The payment of labour
How about the proposal that
there is no payment at all?
I know, I surprise you with such a proposal,
but please don’t rush to discard it immediately
as nonsense and throw it out together with
your computer.
Let us first discuss why we find such a
proposal unacceptable at a first glance.
There is no doubt this proposal is shocking,
and the first objection that comes to mind is
that if there is no reward for labour, the lazy
who live at the expense of the working people
are rewarded.
This threat, however,
from the
"danger of the lazy",
how real is it?
Is it perhaps also only
one of
the fairy tales of our
system?
Undoubtedly there are people with a greater
appetite for work and others with less.
There are some who should "be put in
irons"
to stop them working.
You know them surely.
They come home from their professional job, and
immediately
start to dig the garden or paint the fence.
Those who have a hobby and spend hours painting or carving.
Or the researchers who work non-stop in the
laboratory and don’t know
whether it is day or night, and with their enthusiasm
carry along their
poor co-workers who lose the sense of time too, and if
you ask them,
they can’t tell you if they have eaten anything, or
when they last slept.
And on the other hand there are those who
get tired with the least effort
and can’t bestir themselves to stand up
and get a beer from the refrigerator.
However are these people healthy?
Can a normal healthy person be so lazy
and have no appetite to do anything?
Isn’t work, activity and creativity in our nature?
If someone prefers to sit apathetically rather
than do anything, it’s probably because he
is sick, either in body or in mind.
It’s a different mater, of course, if he is forced
to do work that
he don’t like, because it fatigues the body and dulls
the mind.
Who would not be bored if he was forced
to turn the hand mill all day?
But we don’t need to force anyone to do
this anymore. We have our machines.
No matter how many times we repeat this,
we cannot perhaps emphasize it enough.
Today, the working
conditions
have changed on Earth.
We no longer need to work like slaves.
Our machines work for us.
Our ancestors have worked,
our inventors have worked.
Our grandfather, old Rudolf Diesel,
worked and built the engine which
drive ships and tractors, so that
none of us today need to row the boat
or dig the field with a spade.
Our grandfather, old Fritz Haber
worked and made the synthesis
of ammonia,
without which we wouldn’t have the fertilizers
we need and we wouldn’t have enough to eat,
now that there are so many of us.
― We
do not need to work?
You are kidding.
I must work from morning to night like a horse,
and my family barely makes ends meet.
In fact, modern man does work like a
horse in the rich world in which we live
(not to mention those in the poor "third
world").
But does he work for his own survival?
Or in reality does he kill himself,
so that the assets of the
"hundred richest people in the world"
can continue to grow?