A communist society would be forced to immediately abandon all wage systems
If every product is to some extent dependent on the external community, then how should an anarcho-communist estimate the share of each contributor to the collective wealth which we all amass? Looking at production from this general, synthetic point of view, we cannot hold with the collectivists that payment proportionate to the hours of labor rendered by each would be an ideal arrangement, or even a step in the right direction. Without discussing whether exchange value of goods is really measured in existing societies by the amount of work necessary to produce it, the collectivist ideal appears to us untenable in a society which considers the means of production as a common property.
Starting from this principle, such a society would find itself forced from the very outset to abandon all forms of wages. The mitigated individualism of the collectivist system certainly could not maintain itself alongside a partial communism—the socialization of land and the means of production. A new form of property requires a new form of remuneration. A new method of production cannot exist side by side with the old forms of consumption, any more than it can adapt itself to the old forms of political organization.
The wage system arises out of the individual ownership of the land and the means of production. It was the necessary condition for the development of capitalist production, and will perish with it, in spite of the attempt to disguise it as ‘profit-sharing’. The common ownership of the means of production must necessarily bring with it the common enjoyment of the fruits of common labor.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 3. Anarchist communism (p. 72).