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They object to the wage-system only in so far as it is a means by "which the employing class can make a profit out of the labourers"; and the only change which in this respect socialists desire to introduce is to transfer the business of wage-paying from the private capitalist to the state the state which will have no "private interests to serve," and consequently no temptation to appropriate any profits for itself.
In especial besides promising them indefinitely augmented wealth, they continue to promise them also some sort of economic emancipation; and many of these socialists, in explicit accord with their predecessors, declare that what they mean by emancipation is the entire abolition of the wage-system. Prominent among this number are Mr.
After the overthrow of the competitive wage-system and of the leisure-class tradition, woman would no longer sell her sex-functions, whether in marriage or prostitution; and so the sex might cease to survive by its vices, and to infect the whole race with its intellectual and moral impotence.
Dr. Ihering is one of them, and his case is very instructive. He analyzed, first, the egotistic forces at work, including the present wage-system and coercion in its variety of political and social laws; and in a carefully worked-out scheme of his work he intended to give the last paragraph to the ethical forces the sense of duty and mutual love which contribute to the same aim.
Here, for instance, is a girl who has been taught to keep her promises, and has promised to love, honour and obey a man; she is to find the task more difficult, because she comes to understand the competitive wage-system while he does not understand it and does not wish to.
"It would mean a lecture on the competitive wage-system," I laughed " too serious a matter for a drive!" This may have seemed shirking on my part. But here I was, wrapped in luxurious furs, rolling gloriously through the park at twilight on a brilliant autumn evening; and the confiscation of property seems so much more startling a proposition when you are in immediate contact with it!
Everything, even success, has to be paid for. And thus that triumpher, that money-maker, whose pile was growing larger at each successive inventory, was sobbing with bitter grief. However, he showed himself kindly disposed towards Toussaint, and promised to assist him. As for a pension that was an idea which he could not entertain, as it was the negation of the wage-system such as it existed.
It is the defect of the wage-system, as Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points in the industrial process where the interests of employers and workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the service of the community.
No one has laid bare the deficiencies of the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are the common wages of labour', he there remarks, 'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.
Now, in proposing to abolish the wage-system, Mr. Webb and his fellow-theorists do not do so without specifying a definite substitute; and when we come to consider what their substitute is, we shall find that it implies, on their part, a full recognition of the function which wage-capital, as the instrument of ability, performs in modern production.
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