II

Nowadays, whoever can load on others his share of labour indispensable to existence, does so, and it is admitted that it will always be so.

Now work indispensable to existence is essentially manual. We may be artists or scientists; but none of us can do without things obtained by manual work — bread, clothes, roads, ships, light, heat, etc. And, moreover, however highly artistic or however subtly metaphysical are our pleasures, they all depend on manual labour. And it is precisely this labour — basis of life — that every one tries to avoid.

We understand perfectly well that it must be so nowadays.

Because, to do manual work now, means in reality to shut yourself up for ten or twelve hours a day in an unhealthy workshop, and to remain riveted to the same task for twenty or thirty years, and maybe for your whole life.

It means to be doomed to a paltry wage, to the uncertainty of the morrow, to want of work, often to destitution, more often than not to death in a hospital, after having worked forty years to feed, clothe, amuse, and instruct others than yourself and your children.

It means to bear the stamp of inferiority all your life, because, whatever the politicians tell us, the manual worker is always considered inferior to the brain worker, and the one who has toiled ten hours in a workshop has not the time, and still less the means, to give himself the high delights of science and art, nor even to prepare himself to appreciate them; he must be content with the crumbs from the table of privileged persons.

We understand that under these conditions manual labour is considered a curse of fate.

We understand that all men have but one dream — that of emerging from, or enabling their children to emerge from this inferior state; to create for themselves an “independent” position, which means what? — To also live by other men’s work!

As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of “brain” workers, black hands and white hands, it will be thus.

What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their wretched task every morning, we are surprised at their perseverance, at their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved to-day to a few privileged favourites.

It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will become what it should be — the free exercise of all the faculties of man.

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 is enough to visit, not the model factory and workshop that we find now and again, but ordinary factories, to conceive the immense waste of human energy that characterizes modern industry. For one factory more or less rationally organized, there are a hundred or more which waste man’s labour, without a more substantial motive than that of perhaps bringing in a few pounds more per day to the employer.

Here you see youths from twenty to twenty five years of age, sitting all day long on a bench, their chests sunken in, feverishly shaking their heads and bodies to tie, with the speed of conjurers, the two ends of worthless scraps of cotton, the refuse of the lace-looms. What progeny will these trembling and rickety bodies bequeath to their country? “But they occupy so little room in the factory, and each of them brings me in sixpence a day,” will say the employer.

In an immense London factory you could see girls, bald at seventeen from carrying trays of matches on their heads from one room to another, when the simplest machine could wheel the matches to their tables. But...it costs so little, the work of women who have no special trade! What is the use of a machine? When these can do no more, they will be easily replaced...there are so many in the street.

On the steps of a mansion on an icy night you will find a bare-footed child asleep, with its bundle of papers in its arms...child-labour costs so little that it may well be employed, every evening, to sell tenpenny-worth of papers, of which the poor boy will receive a penny, or a penny half-penny. And lastly, you may see a robust man tramping, dangling his arms; he has been out of work for months. Meanwhile his daughter grows pale in the overheated vapours of the workshop for dressing stuffs, and his son fills blacking pots by hand, or waits hours at the corner of a street till a passer-by enables him to earn a penny.

And so it is everywhere, from San Francisco to Moscow, and from Naples to Stockholm. The waste of human energy is the distinguishing and predominant trait of industry, not to mention trade where it attains still more colossal proportions.

What a sad satire is that name, Political Economy, given to the science of waste of energy under the system of wagedom!

This is not all. If you speak to the director of a well-organized factory, he will naively explain to you that it is difficult nowadays to find a skilful, vigorous, and energetic workman, who works with a will. “Should such a man present himself among the twenty or thirty who call every Monday asking us for work, he is sure to be received, even if we are reducing the number of our hands. We recognize him at the first glance, and he is always accepted, even though we have to get rid of an older and less active worker the next day.” And the one who has just received notice to quit, and all those who receive it to-morrow, go to reinforce that immense reserve army of capital — workmen out of work — who are only called to the loom or the bench when there is pressure of work, or to oppose strikers. And those others, the average workers that are the refuse of the better-class factories? They join the equally formidable army of aged and indifferent workers that continually circulates between the second-class factories — those which barely cover their expenses and make their way in the world by trickery and snares laid for the buyer, and especially for the consumer in distant countries.

And if you talk to the workmen themselves, you will soon learn that the rule in such factories is — never to do entirely what you are capable of. “Shoddy pay — shoddy work!” this is the advice which the working man receives from his comrades upon entering such a factory.

For the workers know that if in a moment of generosity they give way to the entreaties of an employer and consent to intensify the work in order to carry out a pressing order, this nervous work will be exacted in the future as a rule in the scale of wages. Therefore in all such factories they prefer never to produce as much as they can. In certain industries production is limited so as to keep up high prices, and sometimes the password, “Go-canny,” is given, which signifies, “Bad work for bad pay!”

Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which represents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work. If industry nowadays brings in a hundred times more than it did in the days of our grandfathers, it is due to the sudden awakening of physical and chemical sciences towards the end of last century; not to the capitalist organization of wagedom, but in spite of that organization.