on the locomotive, the signalmen who can stop trains, the switchmen who transfers a train from one line to another. To whom do we owe the Transatlantic cable? Is it to the engineer who obstinately affirmed that the cable would transmit messages when learned electricians declared it to be impossible. Is it to Maury the scientists who advised that thick cables should be set aside for others as thin as canes? Or else do those volunteers come from nobody knows where, who spent their days and nights on deck? My minutely examining every yard of the cable, and remove the nails that the stockholders of steamship Company is 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 some one 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 are we going to apprize these incalculable services in labor notes the works of each but human society would not exist for more than two consecutive generations if every one did not give infinitely more than that for which he is paid in coin, in checks, 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 all the time without demanding an equivalent, if men did not give just to those from whom 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 calculated too much. 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. Collectivists know this. 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 to Pape tells us, thus to pay, He 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, et cetera. They understand that a man of forty, father of three children, has other needs than the 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 labor 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 costs 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 asylums for foundlings, in affecting 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 or not disproportionate to the work, the state will dole out charity. Thence, to the English poor law in the workhouse is but a step. There is but a degree. 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. Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that created the first capitalists, because before accumulating surplus value of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labor so as to not die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists, and if the number of poorer rapidly increased 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 that tore the bonds asunder which once united agrarian and urban communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle of wages so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practiced. 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 clear to the starved, the oppressed, and the sufferers it can never be. For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian acts, voices will call 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 mind in yours institutions. In demolishing, we shall build, as prudence said, and we shall build in the name of communism and anarchy. End of Chapter thirteen.