written August 2018
I A hot summer
I remember the summer six years ago. I remember it because it was an incredibly hot summer, just like this summer. For weeks, or maybe even months, nothing but sunshine, burning heat trapped between the houses and buildings of a city, warm nights, no rain. And I was without work, meaning I was without a paid job, at that time, just like now. Not to say at all, of course, that “work” and “paid job” are to be considered synonymous expressions. There was a park nearby where I lived, that was a bit lonely, really beautiful and the perfect place to get lost in Brian Fallon’s voice, words and melodies on the latest record by his band “The Gaslight Anthem”, so fitting back then, speaking right to me: “There’s nothing like another soul that has been cut up the same”.
I read a lot of books to keep my mind fresh, among them George Orwell’s honest, sensitive and poetic account of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, in which he took part on side of the Communist and Anarchist factions. Through studying the history of the Spanish Civil War and the various socialist experiments undertaken in different Spanish communities, I finally found myself reading more and more literature of anarchist communism, until I stumbled over the writings of Piotr Kropotkin, a Russian thinker of the early 20th century. Kropotkin had some interesting ideas about the question of the value of people’s work…
II Kropotkin on labor wages
In 1920, Kropotkin published the writing “The Wage System”. It is part of a discussion between different factions of the radical Marxist left about the preliminaries and consequences, the methods and ends of a socialist revolution. His main thesis is this: Any wage system is part of the rule of capital in society and only the abolishing of any form of wage system could, after the revolution, help achieving a truly “communist” society. Because of the complexity of human life and work in modern society, any form of trying to measure the value of an individual’s work, that is his or her contribution to the production and wealth of the society as a whole and henceforth his or her legitimate “share” in it, is impossible, and to do so, means nothing but justifying and sanctifying unreasonable preexisting inequalities through the magical wand – shimmering in supposed reason, logic and rationality – of economic theory and mathematics falsely applied.
The discussion his paper is a witness of is between Kropotkin’s “Anarchist” faction and the “Collectivist” faction of communism. Kropotkin’s critique of the Collectivist approach to change, to reform the wage system as found in bourgeois society, yet not to abolish it completely, reads as follows:
“We have said that most Collectivist writers demand that in Socialist society remuneration should be based upon a distinction between qualified or professional labor and simple labor. They assert that an hour of the engineer’s, the architect’s or the doctor’s work should be counted as two or three hours’ work from the blacksmith, the mason or the nurse. And the same distinction, say they, ought to be established between workers whose trades require a longer or shorter apprenticeship and those who are mere day laborers.
Yes, but to establish this distinction is to maintain all the in-equalities of our existing society. It is to trace out beforehand a demarcation between the worker and those who claim to rule him. It is still to divide society into two clearly defined classes: an aristocracy of knowledge above, a horny-handed democracy below; one class devoted to the service of the other; one class toiling with its hands to nourish and clothe the other, whilst that other profits by its leisure to learn how to dominate those who toil for it.”
“But we know also how much of all this to believe. We know that if the engineer, the scientist and the doctor are paid today ten or a hundred times more than the laborer, and the weaver earns three times as much as the toiler in the fields and ten times as much as a match girl, it is not because what they receive is in proportion to their various costs of production. Rather it is in proportion to the extent of monopoly in education and in industry. The engineer, the scientist and the doctor simply draw their profits from their own sort of capital – their degree, their certificates – just as the manufacturer draws a profit from a mill, or as a nobleman used to do from his birth and title.”
“Where then is the sense of talking of the cost of production of labor force, and saying that a student who passes a merry youth at the University, has a right to ten times higher wages than the son of a miner who has pined in a pit since he was eleven? Or that a weaver has a right to wages three or four times higher than those of an agricultural laborer? The expenditure needed to produce a weaver is not four times as great as the necessary cost of producing a field worker. The weaver simply benefits by the advantageous position which industry enjoys in Europe as compared with parts of the world where at present there is no industrial development.”
“The existing scale of wages seems to us a highly complex product of taxation, government interference, monopoly and capitalistic greed – in a word, of the State and the capitalist system. In our opinion all the theories made by economists about the scale of wages have been invented after the event to justify existing injustices. It is needless to regard them.”
(all Quotes, also the following, are taken from: Piotr Kropotkin, “The Wage System”, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1920/wage.htm)
Kropotkin uses the example of a coal mine to illustrate his main point, whereby “service rendered to society, be it labor in factory or field, or moral service, cannot be valued in monetary units”.
“Go into a coal mine and see that man stationed at the huge machine that hoists and lowers the cage. In his hand he holds a lever whereby to check or reverse the action of the machinery. He lowers the handle, and in a second the cage changes the direction of its giddy rush up or down the shaft. His eyes are attentively fixed upon an indicator in front of him which shows exactly the point the cage has reached; no sooner does it touch the given level than at his gentlest pressure it stops dead short, not a foot above or below the required place. And scarcely are the full trucks discharged or the empties loaded before, at a touch to the handle, the cage is again swinging up or down the shaft. For eight or ten hours at a time he thus concentrates his attention. Let his brain relax but for an instant, and the cage would fly up and shatter the wheels, break the rope, crush the men, bring all the work of the mine to a stand-still. Let him lose three seconds upon each reverse of the lever and, in a mine with all the modern improvements, the output will be reduced by from twenty to fifty tons a day.
Well, is it he who renders the greatest service in the mine? Or is it, perhaps, that boy who rings from below the signal for the mounting of the cage? Or is it the miner who risks his life every moment in the depths of the mine and will end one day by being killed by fire-damp? Or, again, the engineer who would lose the coal seam and set men hewing bare rock, if he merely made a mistake in the addition of his calculations? Or, finally, is it the owner, who has put all his patrimony into the concern, and who perhaps has said, in opposition to all previous anticipations: “Dig there, you will find excellent coal”?
All the workers engaged in the mine contribute to the raising of coal in proportion to their strength, their energy, their knowledge their intelligence and their skill. And we can say that all have the right to live, to satisfy their needs, and even gratify their whims, after the more imperious needs of every one are satisfied. But how can we exactly value what they have each done?
Further, is the coal that they have extracted entirely the result of their work? Is it not also the outcome of the work of the men who constructed the railway leading to the mine, and the roads branching off on all sides from the stations? And what of the work of those who have tilled and sown the fields which supply the miners with food, smelted the iron, cut the wood in the forest, made the machines which will consume the coal, and so on?
No hard and fast line can be drawn between the work of one and the work of another. To measure them by results leads to absurdity. To divide them into fractions and measure them by hours of labor leads to absurdity also. One course remains: not to measure them at all, but to recognize the right of all who take part in productive labor first of all to live, and then to enjoy the comforts of life.
Take any other branch of human activity, take our existence as a whole, and say which of us can claim the highest reward for his deeds?
The doctor who has divined the disease or the nurse who has assured its cure by her sanitary cares? The inventor of the first steam engine or the boy who one day, tired of pulling the cord which formerly served to open the valve admitting the steam beneath the piston, tied his cord to the lever of the machine, and went to play with his companions, without imagining that he had invented the mechanism essential to all modern machinery – the automatic valve? The inventor of the locomotive or that Newcastle workman who suggested that wooden sleepers should take the place of the stones which were formerly put under the rails and threw trains off the line by their want of elasticity? The driver of the locomotive or the signalman who stops the train or opens the way for it?” (Kropotkin, “The Wage System”)
After some more vivid examples of this sort, he points to the fundamental error of “middle-class society”, the existing European society of his day and of our day, which one could also call the fundamental error of “liberalism” as a worldview and social practice.
“And, in a still wider field, the vast tract of human life, with its joys, its sorrows, and its varied incidents, cannot each of us mention some one who during his life has rendered him some service so great, so important, that if it were proposed to value it in money he would be filled with indignation? This service may have been a word, nothing but a word in season, or it may have been months or years of devotion. Are you going to estimate these, the most important of all services, in labor notes? “The deeds of each”! But human societies could not live for two successive generations, they would disappear in fifty years, if each one did not give infinitely more than will be returned to him in money, in “notes” or in civic rewards. It would be the extinction of the race if the mother did not expend her life to preserve her children, if every man did not give some things without counting the cost, if human beings did not give most where they look for no reward.
If middle-class society is going to ruin; if we are today in a blind alley from which there is no escape without applying axe and torch to the institutions of the past, that is just because we have calculated too much. It is just because we have allowed ourselves to be drawn into giving that we may receive; because we have desired to make society into a commercial company based upon debit and credit.” (Kropotkin, “The Wage System”)
If all the members of a society based upon the radical individualistic and economist worldview of “liberalism” took their own view of things truly seriously, it would not last long… Making a distinction somehow between “social reality” and “social truth”, one could say: What is real or at least real in its consequences, is not necessarily true. But distortions of truth create realities all the time.
In the words of Kropotkin, “a society cannot exist if it logically carries out the principle, ‘To each according to his deeds.’”, but rather,
“Service rendered to society, be it labor in factory or field, or moral service, cannot be valued in monetary units. There cannot be an exact measure of its value, either of what has been improperly called its “value in exchange” or of its value in use. If we see two individuals, both working for years, for five hours daily, for the community, at two different occupations equally pleasing to them, we can say that, taken all in all, their labors are roughly equivalent. But their work could not be broken up into fractions, so that the product of each day, each hour or each minute of the labor of one should be worth the produce of each minute and each hour of that of the other.
Broadly speaking, we can say that a man who during his whole life deprives himself of leisure for ten hours daily has given much more to society than he who has deprived himself of but five hours a day, or has not deprived himself of any leisure at all. But we cannot take what one man has done during any two hours and say that this produce is worth exactly twice as much as the produce of one hour’s work from another individual, and reward each proportionately. To do this would be to ignore all that is complex in the industry, the agriculture, the entire life of society as it is; it would be to ignore the extent to which all individual work is the outcome of the former and present labors of society as a whole.” (Kropotkin, “The Wage System”)
That’s Kropotkin. Words from once upon a time when one could still think sharply and fight decisively. And then, of course, in the long aftermath of the late 19th century revolution of Nietzsche and all his friends, came along the philosophical wave of “postmodernism” eradicating the very concept of “truth”, of any effort to connect the dots and make sense of human life, and proclaiming the end of all coherent philosophical, religious and political ideologies. Or in other words: then came along the anesthesia of all philosophical reflection and of any possibility to critique the status quo and wage war against it, the end of all wars, yet still there is no peace. Then came the beginning of an ending that keeps repeating itself and knows no beyond. And Samuel Beckett, a contemporary of George Orwell, who once wrote concerning his take on the Spanish Civil War a simple “Up the Republic!”, put the absurdity on display, so that our despair may be seen. Yet, I can tell from experience, that if you read Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”, you will be spared such enthusiasm. Because he fought in the war, on the “right” – on the socialist – side. And you will be spared despair. Because he fought in the war – on the side which lost that battle.
III Tamir
It might happen to you or me one day. Hopefully not. Ending up in a hospital because of a disease or an accident. Because something is seriously not the way it should be with your body, something is seriously not the way it should be with you. Doctors will examine you trying to gather all the information they need to set a diagnosis, so they can treat you. Nurses will take care of you and implement the doctor’s prescriptions. It could be a stay at the hospital for only a few days because of a necessary, yet not too complicated operation or it could be weeks, even weeks that turn into months, because whatever is seriously not the way it should be with your body needs… – you need – time, patience, surrender… to finally, hopefully, release its hold on you again – your health, your well-being restored.
You will thank the nurses and doctors who attended you along your way of healing. You will remember how scared you were when you were lying on a hospital stretcher in the anesthesia and surgery unit for the first time, right before the entrance to the operating room. You were still awake, but soon they would put you to sleep. You would lose control. There was an older male nurse sitting beside you, taking and placing your arm, so he can work on it, disinfecting the crook of your arm, impounding your blood flow, looking for the vein and finally piercing the IV needle right through your skin and through the outer tissue of this very vein in a precise strike… He set up an infusion. He smiled at you. He saw the mild fear in your eyes. With a calm, deep voice he explained what was going to happen to you, once the anesthesiologist would be present in this room alongside the two of you. Morpheus. Dreams. A milky substance in a syringe is already waiting to be injected into your veins. Propophol, the narcotic that will knock you out within seconds. You will stop breathing. They will perform an intubation on you, you will be connected to machines. Then the surgents will take over, while the anesthesiologist keeps sitting next to you, watching your vital signs on a screen…
A man by the name of Martin Luther, who some claim to be a “righteous rebel”, while others think of him as a misguided “heretic”, once said, God takes care of us through the daily work of the milkmaid. Maybe at least this one of all his statements is a true one. In sickness, he takes care of us through doctors and nurses. And through the people who produce… stopcocks…
Tamir has a dream: He wants to study medicine and become a physician. Right now he is packing bags with medical supplies in a factory run by a kibbutz high up in the north of Israel, right on the border with Lebanon. When he talks about becoming a doctor, his eyes shine and smile. It is hard to get accepted at a university in Israel for medical studies. You have to score very highly on a quite difficult pre-university exam to receive a placement. Furthermore, university studies in Israel are not for free. Because of the high fees one needs to pay for them, you find students working in factories before or during studying all over the country. Tamir believes that through hard work, everything is possible. If you just work hard enough… He confirms it to himself with nodding his head. Then, he returns to checking the weight of one more plastic bag filled with stopcocks, closing it, putting the factory’s sticker on it, and handing it over to the people, who put all the bags together in boxes ready to be sent to the customers. To an intensive care unit in a hospital in the United States maybe. Or in Germany. Or in Turkey. The factory’s products are sold to costumers in these countries and many more throughout the world. Some place for sure, where physicians and nurses rely daily on these small helpful devices providing a three way flow for infusing medicine into the veins of those under their care. As for the connective nature of their products, the company’s advertising tagline goes “Where everything connects”.
Whose work is more important and whose contribution to the collective good and to the recovery of a single individual, who found himself – or was found – lacking health and well-being one day, is greater? The work of a physician or a nurse on yet another night shift in a hospital’s intensive care unit, or the work of someone checking and closing bags in the logistics department of a factory, where the machines run day and night, producing thousands and thousands of stopcocks day and night, operated and supervised by workers – day and night…
May Tamir succeed in the pre-university exam and get the chance to study medicine. May he learn all a doctor needs to learn in theory and practice throughout many years and become fit and qualified for the work of a physician. May he stand beside a patient’s bed as a doctor one day, who had to walk a really long way to be able to love his neighbors through this specific kind of service, and as he was walking this long way had to actually disregard how much it is really costing him…, may he stand there with his kind and intoxicating smile, that might be half the healing. And may he never forget that the man or woman in the production or packing department of a factory of medical devices should get all the glory for the other half. Or yet even better: all glory to the One who sustains our life daily, gives us breath, feet, hands and an open heart and fresh mind to work, to serve, to love, not calculating the cost. The One who makes sure, daily, in his grace – and therefore he never sleeps nor slumbers, but always is at work – that in our lives and our work, everything – ultimately – connects…
