Nobody Works for a Wage in an Egalitarian Society, and Governments that Approve of Waged Employment are Anti-Egalitarian Governments

This is true whether the government calls itself "socialist" or "communist" or anything else

The finest, most revolutionary, most pro-working-class-solidarity organization (as explained in “How the Unions Killed the Working Class Movement”) in the United States was the early 20th century IWW—the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies. And it is no accident that the preamble to the IWW Constitution contains these words:

‘Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."‘

The wage system was abolished in about half of Spain 1936-9

There was an egalitarian revolution in about half of Spain in 1936-9, led by egalitarians who called themselves anarchists. (Yes, they made serious mistakes, discussed here, that led to their defeat by the fascist general Franco in 1939, but this article is about what they did right.) They created a society that in some regions abolished the use of money altogether and shared goods and services on the principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.”

In other regions they used various forms of money but in contrast to capitalist societies they used it to pay what they called a “family wage,” which meant the wage depended on how many people the worker had to support with it rather than on the supposed skill or economic value of the worker; there was genuine equality without a superior class of employers paying workers a wage to do what they were told, and the “family wage” simply aimed to accomplish essentially the same thing as the above-mentioned “From each according to…” principle. For these reasons it seems fair to say that wage labor in the usual meaning of the words was abolished.

In rural areas there were voluntary agricultural collectives formed by the peasants where the former rich landowners had fled to the part of Spain that the fascist general Franco still controlled. Peasants who did not wish to join the collective were considered friends of those who did, were admitted to the local assemblies that were the sovereign power in the local community, and were allowed to own as much—and ONLY as much!—land as they could farm with their OWN labor without being allowed to hire wage labor.

"In the village of Magdalena de Pulpis a visitor asked a resident, 'How do you organize without money? Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anything else?' He replied, 'Nothing. Everyone works and everyone has a right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.'” [From Dolgoff, pg. 73., in the bibliography below]

Here are books, articles and a wonderful video film documentary that bring to life an inspiring egalitarian revolution that our rulers don't want us to know about:

Documentary film about the Spanish Revolution

Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936 (You can find this online by searching for the author and title.)

Agustin Guillamon, The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939 (You can find this online by searching for the author and title.)

Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (This book was very widely read by Spanish workers and peasants in the decades leading up to the revolution. You can find it online by searching for the author and title.)

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (You can find this online by searching for the author and title.)

Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives (You can find this online by searching for the author and title.)

Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, by Gaston Leval, Freedom Press, London 1975

The egalitarians out-produced the prior capitalist economy: "Which Creates a Higher Standard of Living: Capitalism or Egalitarianism?"

"Lessons for Today from the Spanish Revolution 1936-9"

Anarchism and the Spanish Revolution 1936-9

An eyewitness account: “A LOCAL ASSEMBLY MEETING: SPAIN, AROUND 1937”

"INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION THE EGALITARIAN WAY: HOW SPANISH EGALITARIANS DID IT 1936-9"

There really is no excuse for a government that purports to be egalitarian tolerating the use of wage labor. Wage labor is inherently exploitation of the laborer. It is a form of oppression.

One does not need to have read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with all of its unnecessary complexities and predictions to understand why wage labor is inherently exploitative and a form of oppression. The simple feature of wage labor is this: The person paying the wage owns the product (or service) created by the person receiving the wage, and the person receiving the wage has zero ownership of what he/she produced. Right here one sees that there is a fundamental inequality between the payer and the receiver of the wage. Furthermore, the payer of the wage is in command over the person receiving it, who must do as ordered by the payer or else be fired. There is absolutely no democracy among the payer and receiver of wages; they are fundamentally socially unequal, like a master and a slave or a feudal lord and a serf. Naturally the payer of wages is typically far wealthier than the person receiving a wage even though the latter typically does far more, and far more onerous, work in far less comfort than the former, which makes the fact of the oppression even more evident.

As I discuss in my Mom and Pop Capitalism?, even the most apparently benign form of a wage-labor-based society (capitalism, whether the government calls itself socialist or not) inevitably becomes more and more unequal, with some rich and some poor, like it is in the United States today. This dynamic is why wealth and power is today being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people in nations that have a reputation for being very equal.

Read about this in "Why They're Rioting in Sweden" and "Class Inequality Soars in "Social Democratic" Germany" and "The 'Iceland Did it Right' Myth" and “DENMARK: A CLASS CONFLICT BATTLEGROUND.”

Ask anybody in Great Britain if their somewhat egalitarian National Health Service is getting better or worse now for ordinary people.

Furthermore, the problem is not simply having a too-powerful government. As I discuss in my “Libertaria: A Libertarian Paradise,” even in an ULTRA-libertarian society enormous class inequality and oppression develop from wage labor being tolerated.

It is really just a question of time for extreme and ugly class inequality to emerge, if the government is not adamantly working to abolish wage labor. And none are doing that today.

Since the defeat of the Spanish revolution, all governments today tolerate wage labor and do not even aim to abolish it.

Marxist regimes only say they aim to abolish wage labor in the far distant future. This is perfectly consistent with the writing of Karl Marx, who expressed it this way in his Critique of the Gotha Program:​

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"¹ [4]

Marx’s words “only then” are a direct negation of what the Spanish Revolution was all about! See the larger context of this in my article about Marxism here.

The Marxist Bolsheviks absolutely tolerated (if not loved²) wage labor! Contrary to the egalitarian practice of the anarchists during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-9, the Bolsheviks during those same years instituted extreme wage inequality. A former Bolshevik [who, as a Bolshevik, wrote this in 1922, but by 1937 was exiled by Stalin to a harsh existence in Siberia and only saved from being executed by the fact that he was a well-known writer in Europe], Victor Serge, provides the following information for wages at this time (the following paragraph is partially exact quotes and partially my edited quotes from Serge's book Russia Twenty Years After [after the 1917 revolution], pg. 4-5:​

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women workers get between 70 and 90 rubles a month (all figures are monthly here), a poverty wage entirely inadequate to feed the one who gets it. Laborers (males) get 100 to 120 rubles. Skilled workers get 250 to 400 rubles. Stakhanovist workers (i.e., those who work supposedly--it's all propaganda--absurdly hard) get 500 rubles and over. A scientific collaborator of a large establishment gets 300 to 400 rubles; a stenographer knowing foreign languages, about 200 rubles; a newspaper editor 230 rubles; miscellaneous employees, 90 to 120 rubles. A director of an enterprise or head of an office gets 400 to 800 rubles; high functionaries (communists) and big specialists get from 1,000 to 5,000 rubles. In the capitals, renowned specialists get as high as between 5,000 and 10,000 rubles per month. Writers get the same income. The great official dramatists, the official painters who do the portraits of the important leaders over and over again, the poets and novelists approved by the Central Committee, may get a million a year and more.

In China wage labor is rampant, and horribly exploitative, as I write about here.

If you want to help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to abolish wage labor and the class inequality it entails, please do this.

1. Although Karl Marx is virtually exclusively associated with the idea of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” he did not invent that idea (and nor did he advocate its implementation until the far future “higher phase of communist society.”) Indeed, as early as 1775—43 years before Karl Marx was even born!—in his Code de la Nature ou le Veritable esprit de Ses Lois a Frenchman named Morelly wrote that his aim was "To distribute work according to capacity; products according to needs." The same idea appears even earlier, in the Bible (Acts, 4:34-35): "Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostle's feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need."

2. How does a Marxist regime, to use the words of Karl Marx’s in the above-quoted Gotha Program, make “the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”? Given the false (as I discuss here in detail) Marxist presumption that people act in their self interest, the ruling elite will need to arrange things so that it is in each worker's self interest to work harder and produce more. Well, the capitalists have invented terrific ways of doing just that. The trick is to make society very unequal and lure people to work harder with the promise that if they do they will be rewarded with greater wealth (and privileges wealth can purchase) than others. Piecework does this by paying the worker only according to how much he/she produces. Another method is Taylorism, which Lenin advocated with enthusiasm. Taylorism is the "science" of breaking the production process into lots of separate tiny actions and making each worker do just one of those actions over and over and over. Taylorism aims to make each worker as unskilled as possible, thus making workers easily replaceable, which is important for a ruling elite that does not want to be bothered by workers making demands and threatening to bring production to a stop by refusing to work until they are satisfied. An article in the International Journal of Social Economics shows how Lenin advocated both methods:​

[start excerpt]​

"In an Apri1 28, 1918 article in Pravda discussing the “urgent problems of the Soviet rule”, and under the heading “Higher productivity of labor”, Lenin (1965a, p. xxii) wrote:​

We should immediately introduce piecework and try it out in practice. We should try out every scientific and progressive suggestion of the Taylor system . . . The Russian is a poor worker in comparison with the advanced nations, and this could not be otherwise under the regime of the Czar and other remnants of feudalism. The last word of capitalism in this respect, the Taylor System, as well as all progressive measures of capitalism, combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and a number of most valuable scientific attainments in the analysis of mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt valuable and scientific technical advance in this field. The possibility of socialism will be determined by our success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organization of management with the latest progressive measures in capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the new Taylor System and its systematic trial and adaptation.​

"...In a speech to the Supreme Economic Council he proposed the introduction of piece rates payment based on performance, a scientific management notion that had not found extensive support among trade union officials elsewhere. He also told the Supreme Economic Council that discipline must be more strict, a view that reached English reading audiences through the Bulletin of the Taylor Society which reprinted Lenin’s speech:​

“It would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship” (Lenin, 1965a, p. 378).​

"No one in a free society could speak with such hubris." [emphasis and italics added]