Wage and Income Policies

Abstract

Income distribution is one of those rare fields in which Marxism is all in all, Russian tradition nothing. With what preconceived Marxist ideas did the Bolsheviks take power in this field? They were primitive Marxists who adhered to Marx’ original views as published, not what we gather from his posthumous writings and correspondence. Owing to the concentration of capital, society is supposed to be becoming more and more dichotomous. Further, in the oppressed part, the independent craftsmen, whose wages are differentiated, are yielding to a simple undifferentiated mass of machine-minding proletarians. Thus, already under capitalism, technical progress has produced a good deal of equality among the future victorious class. It is the business of the revolution to confiscate the profits on capital and put them at the disposition, not of individual workers, but of the workers’ state. From ‘surplus value’ it becomes ‘surplus product’. Management, again, is not a great skill and need not be paid much or cosseted. On the contrary, capitalist development has simplified it, and socialist democracy requires that such jobs be rotated; indeed, all jobs should be rotated in the name of abolishing the division of labour, which is one of the ill-effects of the market. Since machinery has simplified all tasks, not merely management, the frequent interchange of all jobs would abolish alienation and be quite practicable.

This chapter is confined to the socialist sector and excludes the incomes of collective farmers. It deals not only with the inequality of wages per earner, but also with that of income from all sources per household. ‘All sources’ includes legal private enterprise, illegal private enterprise, social services, deposit bank interest and do-it-yourself.