(Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.) It has been indicated that the new society will be different in different countries and in different parts of the same country, in different industries and at different times. No one can predict exactly what it will be, and anyone who tries to predict is unscientific. But every man can work out his own ideas of the most economical and sensible arrangements for a co-operative society, and in these final chapters I set forth my ideas.
One of the first things people ask is, "Will there be money in the new society, or how will labor be rewarded and goods paid for?" I answer that there will be money, and the business methods of the new society will be so nearly the same as at present that in this respect you would hardly realize there had been any change. The only difference will be that in the new society you will be paid several times as much for your labor; or, if you prefer to put it the other way, you will be able to buy several times as much with your money. Why should we waste our time working out systems of "credit-cards," when we already have a system in the form of gold and silver coins and paper currency? Why should we bother with "labor checks," when we have a banking and clearing-house system, understood by everyone but the illiterate? The only difference we shall make is that nobody can get gold and silver coins or paper currency, except by performing labor to pay for them; nobody can have money in the bank and draw checks against it, until he has rendered to society an equivalent amount of service.
When you have earned your money in the new world, you will spend it wherever you please, and for whatever you please; the only difference being that the price you pay will be the exact labor-cost of producing that article, with no deduction for any form of exploitation. As I wrote sixteen years ago in "The Industrial Republic," you will be able to get, if you insist upon it, a seven-legged spider made of diamonds, and the only question society will ask is, Have you performed services equivalent to the material and labor necessary to the creating of that unusual article of commerce? Of course, society won't put it to you in that complicated formula; it will simply ask, "Have you got the price?" Which, you observe, is exactly the question society asks you at present.
The next thing that everybody wants to know is, "Shall we all be paid the same wages?" I answer, yes and no, because there will be three systems of payment. There will be a basic wage, which everybody will get for every kind of useful service necessary to production; this will be, as it were, the foundation of our economic structure. On top of this will be built a system of special payments for special services, which are of an intellectual nature, and cannot be standardized and dealt with wholesale. In addition, there will be for a time a third arrangement, applying to agricultural work, which is in a different stage of development, and to which different conditions apply.
Let us take, first, our standard wage. The census of our Utopian commonwealth reveals that we have ten million able-bodied workers engaged in mining, manufacturing, and transportation; this including, of course, office-work and management—everything that enters into these industries. By scientific management, the best machinery, and the elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error—what our great corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers.
But quickly we find that our industries are not properly balanced. A great many men want to work at the jobs which are clean and pleasant, such as delivering mail, and very few want to work at washing dishes in restaurants and cleaning the sewers. There is no way we can adjust this, except by paying a h............