The Conquest of Bread: The #1 Classic Anarchist Book

by Pyotr Kropotkin

Collectivism, as we know, does not abolish wages, though it introduces considerable modifications into the existing order of things. It only substitutes the State, that is to say, Representative Government, national or local, for the individual employer of labour. Under Collectivism it is the representatives of the nation, or of the district, and their deputies and officials who are to have the control of industry. It is they who reserve to themselves the right of employing the surplus of; production — in the interests of all. Moreover, Collectivism draws a very subtle but very far reaching distinction between the work of the labourer and of the man who has learned a craft. Unskilled labour in the eyes of the collectivist is simple labour, while the work of the craftsman, the mechanic, the engineer, the man of science, etc., is what Marx calls complex labour, and is entitled to a higher wage. But labourers and craftsmen, weavers and men of science, are all wage- servants of the State — “all officials,” as was said lately, to gild the pill.