The Slow Burning Fuse || The call to “abolish the wages system” is one of the most radical and uncompromising slogans ever to emerge from the revolutionary tradition. First advanced with urgency by anarchists and socialists in the 19th century, the demand retains its full explosive power today. In a world characterised by the obscene accumulation of wealth by the few and the grinding precarity of the many, this slogan is not merely a relic of the past. It is a call to confront the deep structure of modern exploitation: the domination of labour by capital, of human life by the wage.
To abolish the wages system is not simply to demand better pay or fairer conditions. It is to reject the entire framework that reduces our capacities, time, creativity, and energy to mere instruments of capital accumulation. The aim is not to reform capitalism into a kinder version of itself, but to fundamentally dismantle it.
The Wages System as a Mechanism of Exploitation
The prevailing mythology of capitalism teaches us that the wage is a fair exchange: the worker provides labour, and the employer compensates them accordingly. This transactional framing conceals a deeper reality. The wage is not a neutral payment for labour; it is the mask worn by exploitation.
Under capitalist production, the means of production, factories, machines, land, offices, are privately owned by a minority. Those without property must sell their capacity to work, their labour power, in exchange for a wage. Yet what the capitalist buys is not simply effort, but control over the worker’s time and output. The worker produces more value than they receive in wages; the surplus is extracted by the capitalist as profit. This extraction of surplus value, first systematically theorised by Marx, is the foundation of capitalist accumulation.
Crucially, the wage relation hides this exploitation. Unlike slavery or serfdom, where the master’s domination is explicit, the wages system presents the employer-employee relationship as voluntary and reciprocal. Yet this voluntariness is largely illusory. In the absence of alternative means of subsistence, the worker must work or starve. Thus, wage labour emerges not as a free choice, but as the coerced sale of one’s life-activity under conditions of economic compulsion.
Alienation and the Fragmentation of Life
Beyond economic exploitation, the wages system is a profound source of alienation. When individuals are compelled to sell their labour, they lose control not only over what they produce, but over how they produce, when they produce, and under whose direction. Work becomes an external force, dictated by the imperatives of capital, rather than a meaningful or self-directed activity.
The result is a deeply fractured human experience. The majority of one’s waking hours are spent doing tasks not freely chosen, under supervision not democratically accountable, in environments shaped by efficiency rather than community or creativity. This alienation extends beyond the workplace. One’s relationships, leisure, identity, and sense of self are all shaped by the rhythms and constraints of wage labour. We live for the weekend, but even our rest is shaped by exhaustion. We dream of freedom, but sell our time in hourly increments.
The wages system thus transforms time itself into a commodity. Hours are priced, minutes monetised, and life reduced to units of productivity. The demand to abolish the wages system is therefore a demand to reclaim life in its fullness and to restore time, creativity, and sociality to human beings as ends in themselves rather than means for profit.
The Historical Origins of the Wage Relation
Contrary to capitalist mythology, wage labour is neither eternal nor natural. For much of human history, societies operated on the basis of communal ownership, subsistence production, and social obligation rather than wage-based employment. While not free from hierarchy or inequality, such societies did not rely on a class of people selling their labour to another for survival.
The rise of the wages system is historically bound to processes of enclosure, colonisation, and industrialisation. In Europe, the enclosure of common lands stripped peasants of their ability to subsist independently. Deprived of land and resources, they were forced into wage labour in the emerging industrial economy. In the colonies, indigenous modes of life were violently dismantled to create labour markets tailored to capitalist extraction. Cash crops, plantations, mines, and factories did not emerge organically, but through coercion and force.
The creation of a proletariat, a class of people dependent on wages to live, was not a peaceful or inevitable development. It required systemic dispossession and violence. The historical origins of wage labour reveal it as a social relation imposed for the benefit of capital, not a universal human condition.
The Wages System as a System of Power
At its core, the wages system is not only an economic arrangement but a system of social power. To live under wage labour is to live under the authority of another. The boss controls the workplace: setting tasks, evaluating performance, enforcing discipline, and ultimately deciding whether one remains employed. The workplace is a private tyranny masked by public legality.
This domination extends beyond the individual worker. The wage system disciplines entire populations. The constant threat of unemployment, and with it, poverty, homelessness, and social exclusion, serves as a powerful tool of control. The capitalist does not need to exert force directly; the market does it for them. A culture of scarcity and competition keeps workers divided and compliant.
Moreover, wage dependency shapes the political structure of society. Those who control capital exert enormous influence over the state, media, and educational systems. Their interests are presented as universal. Yet in truth, the wages system reproduces a class society in which a minority rules over the majority not by direct coercion, but by monopolising access to livelihood.
The Futility of Reform
Faced with the injustices of wage labour, many reformists seek to improve the conditions of work. They demand a higher minimum wage, greater job security, better benefits, or reduced working hours. While these reforms can alleviate immediate suffering, they do not challenge the wages system itself. At best, they modify the terms of exploitation. The structure remains intact.
Moreover, reforms can have a pacifying effect. By offering marginal improvements, they defuse anger and absorb dissent. The dream of transforming society is replaced by the pursuit of incremental adjustments. Worse, a more efficient or humane capitalism can be more stable and more effective in securing compliance.
Reformism also fails to grasp the nature of wage labour as a relation of domination. No amount of legal regulation can eliminate the fact that wage labour always involves the subordination of one person’s life to another’s profit motive. The goal, then, must not be to humanise the wages system, but to abolish it altogether.
Capitalism and the Death of Desire
One of the most insidious effects of the wages system is its impact on human desire and imagination. When all forms of social cooperation are mediated through money and employment, it becomes difficult to conceive of life beyond work. The very idea of a world without bosses, markets, and wages is dismissed as childish, utopian, or impossible.
Yet it is the current system that is both irrational and unsustainable. Billions toil for survival while the productive forces of society are capable of abundance. Countless talents go undeveloped, countless lives go unlived, because the market deems them unprofitable. The capitalist mode of production does not liberate potential; it squanders it in the name of accumulation.
To abolish the wages system is to awaken a different kind of desire: not the desire to climb the career ladder or accumulate wealth, but the desire to live fully, to contribute meaningfully, and to create without coercion. It is a demand for a society in which the full range of human capacities, intellectual, emotional, artistic, technical, can flourish outside the prison of wage labour.
The Alternative: A World Beyond Wages
If not the wages system, then what? The anarcho-communist answer is clear: a stateless, classless society based on common ownership, free association, and mutual aid. In such a society, the means of production would be held in common, not privately owned. Work would be organised democratically through federations of producers and communities, not dictated by employers or market competition.
Distribution would be according to need, not ability to pay. People would contribute to society according to their capacities and receive what they require to live — not as charity, but as a social right. Money would be rendered obsolete, replaced by systems of free access, gift exchange, and communal provisioning.
Crucially, work would be redefined. No longer an externally imposed burden, it would become a form of self-expression, cooperation, and community involvement. Tasks that are unpleasant or dangerous would be shared, automated, or eliminated where possible. The abolition of the wages system is not the end of all work, but the end of work as exploitation.
Responding to the Myth of Laziness
A common objection to the abolition of the wages system is the belief that without wages, no one would work. This assumption reveals more about the current system than the human condition. It presumes that people are naturally lazy and must be coerced by economic necessity to contribute.
In truth, most people take pride in making a difference, in contributing to something larger than themselves. What they resent is not effort, but coercion. Under capitalism, effort is made under conditions of surveillance, competition, and alienation. But remove the compulsion, and people often find joy in cooperation and creativity.
Moreover, vast amounts of socially valuable labour already occur outside the wage relation: parenting, caregiving, community organising, artistic creation, and volunteer work. These are driven not by monetary incentive, but by social ties, personal meaning, and collective purpose. The wages system does not incentivise work; it distorts and confines it.
The Role of Revolutionaries
The demand to abolish the wages system must become central to any serious revolutionary movement. It cannot be treated as a distant ideal or a rhetorical flourish. It must inform how we organise, how we speak, and how we resist.
Revolutionaries must expose the true nature of wage labour. It is not a necessary institution, but an historical imposition and a daily system of domination. We must fight not just for reforms, but for dual power: building structures of solidarity, mutual aid, and collective autonomy that can prefigure and replace the wages system. It means nurturing a revolutionary imagination – the belief that life can be organised otherwise.
“Abolish the wages system”
The wages system is the spine of capitalist society. It organises production, distributes resources, disciplines the population, and masks exploitation as freedom. To abolish it is not to seek slightly better wages or slightly shorter hours, but to strike at the heart of the social order. It is to say that human beings deserve more than the right to sell their labour. We deserve the right to live fully, freely, and cooperatively.
“Abolish the wages system” is not a dream of the past. It is the demand of the present. In an age of automation, ecological crisis, and obscene inequality, the continued existence of wage labour is not just unjust – it is irrational. We have the resources, the technology, and the collective capacity to meet human needs without markets, money, or masters.
The task is not easy. But it is necessary. In the words of the old revolutionary slogan: we have a world to win – and nothing to lose but our wages.
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