Peter Kropotkin wrote and first published The Wage System in La Revolte in 1888. It was translated for Freedom newspaper in 1889. Surprisingly, the essay is not available at The Anarchist Library. However, you can find it in Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society, a collection of essays (re)published by PM Press. The essays focus on dissecting “work”, its form under capitalism, and the possibilities for an alternative society.
Below are excerpts I highlighted while reading.
But we also know what to believe on these questions. We know that if the engineer, the academic and the doctor are today paid ten times as much as the worker, it is not because of the “production costsF of these gentlemen. It is because of an educational monopoly.
The engineer, academic, and doctor are simply exploiting a capital asset — their diplomas — just as the bourgeois exploits his factory, or the nobleman exploited his title. The university degree has replaced the birth certificate of the nobleman of the ancien régime. As to the employer who pays the engineer twenty times more than the labourer, he makes the following simple reckoning: if the engineer can save him a hundred thousand francs a year on his production costs, he will pay the engineer twenty thousand. And when he sees a foreman, able to drive the workers and save ten thousand francs in wages, he loses no time in offering him two or three thousand francs a year. He parts with a thousand francs where he counts on gaining ten thousand, and this in essence is the capitalist system.
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No one has ever worked out the production costs of the labour force. And if an idler costs society a lot more than an honest worker, it still remains to be seen when all things are taken into account — mortality among workers’ children, the ravages of anaemia, and premature deaths — whether a robust day labourer does not cost society more than an artisan.
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A society which will have taken possession of all social wealth and loudly proclaimed that “all” have a right to that wealth — whatever part they may have played in the past in creating it — will be obliged to abandon any ideas about wages either in coin or in labour tokens.
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For us the present wage scale is a complex product of taxes, government intervention, capitalist monopoly. Therefore we say that all the theories advanced by economists about the wage scale, have been invented after the event to justify the existing injustices. We do not need to take them into consideration.
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All the workers engaged in the mine contribute within the limits of their powers, their knowledge, their intelligence and their skill to mine coal. And all we can say is that everybody has the right to live, to satisfy their needs, and even their fantasies, once the most pressing needs of all have been satisfied. But how can one estimate their labours?
And furthermore, the coal they have extracted is it really their labour? Is it not also the labour of those men who built the railways leading to the pithead and the roads that lead in all directions from the stations? Is it not also the work of those who have cultivated and planted the fields, mined the iron ore, felled the timber in the forest, built the machines that will burn the coal and so on?
No distinction can be drawn between the work of any of them. To measure it by the results, leads us into absurdity. To divide them into fractions and measure them by the hours of work, also leads to absurd conclusions. All one can do is not to measure them at all and to recognise the right of all who engage in productive work to enjoy the comforts of life.
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And in an even wider sphere — the real sphere of human existence with its joys, sorrows and accidents — cannot each one of us name somebody who did one a service so great, so important, that he would be horrified if it was suggested to him to estimate the value of that service in money terms? That service could have been a word, just a word, the right one at the right moment; or it could well have been months and years of devotion. Are you going to evaluate these services, the most important of all in “work tokens”?
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And if bourgeois society perishes, if we are today at a dead end from which there is no way out without taking the torch and the axe to the institutions of the past — it is just because one has done too much calculating, which has been just the thing for rogues. It is because we have allowed ourselves to be led to give only in order to receive, and to have made of society a commercial enterprise based on a debit and credit accounting.
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The extreme poverty of the unfortunates — as we have pointed out elsewhere — was the prime cause of riches. It created the first capitalist, for before the “surplus value” which is so much talked about, could be accumulated there had to exist moreover unfortunates who would agree to sell their labour power in order not to die of hunger. It was abject poverty which produced the rich.
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But it will not be so. For when the old institutions crumble beneath the axe of the proletariat, there will be found among them the small groups who will cry out, “Bread for all! Lodgings for all! The Right for all to the comforts of life!”
And these voices will be heeded. The people will say to themselves, “Let us begin by satisfying our needs of life, joy and freedom. And once all will have experienced this well-being we will set to work to demolish the last vestiges of the bourgeois regime, its morality, derived from the account book, its philosophy of ‘debit’ and ‘credit,’ its institutions of mine and thine. And in demolishing we shall build as Proudhon used to say. But we shall build on new foundations — of communism and anarchy and not of individualism and authority.