ectivists are
doing when they recommend the use of the _labour-cheques_ as a mode of
remuneration for labour accomplished for the great Collectivist
employer--the State.

It is easy to understand why the early English socialists, since the
time of Robert Owen, came to the system of labour-cheques. They simply
tried to make Capital and Labour agree. They repudiated the idea of
laying hands on capitalist property by means of revolutionary measures.

It is also easy to understand why Proudhon took up later on the same
idea. In his Mutualist system he tried to make Capital less offensive,
notwithstanding the retaining of private property, which he detested
from the bottom of his heart, but which he believed to be necessary to
guarantee individuals against the State.

Neither is it astonishing that certain economists, more or less
bourgeois, admit labour-cheques. They care little whether the worker is
paid in labour-notes or in coin stamped with the effigy of the Republic
or the Empire. They only care to save from destruction the individual
ownership of dwelling-houses, of land, of factories; in any case--that,
at least, of dwelling-houses and the capital that is necessary for
manufacturing. And labour-notes would just answer the purpose of
upholding this private property.

As long as labour-notes can be exchanged for jewels or carriages, the
owner of the house will willingly accept them for rent. And as long as
dwelling houses, fields, and factories belong to isolated owners, men
will have to pay these owners, in one way or another, for being allowed
to work in the fields or factories, or for living in the houses. The
owners will agree to be paid by the workers in gold, in paper-money, or
in cheques exchangeable for all sorts of commodities, once that toll
upon labour is maintained, and the right to levy it is left with them.
But how can we defend labour-notes, this new form of wagedom, when we
admit that the houses, the fields, and the factories will no longer be
private property,--that they will belong to the commune or the nation?

II

Let us closely examine this system of remuneration for work done,
preached by the French, German, English, and Italian collectivists (the
Spanish anarchists, who still call themselves collectivists, imply by
Collectivism the possession in common of all instruments of production,
and the "liberty of each group to divide the produce, as they think fit,
according to communist or any