Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

Anarchist Communism /115
We know that if engineers, scientists, or doctors are paid ten or a hundred
times more than a labourer, and that a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural
labourer, and ten times more than a girl in a match factory, it is ... by reason
of a monopoly of education, or a monopoly of industry. Engineers, scientists, and
doctors merely exploit their capital-their diplomas-as middle-class employers exploit
a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of nobility
Let them, therefore, not ... tell us that a student who has gaily spent his youth in
a university has a right to a wage ten times greater than the son of a miner who has
grown pale in a mine since the age of eleven; or that a weaver has a right to a wage
three or fo ur times greater than that of an agricultural labourer. The cost of teaching
a weaver his work is not four times greater than the cost of teaching a peasant his.
The weaver simply benefits by the advantages his industry reaps in Europe, in comparison
with countries that have as yet no industries ...
To make a distinction between simple and professional work in a new society
would result in the Revolution sanctioning and recognizing as a principle a brutal
fa ct we submit to nowadays, but that we nevertheless find unjust ...
Services rendered to society, be they work in fa ctory or field, or mental services,
Call11ot be valued in money. There can be no exact measure of value (of what has been
wrongly-termed exchange value), nor of use value, with regard to production. If two
individuals work for the community five hours a day, year in year out, at different
work which is equally agreeable to them, we may say that on the whole their labour is
equivalent. But we cannot divide their work, and say that the result of any particular
day, hour, or minute of work of the one is worth the result of a minute or hour of the
other.
We may roughly say that the man who during his lifetime has deprived himself
of leisure during ten hours a day has given fa r more to society than the one who has
only deprived himself of leisure during five hours a day, or who has not deprived himself
at all. But we cannot take what he has done during two hours and say that the
yield is worth twice as much as the yield of another individual, working only one
hour, and remunerate him in proportion. It would be disregarding all that is complex
in industry, in agriculture, in the whole life of present society; it would be ignoring to
what extent all individual work is the result of past and present labour of society as a
whole. It would mean believing ourselves to be living in the Stone Age, whereas we
are living in an age of steel.
If you enter a coal mine you will see a man in charge of a huge machine that
raises and lowers a cage. In his hand he holds a lever that stops and reverses the