Peter Kropotkine

“ 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. ”

“ It also, after having paid for nothing but the hours of labor, receives the children of those whom it has itself reduced to the extremity of distress. It also takes account of needs—as a charity.
Poverty, the existence of the poor, was the first cause of riches. This it was which created the earliest capitalist. For, before the surplus value, about which people are so fond of talking, could begin to be accumulated it was necessary that there should be poverty-stricken wretches who would consent to sell their labor force rather than die of hunger. It is poverty that has made the rich. ”

“ They forget that the very fact of abolishing individual property in the instillments of production (land, factories, means of communication, capital) must cause society to set out in a new direction; that it must change production from top to bottom, change not only its methods but its ends; that all the everyday relations between individuals must be modified as soon as land, machinery and the rest are considered as common possessions. ”

“ Even Collectivists suspect that a man of forty, the father of three children, has greater needs than a youth of twenty. They suspect that a woman who is suckling her child and spends sleepless nights by its cot, cannot get through so much work as a man who has enjoyed tranquil slumber.
They seem to understand that a man or woman worn out by having, perhaps, worked over hard for society in general may find themselves incapable of performing so many "deeds" as those who take their hours of labor quietly and pocket their "notes" in the privileged offices of State statisticians. ”

“ How can we proclaim that privileges of education are to be the basis of an equal Society, without striking a blow at that very Society. What is submitted to-day, will be submitted to no longer in a society based on equality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is this principle to be the outcome of the Revolution? Dare we dignify by the name of a Social Revolution—that name so dear to the hungry, the suffering and the oppressed—the triumph of such a principle as this? ”

“ And what of the work of those who have tilled and sawn the fields which supply the miners with food, smelted the iron, cut the wood in the forest, made the machines which will consume the coal, and so on?
No hard and fast line can be drawn between the work of one and the work of another. To measure them by results leads to absurdity. To divide them into fractions and measure them by hours of labor leads to absurdity also. ”

“ No one has ever estimated the real cost of production of labor force. And if an idler costs society much more than an honest workman, it still remains to be known if, when all is told (infant mortality amongst the workers, the ravages of anœmia, the pre­mature deaths) a sturdy day laborer does not cost society more than an artisan. ”

“ Service rendered to society, be it labor in factory or field, or moral service, cannot be valued in monetary units. There cannot be an exact measure of its value, either of what has been improperly called its "value in exchange" or of its value in use. If we see two individuals, both working for years, for five hours daily, for the community, at two different occupations equally pleasing to them, we can say that, taken all in all, their labors are roughly equivalent. ”

“ But to take the middle­ class system—a system already in its decadence, a vicious system if ever there was one—and to proclaim this system (with a few innocent corrections, such as the imperative mandate, or the Referendum, the uselessness of which has been demonstrated already) good for a society that has passed through the Social Revolution, is what seems to us absolutely incomprehensible, unless under the name of Social Revolution they understand something very different from Revolution, some petty botching of existing middle-class rule. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The engineer, the scientist and the doctor simply draw their profits from their own sort of capital—their degree, their certificates—just as the manufacturer draws a profit from a mill, or as a nobleman used to do from his birth and title. ”

“ The general above the soldier, the rich engineer above the workman, the doctor above the nurse, already disgust us. Can we suffer them in a society which starts by pro­ claiming equality?
Evidently not. The popular conscience, inspired by the idea of equality, will revolt against such an injustice, it will not tolerate it. It is not worth while to make the attempt.
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 their work could not be broken up into fractions, so that the product of each day, each hour or each minute of the labor of one should be worth the produce of each minute and each hour of that of the other.
Broadly speaking, we can say that a man who during his whole life deprives himself of leisure for ten hours daily has given much more to society than he who has deprived himself of but five hours a day, or has not deprived himself of any leisure at all. ”

“ But we cannot take what one man has done during any two hours and say that this produce is worth exactly twice as much as the produce of one hour's work from another individual, and reward each propor­tionately. To do this would be to ignore all that is complex in the industry, the agriculture, the entire life of society as it is; it would be to ignore the extent to which all individual work is the outcome of the former and present labors of society as a whole. It would be to fancy oneself in the Stone Age, when we are living in the Age of Steel. ”

“ Let us add that certain Collectivists advocate the wholesale remuneration of trade societies. Thus, one society may say: "Here are a hundred tons of steel. To produce them one hundred workers of our society have taken ten days; as our day consisted of eight hours, that makes eight thousand hours of labor for one hundred tons of steel; eighty hours a ton." Upon which the State will pay them eight thousind labor notes of one hour each, and these eight thousand notes will be distributed amongst the fellow-workers in the foundry as seems best to themselves. ”

“ By upholding parliamentary rule the middle class have been simply seeking to oppose a dam betwixt themselves and royalty, or betwixt themselves and the terrritorial aristocracy, without giving liberty to the people. It is moreover plain that, as the people become conscious of their interests, and as the variety of those interests increases, the system becomes unworkable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is to take the distinctive features of middle-class society and sanction them by a social revolution. It is to erect into a principle an abuse which to-day is condemned in the society that is breaking up. ”

“ Oh, certainly, they say, society will feed and bring up its children. Oh, certainly it will assist the old and infirm. Oh, certainly needs not deeds will be the measure of the cost which society will impose on itself to temper the principle of deeds. ”