II. (3)

Bebel says that every individual will select the occupation in which he desires to be employed; the large number of kinds of labour will permit of the satisfaction of the most various desires. But if there should be a surplus in one kind and an insufficiency in others, the executive “will adjust the matter and repair the inequality.” Accordingly, the distribution of labour can only be effected by authority, otherwise the more agreeable and least exhausting occupations will attract everyone, while those which are difficult and dangerous will be avoided. In order to obtain workers for the latter, they must be remunerated on a higher scale. Will the executive have recourse to this means of attracting labour? If it does, the remuneration of labour will no longer be equal and we shall revert to the combinations of capitalist society. What will become of the difference between the industrious and the lazy, the intelligent and the stupid? Bebel replies boldly that there will be no such differences, because the distinctions which we associate with the conception of them will have ceased to exist.

Schoeffle attempts (chap. viii. p. 90) to reconcile collectivism and private property. The individual will be granted the right to exercise thrift and to own private property, and even the right of inheritance as regards goods employed in production. He does not develop this proposal, but we may infer that he would allow the ownership of a picture and the right to leave it by will. But can it be sold? No, for there we fall back into capitalist society, even if its value be only paid in the form of remuneration for labour.

Some collectivists support the retention of money—a dangerous concession, for, if it be of a good standard it may be saved, put on one side and developed into capital. Schoeffle makes no such concession and will permit no one to acquire anything but remuneration or vouchers for labour.

Karl Marx did not concern himself with the incentives to action which are to be placed before men in communistic society, and his followers carefully evade the question. When they do attempt to deal with it they fall into grotesque errors, like M. Jaurès. Herr Kautsky asks himself how the workman is to be made to take an interest in his work, and he can find no incentive other than the force of habit. Like mechanical toys, men will do the same thing every day because they did it the day before. This is merely teaching tricks to animals, the organisation of reflex action causing the individual to do mechanically to-morrow what he did yesterday. This is not a discovery of scientific socialism; the organisers of armies and of churches discovered it long ago and employed it as a means of discipline under the sanctions of allurement and coercion; allurement by preferments, decorations and honorary and material distinctions, and coercion by means of more or less cruel and vigorous punishments. Bebel declares that “a man who will not work shall not have the right to eat.” This is being condemned to death by starvation. And a man who does less work than, in the opinion of the executive, he ought to do, will have to be put upon a restricted diet, so that the collectivist ideal ends in servile labour.