calculated at all in the
complicated processes of modern industry? What is the value produced
by a day's labour of a ploughman, a railway porter, a postman, a
book-keeper, a policeman, a machine-minder? Mr. Bax very sensibly
argues: "What does each man produce of himself as an individual? Show
me how much cotton any given factory operative has produced in the
course of a year? I don't mean the amount of wages the capitalist has
given him for the exploitation of his labour power during that
period--but the actual product of his labour in the manufactured
article. You could not do so, because his labour, like all modern
labour, is associated; and the work of the individual producer is
completely and indissolubly merged in that of the group (factory,
mill) to which he belongs, which is again inseparable from that of the
machinery employed in the process and from that of other
groups."[1233]

It is impossible to calculate the exact value of service to the
community by work in a factory or a field as soon as the wages system
based on demand and supply has ceased to exist. Besides, differential
pay will be impossible, because none will be satisfied with the pay
received, except those who receive the highest pay. Therefore the same
Fabian Society which in other writings, such as those quoted in the
foregoing, advocates unequal payment, concludes: "Inequality of pay
would be odious; the impossibility of estimating the separate value of
each man's labour with any really valid result, the friction which
would arise, the jealousies which would be provoked, the inevitable
discontent, favouritism, and jobbery that would prevail: all these
things will drive the Communal Council into the right path--equal
remuneration of all workers."[1234] The Fabians, like so many other
Socialists, cannot apparently quite make up their mind whether to
plunge into the Scylla of equal pay or into the Charybdis of unequal
pay. Therefore they plunge alternately into the one or the other.

Many Socialists are in favour of equal pay: "The credits granted to
the citizens will be equal in all cases, without reference to skill,
intelligence, or the nature of the service performed."[1235] "The
labours of the bus driver or the mangler will be appraised just as
highly as those of the Prime Minister, with this difference perchance,
that if it can be clearly shown by statistics that buscraft uses up
the life energy of a man more rapidly than statecraft, four h