To distinguish between professional and simple work result in the social revolution sactioning
Neither will the collectivists fail to tell us that the collectivist scale of wages would be an improvement. ‘It would be better’, so they say, ‘to see a professional worker receiving a wage two or three times higher than common workers, than to see a minister receiving in a day what a worker cannot earn in a year. It would be a great step towards equality.’ For the anarchist, this step would be the reverse of progress. To make a distinction between simple and professional work in a new socialist society would result in the revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal fact we submit to nowadays, but that we nevertheless find unjust.
This is why some collectivists, understanding the impossibility of maintaining a scale of wages in a socialist society, hasten to proclaim equality of wages. But now they meet with new difficulties, and their equality of wages becomes the same unrealizable utopia as the scale of wages of other collectivists. A society having taken possession of all social wealth, having boldly proclaimed the right of all to this wealth—whatever share they may have taken in producing it—will be compelled to abandon any system of wages, whether in currency or labour-notes.
References
- Kroptokin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 13. The Collectivist Wages System (p. 226).