Page:The wage system.pdf/6

 They say: "No private property"; and immediately they hasten to maintain private property in its everyday forms. "For productive purposes you are a commune," they say; "the fields, the tools, the machinery, all that has been made up to this day—manufactures, railways, wharves, mines—belong to all of you in common. Not the slightest distinction will be made concerning the share of each one in this collective property.

"But from to-morrow you are minutely to discuss the part that each one of you is to take in making the new machines, digging the new mines. From to-morrow you are to endeavour to weigh exactly the portion which will accrue to each one from the new produce. You are to count your minutes of work, you are to be on the watch lest one moment of your neighbour's toil may purchase more than yours.

"You are to calculate your hours and your minutes of labor, and since the hour measures nothing,—since in one factory a workman can watch four looms at once, whilst in another he only watches two, you are to weigh the muscular force, the energy of brain, the energy of nerve expended. You are scrupulously to count up the years of apprenticeship, that you may value precisely the share of each one amongst you in the production of the future. And all this, after you have declared that you leave entirely out of your reckoning the share he has taken in the past."

Well, it is evident to us that a society cannot organise itself upon two absolutely opposing principles, two principles which contradict one another at every step. And the nation or the commune which should give to itself such an organisation would be forced either to return to private property or else to transform itself immediately into a communist society.

III.—.

We have said that most Collectivist writers demand that in Socialist society remuneration should be based upon a distinctio between qualified or professional labor and simple labor. They assert that an hour of the engineer's, the architect's or the doctor's work should be counted as two or three hours' work from the black­ smith, the mason or the nurse. And the same distinction, say they, ought to be established between workers whose trades require a longer or shorter apprenticeship and those who are mere day laborers.