surrenders all claim upon the product of his labour.
"If," Mr. Cole continues, "the wage system is to be abolished, all these four marks of degraded status must be removed."
Let us look at these "four marks of degraded status." The fact that a man's labour can be bought and sold without the labourer is surely some advance, as indeed is acknowledged by Guild Socialists, on what they call chattel slavery (as distinguished from wage slavery), under which the worker and his labour were sold together, like so many cattle. The fact that a man sells his labour apart from himself, if it be a mark of degraded status, is shared by the labourer with all brain workers and members of professions who sell their skill or their products to consumers. The fact that when I sell a copy of this book I do not sell myself to my readers at the same time, seems to me to be rather an advantage than otherwise, both to me and to them.
But in a sense every man's work is a bit of himself, he puts something of himself into it, and the economic arrangement has enormous advantages by which a worker can sell bits of himself, that is to say bits of his work, in exchange for bits of other people, and so
