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Updated: May 31, 2025
But this does not prevent a great many Socialist reformers from remaining partisans of individual remuneration, and defending the old citadel of wagedom, notwithstanding that it is being delivered over stone by stone to the assailants by its former defenders. They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work. But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice?
We are, nevertheless, going to examine the objection, and see if there is any truth in it. First of all, Is it not evident that if a society, founded on the principle of free work, were really menaced by loafers, it could protect itself without the authoritarian organization we have nowadays, and without having recourse to wagedom?
But how can we defend labour-notes, this new form of wagedom, when we admit that the houses, the fields, and the factories will no longer be private property, that they will belong to the commune or the nation? It amounts to this: Everybody works in field, factory, school, hospital, etc. The working-day is fixed by the State, which owns the land, the factories, the roads, etc.
Moreover, it is time to submit to a serious analysis this legend about superior work, supposed to be obtained under the lash of wagedom. It would be sufficient to visit, not the model factory and workshop that we find now and again, but a number of the ordinary factories, to conceive the immense waste of human energy that characterizes modern industry.
Now, I am not attempting here to find any fault with socialism on the ground that it would, on the admission of some of its most thoughtful exponents, be obliged to re-establish slavery as the price of emancipation from "wagedom."
One of the members of the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the polls by a letter to the Times, proclaiming that socialism was a moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich, was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the "emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the system which he described as "wagedom."
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