Chapter 18 Chapter Thirteen

collectivist wage system I In our view, the collectivists' plans for social transformation are twofold wrong.On the one hand, they advocate the abolition of the capitalist system, but on the other hand they hope to preserve the representative politics and the wage system-these two things are actually the basis of the capitalist system. As for the so-called representative politics, we have already mentioned it often.In Britain, France, Germany or the United States, history has left many lessons for people. Why do those smart people (and there are many such people among collectivists) still serve as members of Congress or city councils? Woolen cloth?We just can't understand.

Now the parliamentary system is collapsing, and the voices attacking it are rising from all quarters and growing louder every day.Not only the results of the representative system, but also its principles have been attacked so that there is no room for existence.But how can those so-called revolutionary socialists still support a system that has been condemned to death? The parliamentary system was established by the middle classes to maintain their rights against the crown, and at the same time to justify and extend their power over the working people; therefore, the parliamentary system is really the peculiar institution of the middle class.Even those who advocate such a system do not seriously claim that a Congress or City Council can really represent a country or a city.The more knowledgeable among them also know that this is impossible.The middle class is just using the parliamentary system to build a dam to protect themselves against the royal power, and it will not give freedom to the people.What's more, the people are now aware of their own real interests, and at the same time the types of interests are increasing day by day, this system is extremely useless.Therefore, although democrats in various countries have tried hard to pursue various improvement strategies; but in the end it was in vain. "National suffrage" has been tried, but it has failed; it is of no avail that some people talk about "proportional representation," "minority representation," and other "parliamentary utopias."In short, they are all trying to find out what cannot be realized, and they always fail after new experiments; and the people's confidence in representative politics is gradually disappearing.

The same is true with regard to the wage system; for how can the wage system be maintained when it is advocated the abolition of private property and the public ownership of all the organs of production?But the collectivists want to do this, and they use "labour vouchers" as a method of remuneration for work by the big collectivist employer (that is, the state). It is easy to see why the early socialists of England, from the time of Robert Owen onwards, adopted a system of "labor notes."They were merely trying to reconcile capital and labour, and they rejected the idea of ​​seizing capitalists' property by revolutionary action.

It is easy to understand why Proudhon later held the same thought.In his system of interdependence, he strives to make capital less poisonous, regardless of the existence and destruction of private property; necessary. It is not surprising that economists of more or less bourgeois color are in favor of "labour notes".As for the payment of wages to the laborer in "labour tokens" or in coins bearing the portrait of the Führer of the Reich or the head of the Democracy, they regarded it as irrelevant.They want nothing more than to preserve private property in houses, land, factories, etc. -- at least private property in houses and capital necessary for manufacture, and "labour notes" are precisely adapted to the purpose of preserving private property.

As long as the "labor certificates" can be exchanged for jewels, chariots, horses, etc., then rich owners who own houses will be willing to receive them as rent.As long as houses, fields, factories, etc., are privately owned, many laborers will have to pay rent to the rich to obtain permission to work in their fields or factories, or to live in their houses. They; whether it is "labour certificates" or coins, they are always rent money.So long as the system of extorting rent from labourers, and the right to extort rent, remained in the hands of the rich, the rich were willing to accept money, notes, and checks in exchange for all kinds of goods.However, when we admit that houses, fields, and factories should no longer be privately owned, but should become public property, then how can we support this new form of wages-"labour vouchers"?

II Let us now examine in detail the system of remuneration for labour, now advocated by the collectivists in France, Germany, England, and Italy. ① ①The Spanish anarchists still call themselves collectivists, and what they call "collectivism" includes the common ownership of all the organs of production, and the "communist or other principles, as they think fit, from the free distribution of produce". - author Anarchists in Spain are no longer called collectivists. - translator In a nutshell, collectivism is like this: everyone works in the fields, in the factories, in the schools, in the hospitals, and elsewhere.As for the working hours, it is regulated by the state which owns the land, workshops, roads, etc.For the daily labor, the state will give "labor vouchers" as remuneration, and on the "labor vouchers" it is clearly written: eight hours of labor.With this paper ticket, workers can buy various things in state-owned stores or in various combinations.This kind of bill can be divided, and you can buy meat for one hour of labor, matches for ten minutes, and tobacco for thirty minutes.After the successful collectivist revolution, we no longer talk about "twopenny soap" but "five-minute soap".

Most collectivists superstitiously believe in the distinction between skilled labor and mere labor defined by middle-class economists (and also believed in Marx), and tell us that the remuneration of skilled or specialized labor should be higher than that of simple labor. Pay more.One hour of a doctor's labor should therefore be regarded as equal to two or three hours of a nurse's labor, or three or five hours of earth-digger's labor.That is why collectivist Grünlund said: "The remuneration of specialized or skilled labor should be double that of simple labor, because this kind of labor requires long-term learning."

Other collectivists, such as the French Marxist Gade, etc., do not recognize this distinction.They advocated "equality of wages."That is to say, doctors, primary school teachers, university professors and earth diggers get the same wages (paid with "labor vouchers").Eight hours of labor in a hospital to nurse the sick is worth as much as eight hours of digging, or in a factory mine. ① Jules Guesde (1845-1922), a French socialist. - translator Others are more conceited; they think that the abominable and unsanitary labors, such as working in the sewers, should be paid more than the pleasant ones.They say that one hour of labor in the gutter should be equal to the two hours of labor taught by the university.

In addition, there are collectivists who favor payment according to the total labor of each industrial combination.A certain combination can say: "Here is a hundred tons of steel, which was produced by one hundred workers in our group in ten days. They work eight hours a day. Then, it takes 100 tons of steel to produce one hundred tons Eight thousand hours, one ton will take eighty hours."Therefore, the state gave this combination 8,000 labor coupons per hour.This association received 8,000 labor tokens, which they distributed among the members of the Ironworkers Association in such a way as they thought fit.

On the other hand, if a hundred miners spend twenty days digging out 8,000 tons of coal, a ton of coal is worth two hours.The Miners' Guild thus received sixteen thousand one-hour tokens, which they distributed among their members as they thought fit. If the miner protests that the value of a ton of steel is not eight hours of labour, but six; dispute. In short, this is the organization the collectivists hope to produce after the social revolution.Their principle, as we have already known, is: the production organization is collective property, and the time spent on production by each person is used as the standard, and the productivity of his labor is considered to distribute the rewards.As for the political organization, it is still the parliamentary system, but it has been improved a bit, such as the adoption of a referendum—a vote in which all citizens participate to indicate whether it is acceptable or not—and mandatory instructions for those elected as members of parliament.

We thought that such a system seemed to us absolutely impracticable. The collectivists first professed a revolutionary principle - the abolition of private property, but when the words were still heard, they arose to deny this claim and maintained the organization of production and consumption based on private property. While declaring the principle of revolution, they ignore the inevitable consequences of this principle.They forget that in order to abolish the private ownership of labor institutions (land, factories, roads, capital), society must be led on a new road; and the current production organization must be completely overturned, so that its ends and means must be completely changed, And as soon as the land, machinery, and all other organs of production are brought into public ownership, the daily relations between individuals must immediately change. They say, "No private property," but at once try to maintain the day-to-day performance of private property. "As far as production is concerned, you are a commune. Fields, tools, machinery, and everything else that has been invented--factories, railways, ports, mines, etc. are yours. In this collective property, everyone The parts that should be are the same, there is no slight difference. "But from tomorrow onwards you will discuss in detail what part of each of you is responsible for making new machines, digging new mines, etc. You are going to carefully estimate what part of the new production will belong to each of you. You will calculate The hours of your labour, and take care that your neighbor's minute does not buy more than yours. "And there is no correct standard to calculate by one hour or two hours, because in some factories, a worker can manage six machines at the same time, but in some factories, one person can only manage two machines; The physical, mental, and nervous energy expended. You have to calculate the time of your apprenticeship in order to estimate the contribution of each of you to future production. part of what should be done in the future.” But we know very well that a society cannot be built on two completely opposite principles, two principles that are always in conflict.Once a country or a commune has such an organization, it will either be forced to return to the private ownership of the production organs, or it will transform itself into a communist society. III We have already said that certain collectivist writers attempted to draw a distinction between skilled or specialized labor and mere labour.They imagine that one hour's labor of an engineer, builder, doctor, etc., should be equal to two or three hours' labor of a blacksmith, mason, or nurse.And a similar distinction should be drawn between the various trades which must be learned, and the simple daily work of the casual laborer. To establish this distinction, all the inequalities in the present society must be maintained.This is to draw in advance a boundary between the workers and those who seek to manage them.This still divides society into two distinct classes--the intelligent aristocracy above, and the weed-handed pariah below--and the people of one class are destined to serve the other class, with their own hands. to feed and clothe another class; while another class uses their leisure to study how to govern those who labor for them. This is to revive a distinctive feature of present society and to give it the sanction of a social revolution.This is to establish as a principle the evils that have been attacked in ancient and declining societies. We know what kind of answer we'll get.They will talk about "scientific socialism"; they will also quote bourgeois economists and Marx to justify the existence of wage grades, because the "labor power" of engineers is compensated for by society. The "labor force" of workers is large.In fact—haven't the economists proved that engineers should be paid twenty times more than earth-diggers, because it costs more "necessary" to make an engineer than to make a earth-digger?Didn't Marx also maintain that the distinction between these two kinds of muscle labor is equally logical?He adopted Rigato's theory of value, advocating that the exchange of goods should be proportional to the amount of labor required in society to produce the goods, and he could not draw any other conclusions. However, we have other opinions on this issue.We know that if an engineer, a scientist, a doctor gets ten or a hundred times as much as a laborer; a weaver three times as much as an agricultural laborer, ten times as much as a matchmaker, it is not because they The "cost of production" is simply due to the monopoly of education, or the monopoly of industry.Engineers, scientists, doctors use only their capital (their diplomas) as the middle-class employer uses his factories, and the aristocrat uses his titles. As for the reason why the employer pays the engineer twenty times more than the labourer, it is only for personal gain; if the engineer can save four thousand pounds a year in the cost of production, the employer will give him eight hundred pounds. .If a foreman saves £400 by skilfully exploiting his workman, he is happy to give the foreman £80 or £120 a year.He puts out forty pounds and expects to get four hundred; such is the nature of the capitalist system, and for the same reason the differences between the various handicrafts arise. We need not, therefore, discuss the "cost of production" which raises the value of skilled labour; they may again tell us that a student who spends his youth happily at the university has a right to The child of a miner who toils away in the mountains and poor caves is entitled to ten times the wages; a weaver is entitled to three or four times the wages of the agricultural laborer.In fact the education of a weaver is not necessarily four times as expensive as that of an agricultural labourer.The weavers derive this favor entirely from the advantages which their industry derives in international trade from other less industrialized countries, and also from the privileges accorded to it by governments over agriculture. No one has ever calculated the cost of production of a producer, assuming that a high-class vagrant costs society many times more than a laborer, and we calculate the death of young children among the poor, the prevalence of anemia, and premature death, etc., And see if a healthy common worker costs less to society than a skilled worker! For example, paying thirty sous to a Paris laborer, six sous to an Orvigny peasant girl who is about to go blind for making lace, and forty sous to a farmer, can anyone say that this represents them? "Production fee"?We know that they are sometimes paid less than that, but we also know that they do so only because, under our present social organization, if they do not want this little wages, they will starve. ①Auvergne, in the south of France. - translator From this we can see that the grade of remuneration is the result of a mixture of taxation, government protection, and capitalist monopoly.In short, this is the result of the state and capital.Therefore, we say that all theories about wages are invented to cover up the injustice of the present society, and we don't need to discuss them again. Again we will be told that the collectivist wage scale is an improvement.They said: "We would rather see a skilled worker get two or three times as much wages as an ordinary worker, than see a high official earn in a day what a worker can't get for a year's hard work; because the previous day Things are always better. And it's a step closer to equality." But in our view, this is a step backwards.To establish in the new society the distinction between mere and specialized labor would be tantamount to accepting as a principle in the revolutionary period the brutal facts which we are now subjugated to endure and which cannot but be regarded as illegitimate.This is almost imitating the actions of those gentlemen of the French Parliament, who on August 4, 1789, declared the abolition of feudal rights, but on August 8 they recognized this same right, taxing the peasants to compensate the nobles, And put this taxation under the protection of the revolution.This again seems to be imitating the Russian government. When the Russian government emancipated the serfs, it declared that the land previously considered to belong to the serfs would now belong to the nobles. ① Refers to the National Assembly (Assemblee Nationale). - translator Or to take another example that is more familiar to the world: in 1871, the Paris Commune decided that the salaries of the members of the Commune Council were fifteen francs a day, while at the same time the soldiers of the defense corps on the ramparts received only thirty sous a day (that is, one half franc), others praised the resolution as a high democratic equality.In reality the Commune merely recognized the former inequalities between officials and soldiers, between government and governed.Such a resolution would seem admirable if it came from a speculative Chamber of Deputies, but ridiculous if it came from a revolutionary Commune.The Commune itself condemned them to death before it put into practice its revolutionary principles. Under the current social system, ministers receive a salary of 100,000 francs a year, while laborers have to be satisfied with wages of around 4,000 francs a year; the wages of foremen are two or three times higher than that of ordinary workers. And among the workers there are many classes, from ten francs a day to six sous a peasant girl; difference.We say: "Down with the privilege of education and the privilege of birth." The reason we want to be anarchists is because we can't see such privileges, we want to rebel against them. We have risen against them in this powerful society.Can we still allow them to exist in a society that declares equality in the future? Some collectivists, knowing the impossibility of maintaining a hierarchy of wages in a society affected by the revolution, hastened to advocate equality of wages.But they encountered new difficulties. Their so-called "wage equality" is the same as the "wage hierarchy" of other collectivists, and it is also an unrealizable "utopia". A society which takes all its wealth into common ownership, and boldly proclaims a right to it for all, regardless of the power they exercise in its production--such a society will be compelled to abolish all wages. system; regardless of whether it is currency or labor vouchers, it should be abolished. IV Collectivists say: "Pay rewards based on the performance of each person." In other words, the standard is based on the weight of this person's duties to society.They think that this principle should be implemented immediately when the social revolution takes place and the institutions of production are taken into public ownership.However, in our view, if the social revolution should unfortunately advocate this principle, it is tantamount to expressing its failure; it means that the social problem that has been placed on our shoulders for thousands of years in the past cannot be solved now. In our present society, the longer the worker works, the less he is paid—naturally, in such a society, this principle appears at first sight to be a desire for justice.In reality, however, it simply continues the injustice of the past.From this principle came the system of wages, and with it all the evils and marked inequalities of the present society; for ever since society valued labor in money, or in every other form of wages, since society decided that the worker should only The entire history of a capitalist society aided by the state, from the day when he should receive the wages he can get, is practically written in advance; it is contained in this. So, do we have to go back to the starting point and go through the same evolution again?Those theorists hope so, but fortunately this is not possible.We thought the revolution had to be communist, otherwise it would be drowned in blood and everything would have to start all over again. The duties we perform for society, whether in the factory, or in the fields, or in the work of the mind, cannot be valued in money.As far as production is concerned, there is really no correct measure of value (which is commonly mistakenly called exchange value), nor of value in use.Suppose now there are two people who work five hours a day for the society, year after year. Although they have different occupations, the happiness given to them is the same.On the whole, therefore, we may say that their labor is almost equal.But we cannot separate their work and say that the results of A's one hour and one minute of work a day are equal to the results of B's ​​one hour and one minute of work a day. In general we may say that a man who sacrifices ten hours of leisure a day in his life contributes much more to society than a man who sacrifices only five hours a day, or none at all.However, we cannot just point out his two hours of work, and say that the output of his two hours of work is twice as much as that of another person's one hour of work, and he is also paid twice as much when paid.To do so is to despise the complex relationship between industrial agriculture and the whole life of the present society; and to completely ignore the fact that individual work is the result of the past and present labor of the whole society.This is like a person who was born in the Iron Age and still dreams of living in the Stone Age. If we go into a modern coal mine, we will see the man standing in front of the big machine raising and lowering the cage.He held a lever in his hand to stop or reverse the movement of the machine; as soon as he let go of the handle, the cage reversed direction in an instant, and he pulled it up and down with extraordinary rapidity.He concentrated his eyes on the pointer, which indicated on the small grid the point of the shaft reached by the lifting cage every second.If the pointer reaches a certain degree, he immediately stops the cage, and it is just at the desired position, which will not be a yard high or low.The charcoal pitman took out the coal cart and replaced it with an empty cart, and he immediately turned the lever, and the cage returned to its original position. He must keep his attention in this way for eight or ten hours.If his mind had rested a little, the cage would fly up against the gears, smash the wheels, break the ropes, injure people, and stop all work in the pit.If he rested for three minutes every time he moved the lever, even in today's most perfect mines, the production of coal would be reduced by twenty tons or even fifty tons a day. So is he the one most needed in the mines?Or the kid down there signaling him to pull up the cage?Or the miners who risked their lives down the shaft, or even died in the mine from a gas explosion?Or the engineer who makes a mistake in his calculations and loses the vein, sending the miners to dig up worthless rock?Or is it the mine owner who invests in the mine, disregards the advice of the experts, and believes that the best coal can be dug there? Therefore, the contribution of those who work in the mines to coal production should be proportionate to their physical strength, energy, knowledge, ability, and skill.We may say that each of them has a right to life, to the satisfaction of his wants, and, after the necessities of life are secured, of his fancies.But how can we estimate the value of the labor of each of them? And, is the coal they dug out the result of their work?Is not this also the work of those who built the railways to the mines, and those who built roads on all sides of the stations?And were they not the men who plowed the fields, dug the iron ore, felled the forests, made the coal-burning machinery, and gradually developed the whole mining industry? It is quite impossible to draw a distinction between the work of each of these people.It is unreasonable to measure their work by the results of their work; it is also unreasonable to divide their whole work into several parts, and to calculate the fraction by the hours worked.Only one thing is right: put needs (desires) above work, no matter what the work is, no matter what the needs are, first, all people who participate in production and work should be recognized as having the right to live, and secondly, their rights should be recognized. The right to well-being. But let us consider any other part of human activity—the totality of the phenomena of life.Who among us can claim the highest reward for his work?What about the doctor who diagnoses the disease?Or the nurse who heals the sick by her hygienic care?What about the man who first invented the steam engine?Or the same man who happened to be one day tired of pulling the rope (which used to be used to open the tongue door and let the steam go under the piston), tied the rope to the lever of the machine, and went out to play with his companions, knowing nothing about him. What about the child who has invented the automatic tongue door, a major part of modern machinery? Who is the inventor of the locomotive?Or the Newcastle worker who proposed to use sleepers instead of stones (stones were used to cushion the underside of the railway track, because there was no elasticity, so the trains often derailed.)?Is it the driver of the train?Or the flagger with the little red and green flag telling the train to stop or move on? To whom do we give credit for the transatlantic submarine power line?To the electrical engineer who insisted on doing so when learned scientists proclaimed that undersea wires couldn't carry messages?Or should it be attributed to the geographer Morley who once said that there should be no thick ropes but rattan wires?Or to those who spend day and night on the deck of the Great Eastern inspecting submarine wires yard by yard, misplaced shareholders of the steamship company in the non-conductive wrapping of the wires, and rendered the wires useless. What about the unidentified volunteers who were pulled out? ①M． F． Maury (1806-1873), a British hydrologist. ——Translator ②Great Eastern, ship name, the original book is missing, this is based on the booklet "The Wage System" (The Wage System, new edition in 1920) of the London Free Press. - translator And on a larger scale, that is, in the vast field of life, which contains joys, sorrows, and all kinds of accidents, any one of us should remember that someone did his duty to him, and it was a big one. A job, and if anyone valued that job in money, he would be offended.Sometimes this kind of job is just a sentence—a timely sentence, and sometimes it takes years and months of business to do it.Can we use "labour vouchers" to measure this "incalculable" labor? "According to the performance of each individual!" However, if each individual is not willing to make his labor more than he receives in money, banknotes, or social rewards, then human society will not be able to continue for more than two generations.If a mother refuses to spend her time raising her children, if each does not get a fair price, and refuses to give anything, if people do not see the reward, and refuse to give more, Then, the human race will perish. If bourgeois society continues to decay day by day, if we have entered a dead end, from which we cannot escape unless we attack the old system with swords, axes, and torches; Too much.This is because we hold in our minds the concept of "giving in order to get".This is because we treat society as a business corporation based on claims and debts. Moreover, the collectivists themselves know it.They vaguely know that if the principle of "distribution based on each person's work performance" is implemented, society will not be able to exist.What they consider to be personal necessities (and we do not mean luxuries) often do not correspond to his work.Thus de Berpau says: "This principle (principle of eminent individualism) can be interfered with by society for the purpose of the education of children and youth, including their upbringing and boarding, and with respect to the sick, weak The social system of social support and nursing homes for old workers and so on has been eased." They know that a man of forty with three children needs more than a young man of twenty.They also know that a woman who sits up at night and sits at the cradle nursing her child cannot do as much work as a man who sleeps well.They also seem to know that those men and women who are overworked and weakened for the sake of society will probably not achieve more than those gentlemen who spend their time casually, living the privileged life of high state officials, and filling their own pockets. ① Cesarde Paepe (1842-1890), the founder of the Belgian Labor Party. - translator They try to moderate their principles.They said: "Society will naturally come to raise children, and it will naturally come to support the elderly and the weak. Society will naturally use needs (rather than work performance) as a measure of value to moderate this principle of work performance." Charity, charity, always Christian charity, this time by the state.Improvement of orphanages, introduction of pension and sickness insurance—they believed this would moderate their reasoning.However, they still cannot avoid the thought of "make a wound first, and then heal it"! Thus, after denying communism and laughing at will at the formula "to each according to his needs", these great economists found themselves forgetting something, namely the needs of the producers, which they now also recognize .But they leave it to the state to measure the need, and to determine whether the need is commensurate with the labour. The country does charity work.From here to England's Poor Relief Act is but a step away from the poor workhouse. This is only a small difference, since even this stepmother of the society we oppose has already had to temper her individualistic principles: she too has to be under the same form of benevolence, and against the communist The direction gave way. She also feared that her shop would be robbed, and came here to give out the lowest diets; and she built hospitals (poorly equipped, perhaps, but sometimes magnificent) to prevent the spread of contagious diseases.After she was paid for the hours she worked, she also often took care of the children of those she had robbed.Remembering their needs, she came to do some charity work again. We have often said that poverty is the number one cause of wealth.It is poverty that creates the first capitalist.For before the accumulation of "surplus-value" as we so often hear it, many people were obliged to sell their labor in order not to die of starvation.Poverty makes capitalists.As for the rapid increase in the number of the poor in the Middle Ages, it was due to the aggression and wars that followed the establishment of the state, as well as the increase in wealth generated by the plundering of the Eastern countries.These two causes cut off the connection between the rural and the urban people, and taught them the principle of abolishing the joint liability formerly practiced in the days of tribal life, and substituting for it a system of wages which favored the plunderers. Does a revolution that gives birth to this principle dare to be called a social revolution?Social revolution, what an affectionate term for the hungry, suffering, and oppressed! This is absolutely impossible.When the old regime is smashed to pieces under the ax of the proletariat, the cry will arise: "We want bread, shelter, and comfort for all!" The people will heed; they will say: "We will come Satisfying our own longing for life, happiness, and freedom that we have never forgotten. When we have all tasted this joy, we will go to work to put the traces of middle-class rule, and its from the ledger. The morality acquired in the world, the philosophy of "loaning" and the system of "mine and yours" will be destroyed together. As Proudhon said: "We destroy and build at the same time"; we will use communism and anarchism construction in name."