That is why certain Collectivists, understanding the impossibility of maintaining a scale of wages in a society inspired by the influence of the Revolution, zealously advocate equality in wages. But they only stumble against fresh difficulties, and their equality of wages becomes a Utopia, as incapable of realisation as the wage scale of the others.
A society that has seized upon all social wealth, and has plainly announced that all have a right to this wealth, whatever may be the part they have taken in creating it in the past, will be obliged to give up all idea of wages, either in money or in labor notes.
IV.—Equal Wages versus Free Communism.
"To each according to his deeds," say the Collectivists, or rather according to his share of service rendered to society. And this is the principle they recommend as the basis of economic organisation, after the Revolution shall have made all the instruments of labor and all that is necessary for production common property!
Well, if the Social Revolution should be so unfortunate as to proclaim this principle, it would be stemming the tide of human progress; it would be leaving unsolved the huge social problem cast by past centuries upon our shoulders.
It is true that in such a society as ours, where the more a man works the less he is paid, this principle may seem, at first sight, an aspiration towards justice. But at bottom it is but the consecration of past injustice. It is with this principle that the wage-system started, to end where it is to-day, in crying inequalities and all the abominations of the present state of things. And it has ended thus because, from the day on which society began to value services in the money or any other sort of wages, from the day on which it was said that each should have only what he could succeed in getting paid for his work, the whole history of Capitalism (the State aiding therein) was written beforehand; its germ was enclosed in this principle.
Must we then return to our point of departure and pass once more through the same process of capitalist evolution? These theorists seem to desire it; but happily it is impossible; the Revolution will be Communistic; or it will be drowned in blood, and must be begun all over again.
Service rendered to society, be it labor in factory or field, or moral service, cannot be valued in monetary units. There cannot be an
